Renovation: The timber racket: A culture of corruption and political payoffs harms the land and ourselves

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The timber racket: A culture of corruption and political payoffs harms the land and ourselves - Jeffrey Kent

 I cannot begin to describe the gut-wrench that coming upon a clear-cut area brings—especially in pristine forest of trees that had stood as tall as 300 feet. Jeffrey Kent writes of the impossibility of adequately controlling illegal logging in this corrupt political system. He should know: he was a federal prosecutor trying to stop it.

As a federal prosecutor in Eugene I oversaw in the late 1980s and early 1990s a dozen investigations and prosecutions exposing rampant theft of federal timber. These thefts ran into the tens of millions of dollars and mocked thousands of hours of scientific work that established federal timber sale boundaries.

I saw partial- and select-cut sales metamorphose into logged clear-cuts. I saw sale boundaries breached by acres. I saw off-limits streams desecrated by heavy equipment. I saw wildlife migration preserves sliced and diced.

I later oversaw investigations that made these crude but massive multi-million dollar thefts look like piker play when hundreds of millions of dollars in perfectly merchantable federal timber removed from these sales was scaled as defective by so-called independent scaling bureaus hired by the timber companies.

By far the most disturbing aspect of all this was the ease with which these crimes were perpetrated while the government’s flawed monitoring systems were systematically compromised.

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