Woody travails

FOR certain US investors, it makes more
sense to create money rather than thinking green. Why else would they hit upon
the horrifying idea of felling trees in
Siberia, which contains a fifth of the
world's forests, to procure lumber to
run idle sawmills in Oregon and
Washington? Russian trees are to be
felled and then bombarded with gamma
rays to kill potentially dangerous
bacteria before importing the lumber to
the US.

The move has sparked off protests from nearly 40 Russian and American
environmentalists who also dashed off
an open protest letter to Al Gore, the us
vice president. Strangely, while on one
hand, the us forest service is engaged in
protecting the habitat of the Siberian
tiger, a native of the Siberian forests, on
the other the us commerce departmentis paying subsidies for the domestic
wood industry to fell trees in the
Siberian Khabarovsk region.

According to David Gordon of the
Pacific Environment and Resources
Centre which is all for the establishment of an indigenous Siberian wood-
working industry, the us policy is quite
contradictory".