by Bill Willers
May 5, 2005
[note: Bill Willers in an emeritus professor of Biology at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and founder of the Superior Wilderness Action Network. He can be reached at willers@charter.net}
"A forest does not take care of itself. It needs to be managed; ... Professional loggers are really the stewards of our forests and timberlands in Wisconsin." -Gene Francisco, March 27, 2005, in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office."
- Aesop
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Imagine this: The head of Wisconsin’s Division of Forestry, servant of the people and overseer of their lands, departs government and taxpayer-funded salary to become the logging industry’s most powerful lobbyist. Did someone say “This can’t happen in the land of Fighting Bob”?
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In 2002, Gene Francisco, whose comment shown above is wrong to the point of absolute silliness, retired as head of DNR Forestry to become director of the Wisconsin Professional Loggers Association. A call to Wisconsin’s Ethics Board brought a surprise: The only brake on such “revolving door” moves is that a former official may not lobby his old office - just that office - for 12 months. That’s it. For the rest of government it’s open season the minute he walks out the DNR door. One has to wonder, why a law so meaningless. It also begs the thinking citizen/taxpayer to wonder what decisions might have been made by an administrator anticipating a future as an industrial lobbyist. |
It gets worse - even strange. Rather than being censured, Francisco was honored with a congratulatory Assembly resolution, introduced by representatives Friske and Gard. Stranger still, he received the Environmental Leader Award from the College of Natural Resources at UW-Stevens Point (UWSP-CNR) -- what progressive Representative Frank Boyle has referred to as “Cut and Slash University”.
Francisco now sits on the Advisory Committee of that College and on the University Forestry Committee. He also is a member of the Governor’s Council on Forestry, which is chaired by ... are you ready for this? ... Fred Souba, formerly with Nekoosa Papers and Johnson Timber Corporation, now Vice President of Forest Resources for the North American branch of Stora Enso, a global forest products concern based in Finland.
A Bill Hard to Believe
In the wake of Francisco’s shift, Assembly Speaker John Gard formed a Task Force on Forestry heavily tilted toward industry. It included Francisco. In 2004, the Task Force reported its recommendations, and this past March Assembly Bill 254 was introduced by 30 legislators (including Friske and Gard), 27 of them Republicans.
If passed, AB 254 would change state law regarding forests (28.04) and make indisputable the right to log all state-owned lands, and private lands under some state program, according to “generally accepted forestry management practices”. Generally accepted practices are what independent biologists and environmentalists have struggled against for decades -- vast clearcuts, aspen monocultures, pine plantations, forest fragmentation from cobwebs of logging roads, soil compaction from heavy machinery, erosion and loss of soil nutrients, loss of habitat and rare plant communities, dousings with chemicals - the world as fiber factory.
This Bill prevents the reestablishment of diverse native forests in favor of sterile production units of even-aged plantations like rows of ten pins and aspen monocultures resembling gigantic lawns, not only for the sake of corporate profits and “economic reality” but also, irony of ironies, in the name of “social responsibility”. “Oh look” it seems to say, “we give you lots of consumer goods like baseball bats and toilet paper!.”
But dozens of plants can provide paper, including wheat straw, bamboo, hemp (on which the US Constitution was written) and kenaf, the best alternative source according to the US Department of Agriculture. What one needs for paper is plant fiber, and the reason that forests are now our sole source for paper was given to me at the UW Forest Products Laboratory: “Economics”. The forest products industry and its servant “forest science” ignore alternatives to tree-based paper just as Big Fossil Fuel avoids alternatives to oil and coal, but It is not necessary to yield up our forests for the sake of “paper product”.
AB 254, mandates that if “active management” (i.e., logging) is not executed by DNR, then DNR personnel must conduct analyses of the economic impacts of failure to log, an intimidating piling on of paperwork. This would favor “active management” even when real forest ecologists, independent of industry, would advocate “passive management” (letting things go natural).
The most sinister aspect of 254, though, is that citizens would not be allowed to question ANY forestry practice deemed “generally accepted” according to industrial definition (Including noise and air pollution impacting local communities). Nor would towns be allowed to establish ordinances interpreted as interfering with logging operations. If citizens sue and are ruled against in court -- the only possible outcome given the wording of the Bill -- they are required to pay industry for court costs, legal fees, time lost, and any other losses that industry could claim. We’re talking about Wisconsin’s public forests managed as industrial mills and with no way for citizens to stop it.
Not that they’re much more than mills now. A 1999 Bureau of Endangered Resources biotic survey of the Brule River State Forest revealed that 71% of its wooded area is already managed as “industrial forests” of aspen monoculture or pine plantation. Other state forests similarly.
254 also seeks to limit the creation of “natural areas” unavailable to the chain saw. Industry is hell bent on getting it all. (“Nothing personal”, said the Godfather, “just business.”)
“Certification”
It is difficult to discuss AB 254 without mention of “certification”. Some years back, industrial polls found that citizens will pay more for lumber from forests they are told get managed “ecologically”. With that, the concept of “certification” was born, and now Wisconsin’s forests are being prepared for it. This past October, UW-Stevens Point issued a press release: “Gene Francisco ... will present a College of Natural Resources (CNR) Colloquium [titled] ‘Master Logger Certification: A New Paradigm in the Logging Profession’, part of the CNR Fall 2004 Colloquium Series.”
Recall the reference above to “generally accepted forestry management practices” in industry’s Assembly Bill 254? If you do, you will understand “certification” very well.
Walter Hickel, a former governor of Alaska, was Richard Nixon’s Interior Secretary, so he knew a thing or two about running “the commons”. He once said “If you steal $10 from a man’s wallet, you’re likely to get into a fight. But if you steal billions from the commons, co-owned by him and his descendants, he might not even notice.” How right he was.
Where are real biologists?
On looking at all the panels, associations, advisory boards, centers, councils, committees etc. that dictate the future of forests, one sees endless lists of industrialists, “environmental education specialists, and tree farmers from the US Forest Service, DNR and industrial “forest science”. One might wonder where all the independent biologists are. Where are the botanists and zoologists? Where are the ecologists and conservation biologists, independent of industrial connection, who look at natural forests in all their complexity, seeking to understand how they function as intact native ecosystems? Simply put, they are not invited to “the table”.
Back in 1994, biologists did let out a collective shout. More than 200 from 17 Wisconsin campuses, both public and private, requested that restoration and protection of native biological diversity be made the primary consideration in the statute regarding forests (28.04). Over the following year, industry’s lobbyists fought it, but finally the word “biodiversity” was inserted into the statute as one of the many “uses” of forests. Now, AB 254 would counter even that modest concession by turning the law into nothing less than a perpetual open season for the logging industry.
And there have been other bona fide biological efforts. In the recent past, biologists at the University of Wisconsin proposed that two “diversity maintenance areas” of 50,000 acres each be allowed to return to unlogged, unroaded, deep-forest conditions (If in a square, 50,000 acres would be 8.8 miles on a side). Another proposal by biologists would have given private landowners in key areas who manage for biological diversity the same tax break enjoyed by those who manage for timber. Industry countered both.
But those proposals still linger in the minds of biologists. We look forward to their reintroduction, to legislators not beholden to the forest products industry who will work for their passage, and to an involved citizenry who will back the efforts and back them strongly. That scenario, in addition to a realistic, independent inquiry into “tree-free” paper sources could make for a new beginning for the state’s forests, now on a path of steady decline.