If there were an international tribunal that prosecuted crimes against the planet, like the one in The Hague that deals with crimes against humanity, what is happening on the Cumberland Plateau in eastern Tennessee would undoubtedly be indictable.

         The crime—one of many clandestine ecocides American corporations are committing around the world—has taken place over three decades. About 200,000 acres on this tableland have already been clear-cut by the paper industry, and the cutting continues. Where some of the most biologically rich hardwood forest in North America’s temperate zone (which extends from the Gulf of Mexico to southern Canada) once grew, there are now row after row of loblolly pine trees genetically engineered to yield the most pulp in the shortest time. But  the paper industry’s insatiable appetite for timber has met with unexpected competition from an equally voracious insect. In the last four years, an estimated  50 to 70 percent of the pines planted on the plateau have been devoured by the southern pine beetle. The entire South has been ravaged by the worst outbreak in its history of this native predator of pine trees, caused by the tremendous increase in the amount of pine available for it to eat on the industry plantations that have replaced the native forest. Unable to salvage its dead timber, the paper industry has been losing hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet it seems still committed to destroying what remains of the extraordinarily lush forest on the Cumberland Plateau, which, along with eastern Tennessee’s Great Valley and the Cumberland Mountains, has the highest concentration of endangered species in North America. The loss of biodiversity is tragic, but also absurd economically; it doesn’t even make good business sense. 

         Not many people are aware of what is taking place. Nearly ninety percent of the Cumberland Plateau is in private hands and exempt from all but a few government regulations. The federal and state agencies that are supposed to be regulating the paper, timber, and mining industries are populated with former timber executives and have come to view them as clients whose permits and projects should be facilitated rather than scrutinized. The cozy relationship that exists between Tennessee’s public and private sectors, and the impunity and magnitude of the environmental destruction that is taking place on the plateau, is something you might expect in Guatemala or deep in the Brazilian Amazon, not in our republic, where there are supposed to be laws that protect our wilderness treasures and prosecute conflicts of interest. But a quarter of the world’s paper, and 60 percent of America’s wood products,  are being produced in the South,  and the will to address the abuses of the paper industry, which contributes millions of dollars to the campaign coffers of politicians around the country, just isn’t there— certainly not in Tennessee.

       There’s another reason for the lack of public awareness: Much of the devastation is  hidden from view by thin “beauty strips” of native forest that have been left along the plateau’s highways. The only way to get the full picture is to go up in a small plane and see it from the air.  
 

           SO EARLY THIS PAST SEPTEMBER I took off from Knoxville, Tennessee, in a Cessna 180 piloted by Hume Davenport, the founder of  a nonprofit, conservation-minded aviation service called SouthWings. Hume, whose ancestors came to the Cumberlands in l801, has provided his” flying classroom” to dozens of journalists, environmentalists, and policy-makers trying to grasp the enormity of what is happening on the plateau.  

           The Cumberlands (some dispense with the s) are made up of the Cumberland Plateau and the mountains and foothills on its edges. The plateau itself is a 400-mile-long tableland that is the tail end of the Appalachian Plateau, and extends from West Virginia and Virginia down into Kentucky and Tennessee on a southwesterly diagonal, and peters out in Alabama.  The part in Tennessee tapers from 55 miles wide to about 38, and contains 6,875 square miles— an area larger than the state of Connecticut). About 85 percent of  it  is still covered with the native woodland. Some of the last remaining large stands of the Appalachian mixed mesophytic forest (where a variety of hardwoods grow in moderately moist conditions) are here, but the plateau was “pretty much raked over the coals a century ago,” Hume explained, and most of the trees are second-growth.  East of the plateau, plunging a thousand feet in a steep escarpment that was a formidable barrier for the westering pioneers, until Daniel Boone forged a route through the Cumberland Gap in l769, is the Great Valley of East Tennessee, where Knoxville and Chattanooga are, and where the Tennessee River winds. 

     Soon we were over the Cumberland Mountains, whose peaks range from 2,000 to 4,000 feet.  Hume’s aeronautical map indicated  “numerous strip mines,” and   we could see that some of the mountains had been cored like apples. Others had been decapitated, or “cross-ridge mined,” in the industry’s euphemism. The heyday of the mining was between l920 and l970, and its scars were mostly overgrown with vegetation. But recent improvements in smokestack filters have renewed interest in burning coal, and mining is making a comeback. We circled Zeb Mountain, which the Robert Clear Coal Corporation had just gotten a permit to cross-ridge mine. Roads and sediment ponds had been put in on its slopes, and the trees had been clear-cut, like a person being shaved before an operation. Mud was oozing down into a stream below, smothering the habitat of a striking little fish called the black-side dace, which is only found in 30 streams on earth.
            “Mining and clearcutting go hand in hand,” Hume explained.  

            In nearby Pioneer, we made a few passes over the Royal Blue chip mill, which is owned by International Paper, the biggest paper company in the south. A chip mill is a satellite facility, where hardwoods of smaller diameter and plantation pines are diced into wafers that are taken to a mother mill, to be dissolved into pulp. The larger hardwoods are sawed up into boards at a sawmill.  There are 259 chip and pulp mills in the 13 southern states. More than a hundred of them were constructed between l987 and l997, when chip exports (mostly to Japan) escalated by 500 percent. Five mills get their wood from the plateau. Royal Blue alone eats up 7,000 acres of hardwood trees a year—oaks, tulip poplars, and half a dozen other species— from within a 75-mile radius. We could see  two miniature logging trucks coming down the highway far below us, another being unloaded, and four waiting behind it. The logs were being picked up by a huge claw suspended from a crane that fed them into the chipper, which spewed the chips out a pipe directly onto railroad cars that would take them to International Paper’s mother mill in Cortland, Alabama. Most of the wood here is “gatewood”: No questions asked about where the timber comes from or the manner in which it was harvested. 
    
     WE BANKED southwest, and heading right down the middle of the plateau, began to see massive devastation. “This isn’t ma-and-pa, let’s-clear-40 acres stuff,” Hume yelled through the headphones. “It’s big, industrial tree-farming.  When they took out the big trees a century ago, at least they left the little ones to take their place. But now they’re scraping off the soil, right down to the bedrock. Because it’s thin and sandy, they have to spray massive amounts of fertilizer from crop dusters so the pine trees can grow. It’s complete insanity. Most of the trees they’re planting are being chewed up by beetles. Look at these plantations. It’s a graveyard.” 

      Below us vast stands of dead gray loblolly pine, covering hundreds of acres, had been skeletonized by the southern pine beetle, Dendroctonus frontalis. The beetle breaks out every 10 to 30 years—what triggers the outbreak is not understood—and attacks native longleaf, shortleaf, Virginia, black, yellow, Table Mountain, and white pines that are sparsely scattered in the hardwood forest. But with many tens of thousands of acres of monoculture pine on the plateau, the beetles have been having a field day.  The beetles are even chewing up saplings and the prize conifers in people’s yards.  In a race against the plague, the paper companies are being forced to cut their timber before it is mature, creating a glut of scrawny “bugwood” on the market. This has brought the price of pulp to a record low. Coupled with the hundreds of millions of dollars of lost revenue from the timber the beetles have beaten them to, and competition from Canada’s timber industry, the South’s paper companies are in deep trouble.

       The biggest landowner on the southern plateau is Bowater, the largest manufacturer of newsprint in the country and one of the largest of the free-sheet coated paper that cut glossy magazines and catalogues are printed on. Now, as we flew south over Crossville, the commercial hub of the southern plateau and a burgeoning retirement community, houses abruptly gave way to Bowater’s industrial tree-farms and huge squares of mangled wasteland that had been hacked out of  the forest and not yet planted. “This plateau has been ransacked,” Hume said sadly. He took us over a particularly vast mutilated swath that some activists have dubbed the Triangle of Destruction, but it is only one of many. 

     The only clear-cutting I have seen on this scale was in the Amazon 25 years ago. Every merchantable stick below us had been taken, streambeds and banks had been torn up and gouged by recklessly driven machines, and the understory shrubs and stripped-off branches and other debris had been bulldozed into windrows, some of which had been torched and were shooting up sooty flames. “It used to be just Bowater,” Hume said, “but in the last few years International Paper and J.M. Huber—another paper company—have gotten into the act. When Huber showed up in ’97, we saw a vast increase, maybe a doubling, of the clear-cutting.” Four million additional acres of the South’s forests are being converted to pine plantations each year, according to the U.S. Forest Service, and the conversion rate is expected to double by 2040. 

       On the plateau, this translates to an annual holocaust of about fourteen million trees. What’s driving this? Consider that a quarter of the world’s paper is consumed in the South.  The average American consumes about half a ton a year— that’s factoring in toddlers and oldsters, people on life support. This is 111 times the per capita consumption in India, 300 times that of some African countries.  Much of this is glossy catalogues and other junk mail, which I get a two-foot stack of each week; the sections of the paper that I chuck without even glancing at them (the Washington Post and other newspapers are printed on Bowater paper taken straight from the Plateau); the inch-high stack of napkins we’re handed whenever we get take-out; the 10 feet of toilet paper we rip off to wipe ourselves. As one environmentalist put it arrestingly: “We’re wiping our asses with habitat.” 
 
 
 
 

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