By Roanne Withers, Betty Ball, Kelpie Wilson, Anna Marie Stenberg, and Jennifer Beigel, press release issued early July 1990 and reprinted in the Industrial Worker, September 1990
“Greed is a noble motivator.”
—T. Marshall Hahn, Chairman, Georgia-Pacific
The view from Sherwood Road of the hills above Fort Bragg, CA is heartbreaking. “Once there were giant redwoods here,” said Earth First! activist Jennifer Biegel, “now there’s only the rubble left from third growth liquidation logging.” Georgia-Pacific owns 40% of the industrial forestland in Mendocino County, forests that are being harvested more than three times faster than they can grow. On July 21 a Redwood Summer rally and protest was held at Ft. Bragg. Speakers included peace activist Brian Willson; independent logger Walter Smith; Oregon millworker Gene Lawhorn; congressional candidate Darlene Comingore; IWW organizers Roanne Withers and Anne Marie Stenberg, and Mendocino County School Board member David Colfax. Lisa Henry read a statement from bomb victim Judi Bari.
G-P is the world’s largest forest products corporation, having just completed its hostile takeover of Great Northern Nakoosa. Since the takeover, G-P now has an eight billion dollar debt load and it is notorious for paying off its acquisition debts by liquidating its timber. “It has already sold some of its oceanside mill site to real estate developers.
In today’s Mendocino County real estate market it has every incentive to clearcut as fast as possible then sell out.” said Roanne Withers, a Fort Bragg labor organizer. At the turn of the century, Mendocino County timberlands yielded 70,000 board feet per acre. Today it is barely possible to get 10,000 bf per acre and that’s expected to drop to 5,000 soon, according to FRRAP (Forest and Rangelands Resources Assessment Program). “As the forest is eaten up by excessive logging, GP is getting ready to finish off the crumbs and leave the table,” Withers added.
“G-P’s appetite for world forests is voracious,” said Kelpie Wilson of Redwood Summer. “G-P owns millions of acres worldwide. It is the largest importer of tropical hardwoods into the U.S. and now it wants the great boreal forest of Siberia; to log it will play Russian Roulette with the world’s climate.”
“In its rush to turn the world to desert for short term profits, G-P has no qualms about sacrificing the health and security of local communities,” said Anne Marie Stenberg, a Fort Bragg organizer for the IWW union. “In a 1989 PCB spill at the Ft. Bragg mill, G-P willfully exposed three shifts of workers to extreme hazard before clean-up; clean-up was dumping PCB’s into the mill’s boiler furnace to pollute our air.” In fact, G-P was cited by OSHA for a “willful” violation or health and safety law.
G-P employees are disgusted and frightened by G-P’s forest liquidation. A statement from “rank and file workers” in a December, 1989 issue of the Mendocino Commentary said: “If they don’t slow down to a sustainable level there will be no more G-P forests and no more G-P mill jobs in Mendocino County. To make a living wage we must serve as unwilling co-conspirators in the stripping of the forests and the destruction of our own jobs.”
Forests, jobs, wildlife habitat, fisheries and now even the world’s climate are losing out to simple corporate greed; some say the sun never sets on the growing Georgia-Pacific Empire, but Redwood Summer is calling for the eclipse of G-P and corporate forestry by planning its protest to coincide with the solar eclipse. “A new day is dawning that will see a return to locally owned forestry that is sustainable and keeps profits in the community,” said Roanne Withers. Even Don Nelson, spokesman for G-P’s sweetheart union, IWA Local 3-469, sees the crying need for local control. He was recently quoted in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat saying: “I would like to…demand from the timber companies hard information about their inventories and rates of cut. If that information shows a company is clearly cutting beyond a sustainable capacity for their forestlands, then that timber company’s property should be subject to eminent domain and purchased by the state.