With great hope, Clinton, Gore and each member of Congress were presented with a copy. And yet just eight months later they unleashed the Salvage Rider, arguably the worst piece of anti-environmental legislation in recent history, suspending all environmental laws in our forests for one year. Although the book was timely, and its promotion was often brilliant, the issue was more urgent than the message was able to address. Less than five percent of our nation's original forests remain and they are almost entirely on public lands. One has to wonder how we let the situation get so grim.
Image is partly to blame.
Map makers color our national forests green, which lends them the illusion of protection. The Zero-Cut solution, endorsed by hundreds of conservation groups, seeks to protect what is left and begin healing the rest by ending all commercial logging on public lands. It is an effort to promote a zero cut on public lands by facilitating the actual construction and documentation of zeroes in all of our national forests. Of course, the zero is also a circle, and, as I've already pointed out, this is humanity's oldest symbol of wholeness and healing, representing the cycles of life and the path we have traveled in our relationship to trees. We came to a continent draped in virgin forest and cut them relentlessly until now only tattered remnants remain.