Another Great Petersen Speech
James D. Petersen, Executive Director, The Evergreen Foundation [here] and 2007 President, Pacific Logging Congress, gave a great speech at the 65th Annual Truck Loggers Association Convention in Vancouver, B.C. last month.
The speech was entitled Imagine and the text has been posted in full in the W.I.S.E. Rural Culture Colloquia [here].
Please enjoy.
by bear bait
Gee whiz… a name I haven’t heard in 25 years, Leonard Netzorg.
Canada’s problem is our problem: when you examine US demographics, the West is much more urban than the South, the Midwest, and the Rust belt.
Timberland needs trees to have validity, trees grow in forests, and therefore forests must not be logged, because when they are, there are no trees or fewer trees. The majority urban mindset is that cutting a tree is a bad, bad deal. Use salvage lumber. There are many $2 million dollar homes that could have been $1 million dollar homes except the owners wanted to build with salvage materials to be kind to the earth. My thought has always been what damage to the earth did it take for them to earn that extra million dollars? What was the net mitigation or was there one.
Canada is going to get hosed just because Weyerhaeuser has 28 million acres of trees to cut in Canada, which they will cut, even if it means that no other trees might be cut. Or at least that has been the US experience. Even Netzorg could not prevent them from winning and the little mills from losing. Canada will be no different.
The thing about Canada is that they have 1.5 billion acres of forest. 28 million acres is not nothing, but it doesn’t wag the dog.
Canada has always leased it’s government lands to giant timber and pulp corporations. That’s their style. The people live on the fringe and the great interior is woodbasket to the U.S.
Canada holds one fourth of the world’s forests. The U.S. has about a tenth (someone please check those numbers). They cut for wages and dump the product down here for next to nothing. We simply cannot compete in pulp, chips, and low-grade structural lumber with the Canucks.
Unless we levy big tariffs on them, but then they sue us in NAFTA court, and win, and are awarded $billions directly from our U.S. Treasury.
by Forrest Grump
Ah but Grasshoppers, at the rate we are torching our globally-warmed woodstocks, soon we will have one-hundredth the timber.
And if the Canadian genetic experiment on pine beetles does not work out (imagine how GM beetles would go over in America) Canada will kiss much timber goodbye.
Who knows, BB, maybe salvage lumber will be price-competitive in our lifetimes… and none of us lack gray hair.
Been thinking much the same. For their own sakes, here’s hoping the Canucks at least get it.