There was an amazing story in the Seattle paper a few weeks ago, about the Trillium Lumber Company of Bellingham, Washington and its plan to cut down trees on Tierra del Fuego – the island at the southern tip of South America.
You might think this article was an expose – a logging company that has done terrible things to the forested lands of Washington State is now literally going to the ends of the earth for uncut forests. But I haven’t seen much in the way of exposes lately. The article in question was of a more common genre – the puff piece.
The article, in the Seattle Times, said Trillium is traveling almost to the South Pole to find a virgin forest they can cut in an environmentally sound manner. Trillium’s owner, David Syre, was praised as a timber baron with vision, never mind those clearcuts on Puget Sound, a timber baron with heart. You could almost hear Andy Hardy marching up and down in the corporate boardroom.
Under the terms of this environmentally sound forestry plan, Trillium will cut 60 percent of the trees right away and another 30 percent in 15 years. Clearcutting on the installment plan. The state of forestry in the world today is so sad that corporations from first world countries are praised for cutting down third world forests in two steps instead of one.
And do you know what? Even at that rate I don’t trust them. I don’t trust them because I’ve seen this con worked before. This is a sales technique, and it was first perfected by traveling salesmen who would jam their foot in a customer’s door. The Trillium Lumber Company of Bellingham, Washington is now willing to make extraordinary promises about how progressive their logging operations will be, but in a few years they will be talking about cost overruns, complaining about labor and the instability of world markets and currency exchange and then they’ll say that while progressive logging was a noble experiment, it just didn’t work out and now they are going back to good old clearcutting. This routine has been used to sell the public one bill of goods after another, from the days when the west was given away to railroad magnates up through nuclear power and the B-1 bomber.
And why does it happen? Because greed is a very real thing. Because the people at Trillium are going to cut 60 percent of the trees on Tierra del Fuego and then they’ll do a quick calculation in their heads and start dreaming about cutting the other 40 percent. They will look around and see that they have the local and national governments in Chile over a barrel. And so the millionaires at Trillium will trot out the dog-and-pony show about not making enough profit and how they may have to shut down the operation and the government in Chile will cave in to their demands and the clearcuts will extend to the ends of the earth.
I feel rotten being the person who has to point this out, but that’s just the way it is.
To the Ends of the Earth
There was an amazing story in the Seattle paper a few weeks ago, about the Trillium Lumber Company of Bellingham, Washington and its plan to cut down trees on Tierra del Fuego – the island at the southern tip of South America.
You might think this article was an expose – a logging company that has done terrible things to the forested lands of Washington State is now literally going to the ends of the earth for uncut forests. But I haven’t seen much in the way of exposes lately. The article in question was of a more common genre – the puff piece.
The article, in the Seattle Times, said Trillium is traveling almost to the South Pole to find a virgin forest they can cut in an environmentally sound manner. Trillium’s owner, David Syre, was praised as a timber baron with vision, never mind those clearcuts on Puget Sound, a timber baron with heart. You could almost hear Andy Hardy marching up and down in the corporate boardroom.
Under the terms of this environmentally sound forestry plan, Trillium will cut 60 percent of the trees right away and another 30 percent in 15 years. Clearcutting on the installment plan. The state of forestry in the world today is so sad that corporations from first world countries are praised for cutting down third world forests in two steps instead of one.
And do you know what? Even at that rate I don’t trust them. I don’t trust them because I’ve seen this con worked before. This is a sales technique, and it was first perfected by traveling salesmen who would jam their foot in a customer’s door. The Trillium Lumber Company of Bellingham, Washington is now willing to make extraordinary promises about how progressive their logging operations will be, but in a few years they will be talking about cost overruns, complaining about labor and the instability of world markets and currency exchange and then they’ll say that while progressive logging was a noble experiment, it just didn’t work out and now they are going back to good old clearcutting. This routine has been used to sell the public one bill of goods after another, from the days when the west was given away to railroad magnates up through nuclear power and the B-1 bomber.
And why does it happen? Because greed is a very real thing. Because the people at Trillium are going to cut 60 percent of the trees on Tierra del Fuego and then they’ll do a quick calculation in their heads and start dreaming about cutting the other 40 percent. They will look around and see that they have the local and national governments in Chile over a barrel. And so the millionaires at Trillium will trot out the dog-and-pony show about not making enough profit and how they may have to shut down the operation and the government in Chile will cave in to their demands and the clearcuts will extend to the ends of the earth.
I feel rotten being the person who has to point this out, but that’s just the way it is.