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522 SOCTHWisT RFTO AVENUE 

 POSTLANH OREOON 9T2« 

 903-^3-9001 



Praecting Ongon's lands, 

 waurs and naruml itsounxs 



9 December 1993 



The Honorable Mike Espy 

 Secretary, Department of Agriculture 

 14th and Independence Avenue, SW 

 Washington, D.C. 20250 



Dear Secretary Espy. 



The United States is currently in the untenable position of exporting high-quality, 

 unprocessed American logs to Asia while American sawmills are allegedly closing for lack of 

 timber. U.S. companies are proposing to remedy this situation by importing into the U.S. 

 logs that are of lesser quality and are often infested with destructive insect pests and vinjlent 

 pathogens that could cause irreversible damage to the U.S.'s most valuable forests. 



The Oregon Natural Resources Council, a conservation coalition with more than 6000 

 individual members and 50 member organizations in the Pacific Northwest, and the Pacific 

 Environment and Resources Center's Siberian Forests Protection Project, which has been 

 working since 1991 with Russian forest scientists to develop conservation strategies for the 

 Siberian taiga, urge you and the Department of Agriculture to reverse this irrational situation 

 by keeping American logs in the United States and keeping foreign logs out. 

 In this way, we can avoid the economic and ecological "train wrecks" that will definitely take 

 place in the timber-dependent communides of California and the Pacific Northwest if forest 

 and agricultural pests arc transported on the logs imponed from Russia and other countries. 

 We might also prevent the Siberian timber industry from embarking on the same non- 

 sustainable path that has created the ecological, economic, political, and human problems 

 now occuning in the Pacific Northwest and California. 



We would like to outline some of the problems about which we are panicularly 

 concerned: 



A. Importation of foreign forest and agricultural pests: History is replete with 

 examples of insect pests and bacterial and fungal pathogens being introduced into areas 

 where they have no natural predators and where native species have no natural immunities 

 and are vulnerable to attack. Under these conditions, introduced species have no biological 

 barriers to their population growth and their numbers often increase exponentially until they 

 reach epidemic proportions. 



Time and dme again we have wimessed introduced species such as the European 

 gypsy moth, Dutch elm disease, and Asian chestnut blight decimate whole populations of tree 

 species over large portions of their ranges. These diseases have led to losses of billions of 

 dollars in commercial timber and high costs for mitigation and control. In fact, the Office of 



