Word: timber
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...1920s and '30s. But when the protective canopy was cut down, the rubber trees withered under the assault of sun, rain and pests. In 1967 Daniel Ludwig, an American billionaire, launched a rashly ambitious project to clear 2.5 million acres of forest and plant Gmelina trees for their timber. He figured that the imported species would not be susceptible to Brazil's pests. Ludwig was wrong, and as his trees died off, he bailed out of the project...
Among other things, environmentalists fear that completion of the road will provide entree for Japanese trading companies that covet the Amazon's vast timber resources. Acre's governor, however, argues that the road is needed to end the state's isolation and claims that the state will not repeat the mistakes of Rondonia...
...timber industry accepted the plan, but environmentalists rejected it, arguing that they would be giving up their legal rights to fight the logging companies. Nonetheless, Hatfield introduced the plan in Congress. It has already cleared the Senate and is awaiting consideration by a House-Senate conference committee. Notes Andy Kerr, conservation director of the Oregon Natural Resource Council: "The pressures on the politicians are tremendous. The Oregon delegation is having to deal with timber in l989 the way the Mississippi delegation had to deal with civil rights...
...Forest Service defends the logging on the ground that the timber industry is vital to the Western economy. But conservationists counter that too much of the ancient forest is already gone and the destruction should stop. Thus the forests have become the hottest battleground in a broader war between the forces of economic development and the armies of conservation being waged from the wetlands of the East Coast to the oil-stained shores of Alaska's Prince William Sound...
...forests had its origins in the late 1940s, when a postwar housing boom resulted in the voracious cutting of trees on private lands. The logging industry was forced to turn to public lands, including those with old-growth forests (prized because of the high quality and quantity of their timber). The National Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management have cooperated, selling rights to new tracts of forest every year. This policy, combined with modern logging machinery that makes cutting on mountain slopes easier, has put vast stands of old-growth trees in the chain saw's path...