By Ron Guenther - Mendocino Commentary, April 18, 1985, and Country Activist, May 1985
“Present-day corporate capitalism is the most efficient economic system ever devised by the human race to exploit the planetary life support systems to extinction.”
—(Comment at a recent Mendocino County political meeting.)
By any standard, the history of Mendocino County has been one of undisputed exploitation by large corporations—primarily large timber corporations—who have taken from the Earth for their profit on a massive and utterly unrelenting scale. This is the “Redwood Empire,” aptly named by some long-ago observer of corporate empire building and the colonization of places and people for the purpose of corporate exploitation and profit. What we are seeing these days on the Northcoast, and in Mendocino County, is the inevitable conclusion of any corporate exploitation process—not Mom, apple pie and prosperity for all—but the wasting and ruination of precious natural resources and people to the point of complete exhaustion, as the process winds its way to conclusion.
Big timber has ruined Northcoast fisheries with its destructive logging practices, and continues to do so. It has constantly increased its well-documented overcut of the forests as the twin processes of deforestation and desertification carry on to their wasted ends. In any sensible economic system one might expect that as resources get scarcer, exploitation of them would decrease so as to conserve and renew those resources. But under corporate capitalism, as it is practiced on the Northcoast, this is not so. As resources get scarcer, they are exploited all the harder so that as they are quickly and efficiently exhausted the corporations can pack up, leave, and invest their profits in more destruction elsewhere—for example, the life-giving planetary rain forests, or the southeast United States softwood pine forests. It helps to keep these fundamental facts of corporate capitalism in mind when reviewing current timber industry news on the Northcoast.
Not only has the Northcoast timber industry historically placed tremendous overcutting pressure on the forests, it is now increasing that pressure with renewed large scale clearcutting forest management. Chemicals severely toxic to forests, fisheries, wildlife and people are being recklessly used to poison nature’s efforts to heal clearcut scars with non-commercial soil-retaining and forest-regenerating plants. By eliminating human care in favor of economic poisons, short-term corporate profits are increased while long-term damage is ensured.
Old-growth forests that provide the sole habitat for many beautiful and wonderful life forms have been relentlessly liquidated on the Northcoast under the timber industry’s short-term profit strategy. Besides the loss of life, this rapid destruction of oldgrowth forests has resulted in the inevitable mill shut-downs, job eliminations, and community economic dislocations. The recent complete shutdown of the Fort Bragg big mill and the loss of scores of jobs there is just one example among many of the results of the corporate short-term profit strategy. Prime quality park lands in the Sinkyone containing virgin redwood groves, proposed decades ago for public acquisition, are now being used as pawns in a corporate game plan designed to drive wedges between millworkers and the conservation community. If only we can cut these last tiny remnants of the old-growth redwood forests, goes the corporate line, we can provide jobs at the mill for a few more months. And everyone knows how important it is to keep the mill running until the last forest giant has been profitably sawed into something more useful, say the corporate decision makers.
People who get in the way of timber industry exploitation become subject to near maniacal corporate reprisals. A lumber workers union that asks the State Legislature for sustained-yield legislation to protect the future of the forest industry, which makes a buyout offer for the Georgia-Pacific Fort Bragg mill not in keeping with corporate plans, and which acts in solidarity with forest workers poisoned by the Louisiana-Pacific Corporation at Juan Creek is subject to immediate mass firings of its members. Union woods crews, truck drivers, and support crews are eliminated and replaced with others more amenable to speeding up the pace of forest destruction and increasing corporate profit. With top timber industry executives being paid close to $1 million a year, and with the industry raking in many hundreds of millions in exploitive profits each year, deep wage cuts are demanded of local union members to increase corporate profit and “efficiency.”
At this time, the Louisiana-Pacific Corporation has been named by several labor unions as one of the worst of all anti-labor union poisoners and forest destroyers. The unions request a boycott of all L-P products by those who care. The Mendocino Greens will be working on a statewide voter initiative to restore local control over the use of any forest herbicide. The Greens will join in the public demonstration at L-P headquarters near Ukiah on April 23 (next Tuesday). And the local insanity of corporate Earth and people exploitation continues its steady course towards its equally inevitable conclusion.