The CLEARCUT Cult
Calling out the well-monied and influential backers of what’s turning out to be one of the most destructive anti-environmental schemes in modern U.S. history.
-by Josh Schlossberg
The Manson Family. Jonestown. Heaven’s Gate. All cults you’ve probably heard of thanks to their irrational and outrageous ideologies that not only did grievous harm to society but also to its own brainwashed members.
As an ecosystem advocate working on forest preservation in the U.S., these days the religious sect I’m most disturbed by is what I call the Clearcult Cult. These are folks who not only believe that tearing apart millions of acres of biodiverse, carbon-storing forests is a good idea, they launch personal attacks against anyone who so much as suggests there might be the slightest flaw in their taxpayer-funded experiments on publicly owned lands.
While most cults are made up of fringe social outcasts, the Clearcut Cult is peopled primarily by corporate interests, decisionmakers, and gatekeepers, such as: the logging and biomass energy industries; the wildfire industrial complex; land management agencies at the federal, state, county, and municipal level; many elected officials on both sides of the political aisle; a surprising number of reporters and media outlets; and even some extremely-well funded self-proclaimed environmental groups.
(Of course, an argument can be made that those of us trying protect natural ecosystems are also in a cult. Even if true, the difference is in power and influence: we don’t have hundreds of billions of dollars—much less taken from the pockets from taxpayers, we can’t make policy, and we have little to no sway over elected officials.)
The most disturbing part of the Clearcut Cult is not simply the egregious ecological damage they’re doing to public lands, the protection of which is the only way for the U.S. to meet its international responsibility for ecosystem preservation under the Global Biodiversity Framework or climate targets under the Paris agreement. Nor is it the increased fire risk to communities by opening previously dense, cool, moist forests to sunlight and wind.
No, my biggest beef with the Clearcut Cult—and why I truly do believe it’s a cult—is its members’ outright denial of the validity, or sometimes even the existence of, any of the several hundred scientific studies—whether independent and peer-reviewed or from the agencies themselves—that point to either the limited effectiveness or counterproductive nature of cutting down forests to supposedly save homes from burning.
The most some of them will ever admit is that while there might be a handful of legitimate studies out there that contest their logging frenzy, there just so happens to be MORE studies concluding otherwise…leaving out the fact that close to all the studies they favor are funded by the U.S. Forest Service, the very agency that counts on taxpayer dollars to carry out the federal timber sale program and other logging across our National Forests.
Indeed, if we go by their scoring it’s a rigged game, as there will NEVER be the number of independently-funded studies as there are government or industry studies (including from many universities), most of which just so happen to focus on findings that support the pro-logging narrative while pretty much ignoring any data that doesn’t.
Of course, as with any ideological sect, the Clearcut Cult doesn’t simply believe it’s not doing anything wrong, its members think of themselves as saviors, in this case, of our forests and communities. Which is probably why they simply cannot stand any criticism whatsoever but will go to great lengths to try to stomp it out to avoid an honest debate, including whisper campaigns, personal attacks—some of which may go so far as to be considered defamation in a court of law—and blacklisting.
How far does the Clearcut Cult take this delusion? Not only will its adherents not say or write the term logging to describe its most sacred ritual, they insist that anyone using the dictionary definition of the word—“the activity of cutting down trees in order to get wood that can be sold”—instead of their euphemisms is a liar not to be trusted, listened to, or even allowed to meaningfully engage in participatory democracy. Talk about psychological projection, eh?
Okay, so the Clearcut Cult wants to keep siphoning billions of taxpayer dollars to log potentially hundreds of millions of acres of biodiverse, carbon storing forests while increasing the risk of losing homes and lives to wildfire. What about the grievous harm…to its own brainwashed members that I mentioned in the first sentence?
Right now, the Orwellian “Fix Our Forests” Act—which some call F Our Forests—being pushed through Congress seeks to ramp up logging by further gutting the Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Policy Act, largely under the guise of “wildfire fuel reduction” and phony “forest health.” And if that’s not explicit enough, Trump’s executive order of “Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production”—and the Secretary of Agriculture’s subsequent memo sacrificing 112 million acres—59% of National Forests—to “emergency” logging, is cynically and nakedly exploiting fire hysteria to get out the cut in a way we’ve never seen before.
In other words, these actions harm members of the Clearcut Cult itself by chipping away the last thin veneer of credibility from their own crumbling institutions—whether its Congress, government agencies like the Forest Service, and the media—all of which will now increasingly be dismissed by large swaths of the American public as untrustworthy, corrupt, or wholly illegitimate. And, at this point, I’d say rightly so.