ENVIRONMENTALIST PROPAGANDA

This gives rise to the obvious concern that if the trees are cut down the habitats or homes will be lost and the species that lives in them will die. indeed, in 1996 the World Wildlife Fund, at a media conference in Geneva, announced that 50,000 species are going extinct each year due to human activity. And the main cause of these 50,000 extinctions, they said, is commercial logging. The story was carried around the world by Associated Press and other media (Singapore's The Straits Times was one of them)and hundreds of millions of people came to believe that forestry is the main cause of species extinction.

During the past three(3) years I have asked the World Wildlife Fund on many occasions to please provide me with a list of some of the species that have supposedly became extinct due to logging. They have not offered up a single example as evidence.

It is possible that politicians hiding behind the front of World Wildlife Fund for filthy lucre agendas. I had stop donating to this Fund.

In fact, to the best of our scientific knowledge, no species has become extinct i North America due to forestry.

Where are these 50,000 species that are said to be going extinct each year? They are in a computer model in [professor and biologist] Edward O. Wilson's laboratory at Harvard University. They are just mere electrons on a hard drive, they have no Latin names, and they are in no way related to any direct field observations in any forest.

The spotted owl is one of the may species that was never threatened with extinction due to forestry, and yet in the early 1990's , 30,000 loggers were thrown out of work in the US Pacific Northwest due to concern that logging in the National Forests would cause the owl's extinction. Since that time, in just a few short years, it has been shown by actual field observations that there are more than twice as many spotted owls in the public forests Washington state than were thought to be theoretically possible when those loggers lost their jobs. More importantly, it is now evident that spotted owls are capable of living and breeding in landscapes that are dominated by second growth forests. Over 1 000 spotted owls have been documented on Simpson Timber's half million acre second growth redwood forests in northern California. And yet, in reporting on the settlement of the Headwaters redwoods forests nearby, the New York Times described the spotted owls as a "nearly extinct species" despite the fact that there are tens of thousands of them thriving in the forests of the Pacific Northwest.

There is a reason why forestry seldom, if ever, causes species to become extinct. We tend to think that forests need our help to recover after destruction, whether by fire or logging. Of course this is not the case. Forests have been recovering by themselves, without any assistance from fires, volcanoes, landslides, floods and ice ages, ever since forests began over 350 million years ago.

Clear cutting Is Not Deforestation