Lessons from the Ancient Forest Struggle of the Pacific Northwest - By John Bellamy Foster - 1993, Monthly Review Press - Capitalism, Nature, Socialism
Acknowledgments & Credits
This text is NOT written by an IWW member, nor was it written for the IWW. However, as noted in this acknowledgment, Wobbly organizer Judi Bari made significant contributions to this work, and therefore we include it here. John Bellamy Foster is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. He was served as the editor for Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, which is a project of Monthly Review Press. He has written numerous books, including The Vulnerable Planet and The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism. He is also a regular contributer to The Montly Review.
Acknowledgment. The author would like to thank Michael Dawson, Chuck Noble, Doug Boucher, and Alessandro Bonanno for their comments and support at critical stages in the preparation of this article. Acknowledgment is also given to Judi Bari, whose criticisms were useful in the development of the final version of this manuscript.
This pamphlet is a joint project of Monthly Review Press and Capitalism, Nature, Socialism/Center for Ecological Socialism. It will be published in a slightly different form in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 4, no. 1 (March 1993).
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Over the last five years, the northern spotted owl has been transformed from an obscure species residing in the old-growth coniferous forest of the Pacific Northwest into a potent national symbol of the supposed irreconcilable struggle between environmentalists and workers. "The northern spotted owl," Michael Renner noted in Worldwatch's State of the World 1992, "has become a symbol of the seemingly intractable conflict between jobs and environmental protectionand of the larger tensions between the health of the economy and that of the natural world on which it ultimately depends." In the 1992 presidential election campaign, the Republican ticket of George Bush Sr. and Dan Quayle referred daily to "jobs vs. the owl." "You ought to talk to the timber people in the Northwest," Quayle exclaimed in the nationally televised vice-presidential debates, "where they [preservationists] say that, well, we can only save the owl, forget about jobs!" Bush used the example of the owl in the campaign to argue that the Endangered Species Act is a "sword aimed at the jobs, communities and families of entire regions."[1]
Yet this highly symbolic reduction of the struggle for environmental protection to one of the owl vs. jobs, which the Bush administration did so much to promote, only serves to obscure the fundamental problem, even within the Pacific Northwest itself. Behind the owl lies the question of whether the ancient forest of the Northwest, consisting of trees that are centuries old, is to be treated as an inventory of billions of board feet of standing timber to be sold off according to the dictates of the market, or whether it is to be looked upon as an ecosystem of immeasurable value, the home of numerous endangered species.
Similarly, behind the issue of "jobs" lies the deeper question of who owns these jobs, under what conditions and for what ends. The central actor in the regulation of the timber industry in and around the national forests has never been workers, conservationists, or even the government, but rather the large timber corporations themselves.
Ultimately, the battle over the ancient forests is as much a class struggle as it is an ecological one. If forest product workers find their jobs threatened, this has far less to do with the struggle of environmentalists to preserve the ancient forest and the owl than to the efforts of capital and the state to promote profits at the expense of both workers and the environment.[2]
[1] Michael Renner, "Creating Sustainable Jobs in Industrial Countries," in Lester R. Brown et al., The State of the World 1992 (London: Earthscan, 1992), p. 138; Bush quoted in the New York Times, 16 December 1992.
[2] For an early article on which portions of the following argument are based, see John Bellamy Foster, "Capitalism and the Ancient Forest," Monthly Review 43, no. 5 (October 1991).
