Summer 2000, Volume 9, Number 2
Greenspirit
Trees Are The Answer
by Patrick Moore, Ph.D.
Chairman Sustainable Forestry Committee
The forest industry stands accused of some very serious crimes against the environment. It is charged with the extinction of tens of thousands of species, the deforestation of vast areas of the Earth, and the total and irreversible destruction of the ecosystem. If I were one of the urban majority, and I thought the forest industry was causing the irreversible destruction of the environment I wouldn't care how many jobs it created or how many communities depended on it, I would be against it.
I have spent the last 15 years trying to understand the relationship between forestry and the environment, to separate fact from fiction, myth from reality. Since 1991 I have chaired the Sustainable Forestry Committee of the Forest Alliance of British Columbia. This has provided an ideal opportunity to explore all aspects of the subject. This presentation is the synthesis of what I have learned. But first, let me give you a little background.
I was born and raised in the tiny fishing and logging village of Winter Harbour on the northwest tip of Vancouver Island, in the rainforest by the Pacific. I didn't realize what a blessed childhood I'd had, playing on the tidal flats by the salmon spawning streams in the rainforest, until I was shipped away to boarding school in Vancouver at age fourteen. I eventually attended the University of BC studying the life sciences: biology, forestry, genetics; but it was when I discovered ecology that I realized that through science I could gain an insight into the mystery of the rainforest I had known as a child. I become a born-again ecologist, and in the late 1960's, was soon transformed into a radical environmental activist. I found myself in a church basement in Vancouver with a like-minded group of people, planning a protest campaign against US hydrogen bomb testing in Alaska. We proved that a somewhat rag-tag looking group of activists could sail a leaky old halibut boat across the north Pacific ocean and change the course of history. By creating a focal point for opposition to the tests we got on national TV news in Canada and the US, building a ground swell of opposition to nuclear testing in both countries. When that bomb went off in November 1971 it was the last hydrogen bomb ever detonated on planet Earth. Even though there were four more tests planned in the series, President Nixon canceled them due to the public opposition. This was the birth of Greenpeace.
Flushed with victory and knowing we could bring about change by getting up and doing something, we were welcomed into the longhouse of the Kwakiutl Nation at Alert Bay near the north end of Vancouver Island where we were made brothers of the tribe because they believed in what we were doing. This began the tradition of the Warriors of the Rainbow, after a Cree legend that said that one day when the skies are black and the birds fall dead to the ground and the rivers are poisoned, people of all races, colors and creeds will join together to form the Warriors of the Rainbow to save the Earth from environmental destruction. We named our ship the Rainbow Warrior and I spent fifteen years on the front lines of the eco-movement as we evolved from that church basement into the world's largest environmental activist organization.
Next we took on French atmospheric nuclear testing in the South Pacific. They proved a bit more difficult that the US Atomic Energy Administration. But after many years of protest voyages and campaigning, involving loss of life on our side, they were first driven underground and eventually stopped testing altogether.
In 1975 we set sail deep-sea into the North Pacific against the Soviet Union's factory whaling fleets that were slaughtering the last of the sperm whales off California. We put ourselves in front of the harpoons in little rubber boats and made it on CBS, ABC and NBC evening news. That really put Greenpeace on the map. In 1979 the International Whaling Commission banned factory whaling in the North Pacific and soon it was banned in all the world's oceans.
In 1978 1 was arrested off Newfoundland for sitting on a baby seal without permission of the Canadian Minister of Fisheries. I was trying to shield it from the hunter's club. I was convicted; under the draconianly named Seal Protection Regulations that made it illegal to protect seals. In 1984 baby seal skins were banned from European markets, effectively ending the slaughter.
Can you believe that in the early 1980's, the countries of Western Europe were pooling their low and medium level nuclear wastes, putting them in thousands of oil drums, loading them on ships and dumping them in the Atlantic ocean as a way of "disposing" of the wastes. In 1984 a combined effort by Greenpeace and the UK Seafarer's Union put an end to that practice for good.
By the mid-1980's Greenpeace had grown from that church basement to an organization with an income of over US $ 100 million per year, offices in 21 countries and over 100 campaigns around the world, now tackling toxic waste, acid rain, uranium min-ing and drift net fishing as well as the original issues. We had won over a majority of the public in the industrialized democracies. Presidents and prime ministers were talking about the environment on a daily basis.
For me it was time to make a change. I had been against at least three or four things every day of my life for 15 years; I decided I'd like to be in favor of something for a change. I made the transition from the politics of confrontation to the politics of building consensus. After all, when a majority of people decide they agree with you it is probably time to stop hitting them over the head with a stick and sit down and talk to them about finding solutions to our environmental problems.
All social movements evolve from an earlier period of polarization and confrontation during which a minority struggles to convince society that its cause is true and just, eventually followed by a time of reconciliation if a majority of the population accepts the values of the new movement. For the environmental movement this transition began to occur in the mid-1980's. The term sustainable development was adopted to describe the challenge of taking the new environmental values we had popularized, and incorporating them into the traditional social and economic values that have always governed public policy and our daily behavior. We cannot simply switch to basing all our actions on purely environmental values. Every day 6 billion people wake up with real needs for food, energy and materials. The challenge for sustainability is to provide for those needs in ways that reduce negative impact on the environment. But any changes made must also be socially acceptable and technically and economically feasible. It is not always easy to balance environmental, social, and economic priorities. Compromise and co-operation with the involvement of government, industry, academia and the environmental movement is required to achieve sustainability. it is this effort to find consensus among competing interests that has occupied my time for the past 15 years.
Coming from British Columbia, born into a third generation forest industry family, and educated in forestry and ecology, it made sense that I would focus on the challenge of defining sustainable forestry. After all, forests are by far the most important environment in British Columbia and they are also by for the most important basis of economic wealth for families and communities.
I soon discovered that trees are just large plants that have evolved the ability to grow long wooden stems. They didn't do that so we could cut them up into lumber and grind them into pulp; they actually had only one purpose in mind and that was to get their needles or leaves higher up above the other plants where the tree could then monopolize the Sun's energy for photosynthesis. When foresters create openings or clearcuts when they harvest trees, one of the reasons for doing it is so the new trees growing back can be in full sunlight. Trees are basically plants that want to be in the sun. If trees wanted to be in the shade they would have been shrubs instead, they would not have spent so much time and energy growing long wooden stems.
Forests are home to the majority of living species; not the oceans, nor the grasslands, nor the alpine areas, but ecosystems that are dominated by trees. There is a fairly simple reason for this. The living bodies of the trees themselves create a new environment that would not be there in their absence. Now the canopy above is home to millions of birds and insects where there was once only thin air. And beneath the canopy, in the interior of the forest, the environment is now protected from frost and sun and wind. This, in combination with the food provided by the leaves, fruits and even the wood of the trees, creates thousands of new habitats into which new species can evolve, species that could never have existed if it were not for the presence of the living trees.
This gives rise to the obvious concern that if the trees are cut down the habitats or homes will be lost and the species that live in them will die. Indeed, in 1996 the World Wildlife Fund, at a media conference in Geneva, announced that 50,000 species are going extinct each year due to human activity. And the main cause of these 50,000 extinctions, they said, is commercial logging. The story was carried around the world by Associated Press and other media and hundreds of millions of people come to believe that forestry is the main cause of species extinction.
During the past three years I have asked the World Wildlife Fund on many occasions to please provide me with a list of some of the species that have supposedly become extinct due to logging. They have not offered up a single example as evidence. In fact, to the best of our scientific knowledge, no species has become extinct in North America due to forestry.
Where are these 50,000 species that are said to be going extinct each year? They are in a computer model in Edward 0.Wilson's laboratory at Harvard University. They are electrons on a hard drive, they have no Latin names, and they are in no way related to any direct field observations in any forest.
Continued in the next issue of Woodland Steward