Word: lumberingly
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While the Penan are fighting the local loggers, the tribe's real antagonists are some 2,600 miles away, in Japan. Most of the trees cut in the Malaysian part of Borneo (the rest of the island is controlled by Indonesia and Brunei) are shipped to Japan, where the lumber is most often made into throwaway plywood construction forms used to mold concrete. Nor is the situation in Borneo unusual. Japan's heavy demand for wood has led to the deforestation of vast tracts in Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea. Last April the Japan Tropical Forest Action...
...lumber business is only one of many Japanese industries that have had far-reaching impact on the global environment. A combination of traditional crafts and consumer tastes for the exotic makes Japan the world's largest market for many threatened species and the products created from them. Over the years, elephants by the thousands have been slaughtered so that their ivory can be used, for example, in Japanese signature seals, and wedding ornaments are fashioned from the shells of endangered hawksbill turtles. Japanese fishermen have drawn impassioned criticism for their use of huge drift nets across vast expanses...
Nakashima's bench mark is the wood itself: form follows grain. He has gathered an extensive collection of lumber that includes slabs of Carpathian elm, Oregon myrtle and French olive ash. Nakashima says, "I'm something of a Druid," and he sallies into the woods to check promising trees himself. "I use logs that would be almost useless to commercial furniture makers, with their concern for regular grain and thin veneers," he adds. "If a tree has had a joyful life it produces a beautiful grain. Other trees have lived unhappily -- bad weather or a terrible location. We use both...
Specifically, Japan was charged with restricting the import of U.S.-made supercomputers, satellites and lumber products. Under Super 301, Washington will negotiate with the targeted countries for removal of the barriers; if no progress is made, the law allows for retaliatory tariffs against some of the offenders' imports...
...proposing to make the owl a threatened species, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service may enable the birds, now numbering only about 2,500 pairs, to succeed where environmentalists have failed: it may halt or slow down an insatiable logging industry that has been turning ancient trees into lumber at the rate of more than 55,000 acres of old growth a year. But for the owl to prevail, its status as a threatened species must be formally declared, a process that may take another year. Then it could become a federal crime even to disturb the owl's habitat...