Industrial Forestry: Exposing Corporate Logging

Large scale corporate industrial logging continues to threaten our forests, wildlife, and watersheds.  Timber giants such as Green Diamond Resource Company (formerly known as Simpson Timber), and Sierra Pacific Industries own vast tracts of vital forestlands in the redwood region and beyond.  These corporate logging companies continue to employ highly intensive and highly damaging forest practices such as clearcutting, construction of endless road systems, conversion of forests essential for fish, wildlife and watersheds to sterile tree plantations, and the application of chemical herbicides.  These companies also employ extremely short logging rotations which compromises the productivity and habitat quality of our forests.

The results of these corporate industrial logging practices are painfully and abundantly clear—numerous species that rely on old, mature, and complex forests such as the Northern Spotted Owl are being pushed out of their habitats.  Sensitive fish species such as Coho salmon and Steelhead trout are quickly vanishing, and many of our watersheds are now considered impaired as a result of intensive and rapacious forest management on private lands.

EPIC’s Industrial Forestry Reform Program exposes these practices for what they are—highly damaging, and ultimately, unsustainable.  We track logging on private industrial timberlands and engage in the review process  of proposed logging operations, including direct engagement with regulatory agencies responsible for reigning in these corporate actors.  In California, existing regulatory mechanism have utterly failed to corral these timber giants, and agencies responsible for protecting forests, watersheds, and wildlife such as the Department of Fish and Game have been stripped of the funding necessary to carry out their statutory and regulatory responsibilities.