Free Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared M. Diamond

Germany, South Africa, Mongolia, and other countries contemplating mining investments have recently been coming to Montana to inform themselves at first hand about bad mining practices and their consequences.
    A second set of environmental problems in Montana involves the logging and burning of its forests. Just as no one denies that metal mining is essen tial, somewhere and somehow, no one would dispute that logging is also necessary to obtain wood for timber and for making paper. The question that my Montana friends sympathetic to logging raise is: if you object to logging in Montana, where do you propose to get wood instead? Rick Laible defended to me a controversial recent Montana logging proposal by noting, "It beats cutting down the rainforest!" Jack Ward Thomas's defense was similar: "By refusing to harvest our own dead trees and instead importing live trees from Canada, we have exported both the environmental effects of logging, and the economic benefits of it, to Canada." Dick Hirschy sarcasti cally commented, "There's a saying, 'Don't rape the land by logging' —so we are raping Canada instead."
    Commercial logging began in the Bitterroot Valley in 1886, to provide Ponderosa Pine logs for the mining community at Butte. The post-World War II housing boom in the U.S., and the resulting surge in demand for wood, caused timber sales on U.S. National Forest land to peak around 1972 at over six times their 1945 levels. DDT was released over forests from air planes to control insect tree pests. In order to be able to reestablish uniform even-aged trees of chosen tree species, and thereby to maximize timber yields and increase logging efficiency, logging was carried out by clear-cutting all trees rather than by selective logging of marked individual trees. Set against those big advantages of clear-cutting were some disadvantages: water temperatures in streams no longer shaded by trees rose above values optimal for fish spawning and survival; snow on unshaded bare ground melted in a quick pulse in the spring, instead of the shaded forest's snow- pack gradually melting and releasing water for irrigating ranches through out the summer; and, in some cases, sediment runoff increased, and water  quality decreased. But the most visible evil of clear-cutting, for citizens of a state who considered their land's most valuable resource to be its beauty, was that clear-cut hillsides looked ugly, really ugly.
    The resulting debate became known as the Clearcut Controversy. Out raged Montana ranchers, landowners, and the general public protested. U.S. Forest Service managers made the mistake of insisting that they were the professionals who knew all about logging, and that the public was ignorant and should keep quiet. The 1970 Bolle Report, prepared by forestry profes sionals outside the Forest Service, criticized Forest Service policies and, fanned by similar disputes over clear-cutting of West Virginia national forests, led to national changes, including restrictions on clear-cutting and a return to emphasis on managing forests for multiple purposes other than timber production (as already envisioned when the Forest Service was es tablished in 1905).
    In the decades since the Clearcut Controversy, Forest Service annual timber sales have decreased by more than 80% —in part because of environmental regulations mandated in the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Wa ter Act, and requirements for national forests to maintain habitats for all species, and in part because of the decline in easily accessible big trees due to logging itself. When the Forest Service now proposes a timber sale, envi ronmental organizations file protests and appeals that take up to 10 years to resolve and that make logging less economic even if the appeals are ultimately denied. Virtually all my Montana friends, even those who consider themselves dedicated environmentalists, told me that they consider the pen dulum to have swung too far in the direction away from