There’s a dark past behind the pieces of paper sitting right in your printer, right in your notebook— may be right beneath your pencil. Potentially dark, that is. According to the EIA (Environmental Investigation Agency), up to 90% of timber logged in some developing countries is done so illegally. Therefore—assuming you didn’t buy some specialty paper from a country without rainforests and a fragile government— there is a strong likelihood that the wood products you’ve purchased in America are more tainted with corruption than you’d like to believe.
That’s the first of what I learned after attending the June 12th presentation, “Corruption, War and Timber,” hosted by the MD Sierra Club and featuring the voices of Goldman Prize Award Winner, Silas Siakor of Liberia, Julia Urrunaga of Peru, and Roy Houseman of the United Steelworkers (Wait—Steelworkers and activists working together? Yes, it’s true, and I’ll explain how in a bit).
Silas Siakor, who exposed illegal logging and its connection to the regime of Charles Taylor in Liberia, was one of the speakers at the presentation.
Before a small but mighty crowd at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, the first two speakers, Silas and Julia, each offered accounts of their first-hand experiences with illegal logging in their home countries of Liberia and Peru.
Silas took the technical route, mapping out the Massachusetts-size chunk of land allocated for logging within what is such a small state in Africa. Liberia, Silas explained, long suffered under the reign of President Charles Taylor, who exploited and expanded the illegal logging industry in order to fund a 14-year civil war that ended with 250,000 people dead. Today, under the new president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the situation has the potential to improve, but illegal logging continues to rob millions of dollars from the national economy and millions of people of their homes and livelihoods.
Across the world in Peru, the situation is no better. Deep in the country’s rainforests, which comprise 60% of its landscape, illegal logging is rampant and threatens not only the incredible biodiversity of the land, but also the safety of nearby people. Julia shared with us a few stories she’d heard during her travels in rural Peru: people offered seemingly respectable jobs by the illegal logging companies then journey for days to the middle of the jungle, only to find themselves faced with terrible living conditions, sexual assault, and none of the pay they were promised.
I also found interesting another truth shared by Julia in regards to the argument of “improved infrastructure” that accompanies this topic, such as, “Well, yes the illegal logging seems bad to us in the first world, but for the people in those impoverished towns, the logging companies bring improved infrastructure and new opportunities.” The logic here is desperately flawed, according to Julia. The illegal logging companies in Peru—just as in Liberia—leave the towns in far worse condition than they were in before they came.
The third speaker, Roy Houseman, had perhaps the most unexpected perspective of the three because he indeed was a United Steelworkers representative at an environmental activism event (typically the two don’t appear on the same side of an issue). Roy, however, explained the connection: a portion of the United Steelworkers is actually devoted to the pulp and paper industry workers. Because illegal loggers evade the taxes and regulations of their home country, I was surprised to learn, illegally-imported and illegally-harvested wood products are priced lower than their American counterparts, which forces plants out of business and workers out of their jobs.
The solution to each of these problems, as Roy revealed near the end of the event, is the Lacey Act (check this video out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcDpSV5OuXY&list=UUrZE-1EnSlpXHTvEAXaucAQ), a pre-existing conservation law that that protects plants and wildlife in the U.S. With the illegal logging amendments, illegally-taken or transported plants (illegal by our standards or another country’s) are prohibited from trade. As Roy put it, having a law on the “demand side” of the system, ensures its effectiveness—and in fact it already has been effective in diverting numerous large scale illegal logging schemes from the market.
In closing the presentations, then, Jesse Prentice-Dunn, representative of the Sierra Club’s Responsible Trade Program, and Josh Tulkin, Director of the Maryland Chapter of the Sierra Club, shared how we in the audience might contribute to the fight for the Lacey Act—by writing to our senators (particularly Senator Mikulski) and by simply sharing word of such a pressing, yet so unfamiliar a subject.
After a Q&A session, the event concluded with a reminder of the interconnectedness of each aspect of our planet: within one country, the land, communities, economy, and politics all find impact from the beginning stages of illegal logging—and then those impacts are compounded across the globe as the logging infiltrates every other country through its subsequent stages of processing.
If I didn’t know too well before, I certainly know now the benefits of the Lacey Act in attempting to stop one of the most corrupt environmental and economic systems in the world—that which at once seems so distant, and yet ends with the piece of paper on your desk.
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