Customers waiting to see if company actually ends old-growth cuts

March 27, 2002

BOISE, Idaho (AP) - A timber company says it is ending the logging of old-growth forests, but whether the move will bring back customers who cut ties because of public sentiment against the practice could take years to determine.

Boise, the new name for Idaho-based Boise Cascade, has announced that old-growth timber plays such a small part in its need for paper and wood it will stop harvesting the ancient trees in two years.

"It takes a little bit of time to transition out of the commitments we have in our contracts," Boise spokesman Mike Moser said. "But in 2001, old-growth represented less than one percent of the fiber we use in manufacturing."

"We don't think they can yet claim the mantle of green forestry," said Michael Brune of the Rainforest Action Network of the Idaho-based corporation. "If the customer's always right, Boise will need to get out of old-growth or be pushed out of business."

Information campaigns by conservation groups have prompted consumers to demand the paper and wood products they buy not come from areas where trees have stood for hundreds or even thousands of years.

Some of Boise's customers, including Kinko's paper products and sportswear
companies Patagonia and L.L. Bean, stopped buying from the company. It is one of the largest companies logging the big trees which provide habitat for scores of plants and animals.

Kinko's in 1997 committed to not knowingly purchase products from old-growth
forests.

"It's definitely part of our history to be a good steward of the environment," Kinko's spokeswoman Maggie Thill said, adding the company has increased its use of recycled paper by 125 percent since 1998. Thill would not say whether Kinko's would reconsider doing business with Boise.

"We would have to look at everything," said John Sterling of Patagonia, a major sporting goods manufacturer that canceled its paper contract with Boise last year. "We're not getting that much from Boise. It's a great improvement if timber companies stop cutting old-growth, but it's a hard thing to know where the timber comes from."

Boise said its defines old-growth trees as those older than 200 years and in stands of 5,000 acres or more.

"The Forest Service has 100 terms of old-growth," Moser said. "After many, many months of research, we think we have a well-researched definition.

"This policy is global," he said. "We don't harvest any trees outside the United States."

But Brune said Boise still buys and distributes old-growth timber from Indonesia, Chile, Canada and Southeast Asia.

"The international impacts of their policy are nil," he said. "We want Boise to preserve the last remaining old-growth fragments in the United States and the large, intact old-growth worldwide."

Boise Cascade also was part of a consortium with two Idaho mountain counties, a rancher and the Kootenai Indian Tribe which filed a 2001 suit in federal court against the Clinton administration's attempt to preserve 58 million acres of roadless forest nationwide.

"This still is a dramatic turning point," Brune said of the company.

"Boise has been fighting change tooth and nail - and now it says it won't."

Pat Rasmussen
Leavenworth Audubon Adopt-a-Forest
PO Box 154
Peshastin, WA 98847
Phone: 509-548-7640
patr@crcwnet.com
www.leavenworth-leaf.com