City life comes to halt when U.S. timbermen protest

Press, 26 August 1977, Page 13

City life comes to halt when U.S. timbermen protest

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JOHN WILSON

When timber workers from the West Coast came to Christchurch this month to make a case to be allowed to go on cutting down native trees, they were content with an orderly parade on foot. It scarcely interrupted the flow of city life, except to make shoppers and officeworkers pause when they heard the unfamiliar strains of the bagpipes ii Cathedral Square. But when the lumberjacks from Humboldt County, in northern California, descended on Sar Francisco in April to oppose plans which they feared would undercut the livelihood they make from felling the state’s redwoods, they drove more than 100 lumber rigs into the centre of the city and snarled up the traffic for miles. Not content with this, they are planning to send a cavalcade of logladen trucks across the country to make their point dramatically at the nation’s Capitol. The issues in northern California are surprisingly similar to the issues on the West Coast. Plans are afoot to extend the Redwood National Park in Humboldt County from its present 58,000 acres to anything between 75,000 and 100,000 acres. The plans, if executed, would have a similar effect to the plans to create a large number of special reserves on the West Coast — significant amounts of timber would be locked away from milling.

Like the West Coast, Humboldt County is heavily dependent on the timber industry. About 80 per cent of all economic activity in the county is tied in with the timber industry. The county is also an area of relatively high unemployment. The rate at present is about 15 per cent — twice the national average — and the timber companies are claiming that if the plans to extend the national park are put into effect, 1600 loggers will be thrown out of work.

The timber companies are claiming that extension of the park will turn Eureka, the county’s main

town, into a deserted ghost town — a claim calling at once to mind the picture of a deserted street in Cobden which figured prominently in one of the advertisements run in Christchurch newspapers by the West Coast Sawmillers’ Association. The prediction has been made that if the park is extended, Humboldt County will become “a disaster area, to provide

tccess for relatively few people to the tall trees.” The Redwood National Park is a recent creation. It was established in 1968, 50 years after the Save the Redwoods League was founded. This league patiently wheedled money from the public and bought 28 separate areas of forest which were then given to the people of California as state parks. Three of the forests first bought by the league were incorporated in the Redwood National Park in 1968.

The money needed to buy the additional land from the timber companies, which the conservationists want to see included in the park — $359M — is available from off-shore oil revenues. But the timber companies are not willing sellers. Where they once had a free hand in the land they owned, the companies are now required to file environmental impact statements on their felling plans and face vigorous public protests about their clear-felling techniques. These were recently discovered to be possibly contrary to an obscure federal law passed last century. The companies. and their workers, see the plans to enlarge the Redwood National Park as a further, unacceptable, restraint on their right to make the most of a resource — just as the West Coast sawmillers and their workers see the proposals to create reserves on the West Coast.

The battle over the few thousand acres of redwood forest in Northern California has already been more bitter and vigorous than the battle in New Zealand over areas of a similar size of the native forests of the West Coast. But even the struggle over the redwoods may be dwarfed by the confrontation looming over proposals to lock far larger areas of land in Alaska awav from eco-

nomic exploitation by declaring them national park or reserve. Representative Morris Udall of Arizona is championing a plan to set aside 114 M of Alaska's 365 M acres as national park, wildlife refuge, and wild and scenic river areas. This would prevent mining and logging on the land, which will be allowed after the end of 1978 unless the United States Congress acts before then to protect it. Alaska's own representatives in Washington have countered with a plan to protect only 25M acres, but to set aside a further HOM acres to be administered, under a unique arrangement providing for joint federalstate control, for uses which have been approved by a special commission. The area of land in Alaska being much larger than the areas in California or on New Zealand's West Coast, the economic stake is much bigger. Representative Udall's plan would lock away vast reserves of oil and gas in the Arctic National Wildlife Range next to the Prudhoe Bay field, which is supplying the Alaska pipeline. reserves of copper in the Brooks Range, and reserves of other minerals, especially coal, elsewhere in the state. Exploitation of the resources of areas outside those directly protected by national park or reserve status would be difficult because the protected areas would close off crucial transportation routes.