1-World Trees

Global Rates of Destruction

2.47 acres (1 hectare) per second: equivalent to two U.S. football fields

150 acres (60 hectares) per minute

214,000 acres (86,000 hectares) per day: an area larger than New York City

78 million acres (31 million hectares) per year: an area larger than Poland

In Brazil

5.4 million acres per year (estimate averaged for period 1979-1990)

Species Extinction

Projected Economic Value of One Hectare in the Peruvian Amazon

$6,820 per year if intact forest is sustainably harvested for fruits, latex, and timber

$1,000 if clear-cut for commercial timber (not sustainably harvested)

While you were reading the above statistics, approximately 150 acres of rainforest were destroyed. Within the next hour approximately six species will become extinct. While extinction is a natural process, the alarming rate of extinction today, comparable only to the extinction of the dinosaurs, is specifically human-induced and unprecedented. Experts agree that the number-one cause of extinction is habitat destruction. Quite simply, when habitat is reduced, species disappear. In the rainforests, logging, cattle ranching, mining, oil extraction, hydroelectric dams and subsistence farming are the leading causes of habitat destruction. Indirectly, the leading threats to rainforest ecosystems are unbridled development, funded by international aid-lending institutions such as the World Bank, and the voracious consumer appetites of industrialized nations. If deforestation continues at current rates, scientists estimate nearly 80-90 percent of tropical rainforest ecosystems will be destroyed by the year 2020.

A bitter environmental battle over logging in redwood groves turned deadly last week when Earth First activists challenged Pacific Lumber Co. loggers at work above Grizzly Creek in California's Humboldt County. Cat-and-mouse taunting between protesters and timber crews had gone on for years, but recent confrontations had turned sour. Earlier this year an activist took refuge in a 40-ft. redwood sapling, and loggers felled the tree. Somehow the climber tumbled out unharmed. Last week's skirmish ended differently: with shouts, the whine of a chain saw and a falling redwood hitting another tree. As the confusion of dust and noise subsided, activist David ("Gypsy") Chain, 24, of Austin, Texas, lay with a crushed skull, dying.

By week's end no charges had been filed. Chain's death was both an accident and the darkest of ironies, because this environmental war was supposed to be over. Lawyers and legislators had stepped in to settle the dispute, but Pacific Lumber did not see fit to stop felling trees, and the activists, who charged that the cutting destroyed the habitat of endangered seabirds, did not stop trying to block the loggers.

The bill that the California legislature passed this month to handle the controversy, referred to glumly by environmentalists as "the Deal," sounds good. Some 300-ft.-tall old-growth giants along the northern part of the state's coast are saved, along with scraps of wildlife habitat, and if a financier named Charles Hurwitz gets nearly half a billion dollars in federal and state money, who cares? The stock market creates or vaporizes that much wealth in the time it takes Alan Greenspan to clear his throat.

At closer inspection, however, the Deal is a textbook example of the wreckage that occurs when political imbalance--weakness on the part of federal and state environmental agencies, blustering strength among enemies of land-use regulation--allows owners of private property to hold the environment at ransom.

This ransom is a big one--and likely to be the benchmark for future environmental payoffs involving private timberland. In return for 3,500 acres of ancient redwoods in Humboldt County's Headwaters Grove, the largest old-growth tract still in private hands, and 4,000 acres of additional land, most of it heavily logged, Maxxam Corp. of Houston, Pacific Lumber's owner, will get $250 million from the Federal Government and $210 million from California. At week's end there seemed little doubt that Governor Pete Wilson would sign the payment bill. Maxxam, controlled by Hurwitz, was a major contributor to his most recent election campaign.

To anyone who has spent a night in Headwaters Grove, awakening at dawn to hear the cries of marbled murrelets, the endangered seabirds that nest in the huge trees, and to watch the great trunks take form in the lightening mist, the idea of owning such a place is daft. But, yes, if the Deal goes through, Maxxam won't own Headwaters. Won't cut it. And California will have a beautiful new tree museum.

Conservationists hoped for more: not just Headwaters, but 60,000 acres of mostly scarred and bulldozed land that could be rehabilitated. There is a dim hope, still, that they will get it. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is slowly pursuing an old case against Hurwitz, having to do with a savings and loan collapse. A settlement of $250 million from Hurwitz was spoken of. So was a swap: debt for nature, maybe involving Pacific Lumber land.

The plan might work if the landowner respected the land. This appears to have been the case with Pacific Lumber before Hurwitz bought it in a hostile takeover in 1985. But since then, on the evidence of a passionate new book by activist Doug Thron, a photographer and lecturer, and reporter Joan Dunning, accelerated logging has devastated the land and the streams that flow through it. From the Redwood Forest (Chelsea Green; $24.95) relates a brutal progression. Pacific Lumber, under Maxxam and Hurwitz, started widespread clear-cutting, a practice that leaves no tree standing and works against natural regrowth. Then Pacific Lumber began cutting through the winter months, and on dangerously steep slopes, giving the impacted ground and the silted streams no respite.

Activists reported repeated violations of court orders, federal environmental rules and state forestry regulations. They filed lawsuits, won judgments and saw little change. Pacific Lumber stonewalled and talked of jobs. The mood in Humboldt County, where the only good jobs had always been in the woods or the mills, turned rancid. When protesters conducted peaceful sit-ins at the company's headquarters and the office of U.S. Congressman Frank Riggs, the sheriff's department daubed pepper spray near their eyes and taped the process for a training film. A lawsuit by the protesters resulted in a hung jury, with a retrial scheduled for November. The training film is available to law officers.