Ron Arnold's Left Tracking Library

THE HIDDEN AGENDA EXPOSED
THE EGA TAPES
Session 2: North American Forests:
Coping With Multiple Use and Abuse

THE EGA TAPES

Session 2:
North American Forests:
Coping With Multiple Use and Abuse

Ted Nordeau: Your facilitators are Charles Clusen, American Conservation Association and myself with the Consultative Group on Biological Diversity.

Chuck and I have talked briefly on how we might handle this, and I think our attitude it to try to assist and respond and stimulate interests  that are yours.  And if you read the write up, sort of buried within it and emerging as peeps from time to time is the very clearcut intent to serve a grantmaker's needs or purposes.

I think the second thing to say is that neither one of us is presenting ourselves as ultimate experts on forestry issues.  We're deeply concerned and we've been involved in them, but there is expertise around the table as well.  And we will hope that expertise will fill in when we fall down.

I think the third point of procedure would be that we'll speak briefly in terms of what our backgrounds are to give you a sense of where we're coming from.  But at the same time we are keen to know whether there are particular interests within the group.  You have come here.  You have allocated two hours of your morning to this.  You must have a reason for being other than to fill your dance card.  And if there are real interests, it might be helpful if we went around the room quickly now to know those.  Because our attempt would be to try to channel the discussion and information to those interests rather than to sing a song for an hour and a half or so.

So I wonder if it's less important, perhaps, to identify ourselves institutionally, although that's fine, but it's really the interests that we're talking about, and the substance that we're talking about today.

So I wonder if we could start at the far end of the room down there.  Just identify yourself and what your interest might in the broader context of forests.

My name is George Bullard, I'm with Lifeworks Foundation in Nashville, Tennessee.  I've come to just gain a deeper understanding of what the problems and the issues really are.

My name is Tom Wathen, I'm with the Pew Charitable Trusts, and I'm interested in those forestry issues outside of strict preservation.

I'm Molly White from the Gap Foundation and I just wanted sort of a broad update and maybe a little more specific discussion on some of the current issues where WAFC [Western Ancient Forest Campaign] has taken things, where things stand today, etc.  I don't know...

Rachel Young from the Oregon Community Foundation, and I guess I'm interested in knowing where modest grants could be used and serve...

Ted Nordeau: Where...?

Rachel Young: Modest grants.

Ted Nordeau: Could be employed where in a certain niche to make a difference?

I'm Julie Clark, I'm from Chattanooga, Tennessee and I'm just very concerned about the future of the free standing forests that we have left.

Bennett Clark with the Lyndhurst Foundation, also from Tennessee.  We've seen that the forest products industry is moving into our area and beginning to clearcut.  So we're interested in what alternatives exist, or alternative examples exist for private land owners in particular.  Maybe we can show them ways that they wouldn't clearcut their land and still make a profit off their timber.

I'm Jan Koenigsberg with the Alaska Conservation Foundation, and I'm interested in mobilizing popular support for forest protection in this one.

Lisa McIntosh from the McIntosh Foundation [West Palm Beach, Florida; Assets 1989 $31,295,929].  We've been involved in forestry issues for well over twenty years.

Gary Schwartz, Fund of the Four Directions.  We do a lot of funding with Native Americans.  And I'm just kind of curious how some groups have been working with Native Americans.

I'm Judy Donald with the Beldon Fund.  And I guess I'm interested in looking at grass roots opportunities in the context of maybe being tied in conflicts with national issues.

I'm Lois DeBauker with the Mott Foundation.  I'm interested for two different reasons.  One is because we do a lot of grantmaking in the Great Lakes states and there's a lot of second growth forests there.  And I'm interested in learning a lot about what foundation thought about that management might be.  And the other is because we're in a huge planning process to figure out where our future funding priorities will be.  And one of the ideas that we're toying with, among many, is forestry and American forestry.

I'm Stewart Crosby with the Carolyn Foundation and I'm here today because I would like to learn about forest issues outside the Northwest, hopefully in the Mid-East--I mean the Mid-West, excuse me--and in the South.

I'm Gordon Wallace with the Wallace Genetic Foundation.  I'm interested in how we can work through legislation and our representatives to eliminate clearcutting in the National Forests.

I'm Don Dowk [?-unintelligible], in the McKenzie River Gathering Foundation in Eugene.  And I'm interested in continued support of ancient forests and native forest activism.  And we primarily fund rural environmental organizations and smaller upstart grass roots organizations.

My name is Suzanne Easton.  I'm with the Mead Foundation.  We fund forestry projects in the Northwest, primarily at this time sustainability and when we need development.  I'm interested in looking for coordinated grantmaking in forestry issues in the Northwest.

My name is Bill Devall, with the IRA-HITI Foundation [renamed the Foundation for Deep Ecology] out of San Francisco.  We are interested in reforming forest practices throughout North America and temperate rain forests in Chile--well, anywhere they occur in the world.  We are publishing an exhibit format book this year entitled Clearcut: The Destruction of North American Forests.  It will be a major public relations campaign on the state and plight of the forests in North America.  We are particularly interested in ancient forests in the Pacific Northwest and setting up Eco-Forestry Institutes for private landowners who are not concerned with the immediate bottom line but want to live with the forest rather than destroying the forest.

I'm Millie Sisiloff from the Tortuga Foundation.  And I'm concerned in the responsible management of our old growth timber.

Bill Holden, Wilburforce Foundation.  We're Seattle-based.  And one of the things we focus on is conserving and preserving lands through easements, particularly interested in balancing between the preservation values and particularly in this area the recreational use and the damage or the gain that can come from a recreational standpoint.

I'm Terry Lisk with the Educational Foundation of America and I'm interested in just getting a better understanding of what's going on with the forest nationally, involved in the Northwest.

I'm Libby Ellis from Patagonia.  I'm interested in hearing about grass roots opportunities for funding and hearing more about what people are doing, different groups.

Kimery Wiltshire, the Illilouette Fund.  Most of our donors are interested very much in forestry issues.  And we're especially focussed on how you take the passion and commitment and experience of the groups working on the grass roots, local and regional level and translate that into national policy.

Ted Nordeau: We've been going around to talk about what our interests in forests are so you all have a sense of what people are keyed into for this session.  And we'll just continue if we may.

Sure.  Barbara Ettinger of the Educational Foundation of America.  Also interested in the grass roots organizing.

I'm Charlie Moore with the W. Alton Jones Foundation.  I know our foundation has a major interest in the ancient forest campaign in the Northwest.  I'm too new with the foundation to tell you what exactly we're doing.  I've only been there two weeks.  So for me this session is very good.  I'm learning a lot.  I was just up in British Columbia with Ted and some others.  I probably know more about British Columbia forests than I do about the Pacific Northwest.  But hopefully I'll learn more about the Pacific Northwest in this session.

I'm Wendy Greshman with the Council on Foundations.  And I'm generally interested in learning more about forestry issues and with a special interest in the Adirondacks.

Ted Nordeau: Okay, that's the first time I've heard Adirondacks.  You want to tell us who you are and what your interests are?

My name is Sherry Shant, I'm from the Summit Foundation.  And we're interested in grants focusing on the environment and population.  We came with LightHawk on the way here, so we got especially interested in the Northeast and we live in San Francisco, so we [indistinct].

Edith Stein, the LaSalle Adams Fund, figuring out our program.  We like forests.

Ted Nordeau: We like forests.  [laughter.]  Have I gotten everybody?  I think so.  Oh!  Bill Lazar, forgive me.  Our introducer today is...

Bill Lazar, I live in Portland.  I have a strong interest in the ancient forests of the temperate rain forest ecosystem and also of the Northern Rockies.

Ted Nordeau: Also John Power.

John Power, I'd just like to introduce one possibility.  That's the possibility of banning logging on national lands, forests, BLM, etc.  Is it feasible?  Is it realistic?  Are people willing to investigate it and get behind it?

Ted Nordeau: Okay now, we've gone all the way around except we haven't introduced ourselves, and what our interests are.  Basically, in some senses that doesn't matter because our intent is not to lecture to you but to facilitate your discussion, exchange of information.  But lets, what I'd like to do is to begin with Chuck Clusen and his range of experience.  I'll let him tell you what that is, and I'll follow with a few brief comments about issues and funding opportunities.  Then we really will get into whatever kind of discussion we can manage.  I would suggest that we take a short break about a half an hour from now for ten minutes.  The reason for that is to allow some direct interchange.  You may have heard something and you want to after somebody.  This is probably one of the better opportunities to quickly make that connection.  Then you can reunite later on as well.  So we'll break from 11:20 until 11:30, have the last half hour running into lunch.  Chuck?

Chuck Clusen: Okay.  Well, during the 1970s and 80s, I was involved as an advocate in a great number of forest issues in large part dealing with wilderness: the lead-up to RARE II, the implementation of RARE II, the passage of RARE II bills.  I started at the Sierra Club where I was for eight years.  Then I was Vice President for Programs at the Wilderness Society for eight years.

Audience member: What was RARE?

Chuck Clusen: That was the Roadless Area Evaluation and Review program that the Forest Service ran. It inventoried all the roadless country, the old growth forests left on the National Forest system, and proceeded to make recommendations as to which should be preserved as wilderness, which should be chopped down ultimately, and which should have some further consideration in the new planning process that was mandated by the National Forest Management Act.

I also was greatly involved in the Alaska lands.  I led the Alaska Lands Coalition during the lands fight in the late 70s and 1980s.  And in the late 80s I spent a period of time in the Adirondacks.  I was the Executive Director of the Adirondack Council.  So my background is advocacy, it's public lands, it's land use regulations and so forth.  Now for three years I've been with the American Conservation Association, which is a foundation.  It's Laurance Rockefeller's foundation.  He has specialized over the many years in sort of land use kinds of issues although we've branched off into some other things more recently.

In going around the room I was having some trouble trying to find some common themes.  And so I think I might do in quick form is tell you about two forest issues that I personally have been involved in recently that I think at least goes to some the interests that were stated.  Both are collaborative efforts by the environmental community.  One is very heavily a public federal lands issue, a more traditional kind of thing.  The other is much more of a private land forest kind of situation.

The first has to do with Alaska and what has become known as the Alaska Coastal Rainforest Campaign.  Jan Koenigsberg's foundation initiated this, and Pew Charitable Trusts asked me to help them facilitate the group of some ten organizations to come up with a campaign plan.  And there's a document like this.  Anybody who has great interest, I'm sure that Jan can arrange for you to get one. 

But in any case, what it has to do with is two major issues in coastal Alaska.  First is the Tongass National Forest of which we environmentalists have been battling over for years.  We did the first cut at it in the Alaska Lands Act where we set aside about 5 million acres of wilderness including two forests, national monuments--Admiralty Island and Misty Fiords--and a number of smaller wilderness areas.  We unfortunately had to swallow some very bad provisions: mandated cut levels, tremendous subsidization for road building and other things and so for ten years after the passage of the Alaska Lands Act in 1980, environmentalists fought to try to bring about reform in the Tongass.

And in 1990 there was the passage of the Tongass Timber Reform Act.  As much as that Act was a step forward--it undid some of the damage of the earlier Alaska Lands Act and set aside another million acres--it still does not really address all the problems there, and in fact the cut level is now up despite the passage of that Act, which is very ironic.  And the Forest Service is now doing in our planning process, and is doing everything they can to skirt around this new statute.

The other issue has to do largely with Prince William Sound and other areas adjacent to it.  In 1971 Congress passed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.  This was pushed along by the discovery of oil in Prudhoe Bay.  When the United States, Secretary Seward, bought Alaska from the Czar, back in the late 1850s, we did not buy really the ownership jurisdiction of the land.  We bought the governmental jurisdiction and the land that inhabited by white Russians.  And so there's always been this aboriginal question.  So when oil was discovered and the oil companies wanted to build a pipeline, the natives sued and said you can't build this pipeline.  It's our land.  So that, Congress moved very fast, obviously and passed the Settlement Act. 

Well, part of that settlement was to give native groups in Alaska some 44 million acres of land.  And it's a very elaborate complicated system.  But as a result in the forests of Alaska, essentially the Southeast part and the Prince William Sound part, the natives have been able to select land.  And by no accident they have selected the most productive forest land.  The land with the biggest trees, the biggest old growth. 

And many of these corporations, the native corporations, are now in trouble.  They can't pay their debt load, interest payments.  Many of them are going bankrupt.  There is a real tragedy.  The Native Claims Act is a shambles and we have a very difficult situation. 

Well, as you all now, there has been a settlement on the Exxon Valdez with Exxon, which to Exxon is to put up over a period of ten years about a billion dollars.  And the environmental community very much wants this money to be channeled into buying either the lands that these natives have or the timber rights or easements or whatever.

In many, many cases and I think ultimately in most cases the native corporations will want to sell these lands or at least the timber rights.  And so there is a big campaign to try to get this Exxon money used for that purpose.  There's some other handles to get money, too, to buy these lands or interests in lands, but that very simply is what the issue is about.

At any rate we have ten organizations that have come together.  We put together a campaign plan with a broad array of strategies.  It's envisioned that it's at least a three year campaign and most likely it will take the better part of a decade.

I, Jan and others here who know about it, we'd love to talk to you more, but that in a very simple fashion is what that's about.  It's a coordinated effort and there is a fund raising effort which has been initiated.  We're very hopeful that the Pew Charitable Trusts will make a significant contribution to us.  But we suspect that will be more money needed.  So that will be a great opportunity perhaps for some of you.

A second issue, which I'll talk about very briefly, has to do with the Northern Forest Lands, and given I've had some background with the Adirondacks, this is sort of an extension.

What the Northern Forest Lands are is Northern Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and the Adirondacks and Tugg Hill area of upstate New York.  And back in 19-, late -87, Diamond Corporation, famous for Diamond matches, had been taken over by an entrepreneur who then put the whole corporation up for sale.  And he bought it cheap and he decided to sell the parts, the mills off one way, the lands off another way.  And ultimately the lands in New Hampshire, Vermont and New York got sold to speculators.  And it created quite a stir.  And many people, particularly in New England, had of course lived with the industrial forest owners for a century.  There was a long tradition of what was felt to be compatibility.  The industry provided the jobs, the lands were open for public use: hunting, fishing, and camping, and so on.  And it seemed like things would never change.  All of a sudden people realized that the ownership of these large blocks of land, and in total we're talking about 26 million acres, was up in the air and further sales have occurred in the interim and so on.

In any case, the Congress became aware of it, was very concerned.  They asked the Forest Service to do a study.  A study was done.  That led to two further actions by Congress, one the creation of a Northern Forest Lands Council, which is made up of appointments by the four Governors and the Forest Service to try to devise institutional solutions to these problems of the instability of ownership of the land and the potential for this land being broken up for development.  A also it created the Forest Legacy Program, which those four states and Washington State were put together to be eligible to receive federal acquisition monies for easements.

In any case, throughout this period the environmental community across these four states, which really did not have a history of collaboration, has come together in a very large coalition called the Northern Forest Alliance, and now has I think 28 organizations.  It has the major national groups as well as all the principal state groups in these four states.  And I've been working with them over the last year and a half.  One, on their development of political strategies and so on, but also to facilitate their development of a campaign plan very similar to the Alaska situation as to a campaign that will probably go on for at least a decade to address these problems.

In many ways this is a much more complex situation because of the private ownership in total of 80 percent of these 26 million acres is private.  The Adirondacks have the greatest amount of public land, some 2.4 million acres.  In Maine only 5 percent of the land is public.  In New Hampshire and Vermont it's in the middle, there's two national Forests there.  And there no way we're going to buy it all, unfortunately, although there is great interest in this Forest Legacy easement program and also more traditional land acquisition.  But that's only going to be part of the solution. 

So there's a lot of thought and work being done to deal with how do you take a forest industry which is dying, which is becoming less and less economic, make it viable.  A lot of talk about how you make a working forest ecologically sound, sustainable, and there's a great deal of talk about and work trying to figure out how to make the transition to sustainable economic futures.

So in any case that gives you a very quick brush with this thing.  So much is going on with that issue, I'd be happy to talk about that further.  I thought by presenting these two cases, which are only two of many that could be presented around the country.  They're both ecosystem based.  They're both forest land based.  They have different kinds of attributes.  Otherwise, their solutions will probably be largely different.  But they do contrast, I think, a lot or part of the kinds of situations that could arise around the country.  And I think that there was some statement of interest about collaborative efforts by the environmental community and collaborative efforts among funders.  These are two examples--there are others--so in any case, I wanted to throw those out just to get things going.

Ted Nordeau: Good.  Let me pick up quickly.  I realize how impossible this task is, to get all our interests encompassed during this period of time.  I wonder if we could take a quick poll to find out which of you are already funding significantly--and I'm not talking money-wise, but number of grants--in the field of forestry in some form, could be community I realize.  Okay.  And the rest of you are sort of on the edge and looking at it and wondering if it's a good area to get into.  And that's helpful, because we'll draw on those who are already in it, because ultimately we want to get back to grantmaking and what are some important issues.

My comments will be very brief, because I want to turn to you.  One, I thought I'd just list some issues, in case you wanted to know whether there are some issues out there to pay attention to.  And these are by no means exhaustive, they are illustrative of the issues.  And secondly I want to illustrate several grantmaking opportunities, four or five, just you'll have a sense of the kind of activity and churning that's going on.

One issue that you've already heard about is the loss of old growth forests, mainly in the Pacific Northwest, and that includes British Columbia and Alaska as well.  We're down to less than ten percent of the original old growth.  And preservationists and conservationists who are deeply concerned about species loss, about the magnificence of these types of forests, perhaps the richest temperate rainforests on the planet are actively working to save what's left.  Other forces, because of the value of these logs, are working very hard to take what's left.

I referenced species losses.  It's a part of an issue that so many of us are looking at.  When a forest comes down, when the old growth comes down, what goes up is a tree plantation, essentially.  And the broader public is very little aware of the fact that a tree plantation is light years away from what the original forest was in terms of the diversity.  So some recognition within the public interest that seems inevitable if we are to preserve some of the wealth and biological diversity that exists in these old growth forests. 

Another dimension is that the American public is by and large subsidizing a lot of the timber cutting going on in the national forests.  You've heard of below-cost timber cutting.  This still goes on everywhere and there's a lot of hassling or wrangling over the accounting for this that has to do with roads and the term of amortization and so on.  But by and large, the public is supporting through subsidies a lot of the timber cutting that's going on, on U.S. National Forests. 

And another thing that we're discovering--well, the fisheries biologists have known it forever, and the public is gradually coming to understand it--and that is that salmon fisheries are highly dependent on healthy forests and healthy ecosystems.  So the logging, some of which we've only recently seen in British Columbia in the last two days is absolutely and fundamentally detrimental to healthy salmon populations.  That's important in a political sense because the owl, the currency of the spotted owl isn't near what the currency of the salmon is.  Lots greater human attachment to the salmon.  Back to David Suzuki, we're dealing with human beings once again.

Just to mention a few grantmaking opportunities and the types things foundations are doing.  Let me mention one area that I'm waiting to see somebody enter, and that's basically restoration strategizing.  We have now the end of the cold war, if you will, and the conversion to presumably a peacetime economy.  Well, there's been a war going on in the woods for quite a while, too, from the broad version of cut and run to something that has to do with restoration ecology is a major challenge for the next two decades, I would guess.  Also, a very interesting and intriguing employment possibility.  We're subsidizing the cutting of trees.  Might we well not subsidize the restoration of some of the damage that's been done to planet earth.

Another grantmaking opportunity that several people in the room have been involved in already is the reform of the Forest Service from below.  In an undertaking with an organization in Oregon that is seeking to bring and reinforce new values among new foresters who are entering our National Forest Service if you will.  It's a struggle.  It's not easy.  But reforming a federal bureaucracy from the bottom is a rather brave idea, a rather exciting idea. 

Another organization in the Northwest is dedicated to no more logging on the National Forests, back to you, Jon.  The notion that we don't need the timber.  The notion that in fact if you restrict logging our National and public forests, you're going to drive up the price of timber on private forests and make it more worthwhile to invest in those private land forests, such that the private sector, then would take the way wood production, as many on the right in this country would strongly argue it should.  So there's an interesting economic argument there associated with restriction of logging on public lands.  As long as you're logging on public lands, the incentive to invest in private lands has got to be less.  Willy-nilly, it's got to be less.

Unidentified audience member: Ted?

Ted: Yeah?

Unidentified audience member: Might you mention the names of the groups as you go by or is that not appropriate?

Ted: We can. [laughs]  Sure.  Native American, let's see, Native Forests Council in Oregon is the one who is pressing most hard for restriction on logging in all National Forests.  The Association of Forest Service Employees for Ethics in the Environment is the organization that's working internally in the Forest Service.  Externally and internally to open that up to even to issues such as Freedom of Speech.  What can you say if you're working for the Forest Service about your disagreement with these major polices that are being carried out by the Forest Service?

Unidentified audience member: There's a [?-unintelligible] organization now of peer professional employees for environmental ethics which is going to attempt to broaden this movement to include other resource agencies.  ATEE[?] at this stage it appears will become the umbrella under which even AFSEEE will operate.

Ted Nordeau: This is interesting foundation territory.  You can look at it and walk away.  But also you can--I'm just about through because I want to get others in.

There's another whole issue that's related to economics.  Suzuki was mentioning this this morning.  What we have in this country is incentives for the Forest Service, a resource management agency, to cut more.  The more they cut the bigger their budget is.  and somehow or another that's screwed up.  They're supposed to be managing it for sustainability in the long term.  But there are a lot of incentive embedded in the cut system at the present time.  And until those are brought out more clearly and exposed, it's going to hard for the public to understand why it should just be business as usual.

One of my favorite cases, and I happen to know it in terms of public education, is the Inland Empire Public Lands Council based in Spokane, Washington, not too far from here.  And a billboard campaign.  No matter what side you're on, they're putting billboards up in Spokane of clearcuts.  And they figure that about 140,000 people see those billboards every day.  And they make quite an eloquent statement.  They have then moved on from there to put signs on buses.  They have distributed 40,000 door hanger things with the same clearcut picture.  They're emphasizing the clearcuts.  And now they're on to radio programs in Spokane and so on.  I'm told, I don't know this, they're driving the industry crazy in Spokane.  But they're always trying to stay one step ahead.  Now the industry rented those billboards the month after they got through showing their clearcuts, to show nice stands of growing trees.  The battle is engaged.  They're inventive.  They're educational, if you will.  They're provoking discussions that didn't take place before. 

And then just lastly as an example of the kind of engagement one can get into...

[break to later part of session, portion not recorded]

Donald Ross: Two years ago at the EGA conference that took place in Estes Park, Colorado, a group of funders were talking about the same subject and agreed to meet a couple of months later in Seattle.  And out of that came an idea to try to project the kind of energy and enthusiasm from the grass roots groups in the Northwest nationally.  And an effort was formed called the Western Ancient Forest Campaign directed by a four-person board of directors made up of grass roots in California, Oregon and Washington.  It now has a budget of about four or five hundred thousand.  Its main base of activity is Washington, where they've been doing non-lobbying education of congresspeople.  [cynical audience laughter]

And they've been doing some road show and grass roots organizing in selected districts around the country to try to up the education level and pressure. 

That effort after a year of activity, it became clear wasn't sufficient.  And led by kind of the Pew Charitable Trusts and Alton Jones about five or six funders put together about a million dollars.  Bullitt was very active in that as well, to set up a much more sophisticated media strategic coordination operation in Washington.  The guy who was hired to do that was the former head of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, a guy named Bob Chlopak.  And he worked with the Western Ancient Forests Campaign, with the two or three environmental groups that were actually doing anything on forests, as opposed to sending out direct mail appeals to raise money, saying what they were doing on it, and waged an incredible struggle this year.  Separate and distinct, but related to it, is what Jon raised, which was LightHawk, through a large donor in Minnesota, and some assistance from other funders as well, raised something on the order of I think about three quarters of a million dollars or maybe a million dollars for a media campaign. 

These two effort kind of overlapped in places and went their separate ways in places, but produced between them--and it's hard to figure out who did what--just tons of editorials, TV spots, news features.  LightHawk itself took a number of television stations up for actual film footage of clearcuts.  It has clearly taken the issue from what people in the Northwest always though was a very visible issue, but once you got out of the Northwest it was nowhere.  It didn't register. 

In fact it didn't register so badly that in the beginning of the effort they did focus groups in a couple of states.  And they had people literally debating, saying there are no Ancient Forests.  You're wrong, this is the New World.  The Ancient Forests are in the Old World.  And taught all the groups that had consciously changed the name of the effort from the Old Growth fight to the Ancient Forest fight that maybe they should have done focus groups before they made that name change. 

It's taken it from that level of obscurity to where it's really on the map as a major issue.  And in the next session of congress, clearly, this year it came right down to the end in a tremendous struggle within the Interior Committee.  The house clearly would have passed a decent bill but for the intervention of Speaker Foley, whose district, incidentally, encompasses Spokane, and there is a full time organizer working with the Inland Empire [Public Land Council] trying to make his life miserable, even if he can't be defeated.

But it will be a major issue in the next session and it's going to be intertwined with the endangered species act.  Because the debate over the owl is clearly going to be the centerpiece of the endangered species act.  So for funders who are interested in the forest issue and or the endangered species issue, this is really a cutting edge of opportunity for the next at least 12 months when the new Congress comes back into session.

Lois DeBauker: I have a question about the Ancient Forests.  Thinking about Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and then Canada, can any of you give me of how much of the remaining forest is in the U.S., you know, how much of it is Canada?  Which of the funders in this room are able to fund in Canada, and those who have the ability to fund internationally, you know, what are the opportunities in Canada.

Donald Ross: Bill, do you want to speak to anything about Ancient Forests?

Bill Devall: Yes.  Those funders who cannot fund in Canada who are here, we do have offers from a consortium, from members of a consortium we just met in British Columbia, to a fiscal agent for flow-through grants in British Columbia.  Having just flown in Vancouver Island and having looked at masks in Vancouver Island as well as other masks in British Columbia, I have to realize the scope and magnitude of British Columbia.  British Columbia, for those of you from the East, is larger than California, Oregon and Washington combined.  There is more opportunity for preservation of biodiversity than all the rest of Western States combined.  It really is the last of the great chances for biodiversity in not only temperate rain forests, but a whole range of ecosystems, greater ecosystems.  Here in the trans-boundary issues we have the development of a truly innovative approach to looking at the landscape through the lens of conservation biology.  The Greater North Cascades Ecosystem Alliance has tremendous work that is being done and has been done in Canada and in the Washington areas of the Greater North Cascades. 

I think that the question of how much is left, you know, is it 2 percent, is it 5 percent, is it 7 percent, really is not a very productive question to ask in terms of designing, designing reserves and designing the landscape or looking at the land in the viewpoint of landscape ecology through the lens of conservation biology.  Basically we're looking at in any case up here a fragmented forest.  What we need are large core areas connected to other areas so we begin to look at the landscape the way the plants and animals look at the landscape. 

The, I think what we have seen coming together here in the Northwest is a is the really the new philosophy, new science, conservation biology in the new sense of community, I think it was Wallace Stegner in his books on the American West, he said that the problem with Europeans in conquering the American West is that they never developed their own culture.  Never developed a culture of place, whether the Pacific Northwest, the Intermountain ranges, and further southwest.  I would say the long term, which in the next century, is for the Europeans who are living in these land areas to develop a culture of place. 

But the immediate problem is a political problem.  It's a political problem in that we have a very narrow window of opportunity both in British Columbia and in the Pacific Northwest with the Ancient Forest Alliance to make land use decisions on areas that are really irreplaceable, really irreplaceable.  And addressing that as a political problem and addressing it that the transition is already occurred in industry.  The industry knows that they're a global industry.  They are going to other areas in the world where they can exploit cheaper, addressing that creatively with a combination of people who are committed to the land by setting up ecotrusts and ecoforestry institutes, and really defining what sustainable forestry really means in the long run and protecting the public lands all become part of the package in this very narrow period of the next two to three years that we have to operate in.  Maybe I'll just stop there.

Ted Nordeau: Just a point of procedure to note, Lois, on top of that grantmaking outside of the United States.  If a foundation has a concern for Canada, for example, you can have stateside grantees that then would operate on your behalf and they would be your fiscal agent responsible for reporting.  The Wilderness Society, for example, has done that on occasion.  That should not be a barrier.  The barrier would more likely be your trustees who don't want to cross the border for some reason or other.

But one other point I should make.  We really are looking at this band that you're sitting in now as a bioregion stretching from Northern California into Alaska.  The political boundaries are artificial.  They were made by humans at an earlier stage.  Nature doesn't respect them as David Suzuki was saying.

Female voice: But they really are [indistinct] when it comes to interventions, that you had different interventions like with the Canadian government and problems that you have in the U.S.

Ted Nordeau: Very much so.  And the follow up to that is that we have just organized a two day seminar in British Columbia with their leading conservationists.  And they have a strategic game plan.  And they are ready to move rather quickly within their system to accomplish what needs to be accomplished in the short term.  People like bill's Ira-Hiti Foundation have been there and are already funding those types of activities.

Male voice: I'd just like to say that my understanding of British Columbia is we still have something on the order of half of the Ancient Forests left.  In Southeast Alaska I think it's probably close to the same kind of figure.  You get up to Prince William Sound and you probably have 99 to 95 percent left.  In all three cases though the logging moving very rapidly.  And we're looking at a period of about the next five or ten years of losing a very great portion of what's left in all three of those areas.

Ted Nordeau: Bill, response?

Bill: And we're particularly in danger of losing the low elevation and in Oregon and Washington, although it may not be helpful to look at the percentages, we're down to certainly ten percent.  Many people would argue less.  A lot of it is very fragmented.  It's not, it doesn't have the quite the quality of the vast areas of wilderness that exist in Alaska and British Columbia.

Ted Nordeau: You should have one other grantmaking option or mode of grantmaking option.  It's to support litigation.  And I think most of you are aware of the spotted owl that the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund has been working on and with.  But for the spotted owl I think a great deal of the land would have, or the trees would have been lost by now.  and I should assure you that the spotted owl wasn't their chosen instrument.  Those who are using the spotted owl and legal reasons to stop logging or put it on hold for the time being would much rather have a broader ecosystem definition to hold onto and to use in their litigation.  They do not... [portion not recorded]

END SIDE ONE

BEGINNING SIDE TWO

Female voice: ...interesting, and I think some the whole logging challenges you see up there are a little different than what I hear and see in Washington or in Oregon.  That it's kind of a little bit like the pipeline project.  You've got, you know when you meet a logger at a lodge up there, they're up there from Boise or they're from somewhere else.  And they've come up there because there's this big cut about to happen and, you know, they're earning $40,000 salaries and they're in a logging camp.  And it's nothing that they plan to do for a long time.  I mean they're just there to do it and out they go.  And so it's a very interesting dynamic on the communities up there.  In terms of where the fishing community is more likely to be born and raised there.  I, I, at least that's the sense I got as I seeing and doing some vacationing.  And I think the strategies are a little different up in Alaska.  And I sure don't have the answer.  But I heard different kinds of things just taking a couple of weeks of vacationing and kayaking and trying to meet people.

Ted Nordeau: Well, it's very interesting.  And I think we domestically are learning from our colleagues who have been working internationally for years now about this whole concept of sustainability.  And in all the issues I'm involved with now with the environmental community, the concept of stability of communities, community futures and so on, is prevalent through all that, whether it's the Northern Forest or whether it's Alaska or it's B.C. or whatever it is.  And everybody's struggling with this issue and where the answers may vary from place to place, everybody's struggling but nobody really knows how to do it.  And everybody has the, I think has come to the conclusion that unless we can address those questions and at least point to what solutions are, not necessarily that the environmental community has to do it, at least to point to what solutions are, that we're probably not going to be, we're probably not going to achieve a significantly higher level of success of planned preservation and conservation of these areas. 

In the case of the Southeast Alaska project, what they are thinking about doing is going to some communities, particularly in Prince William Sound, which really have economies based on fish like Cordova, and trying to study that, that local economy, and glean from it the elements of why it is basically stable in working, and then to build and model and then try to go to a place like a Ketchikan or a Sitka, where we have these big, very environmentally harmful, huge pulp mills that are albatrosses that just have to go.  And try to work with the citizens there, the community leaders to try to institute these kinds of solutions that may come from a Cordova.  I'm forced to change the rules.  I was going to have break.  But we have so many in this room now that a break would be a waste of time I think.  If you wish to leave, leave individually. 

Female voice: I think we have been trying to address the forestry issue for well over twenty years.  And we've gone through a ration of different approaches over the years.  Some have been successful and some not so.  But what we are looking to now and the future is recognizing that the political climate that we have today regardless of who is elected, who our new administration is going to be, the overriding problems that this country is going face are going to be economic and jobs.  And that unless we begin to approach some of our environmental problems with an eye to helping to solve in some way the economic and the job issue that have gone along with them I don't think we're going to be very successful in nine or ten years.  The next ten years are going to be crucial in trying to protect what we've been able to do so far in the last twenty.  

So I think we foundations are, an example of what we're doing, we have been supporting public interest law firms for many years.  We were one of the first foundations to put money into the whole concept of public interest law and it's proved to be a very successful tool, one of many in approaching these problems.  Along the line it became apparent that you couldn't just bring litigation, you had to be able to back it up with scientific expertise, so we began to shore up the organizations that we were supporting by funding scientists to be added to their staff, which would then be another element that they would have in their arsenal in approaching the problem. 

Our conclusion today is that the next step is these organizations that are in place now need also some economic expertise which they don't have.  And so our next series of priorities I think with the organizations that we work with are going to be to fund economists or investment banker type expertise to be added to the staffs that they already have as a means of trying to begin to deal with the problems, the economic problems that we've got, that we are facing.  Because those are going to take precedence over environment even if we have a democratic administration.  Just because Clinton and Gore, and Gore get elected, if they do indeed get elected, does not mean that all of a sudden they're going to open up Interior and open up all of the, you know, just reverse everything that the Reagan and the Bush administrations have done.  They're going to be much more preoccupied with getting our country's economic situation back in some sort of balance.  So we have to work within those parameters.

Ted Nordeau: Back to Bill and Audrey:

Bill: I strongly agree with you.  But I also strongly agree with David Suzuki's statement that traditional economics is an absolute failure in terms of anything that I think people in this room are dealing with.  I would have to be a ecologically based, ecocentric based value system within which an economic occurs for the long term future.  And short term, that the old growth forests will only last at current rates of cut for five or ten years and the second growth forests take time to grow and that plantations are non-forests.  The ecological reality of forests is that forests are an expression of soils, air and time, and time is what the current economic system in many of the human cultures--we are here as Europeans have not dealt with very effectively.  And so the time can be built into economic models, but the transition, we should not and in forests expect forests to support the level of profit and the level of population in the Pacific Northwest they have supported over the last hundred years.  That is just a fact.  And within that fact and that we would develop proposals which we as environmentalists and as funders cannot implement.  It has to be community and it has to be government and it has to be corporate decisions.  We can't fix this as funders.  We can develop proposals to help in transition.  But the transition will occur and it will be hard.  It's just a question of whether or not it will be hard-hard or whether it will just be hard. 

Ted Nordeau: Jan Koenigsberg, Alaska Conservation Foundation?

Jan Koenigsberg: Just going through the bioregion of the Northwest up through the outer belt in Alaska where the coastal rain forest part basically disappears naturally.  The spectrum of difference, i.e. change biologically, but it's been hinted at, the most important thing about the northern end of that spectrum is that the communities there are dependent on healthy ecosystem function.  It's just all fishing communities.  And it's the lone jetties in that whole spectrum of the rain forest where there's no inherent opposition in maintaining the coastal rain forest.  You have already the ecological basis for healthy communities and you have the grassroots constituency to support a political agenda to protect that.  So if we're looking at economic opportunities, there's clearly one staring us in the face.  But that would require battling through transitional alternatives.  They're concerned about the fact that when oil money runs out, you know, in probably twenty years, there's going to have to be some transition of the state as a whole.  But the point is that we have a fairly wide window to provide some alternatives for state revenues that aren't going to depend on overextraction and exploitation of natural resource.

Ted Nordeau: Tom Wathen, Pew Charitable Trusts.

Tom Wathen: At the Pew Charitable Trusts, one of the areas that I work with is the forestry area.  And I've been very interested in the turn of the environmental community to economic issues.  But I'm posing a question in what I'm looking at, and I would be interested in talking with other funders informally later, and this is the approach, I want to know whether the economic piece in this battle with the forests is the link that the environmentalists have missed, which would be along the lines of what you're describing.  Or rather, and I know this will be somewhat controversial to say, whether it represents a sort of last retreat in an ultimate defeat. 

Because, and I say this because politically environmentalists have been put on the defensive, and how you meet something, you know, how you meet something defensively often determines how you come out.  I do not have, I don't know the answer to that.  I just, I just don't.  But one of the things that we're thinking of doing, is that we want to look at the different efforts that have gone on in working with transition in local communities and really want to know where that has been successful, not just in terms of helping those communities, but where has it really turned the political debate.  Where have you actually been able to convince people that indeed economic transition can be made.  And therefore they come out in favor of some sort of forestry preservation or at leave have uh, lessened significantly opposition.

Ted Nordeau: Don Ross, Rockefeller Family Fund.

Donald Ross: This wasn't actually planned, that's what makes politically two things important, picking up what you said, the first is that not only will Clinton-Gore if they were elected not make a difference on the forest issue in the short term, it's conceivable it would be worse.  The problem with the Congress is both, and there's no chance that Clinton and Gore are going to try to take on the Speaker of the House and [indistinct] draw the lines with a new administration when they come in and need that Speaker's cooperation to get anything done.  So I don't look to them helping on this issue in the short term at all, and arguably it's worse. 

The second thing, I used to fund in the peace area, and we had these numerous groups of people coming in talking to me about conversion, about how they were going to advise McDonnel Douglas or General Dynamics or Grumman how to switch their production methodologies so that they wouldn't be making more planes and battleships.  And anyone who looks at conversion with anything other than that effort with anything other than romantic eyes, sees that it's zilch, they had almost no impact whatsoever.  And I think it's not the well that some of what is happening in the environmental area, when nonprofit funders, most of whom have no experience with the bottom line are supporting groups who equally have no experience ever running a business, managing a business, starting a business, who are going to go in and advise loggers who have no high school education and are making $40,000 a year how to convert to being something, some other kind of economy in the middle of the woods that is going to produce $15,000 a year at best, and expect that they're going to embrace it.  It's just folly.  And on this kind of issue there is times, it happens all the time naturally, where you simply say, "It is unacceptable to continue to do that activity, whether it's logging, whether it's a type of polluting, toxic polluting, or whatever.  You can't do it!"  And if it means shutting the plant down or if it means stopping a pulp mill in Sitka or what have you, that's what has to happen.  And all these little plans to transition it aren't going to make those people who have no ability to transition, by and large, to comparable jobs, feel any better.  I at least have answered that question for our funding, thinking it's a big big mistake to go in that direction.

Ted Nordeau: But it has put the environmentalists on the defensive, hasn't it?

Donald Ross:  That doesn't matter.

Male voice: Yeah, we've had a transition, economic transition already happening.  It's more of a cliff than a ramp right now.  What I've seen is that, look at some of the communities that have been on the other side.  In Oregon there's a couple of them, one is Butte Falls.  They were surrounded by about 80,000 acres of [indistinct] lands, it was the victim of a leveraged takeover.  About 80,000 acres of forest was leveled in a five year span.  The community was devastated.  Now the loggers get in front of a hearing, in front of the legislature saying we, this is horrible, what the industry has done to us.  And I think that we can build some alliances with people like that.  In places like that.  Other places, with something like Ashland, which is doing economically much better than it was when it was primarily a logging community, and other problems associated with the development of Ashland, but it seems to me that this transition sort of looks like Kubler-Ross's what are they, the twelve stages of dying, whatever, the denial thing is the hardest one to get past.  And to try to push people over that point might not be the most productive strategy maybe there is.  Maybe we should go beyond that to look at communities that are already past it, and work with them.  Because, eventually we can make the case that no logging are ancient forests or no logging are national forests is the best economic strategy of the nation, and we can make that case, and we do.  But still, there local communities that are going to go over the abyss in the short run, and that's what the Wise Use Movement is making use of. 

Ted Nordeau: Chuck Clusen?

Chuck Clusen: Well I was going to make comments regarding Tom's question and I think to some extent I agree with Don, but I think that there are differences, with different forestry users around the country.  I think that in the big huge allocation questions specifically on federal public lands we're dealing with old growth forests, I think Don is largely right.  You know, Forks, Washington just cannot continue to exist the way it has.  It's going to be either a different kind of economy or it's not going to be there.  There is going to have to be change and transition.  But when you work in an area like the Northeast, there is a real difference between the industrial forests land, which are owned by the big companies like Champion or Bowater or whoever, who have, are integrated companies, own the mills, whatever, and we're arguing with some of those companies about forest practices, clear cutting, use of chemicals, overcutting, et cetera.  When you get to the non-industrial private land owners you have a very different situation.  And you go across state, to New England and upstate New York and even parts of the upper Great Lakes of the Midwest, you do have large amounts of land owned by associations, by families, by private individuals, by groups of investors who are coming together. 

And there's not that ferment of innovation occurring in developing new kinds of markets for the products where you have managers who really do care about the kind of forestry they're doing and what they're doing to the land overall.  These are not ancient forests.  These are not our great ecological reservoirs.  But they do provide a great array of environmental benefits, for water quality, water supply, recreation, scenic beauty, all kinds of other things.  And I think for instance in the Northeast there's been an actually, there's a real passion, but there is still a lot of dialogue and discussion that's been going on for a lone time between the environmental community and at least parts of the forest industry.  And I think that there is a real meeting ground there.  And there's a lot of ideas that are coming out through the use of easements and things like that.  And I think actually there's a great deal of sympathy by at least parts of the environmental community to try to address some of the economic questions of industry maybe through different kinds of changes in the tax structure and so on.

And to give you an example.  When you have a very large family land owner and it's been stable for a hundred years in which a real fear is the change of ownership where the land may fall in the hands of speculators and be subdivided into second homes.  The idea of keeping it in that family becomes a public interest and the estate taxes in many cases and driving these lands to be put on the market and opened up to speculators.  So that's just one kind of an example.  But it does vary from place to place and what kind of forests you're talking about. 

Ted Nordeau: Did you have a question?

Female: As one of the reasons that I keep calling up to and adding an economic expertise to the environmental discussion, in many of the communities I've seen that economic expertise is not coming from the community perspective, it's coming and financed.  And financed by the logging company or the major owner of the land.  And so they're hiring people to develop this economic analysis with a very self interest in mind.  And I think it's, there's a way for the environmental community or some way to facilitate that longer term picture with diverse interests in mind that don't have all the public relations dollars behind, you know, that single message is very helpful.  And I think it needs to be looked at.  It's just been, the only economic message we've been getting in many of those communities don't have the community in mind.

Ted Nordeau: Interesting we're dealing so heavily in the idiom of economics.  Community vitality, community spirit, all kinds of unmeasurable characteristics that are so fundamental in the bedrock of any community don't get measured, don't get talked about, don't get analyzed.  Certainly economics is an indicator, there's no question, maybe the major indicator.  But it's not the whole story.  Bill, do you want to come in?

Bill Devall: Well, you have my thought, which is appropriate sociological thought that I was going to mention and then as a sociologist and political scientist, that economics in a broad sense is what is the community, what is the total community, not the primary extractive industries.  A couple of examples that may or may not be of interest and then an example of funding opportunities.  Sociologists have studied communities in transition for the last sixty years.  Two examples, one is called death by dieselization and the other is called death by containerization.  Dieselization is when diesels came into the railroad industry, which was a major industry in hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of towns across the Western continent.  And these towns would supply coal, and the small, and the people who worked on these trains were fueled by coal.  And diesels came in and all their jobs were wiped out.  Now this is across a large landscape, and the people did not, in the transition, understand the impact that this technology was going to have on them.  So towns just sort of withered away.  And you can see them if you ever ride the rails on Amtrak. 

Second was the containerization of the railroads was very centralized in forged San Francisco.  And it had a very strong counterforce in Harry Bridges who was the head of the union.  Bridges had been having some great social conflicts with the owners of the shipping industry and they hated him.  For some reason he saw this transition and he wasn't worried and he negotiated a contract, which basically involved ninety percent of his members in his union over a ten year period.  It was a buyout of the entire railroadmens' retirement, retirements, all kinds of pensions, all the hospitalization, financed by the companies who wanted to containerize.  But he could only do that because he had a very strong power base. 

What we see in the timber industry is a very strong small number of corporations and these are billion dollar corporations, Fletcher-Challenge, Louisiana Pacific, Georgia Pacific, et cetera, and very weak unions.  And environmentalists are seen as outsiders, so we do not have a level playing field.  What we are trying to do in British Columbia and its really a lot of change we have, is create a level playing field for environmentalists to put forth the arguments that will allow us to form a column between the multinational corporations and the community interests in a broader sense of the community.  The environment of the community.  And a really important part of that package, which is very much for those of you interested in those to read is to have a new economics done within the next year in British Columbia so the environmentalists can take this to the decision making process, usually in, basically in PR that timber corporations are going to put out concerning job loss.

Ted Nordeau: That's another interesting challenge of foundations, and that's the national-regional issue.  If you're in Tennessee and funding in Tennessee, should you be funding in Oregon at all?  Does that make any sense?  Coming at it from the other side, the grassroots organizations in the Pacific Northwest knew they had to nationalize the issue if they were going to save old growth in this region.  The forces of industry, and the Forest Service and the political representation in Congress from the region were all going one way and the environmentalists were trying to take the issue another way.  Without national legislation  they did not see a way to advance their cause.  Thus they had to go to foundations outside their region.  That's one reason, another reason was many of the foundations are resource related in the Pacific Northwest and not inclined to fund these sorts of things.  So the reason that there's an interesting challenge for foundations to determine whether something is a national issue or is a regional issue above and beyond current guidelines and current trustee interests.  But certainly without national interest in the Pacific Northwest, my guess, it's a strong guess, would be that the conservation movement for old growth preservation would be much weakened from what it is today.

Female Voice: I'm wondering whether anybody is moving on support of groups that are urging the state level forest management plan, like new state laws.  Who's working on it, because that would be a pretty important opportunity, especially, well, in a lot of states, but in the second growth states, too.  And I keep thinking of the foundations and a lot of thinking very, everybody's becoming very intensively after they've ruined...

Ted Nordeau: Could we see a show of hands of who has any interest in or is working on state level?  Okay, so there's--Anybody want to jump in, Kimery, you want to come back on California?

Kimery Wiltshire: Oh, California is, you know, an example of sort of an ongoing disaster in terms of bringing kinds of changes in state policy starting with the very close failure of a statewide ballot initiative two years ago that would have dealt with private and state controlled forest lands in California.  It just, uh, nothing's happening.  And it's tremendously frustrating.  There was a [indistinct] evolving bill in the state legislature that went from being controlled by Sierra Club to being controlled by the governor of the state that ended in disaster at the end of the, at the end of the legislative period just last month.  Tremendously difficult situation, dealing with private lands, with you know, logging companies like Maxxam, corporations, and didn't make any headway whatsoever.

Ted Nordeau: There's a lot of work being done in Oregon principally on the state involvement in forest land initiatives.  Actually, Doug Morrow? can probably speak, going to speak even better to those initiatives.  You want to say a word?

Doug: There's a big interest in state and private.  We have a number of state forests in Oregon.  And probably 40 percent of our forest base is in private ownership and that's the lower elevations, the most productive lands.  Virtually none of it is in old growth forest.  It's all second growth forests and consequently we've been doing the sustainable forestry debate and economic debate.  The state forests are complicated by the fact that they're trust lands, which means that they were eventually stolen or found to be in massive state ownership they would dedicate the funds from logging, would be dedicated to counties for schools. 

That makes it rather difficult because you have to argue against their fiduciary responsibility.  The private lands issue is very difficult because you're dealing with, like Weyerhaeuser, which is probably bigger than the state of Oregon economically.  And if you look at all of their land holdings worldwide, they're probably bigger than the state of Oregon.  You're dealing with private property rights issues versus creative sustainability.  There is opportunity there because the arguments that are being used most effectively against these companies are the same arguments the companies use against us on ancient forests.  For example, they're cutting trees prematurely even from a timber production point of view.  If you're not interested in ecosystems, but only in pure timber production, trees in the northwest reach what is known as a culmination of mean annual increment, which is forester's term for maximum productivity, anywhere from about 60 to 120 years, and they're increasingly cutting the trees at 40 years and 35 years and taking the money and divesting.  So you can say you're destroying the future timber supply and the sustainability of the very communities that you're accusing us of devastating.  But it's a new debate.  It's fresh.  And it's early on the next stage.

Ted Nordeau: Go back to Bill and then Kimery. 

Bill: I'm sorry.  There, just in the past year there was a battle in the legislature resulting in a new forest practice act, state forest practices act which really didn't help us at all and as a result there's likely to be an initiative on the ballot in Oregon dealing with state lands.

Ted Nordeau: Kimery?

Kimery Wiltshire: I just realized that I really just completely depressed myself by giving that assessment on what's happening in California on state forestry issues.  And just thinking about it in the last few minutes I got even more depressed thinking about what are the outcomes of this, you know, this horrible two to three year long fight in California has been this great divisiveness and bitterness among the environmental community on which was the best way to proceed which is you know, certainly on a national level and happening among the other regions on initiatives that we haven't even talked about here today in terms of the continued inability of the environmental movement to speak with any kind of focused forceful voice on forest land protection and ancient forests and this type of thing.  So with that in mind, I'll just go outside and slash my wrists. [laughter]

Ted Nordeau: Quickly, because we have a couple more comments.

Male voice: We have found that an increasing number of states that, whose activists are never coming together on state and private too, so you're seeing some weaving together.

Ted Nordeau: Only a few minutes.  You, Ted then Jon.

Female voice: Just to follow up on Kimery's remarks.  I mean I think it's really true that there is no consensus on how to approach these issues.  I mean I think a lot of people here agree on what we're after, but there's certainly not true when you start to work on these issues.  And I'm heartened by the fact that there are a lot of foundations here who are just interested who have not been giving to forestry issues that are interested.  And I would like to see us try to establish some sort of mechanism to work with these foundations to see what their interests are, what their constraints are in terms of their only foundations, and to see whether the various angles that exist that they can plug into, because I think there are a variety of angles at which you can plug into these issues.  And it's not just the ancient forest campaign, but there a lot of things that can be done.  And if we could somehow as a group get together and come up with what are you know, the different kinds of organizations that are being funded by some of us and what are the areas that are not being funded that are very important and then try to plug in these other groups who have an interest.  So if there could be some discussion on that, I would like that, maybe here or later on.

Ted Nordeau: Jon.

Jon: Is there any attempt or usefulness even in trying to ratchet up the level of compensation that's spoken about for the timber workers to sort of peel them away from, from the real, you know, the culprits in the corporations.  I'm just wondering if that's just economically impossible or if, uh, it doesn't seem that there are that many timber workers but there seems to be a very strong political force.

Male voice: I could respond I think it's very thoughtful, taxing, taking back the enormous profits that these corporations have reaped over the expanse of the last fifty years in particular.  And that means in some cases confiscating their assets.  I strongly advocate the government confiscating Maxxam Corporation, which is in the five hundred biggest and used junk bonds and the whole saving and loan scandal and all that we could get into to take over the last private old growth redwood forest in the world in Humboldt County.  Government can tax them, they can confiscate them, they can require them to engage in restoration forestry and all it takes is the political will.

Ted Nordeau: [names a person, indistinct]

Male voice: I just wanted to put a word in for the Rocky Mountain Institute for Forestry that's either university based or non-profit.  We're the hotbeds of progressive sustainable forestry.

[Indistinct exchange among two people]

Male voice: ...institutes set up in the United States and Canada, eco-forestry institutes based on the work of the new foresters and Chris Maser you may be familiar with, and Poland Petty is being published this month.  He's in Japan right now designing a thousand year old forest for a Shinto monastery.  And I think that the institutions, the university forestry institutes in particular have been tied to the industry and treated industrial moral forestry at this time are clearcut wastelands as it were.  But there are other initiatives which are starting very rapidly and in need of a great deal of help to jump start them.

Ted Nordeau: One comment on a biological reason why it's very important to think of private forests in the context of public forests as well.  Species don't know the difference where the property lines are.  And if we're thinking about horrors, if we're thinking about ecosystems, if we're thinking about sustainability of ecosystems biodiversity some kind of melding of the private and public forest interests have to be brought together.  And one hopes, or at least I would hope that could be done through incentives rather than additional regulation.  that's very tough to regulate.  Bill?

Bill:  That's another point.  And that's particularly true in the case of salmon and anadromous fish.  In much of the Northwest BLM land you have a checkerboard pattern.  You know, you have an acre or a square mile of national BLM and a square mile of private land.  The private land is traditionally. it's just clearcut from border to border.  And of course, you know, you can have borders on the BLM land, you can have borders along the streams to maintain the stream habitat, but if the if the square mile above and the square mile below has been clearcut, then you've effectively destroyed that stream for anadromous fish.  One of the comments.  We were talking about protecting them.  I run into this in the Northwest.  We talk about stopping cutting on the National Forests in the Pacific Northwest.  We have to remember that puts pressure on other parts of the world when we push down there it pops up in British Columbia.  And one place it's particularly popping up now is the Soviet Union where the U.S. multinationals are avidly pursuing opportunities to clearcut the Lake Baikal region and throughout the boreal forests in the Soviet Union.

Ted Nordeau: Carl, can you say a word about trade in an environmentalist context?  In having authored a guide to trade and environment, there's no one better to speak to that issue as it applies to forest harvesting and international trade in timber and so on.

Carl: There's a workshop later on trade.  It's a sort of complex area.  But the bottom line is like other government policies like tax policies or procurement policies, the trade policies that our government enters into with other governments has an immediate direct impact on the economics of forestry.  And so, but I wouldn't say that it's necessarily any more so than in any other environmental protection area.  Just an illustrative example, one of the principles of the trade polices is that one government should not subsidize its industry.  And if it does so it will be using, putting its industries at a competitive advantage to the foreign competitors.  And so our government has agreed not to do that in a very sort of general loose sense.  Our timber industry challenged the practices in British Columbia of their government paying for some forest restoration as a hidden subsidy.  And as a result the B.C. government scaled, pulled back on those restoration efforts.  That's a major impact of the trade policy.  On the other end, the rather large subsidies that our government, our Forest Service puts in to propping up the timber industry in the United States could similarly be challenged perhaps under trade agreements.  So you that it's just, it's really sort of a new front that has sort of opened up.  And the reason it's just opened up is because the trade agreements are being strengthened or in the case of the Canadian - U.S free trade agreement initiated for the first time on the scale they are.  So it's an area that all environmentalists in all areas really have to at least learn the basic parameters of and have some people follow it.

Ted Nordeau: Don, could I ask you to speak to us again about the clearing house function if you're interested in forestry issues how you find out who's making what kinds of grants and how you get information that's useful?

Donald Ross: Well, I don't think there's any one source.  Probably, the Western ancient Forest Campaign in Washington might have as much information as anyone.  Actually the EGA listing on Econet sometime soon when Econet has the capability is going to function as a database that you can actually sort yourself if you use that.  I don't know how many of you have used it.  Right now it's sort of a listing, but you can't manipulate it the way you can a database.  And you would instantly learn at least who was funding what.  But I don't know whether there's any one source and I haven't heard of any plans.  Ted, is there any plan to follow up on the meeting?  Last year there was a meeting in Portland in January.

Female voice: That was very useful.  I mean it was a forum for funders for forestry issues.  And maybe there are a lot who are already funding in the forestry area.  But maybe if we could have one that is designed particularly for foundations that are just starting to get interested in that issue.  We ended up giving two grants out of that session.  It was very information.  That way it serves an educational function as well as really trying to find out what the area had for funders.

Ted Nordeau: No clearinghouse.  We did, were a listing, a dozen pages or so of all 1991 grants to the Ancient Forest activities in the Pacific Northwest.  And that was helpful.  That gives you the range of who's doing what where.  But that, that was only an episodic thing that we did.  Jon:

Jon: Would you explain what will happen at this northwest meeting that was announced today?

Male voice: Yeah.  Maybe nothing.  It's an ongoing conference which came out of conference of northwest funders last spring, spring of '91.  And what we're doing is inviting people to, we knew that there was going to be a forestry conference in the spring of 92 and an EGA conference in the fall of 93.  Folks felt it would be better to dovetail with this conference.  And now having come to this conference with the agenda as big as it is, with all the other activities, most people are more satisfied networking informally.  And maybe we're going to have a dinner at this point and talk about the future of the network.  We still have to do that.  We still have to ask the folks to come.  But at this point I think that people are going to be hiking Mount Constitution and not sitting in on our caucus. 

Ted Nordeau: Don.

Donald Ross: Something that also ties into this is that the management committee of EGA approved holding a conference in Washington some time either in December or more likely January.  The briefing of funders on [indistinct], the board is going to come up with a new authorization in the next two years.  In Congress there's about seven major environmental bills.  EGA put out a packet on that.  It was really well done, a succinct description.  The briefing will be another opportunity for people concerned about forests and endangered species politically to get together encompassing the whole issue that you asked about.

Ted Nordeau: The key to finding out who's funding, don't forget your research skills.  A dozen annual reports from a dozen foundations, looking over that will give you the sense of where people are.  And then a few follow up phone calls will allow you to target in on that.  So, it's not as mysterious, finding out what's going on as it might appear.  If you have any question on this area, a lot of us who fund in this area will be happy to speak to you.  Just give a call.  Thank you very much.  We'll be done.

END OF SESSION.

END OF TAPE.