Playing Make Believe in Green Diamond Land

What do you do if your company is widely reviled for its horrific environmental practices?

Easy, you design it a new logo, give it a new name and greenwash the living daylights out of it. Enter Green Diamond Resource Company. Formerly Simpson Timber, Green Diamond is a forest products company headquartered in Seattle with substantial logging operations on California’s North Coast. The company is fond of clear cutting acres of trees, transforming forests into cookie cutter housing developments and murdering northern spotted owls. And, just in case folks get a tad bit upset about all that, Green Diamond has a robust greenwashing campaign to assure us they’re sound environmental stewards.

Welcome to the land of make believe, welcome to Green Diamond Land.

It’s a topsy turvy place where nothing is as it seems. Up is down, right is left, good is bad. Clearcut logging promotes healthy forests. Killing owls actually helps conserve owl habitat. And a “commitment to responsible…forest stewardship” means turning redwood groves into tract housing. Green Diamond—as the company so proudly announces on its website—has even been awarded Sustainable Forestry Certification for its ability to heartlessly clearcut entire swaths of forest land in one fell swoop, allowing the sun to finally reach the struggling flora previously oppressed and by the oversized redwoods. In Green Diamond Land, horses ride sidesaddle on the backs of monkeys and apples eat people.

Seriously though, we couldn’t make this stuff up if we tried. Green Diamond actually claims that clear cutting forests allows new forests to grow faster and that such clearcuts mimc nature by serving as proxies for cyclical wildfires and rainstorms. Green Diamond actually boasts about its Habitat Conservation Plan for northern spotted owls, while the numbers of owls living on the company’s land continues to dwindle. Green Diamond actually presents itself as a model in sustainable industrial forestry and at the same time lobbies for the Humboldt County General Plan to allow residential development on eons-old forest land.

Green Diamond lives in its own world of make believe.

But, no matter how hard they might want us to join in their delusion, evidence to the contrary is overwhelming. The scarred landscape belies the company’s profit-at-all-costs business model. We see the devastation wrought and the erosion caused by clearcutting. We count the fewer and fewer numbers of northern spotted owls living on the company’s timber lands. We discover the plans to turn once vibrant forests into just another row of houses, most likely constructed using immature, poor quality lumber produced by Green Diamond.

The time for playing make believe is over. Drowning in a sea of greenwashing, Green Diamond needs to wake up from its manufactured fable and rejoin the rest of us in reality. We must speak with one voice and tell Green Diamond no more clearcutting, no more killing northern spotted owls and no turning the forests surrounding our communities into stucco swathed subdivisions. Help EPIC make a stand, get involved or donate today.