Speaking for trees

E: The Environmental Magazine, Jan-Feb, 2004 by Jim Motavalli

Technical reports, no matter how precise and scientific, won't end clear-cutting, but good writing just might. Strangely Like War: The Global Assault on Forests by Derrick Jensen and George Draffan (Chelsea Green Publishing, $15) is an impassioned manifesto to stop timber industry destruction before it's too late.

Like the Lorax, these authors speak for the trees. This relatively compact book is a radical indictment, written in an appropriate tone of high moral outrage. It painstakingly explodes the comfortable myths that keep the chainsaws running. And the authors name names, from Charles Hurwitz, the corporate raider whose holding company MAXXAM is despoiling old-growth redwoods, to Mark Rey, the timber industry lifer appointed by President Bush to oversee the Forest Service. The authors' simple solution: "Immediately leave remaining frontier forests alone, and confine industrial forestry to existing plantations." Since remnant old-growth forests are isolated pockets no longer central to timber company bottom lines, the companies could stop cutting them down. Just like that.