Steal a Tree Go to Prison; Steal a Forest Meet the President

[zengrifter]

ENN: Environmental News Network

Published June 17, 2008 09:50 AM
Steal a Tree Go to Prison; Steal a Forest Meet the President

This is an excerpt from Jeffrey St. Clair's new environmental history,
Born Under a Bad Sky, now available from AK Press / CounterPunch Books.

Stealing trees is as old as the King's timber reserves. The sanctions for such sylvan thievery have always been harsh. In medieval England, it meant public torture and slow death. In the US, the levy was a kind of financial death penalty --triple damages plus serious jail time.

A couple of years ago, two tree poachers drove a log truck onto a small farm in central Indiana after midnight, cut down two 100-year old black walnut trees in the small woodlot, loaded the pilfered trunks onto their truck and fled across a cornfield. The county sheriff caught them when their truck stalled in the field and sank in the mud. It turns out that the men had been hired by a local sawmill owner, who was set to sell the lumber to a German timber broker. All three men were tried and convicted of tree theft.

The black walnut trees, highly prized by German furniture makers, were valued at $150,000 each. The men were hit with $900,000 in fines and three years of jail time.

Contrast this with evidence coming out of a trial in Portland, Oregon, concerning timber theft on a massive scale. According to internal documents from the US Forest Service, more than 10% of all trees cut off of the national forests are stolen, usually by timber companies that deliberately log outside the boundaries of timber sales offered by the agency. The annual toll involves hundreds of thousands of trees valued at more than $100 million.

MORE- http://www.enn.com/top_stories/article/37418

[aslan]

It clearly explains why McCain, H Clinton, even Obama will not make a grain of difference in US policy, or the fact that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The system needs a real revolutionary maverick, not a make-believe one like McCain--someone like Ron Paul could do the country proud. But guess what?--the story also explains why people like Paul can't get elected. To motivate people to action, you need a burning platform--then people will jump and swim to safety. Governments are good at using the burning platform technique, creating burning platforms of their own making--like the urgency to invade Iraq, or the necessity to bomb Iran. We are on a "real" burning platform now, but the experts keep telling us that all is well. What will it take to wake people up to the fact that all is not well? That everything the country has stood for these many years could quickly go up in smoke?