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On
the Justness of Tree Spiking There
is just one hope of repulsing the tyrannical ambition of civilization
to conquer every niche on the whole earth. That hope is the organization
of spirited people who will fight for the freedom of the wilderness. I
say, break the law. The Forest Service sells lumber companies the rights to harvest trees on parcels of National Forest land. The lumber companies then move in and clearcut the parcel -- they cut down all the trees irrespective of size. This removes vital nutrients from the ecosystem, destabalizing it, and leading to the complete failure of the land to support any life. Our National Forests are being destroyed by that organization formed to manage and protect them. There are many ways to block this practice, but most efforts, such as through politics, only work temporarily, if at all. When all these methods have failed, some organizations have turned to tree spiking. Tree spiking is taking nails, or spikes, and driving them into trees with a hammer. When a nail is almost flush with the tree, the spiker cuts its head off, finishes driving it, and camouflages it. The spiker then marks the entire area, and contacts the Forest Service with a warning. If the rights to the parcel have already been sold, the lumbering company must also be advised of the Spiking. These nails interfere with the chainsaw's ability to cut down the tree in the first place, but if they do not prevent the trees from being felled, they wreak havoc on the band saws in the mills. This causes down time of equipment and large expenses; damage to the mill can cost up to $20,000 (Foreman, p. 153). The point of this practice is to make the lumber too expensive to extract, with minimal to no damage to the trees. The opposition to Tree Spiking, which are almost everyone with an interest in the Forest Service or the lumbering industry, including those, specifically Congress, who feel the political pressure from the latter, view Tree Spiking as an act of Ecotage. Most of these feel that it must be punished as if it were a terrorist act. Spiking was made illegal in the fall of 1988 (Foreman, p. 150), and in many cases, it carries a minimum of three months in prison and a $1000 fine. This is no longer seen as an act of petty vandalism, but with only 15 million of the Service's 80 million acres of roadless areas recommended for protection from logging , the problem will only get worse. The logging companies are losing a large sum of money every year and they will not give up. One investigator for the Earth First! Journal estimated in 1990 that "ecotage in the National Forests alone in the United States is costing industry and government $20 - 25 million annually (EF! Journal, 3 Feb. 1990, from Foreman, p. 134). The problem is mostly in the western states, but only because of the large, roadless tracts of land which do not exist in the east. The remaining pieces of roadless areas in this country are vital. Lumber companies' removal of all the trees off of huge tracts of land, leaves the land barren and destroyed, the animals no homes and no places to go, and the ecosystem destroyed. The American people need to save as much of this land as possible before it is too late and the country is uninhabitable. The most fundamental reason for this is basic survival. Trees supply the planet's atmosphere with oxygen, by using carbon dioxide; if humans destroy that environment from which they came and on which they depend for so many things, then they will die. It is very simple: survival on this planet is impossible without the planet's natural environment. In this country, citizens take certain rights for granted, such as the right to live. They also, however, should have the right to a clean and unmolested environment. Why should these rights not extend to Nature and facets of it? Christopher Stone explains this in his "Entity Idealism," in which the act of destroying a natural object (such as a tree), "would be condemned because the object itself was morally considerate and its destruction wrong irrespective of consequences for human virtue of welfare or anything else" (92). Certainly humans need to survive, and must take some things from Nature for survival, but they are far surpassing mere subsistence levels. It is thus not necessary to cut down all these trees. Americans can recycle, use other materials which recycle better, cut down on waste, and use less natural resources. In our National Forests, the parcels of land to be cut can be drastically decreased, and those trees can be managed properly. The practice of selective cutting must be implemented. Selective cutting is harvesting only the trees above a certain size, and leaving the others to replenish the forest. This is different from the current practice of clearcutting, in which all trees are cut. With selective cutting, most of the nutrients remain, and the forest can grow back, but with clearcutting, all the nutrients in the removed trees are stripped from the ecosystem and soon the land will no longer be able to support life. The Forest Service does not think in these terms; they think in terms of the immediate gratification of lumber sales. Over $1.4 Billion of the Forest Service's $3.6 Billion budget in 1990 came from lumber sales in National Forests, and because of a 1976 Congressional change in the 1930 Knutson-Vandenberg Act, they can keep all of it for "wildlife, recreation, watershed and other forest improvements" (Baden, 229-30). Therefore, the impetus for the Service is to cut down as many trees as possible. Because Congress pays almost all of the costs of setting up the timber sales in the first place and building the access roads for the timber companies, and because the companies pay more for the rights to clearcut, which is an easier and cheaper method for them, it is financially more lucrative for the Service to continue clearcutting new areas even though this is short-sighted and destructive. The point here is that the Forest Service is being irresponsible in its management of publicly-owned National Forests, resulting in the continued destruction of vital forests. |
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