Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [207]
that organic foods are covered with dangerous strains of E. coli. But the researchers Stossel cited later stated he misrepresented their research. The reason they didn’t find any pesticides is because they never tested for them (they were never asked to). Further, they said Stossel misrepresented the tests on E. coli. Stossel refused to issue a retraction. Worse, the network aired the piece two more times. And still worse, it came out later that 20/20’s executive director Victor Neufeld knew about the test results and knew that Stossel was lying a full three months before the original broadcast.391 This is not unusual for Stossel and company.392 I recently spoke with one environmentalist/teacher who was interviewed by him who said, “It was nothing but a hit piece. He sliced and diced the interviews with me and the grade schools students to make it seem as though we’d said things we hadn’t, and as though we hadn’t been able to answer questions that we had. He edited the piece to make the children look stupid.” Another called him “the worst motherfucker on the planet,” which is saying quite a lot. And now I’ve got another Stossel story to add to the evidence when he joins the ghost of Streicher in the docket. I got a call a while ago from one of 20/20’s reporters, who wanted to talk to me about deforestation. The next “myth” Stossel is going to debunk, she said, is that this continent is being deforested. After all, as the timber industry says, there are more trees on this continent today than there were seventy years ago. She wanted a response from an environmentalist. I told her that 95 percent of this continent’s native forests are gone, and that the creatures who live in these forests are gone or going. She reiterated the timber industry claim, and said that Stossel was going to use that as the basis for saying, “Give me a break! Deforestation isn’t happening!” I said the timber industry’s statement has two unstated premises, and reminded her of the first rule of propaganda: if you can slide your premises by people, you’ve got them. The first premise is the insane presumption that a ten-inch seedling is the same as a two-thousand-year-old tree. Sure, there may be more seedlings today, but there are a hell of a lot fewer ancient trees. And many big timber corporations cut trees on a fifty-year rotation, meaning that the trees will never even enter adolescence so long as civilization stands. The second is the equally insane presumption that a monocrop of Douglas firs (on a fifty-year rotation!)393 is the same as a healthy forest, that a forest is just a bunch of the same kind of trees growing on a hillside instead of what it really is, a web of relationships shimmering amongst, for example, salmon, voles, fungi, salamanders, murrelets, trees, ferns, and so on all working and living together. Pretty basic stuff. But, she asked, aren’t there more of some types of wildlife today than ever before? I responded by telling her that one of the classic lies told by the Forest Service and the timber industry is that because there are more white-tailed deer now than before, that means forests must be in better shape. The problem is that white-tailed deer like the edges between forest and non-forest, so more white-tailed deer doesn’t mean more forests: it means more edges, which really means more clearcuts. To say, I continued, that more white-tailed deer means more forests is simply another lie. I talked to her for more than an hour, and by the end she seemed to really understand these points. I made clear that the only way you can make Stossel’s leap—from saying that there are more trees today than there were seventy years ago, to saying that deforestation isn’t happening—is if you’re either ignorant of these premises or you’re lying. As George Draffan and I wrote in Strangely Like War, “To even imply that a tree farm on a fifty-year rotation remotely resembles a living forest is either extraordinarily and willfully ignorant, or intentionally deceitful. Either way, those who make such statements are unfit to make forestry decisions.