Confronting California's "Logzilla".

Between 1992 and 1999, Sierra Pacific increased the amount of land it clearcut by 2,426 percent

For the past decade, Texas billionaire Charles Hurwitz and his Pacific Lumber Company have been virtually synonymous with forest destruction in California.

During that same time, Red Emmerson's Sierra Pacific Industries (SPI) has been quietly plundering the state's forests on a scale that makes Charles Hurwitz look like a novice. Yet, until recently, SPI's activities had received almost no public scrutiny or media attention.

SPI owns 1.5 million acres of land in California, making it the state's largest private landowner and the second-largest landowner in North America (right behind Ted Turner). Unlike Pacific Lumber, though, which only logs on private land, SPI also cuts trees in US National Forests.

In fact, it is the largest harvester of federal timber in California, cutting 39 percent of all of the trees taken from the state's national forests -- almost four times as much as its nearest competitor. SPI'S logging operations are so extensive that, although it operates only in California, it is the country's second-largest harvester of federal timber.

Public Lands Plunder 

SPI first began to receive public attention in 1998, when Congress added a controversial pro-logging "rider" to another piece of legislation. The rider was developed by the Quincy Library Group, a self-proclaimed "community group" (named for the local library in northern California where they met) that convened to develop new logging plans for the national forests of California's northern Sierra Nevada.

Twenty of the 30 primary participants in this "community" group were affiliated with the timber industry -- mostly as SPI employees. Their plan called for doubling logging in parts of the Tahoe, Plumas, and Lassen National Forests and dissecting those areas with a network of long, thin clearcuts under the pretense of maintaining "forest health."

The US Forest Service (USFS) is currently readying the first timber sales from the Quincy plan (which is ultimately expected to cost taxpayers at least $70 million in lost revenues). Not surprisingly, SPI is expected to be the main recipient of the timber.

Research by Earth Island's John Muir Project shows that the USFS' timber sale program operates at a net loss -- spending millions to build logging roads, while giving away timber at below-market rates that cost the taxpayers more than $1 billion in forfeited revenue every year. In other words, we are essentially paying the timber industry to cut down our national forests.

In California, SPI has been the primary beneficiary of this pernicious form of corporate welfare, and has used the profits from logging public lands to double its private land holdings over the past decade.

Clearcutting Rampage

As SPI's land holdings have increased, its treatment of those lands has taken a serious turn for the worse. The California Department of Forestry found that, between 1992 and 1999, SPI increased its clearcutting by an astounding 2,426 percent. SPI plans to clearcut 1 million more acres (1,562 square miles) -- an area larger than the state of Rhode Island -- over the next 70 years.

But SPI's clearcutting rampage is provoking resistance among communities up and down the Sierra Nevada range. Last year, residents of the small timber town of Weaverville first sounded the alarm in response to an SPI clearcut that was visible from town. They also raised concerns about a proposed land exchange between SPI and the Bureau of Land Management that would allow SPI to log in areas that would expose their homes to downslope mudslides and flooding.

In early 2000, residents of Nevada City, California, discovered that SPI was planning to clearcut along the Yuba River. A community group called Yuba Nation engaged in nonviolent direct action to resist SPI'S logging. When Yuba Nation's activists began locking themselves to logging equipment, it marked the first major forest-preservation campaign to occur in the Sierra Nevada. Civil disobedience has now spread to Calaveras County, where SPI is clearcutting adjacent to the Calaveras Big Trees State Park.

Direct action is only one facet of these efforts. Yuba Nation has built alliances with local loggers upset with SPI's forestry practices. (One bold logger even spoke at a Yuba Nation rally). In Calaveras, the Ebbets Pass Forest Watch has organized a diverse coalition of environmentalists, community members, local business owners, and even the neighborhood quilting-bee, into a growing chorus of opposition to SPI.

In August, the John Muir Project (JMP) organized a statewide gathering of forest activists and concerned community members at the San Francisco Public Library. Participants shared experiences and made plans to shift the campaign from challenging individual logging plans to addressing the broader issue of logging as a whole. The San Francisco Library meeting was a welcome contrast to the SPI-dominated Quincy Library sham.

A Litany of Abuses

The JMP, which has been researching SPI for two years, now serves as a clearinghouse for SPI-related information. JMP'S findings indicate that Sierra Pacific embodies the worst practices in the timber industry today.

These abuses include: extensive clearcutting; pillaging US forests at taxpayer expense; "forest health" logging scams that actually harm the forest; theft of timber from public lands; "habitat conservation plans" that destroy critical wildlife habitat and undermine endangered species protection; spraying dangerous herbicides; and using political contributions, campaign fundraisers, and a large team of lobbyists to subvert democracy

Fortunately, we have a chance to change that. Passage of the National Forest Protection and Restoration Act (HR1396) would kick SPI off of public lands and redirect US logging subsidies into genuine ecological restoration, support for rural communities, development of alternatives to wood-based materials, and substantial taxpayer savings.

Ending logging on national forests will also release a wealth of activist energy that has been tied up monitoring and appealing the endless torrent of federal timber sales. That energy can then be channeled into transforming SPI'S behavior on private lands -- and end its clearcutting rampage.

For more information, contact the John Muir Project, 2501 Paul Minnie Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA 95062, [phone]. Memberships: $30 (full-time student: $20).