Earth Island Journal: Fall 1993, Spring (Southern Hemisphere) 1993:

Page 18: Green War Profiteers: by Gar Smith: Green War is the war against nature profiting billions for the manufactures of bulldozers, road-builders, treefellers, and chainsaws. To tear the Earth apart in the quest to extract resources and profits: Military weapons makers: McDonnell-Douglas, General Dynamics, Martin-Marietta, & Dow Chemical - Arm Makers in the War on Nature: Catepillar & John Deere; in Japan, Komatsu, Mitsubishi, Marubeni, Nichimen and Nissho Iwai, in Canada FMG Timberjack. Even smaller companies have world impact; In Wisconsin, the Manitowoc company produces a tree debarker that can shred 40 cords of wood per hour - 300 linear feet per second. Manitowoc's "flail debarker" can consume a tree of almost any size and regurgitate "150 green tons of debarked wood per hour." portable debarkers build by Chiparvestors, Inc. can roll into a forest and turn a grove into green pudding at the rate of 50-60 tons per hour.The Tyrannosaurus rex of tree eating machines is the feller bucher, 20 ton forest tank has huge hydraulic arm equipped with a combination tree clamp and power saw. The feller-buncher, like FMG Timberjack proudly explains, simultaneously grabs and cuts a tree, delimbs, cross-cuts, sorts and piles "accurately scaled pre- selected log lengths...in one fully automated pass." John Deere "skidders" used to drag downed trees. Oregon's Peterson Pacific Corp. (PPC) pride is "Leading the Way with Total Tree Harvesting. DDC 5000 Delimber- Debarker-Loader-Chipper, a 750 horsepower diesel beast that can turn out 30- 60 tons of pulverized forest per hour. PPC Boasts that the DDC 500 converts total trees into clean chips in one smooth, single operation with One Machine - One Operator!" PPC's literature emphasizes, now that Big Timber is confronted by "shrinking woodland acreage" that is "causing problems with wood-chip supplies." Caterpillar , an American icon opined Business Week in December 1991. The world's largest maker of earth-moving, construction and mining equipment (with 9.8 billion in sales in 1992, 6 billion in 1990 from overseas) Caterpillar brought generators to power post-war Kuwait, Caterpillar recently carved out space for a major airport in Japan. The biggest cats sell for $1 million each, Caterpillar has a global network of 215 independent dealers and more than 1200 stores and branches in 150 countries, employees 50,000 people worldwide & maintains 15 factories outside the US, in Brazil, the UK, Australia, France, Belgium, Italy, Indonesia, & Mexico. 22 domestic factories employ 18,500 & export $3.4 billion . In 1990 Cat added $2 billion to the US trade balance. Cat is losing ground to Japans Komatsu, 26,000 employees, exports to more than 150 countries 1992 sales 8.5 billion. In 1988 Komatsu merged with Dresser Industries, Inc. a 4.5 billion Dallas based firm, to take the position in the $10 billion US earth moving industry. Canada's FMG (Forest Machine Group) Timberjack, [offspring of menage a plus (French, Finnish & Canadian firms ) and Finnish Repola, LTD (nee Rauma Repola)] Abitibi-Price Inc. (API) from Newfoundland a company that turns 1.2 billion solid square meters of forest (equal to half a million cords of wood) into 400,000 tons of newsprint each year. page 19 Timberjack says its 42,000 pound Model 608 feller- buncher exerting an environmentally friendly pressure of only 5 psi (pounds per square inch) on the land. Today a lumberjack, forest technician, is more likely to be found encapsulated in an elevated, soundproofed cab pinching off hundred year old trees with Nintendo like flicks of a joystick - A joy to operate, work in comfort, filtered and heated air, noise level allows you to enjoy the radio Russia has 2.3 billion acres of forest or 23%, which is 54% of the world's coniferous forests, mostly larch, birch, spruce, pine & cedar. Japan Russia 1993, $700 million worth of equipment in Far East in exchange for six million cubic meters (210 million cubic feet) of logs and 400,000 cubic meters (14 million cubic feet) of milled wood over a five-year period. The 10 partners are: Marubeni Corp., Mitsubishi Corp., Nichimen Corp., Nissho Iwal Corp. (all major tropical wood importers) and Komatsu. The genius of the marketplace has now blessed Earth with Japanese ships that load US logs on the West Coast and grind them into woodchips on the passage to Japan, dumping toxic residues into the ocean as they sail west. Proliferation of chainsaws - the omnipresent contemporary macho "sidearm" in many a frontier community. least expensive Like a Saturday night special by comparison made by McColloch, Stihl, Allis Chalmers, & Massey, Ferguson.