Audubon Brings the Deforestation Crisis Into Our Back Yards

As any good American knows by now, it’s imperative to stop those shortsighted Brazilians and Indonesians who are intent on destroying rain forests--an international resource if ever there was one.

But the current magazine crop suggests that sometimes we don’t see our own deforestation for all the endangered foreign trees.

In the May Audubon, journalist Lee Green presents an engaging expose of official giant slayers. In this telling, however, the Goliaths (California’s giant sequoias) and Davids (a handful of obsessed, grass-roots conservationists) are on the same side. “They’ve Been Raping the Giant Sequoias” is no more objective than its title, but it is told with eloquent passion.

For at least three decades, critics have railed against the U.S. Forest Service for alleged fiscal and environmental mismanagement of the 191 million acres it oversees. Now, Green reports, a Central California mother and a teacher have found evidence that Forest Service managers of the forests north of Bakersfield played fast and loose with a national treasure: the few remaining giant sequoia groves.

Big “museum trees”--some more than 300 feet tall and 35 feet wide--are protected by law. But by using loopholes and technicalities, the Forest Service has encouraged loggers to clear cut and bulldoze--”nuke” in silviculturist-speak--the groves where the giants live. To avoid legal log jams, the Forest Service simply circumvented public debate of this controversial “grove management,” the activists assert.

Armed with relentless anger and Freedom of Information Act requests, the women and their supporters have become thorns in the side of the Forest Service; they are preparing a legal challenge to the clandestine cutting. Meantime, the federal agency seems to view the majestic old groves strictly in terms of harvestable board-feet.

Across the Pacific in America’s 50th state, construction of a 500 megawatt geothermal project threatens the last remaining lowland rain forest in the United States. The May Sierra looks into the politics of the project. The May 31 Rolling Stone puts the threat in broader perspective.

Bill McKibben, author of last year’s much-discussed New Yorker series “The End of Nature,” reports in Rolling Stone that Hawaii is a ideal place for use of solar and other alternative energy sources. But the new Hyatt Regency Waikoloa hotel alone-- with its electric monorail and electric boats--draws 4% of the island’s peak-load electricity. “How much forest will be left,” McKibben wonders, “When we finally come to our senses?”

Hard to say. But in a comprehensive, clear-sighted piece on logging policies in the Pacific Northwest in the May 14 New Yorker, Catherine Caufield points out that “Ours was once a forested planet.” The hills of Greece, Syria and Lebanon were forested, as were many other now-barren landscapes. Now, in large part because of “bad practice” by the Forest Service, what’s left of our ancient forests is disappearing fast. Caufield compares the logging industry’s dilemma to that faced by the whaling industry a while back.

But “unlike the whaling industry, the timber industry is not doomed; change, not death, is inevitable. The question for us now is: Shall we destroy our ancient forests to postpone this change for a few years?”

Not all the news from the forest front is gloomy, though. According to the May-June E Magazine, The Children’s Rainforest project has given young Americans a stake in forests’ future--mainly forests in Costa Rica, as it happens.

REQUIRED READING

* Just as ecological crises often become clearer the farther away they are, so, too, do issues of freedom. We abhor the Ayatollah’s Draconian censorship but look the other way while gentler, more effective, public relations campaigns co-opt our own intellectual freedom. That’s the view of Exposure magazine. “Censorship in America,” writes Alexander Cockburn, “takes the form of a vast industry of manipulation, in which the politicians, the military and the corporations all partake, through the agency of the press, the advertising business and--not to be forgotten--the educational system . . . to censor out all inconvenient information and disruptive ideas.” The April-May issue of this excellent press outlet also includes a portfolio of some of the most celebrated censored work of the day, including Robert Mapplethorpe’s “Helmut.”

* In its May 21 cover story, Newsweek estimates the savings and loan fiasco at “$250 billion that was stolen or wasted and must be repaid.” A cute box shows what that money could buy. For instance, 132 B-2 bombers, 40 Aegis cruisers and 100 Sea Wolf submarines. Or funding for every existing government education program, from preschool through college, for four years; or four years of universal and long-term care for the elderly; or . . .

* In the Civil War, soldiers who crumpled under fire were said to suffer from “nostalgia.” In Vietnam, the affliction was labeled Post-Traumatic Stress Disability. A comprehensive, compelling article in the May-June American Heritage traces the history of “shellshock” and concludes that modern war techniques have rendered the Homeric ideals of valor, courage, manliness and sacrifice so much romantic bunk.

* Willie Loman wouldn’t have been so downbeat if he had had the May Success magazine to browse through. Entirely devoted to salesmanship, the issue is as relentlessly optimistic as a Norman Vincent Peale seminar. It is packed with tips on how to get customers--a kid buying sneakers or a conglomerate bidding on a company--to cough up cash.

NEW ON NEWSSTANDS

* It would be hard to overstate the stupidity of the premiere issue of Nickelodeon magazine. Among many stupid features are a stupid Chevy Chase interview and stupid “Flat Cat” and “Elephant Comedy Club” comic strips. “Know why they don’t allow elephants on the beach?” the elephant comedian asks. “Because we can’t keep our trunks up!” It’s as if the publication were written for fourth-graders. Wait. It is written for fourth-graders. Fourth-, fifth-, sixth- and seventh-graders. Kids who spend hour after hour watching stupid programs on Nickelodeon and learning to lust after the stupid Nickelodeon merchandise advertised in the magazine: The Nick Bubble Watch, the Nick “Super Sloppy Double Dare” T-shirt. Fortunately, the premiere issue of Nickelodeon is available only at Pizza Hut and only on Tuesday nights this month, then by subscription.