Idaho Wilderness Hearings

Statement:

Mr. Bill Weaver. Thank you for the opportunity to testify. For the record, Senator Symms, I'm a carpenter and I would guess that at least 90 percent fo the carpenters I work with strongly favor wil derness. At least the ones in my generation. Until the tract-housing boom of the post World War II era, the Forest Service had been known as a conservation organization. But private industries have overcut their own lands and began pressur ing the Forest Service to change its conservation self views to that of a supplier to industry. It's ironic that most of the high quality timber growing land is in private holding. But large industry has not, until recently, man aged their land with an eye for the future. The industry is now ad vocating final liquidation of western America's remaining public old growth stands. They ask the public to give them this timber at a cost less than it can be grown even on the more productive private holdings and certainly much less than it would cost the public to replace this timber. The intermountain west, with discounted cost benefit anal ysis, certainly cannot grow trees profitably on most of its public land. This situation begs that capital poor small tree farmers rape their holdings to compete with the Forest Service and it asks the next generation to subsidize our fat lifestyle and succeeding gen eration's consumption habits. I predict that the Forest Service's expensive management tech niques will not be subsidized by the next generation. To accomplish this liquidation the industry and the Forest Service cite jobs and community stability as the excuse. Yet, what is more rational, a stable phased in reduced logging base or the disastrous rapid falloffs of logging seen in many west coast communities? What is needed is a national debate concerning the subsidy to western timber companies. The Nation as a whole