Plundering the boreal forests.

When the press talks about deforestation on a massive scale, it is almost always talking about tropical forests - the rainforests now embla-zoned on T-shirts, posters, and internet bulletins. But the tropics are only part of the story. There is another immense belt of forestland that is disappearing at least as rapidly as the tropical forests. The boreal forests - the forests of the far North - make up the world's largest terrestrial ecosystem and have become the world's main source of industrial wood and wood fiber. Much of that wood is cut by the same companies that are felling the tropical forests. And as in the tropics, this logging involves an enormous mismanagement of natural wealth; it threatens indigenous cultures; and it is degrading the biodiversity of large areas of the planet. But the logging of the boreal forests is a tale that remains largely untold. There are no "boreal forest crunch" granola bars.

Covering 11 percent of the earth's surface and including almost a third of the world's forests, the boreal forests form a belt that encircles the North Pole. They cover much of Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia, and northern Russia - more than 70 percent of the forests are Russian. The boreal landscape consists of vast stands of conifers, aspen, and birch. Occasionally, the forest gives way to peatbogs, which cover about a fifth of the region. The winters are long and bitterly cold, with temperatures dropping to minus 40 degrees Celsius; the summers are brief. Much of the region is underlain by permafrost - a subsoil that never thaws.

The forest itself is usually dominated by relatively few tree species. In eastern Canada, for instance, black spruce, white spruce, and balsam fir cover thousands of hectares. In central Siberia, there are vast tracts of larch. Broadleaf trees like birch, aspen, poplar, and alder appear in the southern areas and as pioneers of disturbed sites. The vegetation supports a rich diversity of animal life, including a wide variety of mammals, birds, and fish as well as clouds of insects that feed them. At the top of the food chain are such predators as wolves, lynx, and the highly endangered Siberian tiger.

In global terms, one of the most significant aspects of the boreal ecosystem may be the enormous amount of carbon that it stores. Carbon is the basic building block of the heat-trapping "greenhouse gases" implicated in global warming. The region is estimated to contain about 709 billion tons of carbon, equivalent to all of the carbon held in all proven fossil fuel reserves. Currently, the boreal forests are a "net carbon sink" - their growth absorbs more carbon than they release through decay. Their current net intake appears to be about 700 million tons per year, roughly equal to China's annual carbon emissions. But that intake will almost certainly drop if logging continues at its present rate.

CANADA: A DEFORESTATION ECONOMY

Near the Nelson River, in Canada's west-coast province of British Columbia, the Mitsubishi Corporation  has set up the largest chopstick factory in the world. Mitsubishi, a Japanese manufacturing conglomerate, chose this site because the province has an enormous supply of wood and charges very little for it. Chopsticks require a perfect grain - even the disposable ones that Mitsubishi makes here - so 85 percent of the wood cut for the plant has to be discarded. But even at this level of waste, Mitsubishi is transforming aspen stands into chopsticks at the rate of 7 to 8 million pairs per day.

The Mitsubishi operation is just one of many unnecessary bites that the timber industry is taking out of Canada, where forestland is being felled at the rate of 1 acre (about four-tenths of a hectare) every 12 seconds. Canada has 10 percent of the world's forests, and three-quarters of that - about 1 billion hectares - is boreal. In Canada's boreal region, virtually all of the most productive forests have been committed to logging. Loggers have already claimed most of the old growth in the country's eastern and central provinces. They are now felling the secondary growth of those regions - and rapidly consuming the ancient forests of the Canadian west. About 1 million hectares of Canada's forests are logged annually; over the past ten years, that amounts to an area the size of the former East Germany.

Canadian logging, incidentally, is not much different from that of its neighbor, the United States, which owns huge tracts of boreal forest in Alaska. Plans for Alaska will increase the logging of its interior twentyfold.

As the trees disappear, so do whole constellations of other living things as the system is thrown out of balance. The woodland caribou, for instance, is quietly dying out as its habitat in northwestern Ontario is logged into oblivion. Migratory birds that summer in these forests, like the Cape May warbler, are affected. The cut-over slopes erode into rivers, where the silt suffocates aquatic animals. And many plants are threatened too; in the province of Alberta alone, about 100 plant species are known to grow only in boreal forest, and roughly half of these are already rare.

Canadian logging is essentially a subsidized employment program. The country's provinces, which own 80 percent of the forests, are practically giving their trees away to timber companies, in exchange for logging and pulp mill jobs. The fate of a forest is usually sealed with a "Forest Management Agreement" (FMA), under which authorities lease the land to the corporation that does the cutting. In some provinces, the process does not even allow for an environmental impact review. In effect, the corporations become the owners of the land - they can even use their FMAs as collateral for financing their logging operations. In return for the forests, the provinces usually collect only a minuscule stumpage fee - a payment determined by the amount of wood actually cut. The terms for Mitsubishi's chopstick factory are typical: a 20-year FMA and a stumpage fee of $0.37 per cubic meter of wood cut.

Deals like this have provoked a boom in industrial forestry. Enormous government subsidies, both direct and indirect, have won agreements for some 45 new plants, worth more than $7 billion, all destined for Canada's boreal forest. But it is debatable how well this expansion serves the public. Critics point out that the new operations are ruthlessly efficient in their use of labor - they need very few workers to devastate vast tracts of forest. And the more labor-intensive finishing processes are often done offshore; the Mitsubishi plant, for instance, ships its chopsticks to Taiwan for finishing. So as the cutting in Canada's boreal forest has increased, critics charge that the employment level has generally dropped. Today, no other country in the world has fewer jobs per volume of wood cut.

Alberta, the province just east of British Columbia, has timber fever in its most virulent form. Oil, natural gas, and grain were once the mainstays of Alberta's economy but in the mid-eighties the prices of those commodities plummeted. In response, local officials started looking for timber companies. Today, Alberta's forestry subsidies - in the form of loan guarantees, and road and railroad construction - are worth more than $700 million so far. There are indirect subsidies as well: the timber fees, for instance, provide only 60 percent of the province's forest management costs. On these terms, it is hardly surprising that the province has managed to lease over 20 million hectares of its boreal forest for logging. The main beneficiaries of this bonanza are Mitsubishi and another Japanese company, Daishowa. Collectively, their leases cover 15 percent of the entire province.

Mitsubishi's Alberta-Pacific (Al-Pac) mill on the Athabasca River in northeastern Alberta is one of the province's most recent developments. Completed in 1993, Al-Pac is the largest bleached kraft pulp mill in the world. It consumes 10,000 to 12,000 hectares of boreal forest a year and churns out more than 1,500 metric tons of pulp a day. The bleaching is done with chlorine, which combines with other compounds released in the pulp to form a witch's brew of toxins that are released into the river.

Like the other bleached kraft pulp mills in Alberta, Al-Pac exports all its pulp to other countries for manufacture into paper. The plant's annual production of 500,000 tons is consumed by Canada's two largest wood products customers the United States and Japan. (About 80 percent of Al-Pac's pulp is bought by the United States; the remainder is shipped to Japan.) Most of the profit is shipped out with the pulp. Alberta collects only $0.90 for the 16 aspen trees that will make $590 worth of pulp; a foreign mill will then turn that pulp into $1,250 worth of paper - and paper prices are rising rapidly. In terms of the subsidies Alberta's pulp mills swallow, each Al-Pac job costs provincial taxpayers more than $176,500. Canada's pulp industry has lost more than $700 million - largely public funds - in the past three years.

Al-Pac is the product of the same forces that are driving the logging boom throughout the boreal region, and the world's growing appetite for paper is by far the most important factor. World paper and paperboard consumption currently stands at almost 250 million metric tons, a 17-fold increase over the past 80 years. Just one quarter of the world's population - the peoples of Western Europe, North America, and Japan - now consumes three-quarters of the world's paper. A little paper is produced by tree farms established for that purpose, and a little is produced from sawmill waste. But given the vast quantities of wood that Canada is practically paying the timber companies to fell, there is little incentive to expand these alternative sources. The boreal forests are now the world's major source of pulp fiber and many of the 150 or so corporations that dominate the paper market have set up pulp mills near their northern logging operations. In effect, these forests have become pulp factories: most of the world's pulping capacity is now located in the boreal region.

The pulping is not just an environmental disaster - it is a cultural disaster as well. Over a million indigenous people inhabit the boreal region. In Canada, for instance, there are Dene, Algonquin, and Cree; in Scandinavia, there are Sami ("Lapps"); and Siberia is home to the Nenets, Yakut, Udege, Evenky, Altaisk, and others. Some of these peoples have lived for centuries in an ecological balance with their homelands, but large-scale logging can upset that balance. In Alberta, for instance, Daishowa's mill on the Peace River is the focus of a native land claims dispute. Daishowa opened the mill in 1990, to process wood from its 4 million hectare lease - an area that includes the entire ancestral homeland of the Lubicon Lake Cree. The Lubicon were not consulted when the logging agreement was negotiated and have refused all settlement offers. Their land has already been the site of a major oil and gas development, which netted the province nearly $1 billion in royalties. But the Lubicon did not get a penny and the development destroyed much of the wildlife on which they had traditionally depended. According to Lubicon Chief Bernard Ominayak, such large, extractive industries are a serious threat to traditional native life. "It creates a lot of social problems," he says, "family break-ups, a lot of health problems, and many, many other problems." The oil and gas development is continuing, but Daishowa has not yet started to log, and the Lubicon have launched an international campaign to prevent them from doing so. The failure to accommodate local cultures - a common problem in northern as well as tropical resource extraction - repeats on a human scale the same devastation that is visited on the landscape as a whole.

One of the most telling problems with Canada's forest policy emerges only after the forest is felled. Ninety percent of the country's logging is clear-cutting - a near total ecological disruption when practiced on a large scale. And even the best efforts to reforest the clear-cuts fall far short of the original forest's ecological diversity. Replanting is usually done with only one or two tree species, and with plants drawn from a narrow genetic base. The new stands are usually even-aged, without the diverse mixture of saplings, mature trees, dead snags, and fallen logs typical of natural forest. If left to revegetate on their own, clear-cuts of coniferous forest tend to be reclaimed by aspen, rather than by the formerly dominant spruce and fir - a fundamental ecological change over immense tracts of land.

But often the trees do not come back at all. It is estimated that one-quarter of the area logged every year will fail to regenerate - an area equal in size to the province of Prince Edward Island. The topsoil, a precious ecological asset that may have taken millenniums to accumulate, is often scraped off during logging, or eroded out afterwards. Once the topsoil is gone, the loss of the forest is, for all human purposes, permanent.

RUSSIA: TRADING FORESTS FOR CASH

Canada is not the only boreal country in the throes of a "timber rush." Russia is being stripped of its forests as well - a process funded largely by Japanese, South Korean, and U.S. corporations. Russia's forests cover 770 million hectares and virtually all of this is boreal. West of the Ural Mountains, in European Russia, nearly all the forests have been ravaged by logging. Two-thirds of Russia's timber still comes from the European part of the country, which now holds no more than 20 percent of the forest area. But the pace of logging is accelerating rapidly in the vast forests of Siberia, east of the Urals. Uncertain statistics and chaotic conditions make it impossible to know exactly how much of Siberia is being logged, but Norman Myers, a well-known authority on forests, recently estimated the rate at 4 million hectares annually - almost twice the deforestation rate of Brazil.

The destruction of the Russian forests is a loggers' free-for-all and a policymaker's nightmare. Virtually all forest land is state-owned, but Russia's political disintegration makes it next to impossible to determine which authority controls a particular piece of land or a particular activity. Russia's New Forestry Act, passed in 1993, decrees that the forests are to be managed jointly by federal and regional authorities, but the two levels of government cannot agree on their jurisdictions. And the authorities themselves may be compromised by internal conflicts. The federal Forest Ministry, for instance, issues logging permits and is funded by logging proceeds - but it is also the federal agency for forest conservation.

Instead of a coherent policy, Russia has a set of competing authorities, all of whom appear to be struggling to cut as much timber as possible. Last year, for instance, Roslesprom, the huge state-controlled holding company for the timber industry, published a 10-year plan that would more than double annual production, to as much as 350 million cubic meters. And despite federal claims that 14 percent of Siberia is officially protected, regional officials are selling logging rights in the national parks. In addition to the legal problems, there are the blatantly illegal ones: Russian organized crime is reportedly also a player in the timber business.

If Canada's logging is a quest for jobs, Russia's is a quest for foreign currency. Cutting huge amounts of timber is a quick and easy way to boost export earnings, and given Russia's desperate economic situation that temptation is hard to resist. With the loosening of the old state monopolies, both provincial and federal authorities have been inviting foreign companies to participate in joint logging ventures. There has been no shortage of takers. Siberian logging now involves companies from Japan, South and North Korea, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, China, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Austria, Switzerland - even Canada. Japan alone has negotiated five joint timber export programs in eastern Siberia. In the scramble to "get out the cut," as loggers say, some operations have even resorted to slave labor. Some 200,000 Russian prisoners - the survivors of the Soviet Gulag prison camps - have been conscripted for logging. Another 15,000 to 20,000 North Korean workers are logging Siberian forests reportedly under slave-like conditions for two Russian-North Korean timber ventures.

The arrival of the foreign companies has caused a boom in timber exports to Russia's Asian neighbors, especially Japan and South Korea. But Russian profits in the Asian market remain a tiny fraction of the wood's ultimate value. Eighty percent of Siberian timber is exported as raw logs, nearly all of which are bought at rates far below world market prices. The mill jobs and the resale profits go to the importing nations.

The pressure to cut makes the selection of logging sites more a matter of convenience than sound planning. Trees are cut wherever it is easiest to get at them; the logging proceeds outwards from roads and railroads, and inland from the Pacific coast. The pattern can be seen, for instance, in Ussuriland, which lies along the Russian-Chinese border in eastern Siberia. Ussuriland is ecologically unique: a place where boreal plants intermingle with vegetation typical of the temperate and subtropical forests to the south. It is also one of the last strongholds of the Siberian tiger, once the top predator from Lake Baikal to the Pacific coast and through the Korean peninsula. Today, perhaps only 250 Siberian tigers remain in the wild. But the region's proximity to a coastline well furnished with harbor facilities has made it an easy target for logging. Despite the protests of the indigenous Udege people, some of the area has been logged under a series of agreements with Japan, by a consortium of small U.S. companies, and by South Korea's Hyundai Corporation. In 1991 and 1992, Hyundai logged a 200,000-hectare tract in the coastal Sikhote-Alin Range. Hyundai announced last year that it was pulling out, in the wake of an Udege lawsuit and international protests including harbor blockades by the environmental group Greenpeace. But Russian companies are continuing their logging.

As the logging spreads, reforestation remains something of a novelty. Most logged areas are just abandoned, although the problem is beginning to attract some foreign interest. The U.S. timber company Weyerhaeuser, for instance, has begun shipping hundreds of thousands of tree seedlings into Siberia for replanting. (Weyerhaeuser is interested in winning Russian logging contracts; last year the company lost out in a bid to lease more than 40,000 hectares in Ussuriland.) But the prospects for replanting are not normally very good. Siberian clear-cuts often erode on a massive scale. In the Kirzhinsky region, for example, silt from logging has essentially filled some 30 rivers.

Logging is also destroying permafrost, the more or less permanently frozen substrate that underlies the topsoil in much of the region. Permafrost tends to cool the topsoil during the summer, but in the winter, it acts as a heat reservoir - warming the upper layer, as air temperature drops below the permafrost temperature. This moderation of winter soil temperatures is crucial to boreal plants and the plants, in turn, insulate the permafrost during the summer, preventing it from melting. Clear-cutting disrupts this relationship and tends to melt the permafrost, which makes it difficult for the vegetative cover to reestablish itself. In Siberia, nearly half of the logged permafrost areas have reverted to a kind of swampland, incapable of supporting the tree species that once grew there. In drier regions, especially east of Lake Baikal, logging has left behind a form of northern desert.

BOREAL CARBON

Forest destruction on so vast a scale is not simply a regional problem. As the boreal forests are cut, their capacity to sequester carbon is diminished. Given the threat that climate change already poses to the biosphere, it is understandable why one expert calls boreal logging in general "the height of folly." William Pruitt, a University of Manitoba zoologist who manages a boreal research station, argued recently in International Wildlife magazine that the boreal forest "should remain intact without any cutting, as a carbon sink."

Greenhouse gas emissions may already be jeopardizing the forest's carbon storage capacity. Boreal forests are likely to be extremely susceptible to global warming. As permafrost retreats, the forest it supports may die off. Fires are liable to increase in frequency and intensity, forcing rapid shifts in species composition and probably converting some forest to grassland. Pests that cannot now survive the boreal winters may invade the North; they could devastate stands that are already highly stressed and have little natural immunity.

Computer climate modeling indicates that global warming will tend to force the boreal zone farther north into the tundra - where soil conditions permit. Along its southern boundaries, the forest is likely to retreat. Since its southern decline is expected to be much greater than its northern expansion, the result could be an enormous net die-off of the North's most important tree species. A climate model developed at Oregon State University predicts that a doubling of atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (C[O.sub.2]), the main greenhouse gas, would result in a 66 percent decrease in boreal evergreen conifer cover. (At current emissions rates, the C[O.sub.2] level is expected to double in the next 30 to 50 years.) A recent Greenpeace survey cited four computer models, the Oregon State model among them, which predicted that a doubling of C[O.sub.2] would result in a decline of the boreal forests on the order of 50 to 90 percent.

Nor can the boreal forests be neatly replaced by temperate forests, since the decline of the former is likely to occur much faster than the temperate species can establish themselves. And there is no guarantee that temperate species will establish themselves, because their success will depend on a host of other factors as well - soil and water conditions, the presence of pollinators, and so forth.

The retreat of the boreal forests would likely provoke a vicious circle of still more global warming. The die-offs would release huge quantities carbon through decay, and the increased burning would pump still more carbon into the atmosphere. The warming of permafrost and peatbogs would release large amounts of methane (C[H.sub.4]), a greenhouse gas with 21 times the heat-trapping power of C[O.sub.2]. Such changes could turn the boreal region into a net source of atmospheric carbon. The boreal forests provide one of the most compelling reasons thus far discovered for getting serious about reducing carbon emissions.

THE POLLUTED FORESTS

Logging is not the only threat to the boreal forests; pollution is a widespread and growing problem as well. Throughout the boreal region, pulping operations are releasing toxic organochlorines into rivers, lakes, and bays. Drilling for oil and gas is another serious threat; in western Siberia, oil spills and fires have badly degraded more than a million hectares of forest and opened up yet more land to logging. But the worst polluters are the Russian mining and smelting operations, which probably produce the world's highest sulfur emissions. In some cases the fumes emanating from these smelters have killed off entire forests.

During the fifties and sixties, several huge smelters were built on the mineral-rich Kola Peninsula, which borders Norway and Finland and separates the White Sea from the Barents Sea. Today these smelters are still using their obsolete technologies to extract metals from the North. One Kola plant, the Severo-Nickel smelter, produces 140,000 tons of nickel, 100,000 tons of copper, and 3,000 tons of cobalt a year. But its sulfur emissions weigh nearly as much as its product: it produced 212,000 tons of sulfur dioxide in 1988, according to a Russian Ministry of the Environment report. Another enormous Kola smelter produced 300,000 tons of sulfur dioxide that year. The smelters are contaminating the area with metals and arsenic as well. Three million hectares of forest have been damaged on the Russian side of the border alone, and the damage extends into Finland and Norway. Estimates of the forest killed outright range from 40,000 to 100,000 hectares. But as with its timber, Russia uses its metals to bring in hard currency, so officials are determined to keep the smelters in production. Norway and Finland regard the smelters as a major foreign policy problem, and both have offered help in upgrading the plants.

For the present, however, the Kola smelter emissions continue to rise. Local nickel supplies have been exhausted, and the plants are bringing in ore from the Yenisey River region in north central Siberia. Those deposits have a far higher sulfur content than the Kola ore had. And the Yenisey region's own smelters are even worse than the Kola ones: the Norilsk Combine almost certainly holds the world record for single-source sulfur dioxide emissions, at roughly 2.5 million tons per year. So far, it has killed more than 400,000 hectares of larch forest. Elsewhere, the pollutants may differ but the results are the same. At Krasnoyarsk in south central Russia, for example, fluorine emissions from aluminum smelters are largely to blame for 3.2 million hectares of dead or dying forest. Far from the smelters, acid rain and other forms of long range air pollution pose a growing problem. In southern Sweden and Norway, for instance, deposition of sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxides is affecting soils so radically that some areas may no longer be able to support another generation of trees.

Radioactive pollution is another serious threat. At least 15 provinces of the former Soviet Union contain forests contaminated by radioactivity from nuclear accidents or nuclear weapons tests. Affected areas include 2 million hectares around the Semi-palatinsk test range in northeastern Kazakhstan, about 1 million hectares around Chernobyl, some 500,000 hectares in the Ural Mountains, and over 10,000 hectares near Tomsk, in south central Russia. And the radioactivity is spreading, as fires in contaminated forests release dust and smoke that can drift for hundreds of kilometers.

SCANDINAVIA: THE PRIVATE FOREST

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Sodra Skogsagarna, for instance, is a cooperative of some 30,000 private forest owners in southern Sweden. One of the world's biggest pulp suppliers, Sodra is also one of the few manufacturers of "totally chlorine free" (TCF) paper. Last year, Sodra renounced the cutting of old growth, although its policy was later called into question when the company agreed to log 16 hectares of old growth, at the request of the forest's private owner. (Sweden has a 57 percent forest cover, but only a few tiny patches of old growth are left in its southern part.)

But some abuses are far more dramatic. To the north, in Sweden's mountain country, private landowners are logging old growth forest and other forests of special ecological significance - despite a decision by the country's National Forest Service and the major timber companies to stop their own old growth logging in the area. In Finland, old-growth areas along the Russian border are being felled in clear-cuts as large as 500 hectares. Afterwards, the cuts are ploughed and planted in pine monocultures.

It could be argued that such abuses occur because the Scandinavian countries tend to combine private land tenure with legislation that limits itself largely to regulating public land. In Finland, for instance, clear-cuts are limited to 30 hectares on state-owned land - but the state only owns 24 percent of the forest. In Norway (which has only 37 percent forest cover), the Forestry Act of 1965 requires loggers to take "reasonable care" of the environment and forest but the present government says it will not enforce the Act in a way that would impose substantial economic losses on landowners. Sweden does not regulate logging on properties smaller than 1,000 hectares.

The effect of this arrangement is perhaps not everything that Environment Probe's Solomon might hope for. The private tracts have produced a dense network of logging roads which now penetrates nearly all the forests. Sweden's 200,000 kilometers of logging roads cover an area larger than all the forest reserves in the country. The same is true of the Finnish logging roads. And the managed forests themselves have suffered a considerable reduction in biodiversity. Many forest bird populations, for instance, are in decline and some species, like the capercaillie and several woodpeckers, have suffered serious reductions in habitat. In Sweden, a commonly cited barometer of decline involves invertebrate counts: a commercial forest is home to about 2,000 invertebrate species, as opposed to 5,000 species in an old growth forest. Today, Scandinavia retains less than 5 percent of its old growth.

TAKING ACTION

Halting - or even slowing - the rate at which the great forests of the North are being destroyed will require a wide range of changes in government policy arid corporate accountability, and ultimately in consumer habits. Here, in brief, are the changes that would make the most difference.

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their own resources should be subject to the same environmental restrictions that apply on non-indigenous lands.

4. Halt large-scale clear-cut logging. Governments should ban this practice, and begin to promote sustainably produced forest products, including timber, recreation, and the use of wildlife and fisheries. Nongovernmental organizations can help shift patterns of demand by focusing public awareness on the practices of major buyers of wood products. For example, a number of publishing houses in Europe, in response to this awareness, now demand "clear-cut free" paper.

5. Promote timber certification. Reforming industrial practice by shifting patterns of consumer demand is a strategy that can be applied to prevent most aspects of destructive forestry. Programs can be established to certify products that have been made by sustainable methods, thereby encouraging more benign and efficient resource use. The certification programs should meet independent environmental standards, perhaps like those being developed by the Forest Stewardship Council, a consortium of environmental, indigenous, social, and industry groups founded in 1992.

6. Increase paper recycling and reduce production waste. The pressure on the forests would be greatly reduced by using timber as efficiently as existing technologies now permit, and by recycling more paper. Currently, only about 35 percent of the world's paper is recycled, and post-consumer recycling is much lower than that. Many major paper users, such as large-circulation magazines, use no recycled paper at all. Reducing superfluous uses can also help; Germany's packaging law, for instance, provides incentives for eliminating superfluous packaging.

7. Explore alternatives to wood fiber. China has demonstrated the viability of non-wood pulp for papermaking, with some 80 percent of its paper production coming from wheat or rice straw and other agricultural products or byproducts that do not require cutting forests. More than 40 countries use non-wood fiber (from hemp, kenaf, sisal, and numerous other fiber crops, as well as from cereal waste); yet the major paper-consuming countries of the North have made little use of these sources. Research is needed to determine whether pulp needs could be sustainably met without undermining either the nutrient replenishment of agricultural soil or the energy needs of rural populations who use straw for fodder or fuel.

Pursuing these goals could help to build a timber industry that profits from the health of the boreal forests rather than from hastening its decline. But policy changes alone cannot save these forests, unless those changes are backed by the personal will - and ethical awakening - of large numbers of corporate owners and consumers. Perhaps the greatest challenge is to find ways to help millions of people to care about an ecosystem they have never seen.

RELATED ARTICLE: SOME ORGANIZATIONS WORKING ON BOREAL ISSUES:

TAIGA RESCUE NETWORK Box 116 S-962 23 JokkMokk, SWEDEN Ph: 46-971-17037 Fax: [phone]

SOCIO ECOLOGICAL UNION Tolbochina 4-2-21 Moscow 121 596, RUSSIA Ph: 7-095-316-7543 Fax: [phone]

FRIENDS OF SIBERIAN FORESTS Academgorodok 16-3 Krasnoyarsk 660036, RUSSIA Ph: 7-3912-494-454 Fax: -3912-220-671

WESTERN CANADA WILDERNESS COMMITTEE #4, 10121 Whyte Avenue Edmonton, ALB T6E 1Z5, CANADA Ph: 416-599-0152 Fax: [phone]

PACIFIC ENVIRONMENT AND RESOURCES CENTER 1055 Fort Cronkhite Sausalito, CA 94965, USA Ph: 415-332-8200 Fax: [phone]

ALASKA BOREAL FOREST COUNCIL 1707 Red Fox Drive Fairbanks, ALASKA 99709, USA Ph: 907-479-2879 Fax: [phone]

Anjali Acharya is a staff researcher at the Worldwatch Institute.