A Global Plea to Halt Logging

Around the world, large-scale commercial logging threatens the survival of gorillas, chimpanzees, jaguars, ocelots and rare birds like the toco toucan and the hyacinth macaw.

Despite pledges made at the 1990 Earth Summit, national governments have shown themselves to be unable to control the rapacious global timber industry.

"Life After Logging," a joint report by Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and several other eco-groups, suggests why the Big Timber always gets its way: "The industry is heavily involved in bribery, corruption and political violence around the world, from Brazil to Cambodia."

Eighty percent of the world's forests have already been logged for profit and the remaning 20 percent are facing accelerated threat of clearcutting. In August, the US Forest Service an-nounced that it would double the logging on 2.4 million acres in northern California's national forests. This decision, based on the Quincy Logging Bill, could allow the politically powerful timber industry to transform living trees into 319 million board feed of dead, profitable lumber.

"The world's ancient forests are disappearing at the rate of an acre every second," Greenpeace notes. The irony is that 500-year-old trees are being felled to produce "cigarette filters, cake mix boxes, scotch tape, diapers, toilet paper, magazines." Within the next 30-50 years, Greenpeace predicts, current logging trends - if unchecked - will have completely deforested the Earth.

Simon Counsell, director of Britain's Rainforest Foundation, states the matter clearly: "The scientific evidence now clearly suggests that, unless loggers can be brought under control, the fate of vast areas of rainforest will be irrevocably sealed in the coming few years. If much of the planet's biodiversity is to survive, international agencies such as the World Bank will have to support the rapid dismantling of the tropical logging industry."