Forest activists have worked tirelessly within the system, taking timber product companies to court, reading Environmental Impact reports, writing letters protesting illegal logging, etc, etc, but as Derrick Jensen says, a victory for the timber company is permanent, but a victory for activists is temporary. Corporations will live to fight another day (or be bought out by another even more relentless). The lies that corporations spin about how they are keeping forests healthy by increasing logging activities remind me of the lies the Bush administration tells about how invading and occupying Iraq is good of the Iraqui people. The Bush administration will never admit that the very presence of American soldiers (and corporate profiteers) in Iraq is bad for the health of Iraq, anymore than timber companies will admit that their very presence in the forests is causing harm.

The book lists all the excuses given by the industry about creating jobs, managing forest fires and the health of the forests, then goes on to show how they do the opposite. It also devotes a chapter to corruption and collaboration between governments and industry. One example shows how the efforts of environmental activists to bring attention to the destruction of forests is spun into a decree that "the forests are suffering a major health crisis, so we need to move quickly to cut them down." Clinton then signed a bill to allow logging companies to do so. We sort of knew this about industry propaganda, but it is good to be reminded by specifics. So if the energy we put into the fight is used against us, what then should be our strategy? The book doesn't say, but gives a six page list of organizations to contact.

By focusing on one extraction industry, the authors also demonstrate how globalization works to increase the speed by which we are using up global resources. At the Collapse discussion, I attended the other night, someone mentioned the concept, suggested in the movie The Corporation, that if the entire planet was privatized, then companies would come to realize that sustainability is in their best interest. This book, along with Endgame demonstrates just how naive such a notion is. We are encouraged to think of corporations as being run by humans and therefore having human values, but they do not. They are monsters created by humans to turn the earth into wealth. The Midas Touch all over again. Forestry industries thrive by cutting the frontier, not by practicing sustainable forestry. Corporations are built to consume to the end. So, too, are people being programmed thus, I would add, because we don't know what we are doing, we don't see the atrocities committed.

Paper making and wood processing industries, along with deforesting activities, are the biggest contributors to global warming. Timber companies are the largest category of landowners in the world. Timber companies have yet to create anything close to sustainable forestry. They create plantations of monocrops sprayed with pesticides. By cutting as fast as they can, as much as they can, timber companies flood the market with cheap lumber and plywood after meeting the demands for paper. More than a third of what is cut is pulped to make paper. North America, Europe and Japan consume three fourths of these products. My mind reflects on the amount of paper used in advertising. One could say that propaganda and needless consumerism is driving deforestation. Collapse by dint of coffee cup and morning reading material, all franchised by Starbucks.

When Raiders Of The Lost Ark was released in 1981, I was too young to see it, but I would hear people's descriptions of the horror of the melting faces and my eyes must have been wider than a Muppet's. I saw it eventually on TV in various edited forms. Temple of Doom, again I think I didn't see it in the cinema - although I have a memory of seeing it I think it was a bit of historical revisionism. The Last Crusade, however, was perfectly timed. The anticipation I felt in summer of 1989 to go see it was intense - I can still recall the excitement with which I devoured every tidbit, every production still, the first teaser that came out in 1988 showing some behind-the-scenes footage of the tank chase, the first thing they filmed. It may just have all been canny marketing, manipulating me into the perfect franchise consumer, but it didn't feel that way, it felt like pure fan-love, a sense of true anticipation of the spectacle, unsullied by the years since of more cynical marketing campaigns and strategies (cf. Transformers et al.)