Molly Ivins October 6AUSTIN — The frantic, down-to-the-wire haggling in the U.S. Senate over the parks and public lands bill proves one thing — there's gotta be a better way. One senator, Alaska's Mr. Special Interest Himself, Frank Murkowski, the man who proves that you don't have to be a threat to Einstein to get the White House to cave, held up the entire deal just to run a special favor for Louisiana Pacific Corporation through the legislative mill. There is one temperate rain forest left in North America. One. Along the coast in Alaska's "Southeast," the Tongass National Forest has been clear-cut for decades by a subsidiary of Louisiana Pacific, Ketchikan Pulp Company. Ketchikan Pulp has a 50-year contract that by any definition has to be one of the biggest rip-offs in the history of natural resources. American taxpayers have subsidized Ketchikan's logging all these years, while the company made a fortune selling our timber to Japan and set a proud record as one of the worst polluters in Alaska. It's one of the deals that makes you want to go beat your head against a wall. With the contract mercifully due to expire, what did Murkowski want for his friends at Ketchikan? A 15-year extension. The White House has opposed this folly all along, but there was hell's own political pressure to get a deal out this year. For one thing, New York and New Jersey are desperate to protect the Sterling Forest, a 20,000-acre tract on their joint border that is not only the last undeveloped stretch of woodland in the area but also the source of drinking water for millions of New Jersey residents. The forest is owned by a Swiss insurance company that had agreed to sell it to the Trust for Public Land if the states could get the funding.
San Franciscans were just as desperate to protect the Presidio, their old military base, from greedhead developers; it's their last stretch of undeveloped land. And nearly every other state had a stake in the bill as well. So, Murkowski and Ketchikan wind up with a deal that gives them two more years of cutting in the Tongass, which means hundreds of millions of board feet of lumber. The average lumber truck you see out West with huge pyramid-stacks of tree trunks carries about 15,000 board feet. Ketchikan will now close its Alaska pulp mill but continue to log, sending the timber south to mills that employ fewer people so it can make a greater profit. Murkowski is not happy with the deal. A long-range thinker, he told the Times the two-year extension will save a couple of hundred jobs, at least for the time being. Of course, saving the rain forest would provide hundreds of tourist-industry jobs for perpetuity. Exactly why we should continue to subsidize selling our irreplaceable timber to Japan at a loss, when we know the Japanese will pay us to come to Alaska to look at it growing in a rain forest, is beyond explanation. In the current issue of The Nation, Alex Cockburn tears into several other Clinton deals on the environment, including his supposedly courageous decision to designate 1.8 million acres of federal land in Utah as a national monument. According to Cockburn, environmentalists thought 5.7 million acres was the minimum needed for a wilderness park in the area and 2 million acres was the fallback position of the strip-miners. I'm a great believer in compromise in politics, but it doesn't work with the environment. Politicians cannot restore a rain forest that's been clear cut or a wilderness that's been strip-mined or a species that's extinct — no matter how artful their compromises. *** Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. COPYRIGHT 1996 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
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