Submitted to Shelton Blog by Tom Davis Mason County Progressive
Excerpt from:
Action Alert! FSC
Don’t Greenwash Green Diamond
Resource Company!
By Gary Graham Hughes
Green Diamond Resource Company (previously known as Simpson Timber Company) owns over 400,000 acres of forested lands on the north coast of California in Humboldt and Del Norte Counties. These private lands surround Redwood National and State Parks, the Yurok Reservation, and the communities around Humboldt Bay, Trinidad, Klamath and Crescent City. Therefore, these lands are critical to the integrity of our natural landscapes, water supplies, fish and wildlife, and productive communities.
Green Diamond is now seeking to certify its forest lands through the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), a non-profit organization that sets standards for forestry practices in an attempt to balance environmental, social, and economic values. While this could be a promising development, many questions arise because of Green Diamond’s aggressive clearcut logging, their legacy of toxic pollution, their decades long history of antagonistic relationships with local communities and civil society organizations, and their corporate culture of greenwash, impunity, and lack of accountability.
FSC is using a third party company, Scientific Certification Systems (SCS), to conduct the audit of Green Diamond’s forest lands. This process is open to public input and there was a public meeting on June 11th at the Bayside Grange near Arcata. EPIC was there at this meeting, and the staff of our organization continues to believe that there is real opportunity in this certification process to bring about substantial changes in the manner in which Green Diamond (ex-Simpson Timber) treats public trust resources in our bioregion. We applaud the leadership at Green Diamond for endeavoring to enter into this process.
Nevertheless, due to the dynamics at this meeting and concerns that FSC is not registering nor taking seriously the comments of the public, it has been become clear to us that there is a very real risk that the Forest Stewardship Council could provide certification to Green Diamond without bringing about the necessary transformation of their operations on the ground, and without seriously addressing the corporate culture that pays lip service to social and economic concerns while continuing to hide the impacts on our local landscapes and human communities that have resulted from decades of abuse by this privately held Seattle based company. . . .
Don’t Greenwash Green Diamond!
Link to complete article:
www.wildcalifornia.org/blog/action-alert-fsc-dont-greenwash-green-diamond-resource-company
Wow... Do you suppose they have a Tim Sheldon and a Lynda Ring Erickson equivalent on their Forest Stewardship Council, like we do on our Olympic Region Clean Air Agency??
ReplyDeleteGood luck California.
These are the folks who create the non-profits, who then put their friends on the boards and local government agencies, and who follow that up with several years of under the radar work on the project (most of which is done with the full knowledge and encouragement of local elected officials), and then they invite the public to a public hearing to comment on the planned destruction of their local environment.
After that they usually simply ignore the comments of the citizen, and do what industry wants to do.
U$A 2012.
A wholly owned subsidiary of industry.