By Barbara Hansen - Industrial Worker, May 1988
Media here in the Northwest likes to portray “workers” as people whose interests are totally at odds with “ecologists.” Out-of-work mill-rats are encouraged to blame their troubles on the city-bred backpacker’s desire to roll out an alpine sleeping bag in pristine wilderness on weekends. Convoys of log trucks circle the state capital, protesting wilderness preservation measures. “Spotted Owl Stew” is jokingly featured in little mountain-town cafes. Workers are being “sacrificed” to conservation.
Such a portrayal of the “worker” should be profoundly insulting to the people whose livelihoods depend on forest products (the second largest industry in our region—the first, of course, being war). It’s not hard to see that even given full license to clear-cut every last old-growth forest, there are only a few years left of jobs to be had out of the Northwest woods. Most loggers and forest-product workers aren’t going to retire from those occupations, and the family businesses are not going to be passed on, no matter what conservation measures are taken.
Still the media continues to pump out the line of Jobs vs. Ecology, Workers vs. Spotted Owls, in the interest of fooling the working majority into allowing the U.S. Forest Service to hand over the last of our public woodlands to the corporate few for final exploitation. The poor little spotted owl takes a particular beating in the press. Because this elusive threatened species lives mostly in old-growth areas, it is used by conservation legislation as an “indicator” species.[1] Its presence is a measure of the health of a forest ecosytem, and so ultimately a measure of how much natural world is to be left to us all; but time and again the news pits this little bird against the local economics, posing the problem as money-in-your-hand vs. a bird-you-wouldcareless-about-in-the-bush.
The latest Forest Service plan for the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, for instance, is under attack by the tim-ber industry for its minor concessions to “spotted owlers.” The timber industry warns that 1,000 jobs will be lost if the proposed timber harvest reduction goes through. What the timber industry spokesmen are not saying is that most of the logs hauled out of Northwest forest are not headed for Northwest mills, but are shipped directly from our ports to Asia, where they will be processed. Northwest mills continue to cut back and close down, not because the ecologists won’t let them have raw materials, but because it is the corporate choice to export rather than invest in the new equipment and skill necessary to produce finished lumber to the metric specifications and special requirements the Asian markets demand. No, we are only told that if we don’t destroy the last of our irreplaceable natural habitat-the great trees that are the vital heart of our region—one thousand people will go on the dole. We are not told that only a little capital outlay by the industry could produce many more than the 1,000 jobs lost to “ecology.”
Meanwhile, too, our landfills continue to be engorged with methane producing wastepaper garbage that has forced complete evacuation of more than one nearby community, and more and more living trees are turned into pulp to print the very newspapers that tell us that forest depletion is inevitable and necessary to the economy. Clearly the reason recycling is unpopular with the paper industry is that it is labor-intensive. It takes more workers to sort, ship, and reprocess waste-paper than to shove a log through a chipper. Recycling makes more jobs, not more profits.
And while the TV news tells us that the average new home will be too expensive for the average worker to buy if logging is decreased (as if it isn’t now, with the inflated interest rates) about half the houses in my inner-city neighborhood stand empty and deteriorating while homeless, jobless people crowd the shelters and soup kitchens. Maybe the spotted owls will come and live here.
Footnote:
[1] See “Spotted Owls and Old Growth”, uncredited, Earth First! Journal, December 21 (Yule), 1985.