Illegal Logging

A few weeks back, The New Yorker ran a fascinating story on illegal logging, with a focus on the trade in stolen logs in China and Russia. This clearly is a huge problem rife with underworld connections, shady deals, and rampant destruction of forests.

I was pleased that The New Yorker, a magazine I’ve long admired for its reporting and its fine writing, set its sights on this problem. I was particularly struck by one statistic quoted in the article: “80 percent of the world’s forests are under state control.” Living as we do in the Northeast, a region in which the statistic is turned on its head – 80 percent (or more, depending on which state) of our forests are privately owned – it’s difficult to imagine what that would be like. Even in the Adirondack Park, it’s roughly half and half private and public. Of course if you go out West, you’ll find vast national forests, and a public-private ratio that approaches the worldwide 80 percent.

There are a few things worth thinking about:

Is it easier to steal from the state? If there’s nobody who has a particular ownership interest, does that mean there’s nobody watching out for the resource? Maybe that’s going too far, but it is true that possession of a deed brings with it, well, a sense of ownership. Timber theft continues to be a problem in the Northeast, and occasionally thefts can reach the scale described in the article, but they tend to be smaller. That doesn’t make it less painful to the victim, but it’s important not to translate what’s happening on the other side of the globe to what’s happening here.

There are further implications though for the Northeast’s industry. It’s hard enough to compete with countries whose labor costs are a fraction of ours. When the cost of materials includes only paying the supplier for his troubles – no stumpage payments to the owners – that wood is comparatively cheap. Those who play by the rules are penalized.

And last, timber rustling is not silviculture, and what is left behind is an impoverished forest. The Northeast’s forests are a century removed from the time when they were simply mined and abandoned. That’s not to say we experienced the same sort of rampant theft, but our predecessors did harvest them as if they were nothing more than dollars ready to be plucked. Much of the public land in the Northeast became public because it was not worth it to the owner to keep paying the taxes on it.

There’s much to be said for private ownership of land. Not least is that having an incentive to tend it, steward it, earn some income from it, and pass it along to the next generation in better shape is a very good thing.