Everybody’s heard about the importance of protecting the Amazon rainforest. Many people in government, business and the environmental movement have a willful ignorance about how to protect forests in the United States. This must change.
U.S. forests must be protected immediately. We must end government policies that are shaped by the logging industry and wood products industry. These policies sound reasonable but actually aim to increase logging rather than contain it. We are calling on influential environmental organizations that promote the interests and interests of industry. Forests — and people and the planet — are paying too high a price for the wood product sector’s profits.
Forests are the best system for absorbing carbon and locking it away for decades. But logging is slashing U.S. forests’ ability to accumulate carbon by over one-third. The majority of carbon they store is released immediately after they are felled. Logging in the United States releases approximately 723 million tonsEach year, carbon dioxide is released.
It doesn’t make sense to keep using taxpayer money and taxpayer-owned land to expand logging, but that’s exactly what’s happening. For example, last year’s giant infrastructure bill called for 30 million acres of additional logging on public land — an area bigger than the state of Pennsylvania. It also featured $400 millionTo increase wood market and reduce environmental impact of logging in national forests.
President Biden’s Earth Day executive orderIt protects old-growth forest, which is vital. But it also calls for advancing “forest-related economic opportunities” — the kind of wording that often serves as a euphemism for allowing industrial-scale logging in national forests and on other publicly owned land.
Now comes the Save Our Sequoias ActThe wood-pellet giant also has a spokesman for you. Enviva has tweeted that it’s proud to “co-sponsor,” and which the nation’s richest and largest environmental organization, The Nature Conservancy, supports. In a letter to Congress, dozens of environmental justice and forest protection groups — including Indigenous-led, Latino-led and Asian-led community organizations whose communities depend on healthy forests — point out that the bill would “weaken existing environmental law to expedite potentially harmful logging projects that undermine the ecological integrity of sequoia groves and will do nothing to protect these trees.” The letter’s signers warn that, “Some provisions in the bill could actually exacerbate the threat to the Giant Sequoias and our forests.”
In the South, we’ve seen policies encourage a particularly noxious form of wood-market expansion: the fast-growing wood-pellet industry, which turns U.S. trees into tiny pellets and ships them overseas to be burned to generate electricity. This process produces more carbon pollution than coal-burning. Highly polluting and noisy wood pellet mills keep cropping up in rural low-income communities — most often, communities of color. Neighbors complain of difficulty breathing, as well as serious noise and dust problems.
This is an example the environmental injustices that dirty energy causes and the climate change it perpetuates. As hurricanes, floods and other severe weather phenomena become more frequent and more severe in the South, communities of color and low-income people are bearing a greater burden. The sea level continues to rise and is becoming more severe across the region. Even after floodwaters recede, dangerous mold and unsafe drinking water can be left behind. Families are forced from their ancestral homes to leave the communities they grew up in for hundreds of generations. These trees, which have provided shelter for these communities, are being felled by equipment polluting the air and hauled away from trucks emitting diesel-powered engine emissions.
Our communities are responding to climate injustice by developing homegrown solutions, from installing solar-powered panels that produce clean water from thin air, to developing rural business opportunities that don’t depend on cutting down trees. Too often, we are drowned out in the media by organizations that seek money and media attention while pushing fake climate solutions that cause forest destruction. Sometimes they are logging and wood product companies. Sometimes they get help from giant environmental organizations that claim they are doing the right thing, but that are far away from frontline climate communities, and don’t seem to hear our voices.
We’ve engaged with these organizations, but with mixed success. Two of these organizations, for example, are led by us. 158 faith, forest protection and climate justice groups — representing 3.5 million members in all — that have asked the U.S.’s biggest environmental nonprofit, The Nature Conservancy (TNC), to engage with us on logging and forest-protection issues. TNC’s billion-dollar-a-year income and million-dollar lobbying budget tend to get it a seat at tables in the halls of power, where we are not invited to sit. And TNC’s track recordThis suggests that too many corporations have a cozy relationship with them, and they are more interested in expanding logging than protecting U.S. forests.
We tried to get TNC involved. In 2020, about 50 organizations wrote a letter asking for a meeting with TNC’s CEO, raising concerns that the giant green group was “prioritizing the financial interests of the industrial logging and wood products industry at the expense of solving the climate crisis, protecting nature and advancing environmental justice.” We had two meetings with senior staff, including a five-hour meeting with scientists and environmental justice and forest-protection leaders. TNC thanked our conversation but declined to issue a joint statement about the importance protecting forests from industrial-scale timber logging. It also declined to continue the discussion.
Enough is enough. We call on The Nature Conservancy, other large conservation organizations and the philanthropic community — including the many leaders who’ve pledged support for the concept that frontline communities should speak for themselves — to hear the voice of people living with environmental injustice, and protect the forests we value and the Earth that we share. We call on Congressmen and the Biden/Harris administration to listen to communities that are advancing forest protection and real climate solutions.
Martin Luther King Jr. talked about moving from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. That’s what our communities are talking about when we talk about forests: caring for creation in a way that promotes healthy, safe communities and a sustainable planet for all God’s people.
