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Strangely Like War

The Global Assault on Forests

by Derrick Jensen, George Draffan

Reviews

Save the Vanishing Forests
Authors count the costs of the war on the world’s trees

Reviewed by JEFF GUNTZEL
National Catholic Reporter, October 1, 2004

How do you talk about trees?

Derrick Jensen and George Draffan, authors of Strangely Like War: The Global Assault on Forests, begin with a metaphor fit for the times: Deforestation is war.

The book takes its title from historian Murray Morgan’s description of deforestation in Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula in his book The Last Wilderness. Murray writes: “It was strangely like war. They attacked the forest as if it were an enemy to be pushed back from the beachheads, driven to the hills, broken into patches, and wiped out. Many operators thought they were not only making lumber but liberating the land from the trees.”

But Jensen and Draffan tell us it is not just lumber that we demand of the world’s forests. Trees come down for your newspaper, your kitchen table, and the throwaway chopsticks at the Chinese restaurant. They come down for highways and homes, for cattle to graze before slaughter and for coffee beans to be grown and then ground.

War as a metaphor for human destruction of the natural world is not a new idea. Morgan’s loggers as soldiers were captured on the page a half-century ago. During America’s war against Vietnam, poet, essayist and farmer Wendell Berry noted that the same mentality of greed and exploitation he had seen in the strip-mined mountains of his native Kentucky was also at work in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

According to Jensen and Draffan, “About three-quarters of the world’s original forests have been cut, most of that in the past century. … Ninety-five percent of the original forests of the United States are gone.

“Four hundred and forty thousand miles of logging roads run through the National Forests alone.

“Enough road,” they add, “to drive from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco 150 times.

“Next time you fly over a once-forested region on a clear day, look down. Pay attention to the crazy quilt of clear cuts you see below, to the roads linking clear cuts and fragmenting forests, roads that wash out in heavy rains to scour streambeds and destroy fisheries.”

Streambeds and fisheries are “collateral damage” in the war against the forests; the forest dwellers too. Remember the spotted owl?

“The loss of the forest,” the authors remind us, “means the loss of the creatures who live there.”

Some forest dwellers are human: the pygmies of Central Africa; the Orang Rimba of Indonesia; the Dayak of Malaysia; the Niugini of Papua New Guinea.

Indigenous voices accompany the book’s arguments for indigenous rights. A voice from Papua New Guinea offers a glimpse of two worlds clashing: “You white people use sawn timber to build your houses. We Niugini use black palm for flooring. We use cane instead of nails. We use Kunai to make our roof instead of iron. Machines of the company have spoiled our black palm trees, our cane, and the dozers have trampled our Kunai land.”

The machines -- trucks and bulldozers, skidders and fellerbunchers -- have become part of the landscape that they are tasked to destroy.

And they are destroying it at a rate difficult to comprehend. “One estimate,” Jensen and Draffan write, “says that two and a half acres of forest are cut every second. That’s the equivalent of two football fields. That’s 214,000 acres per day, an area larger than New York City.”

The authors are shrewd observers of the intersection of government and industry. And they examine the language of the global players. They point to the lexicon of the logging industry: “Clear-cuts become ‘temporary meadows’ and ‘mimic natural disturbances.’ Clear-cutting is called ‘even age management,’ or ‘mechanical fire suppression.’ … Ancient trees are called ‘decadent.’ … Old-growth forest is called a ‘biological desert.’ ”

Both Jensen and Draffan have worked against the agents of deforestation for years. Their struggle is as much against the habits of private life as it is about the patterns of corporate and government power.

“Of the major categories of wood products,” they write, “the United States is the top consumer of all but firewood. … With less than 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States consumes between 25 and 38 percent of the world’s wood and paper products.”

According to Jensen and Draffan, “The average person in the United States consumes 700 pounds of paper per year; the average in Great Britain and Japan is 330 pounds per year; the average in the nonindustrialized world is 12 pounds per year.”

We recycle, yes, but not enough. In 1997, less than half of U.S. paper was recovered for reuse.

A sort of desperation-induced schizophrenia infects Strangely Like War. The book is short, occasionally messy. If the authors’ intention was to make contagious their desperation, they have succeeded. At times the book reads like the retelling of an argument that ends abruptly, hands thrown in the air. Other times the book reads more like a fiery manifesto or a deeply personal diary of struggle.

The book suggests some practical steps readers can take: “We can consume less. We can eat less meat, drink less coffee. We can eat locally grown foods. We can spend time in forests. We can ask the trees -- and forests -- what they want.”

But mostly Jensen and Draffan seem to be looking for help in moving towards a sustainable relationship with what is left of the world’s forests.

“The forests are being killed,” Jensen and Draffan write. “What are you going to do about it?”

Jeff Guntzel writes for NCR in New York.

Library Journal, October 15, 2003 (starred review)
Now and then, a landmark book such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring makes the public keenly aware of the vulnerability of nature to human intervention. Strangely Like War exposes the crisis of the large-scale destruction of the world’s forests. Jensen (The Culture of Make Believe) and Draffan (The Elite Consensus) have written a passionate expose of the unprecedented greed and power of the timber industry and of the government’s role in abetting corporate irresponsibility. They debunk the industry’s assertion that forests are a sustainable resource, asserting that widespread industrial forestry not only leads to the extinction of countless species but adversely affects the environment. Numerous examples illustrate how timber corporations, supported by the structures of globalization, easily bypass regulations and restrictions as they seek ever greater profits. The authors foresee a bleak future if this corrupt system continues and if insatiable consumption of wood is not radically reduced. Written with conviction, fervor, and facts, this significant work is highly recommended for all libraries. –-Ilse Heidmann, Washington State Lib., Olympia

Publisher's Weekly, September 22, 2003
Jensen (The Culture of Make Believe) and Draffan (A Primer on Corporate Power) are both pessimistic and angry about the state of the world’s forests. In the U.S. only five percent of native forest remains; forests on a global level are also under attack, with one estimate claiming that two and a half acres are cut every second. International deforestation causes the extinction of plants and animals in addition to driving human forest dwellers, like the Karen of Burma, to Mapuche of Chile and the Penan of Malaysia, from their homelands. The destruction of forests also results in flooding, erosion and landslides. Production of paper products releases highly toxic chemicals into both the air and water. The authors provide many instances of collusion between industry and government, which has led to a U.S. commercial timber and logging industry permitted to destroy forests almost without restriction. Environmental agencies such as the Sierra Club or the Environmental Defense Fund, according to Jensen and Draffan, are more interested in raising money than in raising discomfort among the economically powerful. Globalization, they argue, is a network of financial, legal and political structures that operate for the benefit of the economic elite, allowing those in power to consume the natural resources of other nations. Although the text is occasionally overwrought, the authors have carefully documented worldwide deforestation, as well as the serious environmental and human consequences, and point a finger at those responsible.

Praise for Strangely Like War

"Thank you, Jensen and Draffan. You awaken our hearts and our commonsense at the same time. You help us see the massive destruction of life built into the dominant, now globalizing, belief system. Your passion and your hard, cruel facts give us courage to imagine another possibility and to act." --Frances Moore Lappé, co-author, Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet

"Strangely Like War is must reading for anyone in the least concerned with either the fate of future generations or, indeed, the planet itself. The kind of scholarship and intelligence displayed by Draffan and Jensen demands both integrity and courage. All of us owe them a debt of gratitudefor their work." --Ward Churchill, author of Struggle for the Land and A Little Matter of Genocide

"A potent reminder (especially to those of us lucky enough to be living in regions where a new and respectful forestry is slowly being born) just how hard and fast we need to work: as hard and fast as those who are chain sawing large portions of our planet into a wan scrubland." --Bill McKibben, author of Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age

Praise for Derrick Jensen

"[Jensen's] visceral, biting observations always manage to lead back to his mantra: 'Things don’t have to be the way they are.' He accomplishes the rare feat of both breaking and mending the reader’s heart." --Publisher’s Weekly

"Derrick Jensen is your basic human being, and he sees the world in the basic way all human beings should, but do not. The planet Earth is alive, period. Human beings are one of the many living populations on the living Earth, period. Armed with a heart-stopping language older than words, Jensen is a mathematician, a comedian, a fierce critic of decent white male human history and its complex web of racism, sexism and hate; its greed and wanton disregard for life. Jensen's words are often difficult, but no one ever said facing the past and present of our culture would be a goddamn moonlit stroll down Memory Lane." --Inga Muscio, author of Cunt: A Declaration of Independence

"Derrick Jensen is a man driven to stare without flinching at the baleful design of our culture, which encourages us to honor those who wreak the most havoc on the world (and on human lives) and to scorn those who protest against the havoc as opponents of decency and good order. His analysis of our culture’s predilection for hatred and destruction will rattle your bones." --Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael