Lumber Industry

In the first major post-riot relief for the San Fernando Valley, Rebuild L.A. is channeling $70,000 worth of supplies donated by the lumber industry to help build eight Pacoima townhouses for poor families. The donation will enable Habitat for Humanity--a nonprofit international group whose most famous volunteer is former President Jimmy Carter--to complete its low-income condominium project, which depends largely on volunteer labor and gifts of building materials, Habitat executives said.

Decades after many of America's national forests have been tamed into tree farms and campgrounds, the Tongass National Forest stands as a reminder of what wilderness once was. Beneath its 800-year-old stands of Sitka spruce and Western hemlock lurks a mossy hush, a thick, verdant silence. But even the 17-million-acre crown jewel of the national forest system has not been immune to the demands of the dollar. Years of heavy logging laid bare large swaths of the forest, especially on Prince of Wales Island, where entire hillsides were shaved by clear cuts.

In the first major post-riot relief for the San Fernando Valley, Rebuild L.A. is channeling $70,000 worth of supplies donated by the lumber industry to help build eight Pacoima townhouses for poor families. The donation will enable Habitat for Humanity to complete its low-income condominium project, which depends largely on volunteer labor and gifts of building materials, Habitat executives said.

Will clear-cutting forests increase global warming? That's a contentious issue as California, which is seeking to slash its carbon footprint, wrestles over rules to manage the state's private forests. The Center for Biological Diversity, a Tucson-based environmental group, this week filed lawsuits against the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection in seven California counties to halt logging plans for 5,000 acres across the Sierra Nevada and Cascade regions. The group contends that the agency approved the projects without properly analyzing carbon emissions and climate consequences under the California Environmental Quality Act. "Clear-cutting is an abysmal practice that should have been banned long ago due to its impacts on wildlife and water quality," said Brian Nowicki, the group's California climate policy director.

On a May evening in Houston, a mock logger with a real chain saw dismembered a hunk of redwood at the 50th birthday banquet of financier Charles E. Hurwitz. Just a poke in the ribs, Texas-style, for Western environmentalists' most hated foe. Over the decades in Northwest timber country, there have been many objects of environmentalists' scorn.

The United States will file a rare "extraordinary challenge" to a decision by a North American Free Trade Agreement panel that Canadian softwood shipments did not threaten the American lumber industry, the Bush administration said. A NAFTA panel on Aug. 31 ruled that the U.S. lumber industry was not threatened by billions of dollars in annual imports of Canadian spruce, pine, fir and other woods used to build and remodel houses. That ruling could potentially end U.S.

The U.S. lumber industry, embroiled in a decades-long trade spat with Canada, said it would challenge the constitutionality of a North American Free Trade Agreement dispute settlement system. The Coalition for Fair Lumber Imports said the NAFTA process, called Chapter 19, made findings appealable only to panels of individuals, some of whom are not U.S. citizens and none of whom is accountable within the U.S. government.

The U.S. and Canada have a free-trade agreement. Yes? Well, maybe--it's free trade for U.S. goods north, but the southbound trade is not so free. That is because the U.S. feels free to impose tariffs or embargoes whenever it wants. A recent example is the tariff that the U.S. slapped on Canadian lumber, saying that the Canucks subsidized their lumber industry and hence is in unfair competition with the U.S. lumber industry. Probably they do provide some support for their lumber industry.

Canada and the United States signed an agreement Wednesday to cancel a controversial 15% export tax imposed for the past year on softwood lumber from British Columbia, the government announced. The agreement, signed in Washington, also exempts Canada's Atlantic Maritime Provinces, including New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, from the tax. The breakthrough came when British Columbia, with its lumber industry valued at $6.3 billion (Canadian), raised fees for timber-cutting rights.

The World Trade Organization's highest court struck down an earlier verdict that the United States had not violated trade rules in asserting that Canadian softwood lumber exports hurt U.S. producers. But the Appellate Body declined to make its own ruling on the legality of the U.S. measures. Canada ships about $6 billion in softwood lumber such as spruce, fir and pine to the U.S. each year. A panel of WTO judges ruled in November that Washington had breached no rules when the U.S.

Ron Barlow's 34-year career at the sawmill in the heart of California's Redwood Empire was a study in consistency. From behind the wheel of his yellow LeTourneau log stacker, he watched trees swaying against a bright blue summer sky. In the fall, yellow aspens provided a blast of color in the fog-shrouded forest. Spring brought light-green sprouts of grass poking out of the damp, evergreen-scented ground. Barlow's own season at the mill ended this month when the Seattle lumber company that owns the facility padlocked the gates, leaving more than 40 workers jobless.

The Schwarzenegger administration pushed through new rules Thursday allowing California's biggest timber firms to cash in on the fight against global warming even as they clear-cut parts of their forests. Forest owners stand to reap tens of millions of dollars in the coming decades by selling the capacity of their woods to cleanse the air of carbon dioxide, offsetting greenhouse gases belched by industrial polluters. But the administration's successful effort to allow loggers to sell their carbon credits to industry while also clear-cutting their lands sparked intense opposition from several conservation groups.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Thursday scrapped a plan, authorized in the last days of the Bush administration, to nearly quadruple the allowable logging on federal lands in western Oregon -- including many prized old-growth stands -- and open up protected northern spotted owl habitat across Oregon, Washington and Northern California to timber companies.

More than 3 million acres of pristine wilderness in Alaska's Tongass National Forest would be open to logging and road building under a new management plan released Friday by the U.S. Forest Service. At 17 million acres, roughly the size of West Virginia, the Tongass National Forest in southeastern Alaska is the country's largest national forest and the world's largest intact coastal temperate rain forest.

The crime scene -- a once-wooded landscape marked by tire tracks and tree stumps -- makes the victim, Verna Potter, feel physically violated. "It's just like someone cut your heart out," says the 77-year-old Potter, who lost an estimated $50,000 worth of generations-old oak trees. They were taken from her property and sold without permission while she was away. Rogue loggers have long preyed on private properties from coast to coast, taking advantage of the elderly and the absent.

For five years, the Washington-based World Bank Group has been trying to save one of Earth's last great forests in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But the bank's private-sector arm is also an investor in a company that is drawing criticism for its connections to logging operations there. World Bank environmental officials say that deforestation is the second leading human contributor to global warming, after power plants and ahead of vehicle emissions.

The Commerce Department ruled Friday that Canada was "dumping" lumber on the U.S. market at unfairly low prices, laying the foundation for permanent duties on the exports. It was the second blow this week to relations between the world's two largest trading partners, which are in the midst of negotiations to expand their 3-year-old free-trade agreement to include Mexico.

For the first time since coming under federal protection 15 years ago, the northern spotted owls' forest haven may be in jeopardy. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed to decrease the owls' "critical habitat" by 1.5 million acres, or 22%. The birds were listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1990, with the habitat designation coming two years later.

MARTIN Litton eased his bulky frame out of the cramped back seat of a Subaru sedan and walked across the road. "Let's get a look at the mess they've made here," he said, his blue eyes darting to fresh tree stumps and logging trails gouged into the pale, dusty earth of the southern Sierra. He climbed slowly up an embankment and started snapping photographs. Litton is two months short of 90, hard of hearing and equipped with two artificial knees.