We recommend this book as a brief understanding of forestry and the forest-related environment in the United $tates. The author demonstrates some command of details and also less political naivete than most environmentalists.

Facts we need

• "The world's forests, which once covered 40 percent of the Earth, have been reduced by more than 30 percent since humans first began cutting them down thousands of years ago. The reality is even worse than these statistics indicate. Only 12 percent of the Earth is still covered by intact forest ecosystems... . Between 1950 and 1991, world consumption of wood for fuel and materials rose two-and-a-half times to 3.4 billion cubic meters. World paper consumption has grown about tenfold since 1930."(p 27, italics removed)
• "Of the 850 million acres of original native forest in the lower continental United States at the time of the first European settlements, little ancient or 'virgin' forest still survives."(p. 24)
• Globally, temperate climate forests have increased in quantity by five million acres between 1980 and 1990, but probably not in quality, because of the nature of replanting.(p. 30)
• Tropical forests contain "two-thirds of the world's plants on only about 12 percent of its land area. One forest reserve in Costa Rica has more plant species than the whole of Great Britain; one river in Brazil has more fish species than all the rivers of the United States; one hectare (about 2.5 acres) of Amazon forest may have forty times the number of species of a typical temperate forest hectare. A hectare of Atlantic coastal forest in eastern Brazil was recently found to contain 476 tree species, including 104 never seen before in that type of forest and 5 previously unknown tree species (New York Times, November 12, 1996). By comparison, a hectare of North American temperate forest usually has 2 to 20 tree species. . . . Just in a single decade (1981- 1990), about 385 million acres of tropical forest have been destroyed--an area three times the size of France.... In losing half of its tropical rain forest, the World has also lost thousands of species of life, and is now probably losing more than 130 species a day to extinction, according to the most informed scientific estimates."(p. 128-9)

Rebutting idealism

On the last page of the book, Berger talks about tree-huggers. Across the world, some people chain themselves to trees to resist lumber company exploitation of resources. The redneck reactionaries ridicule these tree-huggers and make them seem mystical.

In truth, some tree-huggers are mystical; they have the equivalent of a religion holding trees as sacred. In contrast, MIM is materialist. MIM's defense of the environment is humyn-centered. We side with the tree- huggers in general, but not always for the reasons they have.

Forests are important to humyns very concretely:

1. Forests account for 40 percent of all pharmaceutical preparations.(p. 3) The study of substances and their uses in nature is far from complete.
2. "Through photosynthesis, forests both contribute oxygen to the atmosphere and remove carbon dioxide from it by storing carbon in the form of plant tissue. Forests thus tend to counterbalance global warming, which is intensified by increases in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide."(p. 4)
3. The job losses to the labor aristocracy for practicing sustainable forestry have been exaggerated, including by some calling themselves Maoist. Most job losses in the lumber industry are the result of automation, not environmentalism.(p. 103) "'Their jobs ... are no more a reason to continue deforestation than jobs in weapons plants are a reason to go to war.'"(p. 104)

Berger himself pays some attention to combating environmental idealism. In addition to recognizing that humyns too are part of the environment (p. 23) and have always had some role as in lighting forest fires, Berger goes much further. "Forest ecology teaches that nature at times brusquely disrupts and even destroys forests by hurricane, tornado, earthquake, avalanche, volcanic eruption, fire, flood, disease, insect infestations, and combinations of these events and processes."(p. 91)

People seeking to preserve a snapshot of Nature for all time are actually conservative idealists. They do not understand the process of change in Nature and they introduce unrealistic politics into our movement.

Economic theory

Environmentalists publishing in 1998 reviewed thus far by MIM have come out on the offensive against academic economists, and with good reason. Most economists either in academia or the World Bank are dogmatic and unable to incorporate new information or developments into their views. The handful able to compare theories outside a very narrow range are disdained within the field.

Both in the President's Advisory Council on the environment and in Berger's book, some of the environmentalists have come to the realization that the "free market" does not have any accurate scientific information in resource development or exploitation. The cost of cutting down a forest is not just the public's loss of wood, but also the many other species and work they do for the economy for things like production of honey or pollination of vegetable and fruit crops.

The lumber companies do not care about honey or pollination of crops. The lumber company is only in one business and makes profit only in that business. The society and the proletariat in particular has the most to lose from the loss of pollination caused by destroying bee environments for example.

The lumber companies also do not think long-term. When they replace trees, they do so without regard to many issues. Perhaps most frightening is the rush to destroy genetic variation in forests that may be useful to humyns. In addition to the species made extinct each year, the trees replanted tend to be cloned and thus less varied in their genetic stock.(p. 17) Should the climate change, the existing trees may not be able to reproduce for lack of genetic variation appropriate for the new climate.

Politics

Berger realizes that Republicans are bad for the environment. In 1995 the Republican Congress stopped anymore species from being added to the Endangered Species list created by law in 1973.(p. 9) The redneck reactionaries do not understand that most often in recent years the extinction of a species means something about the environment that also has negative consequences for humyns.

Berger also realizes that the Democrats have compromised repeatedly with the timber interests. In 1995, Clinton signed a "salvage logging" loophole into law for logging on federal lands.(p. 83)

In 1996, the Sierra Club also started to oppose any commercial logging of federal lands, because the government's Forest Service was proving itself unable to resist the logging companies' lobbying efforts in any effective way.(pp. 151-2) There are 190 million acres in National Forests that the government has set up.(p. 49)

Although Berger does not develop this point or his fight against idealism sufficiently, he does say: "Some multinationals wield financial resources comparable to those of entire states and nations.... They exert overwhelming political and economic power on local elected officials, resource agencies, rural communities, and even on national governments, especially in developing nations.

"The protection of the world's forests is likewise intertwined with the problems of inequitable distribution of wealth and with the global poverty in which a billion people exist."(p. 134) Furthermore, Berger says the "root causes are the unjust and exploitative social, political, and economic conditions that produce and perpetuate concentrated control over land and other resources by elites and multinational corporations. Forest land ownership patterns must be changed in many parts of the world to promote public-interest forest stewardship by well-trained ecologically qualified forest managers and local traditional forest users."(p. 138)

Above all, Berger seems to realize concretely that the solution of the globe's environmental problems is connected to what we Maoists call the "principal contradiction." MIM sees reparations to the Third World as essential to any environmental program. Berger gives more details phrased in the interests of the petty- bourgeoisie of the imperialist countries:

"Recognizing that economic incentives have to be altered so that it becomes more profitable for governments and people to save forests, rather than to destroy them, a steady stream of payments should be made by nations that can afford to pay--and that benefit from the forests' global services--to forest guardian nations that still have important forests. Payments to developing tropical nations certainly are appropriate in recognition of the tens of billions of dollars (or more) worth of pharmaceuticals that the developed nations have created from compounds that originated in tropical forest plants. Payments to developing nations could also be made to recognize the climate-stabilizing benefits of the forests saved and could represent a form of climate 'insurance premium.'"(p. 149)

MIM also has 100 percent agreement with the following caveat to indigenous nations: "But no group, indigenous or other, should be allowed to take actions that destroy the resource base, a common heritage of all peoples."(p. 150) Hence, if there is a massive restructuring in favor of the environment and the indigenous nations allow capitalism to arise and exploit the forests again, then the other peoples have no obligation to respect their right to destroy the environment. By the same token, no country needs to respect the imperialist countries for destroying the environment, in this case through their lumber companies and excessive and wasteful consumption of their products. Whether the imperialist countries accept an environmentalist reparations program or not the international dictatorship of the proletariat and allied oppressed nations will impose it. The "right" to a sustainable non-toxic environment is non-negotiable.

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