Rainforest crunch.

To Supply Newsprint for America's Newspapers, One of Canada!s Largest Stands of Ancient Trees Is Being Decimated

"All the news that's fit to print on Canada's ancient rainforests," read one of a cluster of, placards hoisted by a small group of demonstrators huddled in front of the New York Times building in Manhattan one frigid day last winter. Beside them was a palette loaded with copies of the Times, festively strewn with Yuletide decorations.

As the motley group sang a medley of imaginatively adapted Christmas songs, including "The Twelve Days of Clearcut," and "Don't Rest Environmentalists," Lisa Beaudouin of the New York-based Coalition for Forests explained that the geographical locus of the struggle between her group and the management of the Times was far from 43rd Street, in a forest called Clayoquot Sound, on the southwest coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia--Canada's westernmost province.

Clayoquot (pronounced "Clockwood") Sound--650,000 acres of sitka spruce, western hemlock, red cedar and yellow cedar--is the largest remaining tract of ancient lowland temperate rainforest in the northern hemisphere. Many of Clayoquot's trees are 500 to 600 years old, and have grown to heights of over 200 feet, with diameters of six feet or more, Beaudouin said. The oldest are up to 1,500 years old, 300 feet tall and between 15 and 20 feet in diameter.

Canadian forests are publicly owned, and logging companies buy licenses from provincial governments giving them exclusive rights to certain areas--a single license can cover as much as a million acres. A number of companies hold licenses to log in Clayoquot Sound, but the largest is MacMillan Bloedel (unaffectionately known by forest activists as "MacBlo"), which supplies newsprint and telephone directory paper to U.S. companies such as The New York Times, E Directories and Gannett/USA Today.

Environmentalists want to slow the rate at which Canada's old growth forests are disappearing, and so the Coalition for Forests and other groups such as Greenpeace, Western Canada Wilderness Committee (WCWC) and The Friends of Clayoquot Sound (FOCS) have begun putting pressure on MacMillan Bloedel's customers to persuade them to cancel contracts with the company and find sources of paper made from second-growth trees, post-consumer recycled paper and alternative fiber sources such as hemp and kenaf.

New York Times spokesperson Nancy Nielson told E that less than half a percent of Times newsprint comes from Mac-Millan Bloedel; furthermore, she said, Mac-Millan Bloedel now supplies the Times solely from its Powell River mill, not from the Port Alberni mill which receives lumber from Clayoquot Sound. However, Valerie Langer of FOCS says, "MacMillan Bloedel has told us they can't guarantee that no Clayoquot trees go to Powell River."

Langer, whose FOCS office is in the Vancouver Island village of Tofino (population 1,000), has been arrested three times for sitting down on a MacMillan Bloedel logging road and barring the way to its trucks. She has also been inside some pretty swanky boardrooms. In London, for instance, a group of paper purchasing executives from five major newspaper publishers listened to her concerns and, as a result, the very large Daily Express Newspapers agreed to find alternative supplies of newsprint. This was one of a number of successes the campaign has had in Europe: Greenpeace reports that newspaper and magazine publishers have cancelled contracts with MacMillan Bloedel worth more than $8 million, and found suppliers that produce "clearcut-free" paper.

The New York Times owns a couple of second-growth tree farms, and also buys some 100 percent recycled newsprint from Garden State Paper of New Jersey, but Nielson said the company could not get by without its half-a-percent fix of old growth from MacMillan Bloedel. The Times has opened its doors to Garth Lenz of FOCS, and Misty MacDuffee of WCWC. (Her group travelled with a 10,000-pound red cedar stump--and parked it opposite the Times building.) Times Vice President of Forest Products Stephen Golden, who met the protesters, defended Mac-Millan Bloedel's environmental record, adding that the Times would not do business with a company that broke environmental laws.

Yet MacMillan Bloedel has racked up many convictions under the Federal Fisheries Act, and is currently charged with contaminating a salmon spawning stream called Winter Creek. The company suffered a bad case of deferred maintenance at the Powell River mill on October 17, 1994, when an overfilled wooden pulp vat burst, sending metal fragments flying into two nearby tanks containing 650,000 liters of liquid chlorine dioxide. To prevent the formation of deadly gas, the tanks had to be flushed into Malaspina Strait. A 1992 consultant's report had warned that the metal hoops around the pulp vat were badly corroded, and an internal company memo had warned MacMillan Bloedel men who dug into company coffers to pay for routine maintenance that they risked being fired.

MacMillan Bloedel environmental spokesperson Dennis Fitzgerald said the company "has ordered a review of the procedures for assessing maintenance priorities at the Powell River mill. I find the tone of the [internal company] memo regrettable; it's not the way the company usually communicates with supervisors." Fitzerald also denied that Winter Creek is a salmon spawning stream, though government press releases identify it as such.

The environmentalists' record is mixed. The San Francisco Chronicle cancelled its contract with MacMillan Bloedel, despite a personal visit from British Columbia Premier Michael Harcourt. And Little Nickel Want Ads of Lynwood, Washington found a new paper supplier. But giant GTE Directories, the leading manufacturer of telephone directories in the U.S., and The Seattle Times wouldn't budge. Bobbie Hennessey of GTE said her company had told MacMillan Bloedel to increase the proportion of recycled content in its newsprint, but she insisted, "It's a physical impossibility to rid ourselves of clearcut--if we discontinued using [it] we'd be out of business."

British Columbia's recently developed Forest Practices Code, a raft of new regulations announced in June 1994, has not impressed the environmental community. "It's just smoke and mirrors", said MacDuffee. The regulations leave certain critical aspects of the old system of forest management unchanged: District managers, for instance, historically sympathetic to the logging industry, still have wide discretion in applying the rules to the companies operating in their districts. The "stumpage" fees (the royalty paid by companies to the government) are still the third lowest in the world--which does nothing to encourage companies to control their appetite for old-growth timber. In a report to the European Parliament on the health and long-term viability of Clayoquot Sound, Dr. Gordon Brent Ingram of the University of British Columbia said, "The rate of cutting in 1993 and 1994 will be the highest ever seen."

Tim Keating of Rainforest Relief advocates a form of selective logging that would leave many trees standing. They may have rotten cores and be no good for construction materials for the Japanese market, he said, but they have many roles to play in the forest ecosystem: as habitat for birds and insects, and eventually as nourishers of the soil. "Nothing is waste in the forest," he says.

CONTACT: Friends of Clayoquot Sound, Box 489, Tofino, British Columbia, Canada, VOR2ZO/[phone]; Coalition For Forests, Worldview, 29 King Street, Suite 31, NewYork, NY 10014/[phone].