Hello friends, this is the Environment Show, and welcome.
You mentioned that 90% of the old growth forests have been harvested in the Northwest, and
there is no scientific evidence to prove that that is an accurate figure whatsoever.
I put a mass extinction of species, which is occurring now, at the top of urgent priorities
of the environment because it's the only one that's irreversible.
Jim Geisinger, President of the Northwest Timber Association, his Oregon group is responding
to charges the timber industry has destroyed the habitat of the northern spotted owl.
And Dr. Edward O. Wilson, biologist, concerned not only with the northern spotted owl, but
with a degradation of biodiversity in general.
Two of our stories and guests, this time on the Environment Show, we hope you'll join us.
The Environment Show is a production of WAMC, made possible by the J.M. Kaplan Fund of New
York, and this is Bruce Robertson.
The northern spotted owl weighs a pound and a half, and stands two feet tall.
From its perch in the upper canopy branches of a Douglas fir, 190 feet above the forest
floor, the small, feathery soft bird would doubtless be amazed, maybe gratified, perhaps
even a bit amused if it knew of the flurry of activity going on in the human habitat outside
of its forest boundaries.
Far away from the forested hillsides of Oregon and Washington State, in Washington, D.C., the
Federal Fish and Wildlife Service has designated the northern spotted owl a threatened species.
So as of July 23rd, 1990, it will be illegal to take the species.
Says Elizabeth Lipscomb of the Fish and Wildlife Service.
The definition of take is pretty broad.
It means to harm her ass, shoot, kill, and a few other things.
Specifically, you can't harm the species or kill it.
The Endangered Species Act signed on the books in 1973 provides a rating system to warn
of the peril facing a plant or an animal.
Lipscomb says the criteria is whether a species is threatened throughout all or a significant
portion of its range, and also whether it would become endangered if nothing were done
to save it.
I definition under the act of threatened species is threatened to become endangered, and
an endangered species is likely to become extinct.
So threatened is just the less critical category under the Endangered Species Act.
The case of the northern spotted owl is developing as a paradigm for all that is going on in
the environmental movement of 1990.
Lipscomb says that the Endangered Species Act regulates all federal and private lands
and covers a species wherever it may be, either threatened or endangered in its habitat.
But this is not a story about the northern spotted owl, at least not entirely.
In fact, the issues are as complex as they come.
Again, Elizabeth Lipscomb.
The spotted owl is dependent on a forest that are very old.
They have high canopy closures.
They need tree cavities and broken trees.
They like habitat that's not real clean.
They need broken tree limbs and they don't build nests.
They need to use all tree cavities to nest in.
So what they prefer is old growth of a forest, which are far as of over 200 years old.
That's also very attractive to timber harvesting because the wood is very valuable.
So there's a conflict between the two.
That's basically what this issue is about.
The Pine Forests of Oregon, Washington State and Northern California have provided a way
of life for generations of lumberjacks, a way of life that some see severely threatened
now if the owl gets the protection provided under the Endangered Species Act.
Critics of the plan say the timber industry would lose up to a third of its available forests,
and the result would be a loss of 30, 50, or maybe even 100,000 jobs.
Francis Hunt, however, says there is more to the story than protecting the owl.
Hunt is the forestry resource specialist with the National Wildlife Federation.
He says the owl is taking the fall for something far greater than its little body.
The owl gets blamed for jobs, but in reality the things that are creating the job loss are
the overcutting of the forest, the fact that such a limited amount of these forests are left
that the industry cannot continue to cut them at current rates and therefore is going
to have to scale back its ancient forest logging.
And also the, as I said, the exports and the automation, 26,000 workers have been put
out of work in the last 10 years alone because the industry has automated both its logging
and milling operations.
They can cut more trees, create larger volumes of wood products at greater profits with
fewer workers.
The U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management are both in the process of designing
a plan to balance the protection of the owls with the economic needs of the region.
A plan that they say will result in fewer jobs lost.
Still says hunt, the issue is more than the owl versus jobs.
The broad issue in this story is the fate of the ancient forest ecosystem because that
ecosystem not only supports the owl and other species, but it has for decades supported
the logging industry in the Pacific Northwest.
Unfortunately, or realistically, the logging industry has pretty much decimated that ecosystem,
but about 90% of it has already been logged.
These forests have been logged faster than nature can replace them and log faster than nature
can replace them even with the help of man.
So we're facing a situation where the very forests that have shaped the character of the
region, both economically and environmentally, are now pushed to the brink.
And the evidence that we see are the species that are being threatened, imperiled by the
logging.
And by the fact that it is getting harder and harder for the timber companies to get the
timber they need without creating really dramatic damage to the environment.
Well, you mentioned that 90% of the old growth forests have been harvested in the Northwest,
and there is no scientific evidence to prove that that is an accurate figure whatsoever.
Jim Geisinger, president of the Northwest Forestry Association, based in Portland, Oregon,
the association represents 70 timber companies in Oregon and Washington State involved in
the manufacture of lumber and plywood.
The group is unique in that the timber it uses comes only from federal forest lands.
Over the years, Northern Forest Ecology, he says, has been dictated by naturally regulating
forces, wind, insect infestation, and fire.
And says Geisinger, we have always had a mosaic of age classes ranging from young stands to
older stands since the beginning of time.
And that figure that the environmentalist like the point to assumes that when European
settlers came to this region, there was a huge ocean of old growth, 200 plus year old timber.
That simply isn't true.
We've always had a variety of age classes.
And when we practice professional forestry in the Northwest, that is a very objective
that we try to achieve as well.
To have a variety of age classes so that we can harvest the oldest trees and always have
more trees growing into the older age classes over time.
In the debate over the Northern Spotted Owl and the timber industry, is the story of our
changing civilization, says Francis Hunt of the National Wildlife Federation.
Since we began to settle this continent, she says, we have operated on the idea of cut
the trees, plow the land, and then move on.
But now we need to change this for we are no longer a developing nation.
And our economic health is no longer based on taming, if you will, the vast natural resources
that we have at our disposal.
We have now pushed many of those natural resources to their limits.
And we really need to face the limitation of the resources and think more creatively
in terms of future development strategies and future environmental management strategy.
In the Northern Pine Forest of the Pacific Northwest is a good example of the issues involved
in what we are coming to call now the new environmentalism, the need to balance economic growth
and concerns with environmental protection.
Says Elizabeth Lipscomb of the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Endangered Species Act has
long had a built-in provision for this very dynamic.
She says the service deals with hundreds of cases each year, most of them settled quietly
so that we never hear about them.
When we list the species, we have to, by law, only consider the biology of the species.
We are looking not necessarily at the number of species that there are, but the trend,
if there is a downward population trend, or if there is a definite habitat loss, a trend
of loss of habitat that is obviously going to affect the species, that's what we base
our decision on.
We can't base it on economics, but as we plan for the recovery of the species, we can
take other things into account.
And I think we have a pretty good track record of doing that.
So preserving endangered species and preserving the economic health of the country, I think
is possible if we can work together.
The effects of the Fish and Wildlife Service rating of the Northern Spotted Owl as threatened
are unknown at this time, but Jim Geissinger of the Timber Association says that it is imperative
to keep in mind that more than 50% of the federal lands in Washington and Oregon are already
off limits for timber harvest.
The economic impact that that would have on this region are truly catastrophic, no matter
whose estimates you use.
And those estimates range from around 50,000 jobs to as high as 100,000 jobs based on some
of the most recent analysis that's been done.
There are those who have been hearing those kinds of figures and have charged back that automation
and exports and even depletion of the cash crop have already cost thousands of jobs and
that the owl in this particular case is getting the blame is the scapegoat for a changing
economy.
What is your view of the future of the timber industry toward the late 20th century with
all of those factors economic and natural?
Well, first of all, the export issue is one that doesn't affect federal forests land.
It is illegal to export federal timber and furthermore, there are very strict regulations
that prohibit a person from buying federal timber if they export their own.
And those regulations are being even strengthened through legislation that's pending before
Congress.
On the issue of automation, that is just a pure misrepresentation of the facts.
R&S re-lossed about 15 to 20,000 jobs in the early 80s due to the most severe recession
we've ever experienced in history.
Mills closed and they never reopened and that's where those jobs were lost.
Since the recession, people have improved the technology in their mills not to eliminate
employment but to produce more lumber and plywood from the same amount of raw material
as we previously used.
In other words, we're making more to buy for us out of the same amount of logs today
than we did prior to the recession.
And those mills that survived the recession have not laid off anybody.
In fact, since 1983, employment in our industry in this region has actually increased moderately.
The production of finished products has increased very significantly because of those improvements
in technology.
So what we have is a situation where people are skewing statistics to try to portray a situation
that doesn't exist.
So representing the timber industry, what Geissinger says is at stake is what we want as a nation.
The question is, are we about preserving the forests or preserving the owl?
Nobody wants to see that species go extinct, including the forest products industry.
In fact, according to the forest service, there's 2.7 million acres of land that they categorize
as spot-and-out habitat in national parks and in wilderness areas and other areas off
limits to logging.
Now, we think by supplementing that 2.7 million acres with some additional set of sides,
the spot-and-out can be guaranteed to survive in perpetuity.
There are some questions that need to be addressed, however, such as is it in the best interest
of society to maintain spot-and-out habitat everywhere that exists today, which is a very
different objective than simply prohibiting the species from going extinct.
The Fish and Wildlife Service designation is designed to prevent the loss of the northern
spotted owl and to restore it to its normal population.
Once again, Elizabeth Lipscomb.
That's the goal.
The goal of lifting the species is to stop the down-retrend, reverse it, and eventually
take it off the list.
And so when we've designated this threat and we're not assuming that it will become an
endangered species, we're hoping that we can stop the trend and reverse it and get it
off the list before it ever becomes endangered.
There is legislation circulating in Congress now that would address this, the Ancient Forest
Protection Act in the House of Representatives, Bill HR-4492.
But in the meantime, the mills are still running at full tilt, the owl watches from on high,
and the bulldozers and the activists square off.
For the Environment Show, this is Bruce Robertson.
Here's a poem read by Sheldon Rothberg.
Advice to a prophet by Richard Wilber.
When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city, mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
not proclaiming our fall but begging us and God's name to have self-pity, spare us all
word of the weapons, their force and range, the long numbers that rock at the mind, our
slow, unrecogning hearts will be left behind, unable to fear what is too strange.
Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?
The sun, mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us.
A stone look on the stone's face.
Think of the world's own change.
Though we cannot conceive of an undrempt thing, we know to our cost how the dreamt cloud crumbles.
The vines are blackened by frost.
How the view alters.
We could believe if you told us so that the white-tailed deer will slip into perfect shade,
grown perfectly shy.
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye.
The jackpine lose its knuckle-drip on the cold ledge, and every torrent burn is Zanthus
once.
It's gliding trowts stunned in a twinkling.
What should we be without the dolphins arc?
The doves return.
These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken.
Ask us profit how we shall call our natures forth when that live tongue is all dispelled,
that glass obscured or broken in which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
horse of our courage, in which beheld the singing locus of the soul unsheld, and all we
mean or wish to mean.
Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose our hearts shall fail us.
Come demanding whether there shall be lofty or long standing when the bronze annals of
the oak tree close.
Advice to a profit from new and collected poems by Richard Wilbur, winner of 1989's Pulitzer
Prize, published by Harcourt Brace-Dravenovich in New York, read by Poet and Professor Sheldon
Rothberg, who writes and teaches at Berkshire Community College in Pitsfield, Massachusetts.
Dr. Edward O. Wilson is a Pulitzer Prize winning biologist and author of numerous articles
and books including his most recent book The Ants.
To the growing list of environmental crises facing the earth and its populations of humans,
animals and plants, Wilson would add yet another, one in fact that he would put right at
the top of the list.
I put a mass extinction of species, which is occurring now, at the top of urgent priorities of
the environment because it's the only one that's irreversible.
And furthermore, the entities, the species and the genes in the species that are being eliminated
are such precious resources that took, in most cases, literally millions of years to be assembled
by evolution.
I believe that this is the change in the environment which our descendants will most regret.
What is man's role in either preserving actively or simply passively allowing to continue
to exist the other plants and animals in the earth's environment?
The human influence on the rest of the world's fauna and flora, and we, after all, are part
of the world fauna, ourselves, is catastrophic.
There have been five great mass extinction episodes in the past 600 million years of
geologic history.
Only five, the last one was 65 million years ago.
That ended the age of dinosaurs may have been caused by a giant meteorite strike.
We're not sure.
This is a six-man.
It's occurring in our lifetimes.
It's entirely human-generated, and in many respects, it appears to be worse in its effects
than the one that ended the age of dinosaurs in particular because for the first time,
the plant species of the world are endangered.
At the end of the mesozoic 65 million years ago, dinosaurs and a number of other animals
on the land and sea were wiped out, but not the plants.
Now we're eliminating not only the animals, but the plants.
You see the importance of what is happening is that it's man-made and not a cycle of nature
in that there has always been a cycle of birth, flourishing, decay, destruction, and
ultimate death in the cycles of evolution.
And maybe we should or should not get involved in that, helping it or preventing it, but
you're seeing that nevertheless the difference between this age and any other ages that
this is man-made or man-created.
Yes, for the last 65 million years, we've had what is typical for the long haul of evolution
on Earth, namely a very low birth rate of new species and kinds of plants and animals,
and the very low corresponding death rate.
So they were more or less in balance, and in balance in such a way as to maintain a very
rich mixture around the world of ecosystems and species.
But now humanity has entered the scene and shattered the equilibrium and has increased
the rate of extinction by, well, in my estimate, which many consider conservative, 10,000 times,
and it's accelerating.
In other words, we're extinguishing species at vastly faster rate than new species can be
created.
Wilson says he and his colleagues generally agree that if we continue our rate of habitat
destruction, we will have wiped out 25 percent, one quarter of all the Earth species during
the next 50 years.
Bear in mind we include on our list of species large mammals and plants down to the most
microscopic cellular bacteria and fungi.
The greatest force, the heaviest pressure on the non-human kingdoms of animals and plants
is none other than we humans.
We now co-opt an estimated 40 percent of all of the energy fixed my photosynthesis in
green plants.
That's too much for one species to take up.
The globe can't hold that many big creatures on Earth.
Dr. Eduardo Wilson, he is a Baird Professor of Science, Curator, and Entomology at Harvard
University.
Next week we'll have more of our conversation with Dr. Wilson, including excerpts from
his recent keynote address to a conference of scientists convened at the New York State
Museum in Albany.
For the Environment Show, this is Bruce Robertson.
See Dick and Jane run is history, or at least it's fair to say that materials for school
rooms are changing, and the environment is the focus of some new materials going into
California schools this September.
From Los Angeles, Joy Newell has more on the story.
According to David Kramer, kids in school learn skills, but they don't learn how to apply
the information.
Kramer is a businessman with experience in the computer field who formed a partnership
with an educator because he saw a need for elementary school students to deal with their
world and the many decisions they can make about the environment.
And we look at environmental issues, there is no right answer.
There is one best answer that might fit one community better, but for another community
it might be a completely wrong answer.
If you're looking at the steel industry in the Midwest, if you're looking at the California
desert, there is no one might answer as to what's the best way to deal with your environment.
We want to develop materials that are focused on local environments and local issues that
the kids can really get in and understand and feel and identify with and act on and be
empowered with.
So if I live in Minnesota, I would have a different curricula than if I live in Southern
California.
Precisely, because your environmental issues are completely different than Minnesota than
they are in California.
And the materials that we're developing, we have texts, we have computer programs that
we're developing, we have videos that we're working on, each of them will have a focus
on a particular type of ecology.
In fact, we're dividing the curricula that supplements that we're developing not so much
by grade as much by the biomes or the biological and ecological regions that the children are
growing up in.
When Kramer and I talked, he was about to give a speech about his educational outlook
to a group called Women in Business.
You're hearing the women in the background as they network prior to their meeting.
Kramer's organization is called the Environmental Literacy Group.
Kramer describes a bit about the materials and their intent.
And our materials focus on where they come from, where materials come from, where they
go, because where we throw our styrofoam cup or where we throw our paper cup or where
we recycle our paper cup has a significant impact.
By now most people know landfills are filling up.
I think we have to start paying attention to the fact that landfills are filling up and
we should do something about it.
And children are getting concerned.
They're hearing these things.
They hear over the dinner or maybe in a TV program that they're watching some comment
about.
And they're getting worried.
And we want to empower children.
We want to let kids know they can make a difference because I believe children can make a difference.
And we want children to teach their parents.
We want children to come home and say, Mommy, Daddy, you know I learned today in school?
Who recycle our material?
If we burn less energy, then we can help clean up the world.
And I'd like to be able to do that.
And that makes the kid feel real good.
And I contribute to the self-esteem.
Contribute to the leadership.
Kramer sent me a draft of the materials Environmental Literacy Group is putting in several pilot
schools.
We have two books that are ready.
One is called Impact Global Learning Tools for Proactive Children.
And that book is ready and is being published and is being distributed now.
And we have a book that's due out in a few weeks called The Adventures of Checker.
And it's a story about a creature that comes from outer space, lands on the planet earth,
and it, not he or she, it, has to figure out how to survive on the earth.
So it checks things out.
And it checks the consequences of everything that it does.
And it says, well, if I do this or do that, if I buy organic foods versus inorganic foods
that's maybe treated with pesticides, what's the impact on my body?
What's the impact on the environment of these herbicides and pesticides?
And checker through a chooser-owned adventure story.
If the child makes a choice, it turns to page 7 or 8.
And says, oh, I didn't make the right choice.
Look what happens as a result of what I've done.
And then the child has a chance to go back and make a different choice.
That way learn the appropriate choices.
We're not saying the right choices.
We're saying the appropriate choices.
In one section of The Adventures of Checker, the creature is hungry and has to make a
decision about buying commercially or organically grown carrots at the market.
The organically grown produce is shown to be more expensive.
Checker learns about growing without pesticides and resting the soil between crops and picking
weeds by hand.
The students have to decide which carrots checker buys.
The activities and choices become much more complex with moral components, like feeding
hungry people but decreasing profit because of that decision.
The product was fresh muffins.
Cramer says different activities highlight different environmental problems.
We have an activity called What's in the Trash where children, they're not told that
this activity is going to go on.
They have lunch and then they have lunch as usual and then they don't appear to go to
the trash.
They say, What's in there?
What can be recycled?
What can I do?
What can I do?
What can I compost?
How can I reduce the impact of what's going to landfills?
They see very clearly.
Oh my gosh, I didn't notice that.
This is a perfect activity.
We want to computerize that by expanding on the screen, on the computer screen.
If the child sees what's in the trash and they say they pick paper bag, they'll click
on it on the screen and the computer program will take them back in time to see where that
paper bag came from.
They can see the tree and the process that manufacture that paper bag and they can see
the process of when that paper bag gets recycled or if that paper bag gets thrown out, where
it is to go.
If I were to try to sum up the emphasis of this kind of coursework, I'd say real world
involvement and decision making are what make it different from a lot of what I remember
in school.
For the Environment Show in Los Angeles, I'm Joy Newell.
Joy Newell reports for the Environment Show from KCRW in Santa Monica, California.
Well that's our show for this week.
The Environment Show is a program about the environment, the air, water, soil, wildlife
and people of our common habitat.
The Environment Show is a production of WAMC, Dr. Alan Chartock, Executive Producer.
This is Bruce Robertson.
The Environment Show is made possible by the J.M. Kaplan Fund of New York.
