Timber-Lane

When U.S. children attend grammar school, they learn from their history textbooks that Americans have squandered their natural resources by slaughtering buffalo, raping forests, polluting streams, and plowing up soil-holding grasslands. As the youngsters grow old enough to read Government news releases in the papers, they are reassured that under scientific Government management, our countrymen are developing the skill of harvesting, rather than mining, American wildlife, timber, and land. Whatever its shortcomings in practice, most citizens come to believe that through planned conservation we may have our resources and reap them too.

Conservation-conscious Americans have been disturbed by recent disclosures in Congress indicating that a gold-and silver mining company named "Al Serena Mines" may have used fraudulent mineral assays to obtain the timbering and mineral rights on mining claims in Oregon. The suspected fraud should surprise few people, for it is no great revelation that private interests seeking public resources often resort to doctoring their documents and bribing officials to gain their loot. Astonishment should spring, rather, from the discovery that mining assays should have any bearing on timbering rights at all. The linkage of timbering and mineral rights dates to the nineteenth century, when lumber was worth little, yet was essential for construction of mine shafts. Today the timber above ground is often more valuable that the minerals beneath, so a mining company may sell lumber at great prices and never dig a shaft at all.

Nonetheless, mines operating on fruitful land can profit their operator through their mineral wealth alone; there is no reason that the Federal Government should have to give away timbering rights to encourage mineral production.

It is even less excusable that land rights on Federal mining claims should be granted without restrictions. Lumber companies which operate on Federal lands must receive a license, and they are closely supervised by the U.S. Forest Service, which compels them to harvest their timber in accordance with sound conservation theory. Yet "mining companies", which ordinarily operate for such a short period of time that they have no natural stake in conservation, usually mine the timber on their claim without control, making no effort to restore the forest.

In an election year it is perhaps unrealistic to ask a Congressional committee to frame constructive legislation. Yet the country may at least hope that the Joint Committee investigating the alleged fraud of the Al Serena Mines will eventually tire of exchanging the traditional partisan accusations of "smear" and "collusion." Perhaps it could then consider legislation of long-range concern for all Americans. The Committee might determine just why public land laws must continue to undermine the Forest Service's conservation program by allowing "mining companies"--real or contrived--to devastate our forest heartlands.