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By Root 1988 0

never seen the disastrous consequences that clear-cutting tropical rainforest brings to local landowners. (One of the most cost-effective ways by which organizations opposed to tropical rainforest logging have induced landowners to refuse permission is by taking them to already-logged areas to talk with regretful landowners and to see for themselves.) Officials in the government forestry department can often be bribed, lack the international perspective and financial resources of the logging companies, and may not realize the high value of finished timber. Under those circumstances, rape-and-run will continue to be good business until the companies start to run out of unlogged countries, and until national governments and local landowners are prepared to refuse permission and to muster superior force in order to resist unpermitted logging backed by force.

In other countries, notably western Europe and the United States, rape-and-run logging has become increasingly unprofitable. In contrast to the situation in much of the tropics, western European and American virgin forests have already been cut or are in steep decline. Large logging companies operate on land that they own or else hold by long-term lease rather than short-term lease, thereby giving them under some circumstances an economic incentive for sustainability. Many consumers are sufficiently aware environmentally to care whether the wood products that they are purchasing have been harvested in destructive non-sustainable ways. Government regulation is sometimes serious and restrictive, and government officials are not readily bribed.

The result is that some logging companies operating in western Europe and the United States have become increasingly concerned not only about their ability to compete against Third World producers with lower costs, but also about their own survival, or (to use mining and oil industry terminology) their “social license to operate.” Some logging companies have adopted sound practices and have attempted to convince the public of that, but they found that their claims on their own behalf lacked credibility in the eyes of the public. For instance, many wood and paper products that are offered to consumers for sale carry labels making pro-environmental claims such as “for every tree felled, at least two are planted.” However, a survey of 80 such claims found that 77 could not be substantiated at all, 3 could be only partially substantiated, and almost all were withdrawn when challenged. Understandably, the public has learned to dismiss such claims made by companies themselves.

Adding to the timber companies’ concern about their social license and credibility was their concern about the impending extinction of forests, the basis of their business. More than half of the world’s original forests have been cut down or heavily damaged in the last 8,000 years. Yet our consumption of forest products is accelerating, with the result that more than half of those losses have occurred within the past 50 years—for instance, because of forest clearance for agriculture, and because world consumption of paper has increased five-fold since 1950. Logging is often just the first step in a chain reaction: after loggers build access roads into a forested area, poachers follow those roads to hunt animals, and squatters follow them to settle. Only 12% of the world’s forests lie within protected areas. In a worst-case scenario, all of the world’s readily accessible remaining forests outside those protected areas would be destroyed by unsustainable harvesting within the next several decades, although in a best-case scenario the world could meet its timber needs sustainably from a small area (20% or less) of those forests if they were well managed.

Those concerns about the long-term future of their own industry impelled some timber industry representatives and foresters in the early 1990s to launch discussions with environmental and social organizations and associations of indigenous peoples. In 1993 those discussions resulted in the formation of an international