The forest products industry is another culprit in the wholesale destruction of
species diversity and ecosystem integrity, and as such is implicated in related problems
such as CO2 emissions, climate change, flooding, soil degradation and the disruption of
nitrogen cycles. Logging operations are usually the cutting-edge of industrial
exploitation of the hinterlands—as logging roads pave the way for hunters, mineral
prospectors, farmers and real estate developers. Deforestation is not only implicated in
climate change—with the earth having lost over half of its forest cover in the last
century—but it is now causing the loss of an estimated 5 to 9 percent of the world’s
species every 10 years. While wood can be a very durable and useful product, its current
uses are suspect: almost 20 percent of all US lumber is used to make shipping pallets
which are typically dumped after use; and nearly 40 percent of industrial timber goes into
paper (Young, 2000).
Equally implicated with extraction industry in the destructive River Economy is
another form of primary industry—the petrochemical industry. Environmental problems
here stem not just from the amount of resources exploited, but by the toxic character of
many industrial materials. Our current resource use is not just an expanded version of
traditional materials use, but it is far more complex and poisonous. In 1900, humanity
used about 20 of the 92 naturally occurring elements in periodic table; today we use them
all. The new synthetic chemicals made from hydrocarbon feedstocks today present major
threats to both human health and the global environment. Organochlorines are a
particularly prominent and destructive class of substances which have been linked,