As reported previously in MEC's newsletter, Northwestern sawmill owners have successfully pressured the federal government to allow wood from distant forests to be imported under conditions that threaten U.S. forests with destruction on a massive scale.
Wood is a plant material, whether in the form of logs, unfinished lumber, chips, shipping or packing materials, and it has in it and on it insects, fungi and numerous other organisms, many of them invisible, all from its native forest. Finish milling and kiln drying will kill wood organisms before they are imported if the procedures are done according to strict standards in the country of origin. But U.S. timber companies and sawmills want to process foreign wood in the U.S. to replace domestic logs they can't obtain due to over-logging and export.
The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) is charged by Congress with the duty of preventing the import of exotic pests which can harm U.S. forests. If APHIS took its mandate seriously there would be no imports of unmanufactured wood from outside North America. APHIS cannot prove that any of the organism-killing schemes it requires in its regulations will work. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that APHIS's 'pest mitigation' plans are disastrously flawed. Even the extremely toxic and ozone-depleting fumigant, methyl bromide, on which APHIS is hanging much of its regulation, cannot effectively kill pests in raw wood. By allowing wood imports under this flawed regulation, APHIS is now in the business of promoting international trade at any cost, rather than protecting U.S. forests from invasions of pests.
CATs' and MEC's claim that APHIS's 'pest mitigation' rules will lead to massive forest destruction is a position supported by every reputable scientist in the field. Forest plant disease and insect experts first sounded the alarm to the President and Congress in 1991, when a Humboldt County sawmill imported logs from Siberia. Those logs were found to be crawling with pests known to be capable of wreaking biological havoc in Northwestern forests so were saturated with pesticides at the port of entry before shipment up Highway 101.
The native forest of the Russian Far East and Siberia is the largest in the world, covering an area the size of the continental U.S. It is also one of the most dangerous in terms of the organisms it harbors. Pests associated with Siberian larch, for example, could destroy Douglas fir, its close cousin. There are hundreds of known pests in Siberia and a vast number of unidentified pests that hopefully will never make it to our shores to prove themselves.
Many of the most dangerous forest pests of Siberia and elsewhere are not yet recognized as pests. In a natural forest ecosystem, all species have co-evolved over the millennia, thus trees develop immunity and predators keep populations in check; life is in balance. Remove an organism that appears to be totally benign in its native forest and transplant it to a foreign ecosystem and that organism could become a raging monster of a pest. Almost every serious non-native pest which has invaded forests in the past was unrecognized as a pest when it was at home in its own ecosystem.
Siberian logs were temporarily banned after the initial import in 1991 but can now be imported if pasteurized. This requirement of APHIS's rule effectively prevents Siberian wood imports because wood pasteurization facilities don't exist in Russia. There is an effort underway to install irradiation plants in Russian ports to zap logs as they are exported by the billions of board feet per year, but APHIS has not yet ruled on this proposal.
Among the many problems not faced by APHIS in writing its rules is the situation in which wood is from native forests closer to home, but still distant enough to pose similar threats as does wood from Siberia. Raw lumber from one such forest is being hauled through California every day now under conditions that make forest pest experts very nervous indeed.
Native forests in southern Mexican states are being deforested at an appalling rate. Much of the wood is being imported to Oregon and Washington mills via Interstate 5, right up the center of California. Pine trees are rough cut in Mexico, loaded and trucked north. The lumber enters and passes through the state without prior heat treatment or methyl bromide to kill organisms in the wood, requirements of California if the wood were destined to mills in the state. Because it involves interstate commerce, the weaker federal rule preempts state law.
No pest risk assessment has been completed for wood from forests of non-contiguous states of Mexico
; very little is known about pests and other organisms of these forests which actually are at the same latitude as Guatemala.
APHIS visually inspects exteriors of loads of Mexican lumber at the border; no other protection device is required. APHIS's rule allows the lumber to be in the U.S. for thirty days before it must be milled and kiln dried. Under these circumstances, the potential for escape and establishment of a pest from southern Mexico during transport or storage at a mill is enormous, and the consequences of such a pest introduction could be immeasurable.
In addition to direct destruction of trees which is threatened by the wood imports is the potential for toxic assault when forest landowners and the state seek to eradicate an introduced pest. Pesticides used in attempts to eradicate introduced species can cause as much environmental havoc as the target pests themselves. For example, if a pest entered with New Zealand plantation logs currently off-loading in Eureka each month and became established in Eureka, Arcata and the surrounding hills, eradication in the form of weekly aerial spraying of insecticides would be undertaken as a necessary public emergency.
What is happening with international trade of forest products is typical NAFTA/GATT extremism in practice. In spite of the fact that billions of board feet of wood from Northwestern forests are exported FROM the U.S. each year, economic voodoo still makes it profitable to import wood TO the Northwest. Join MEC and CATs in the effort to stop APHIS from trashing what's left of our native forests with wholesale imports of logs and other wood from outside North America. We are accepting donations of cash and/or time to either group to carry forward this effort. We're in this one for the long haul.
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 1996
Permission granted to excerpt or use this article if source is cited