SCIENTISTS SEEK BAN ON NEW CHIP MILLS; CARNAHAN REQUESTS STUDY IN MISSOURI

The potential damage of chip mills is a disturbing one to a number of scientists in Missouri and other southeastern states.

"My concern is protection of forests and wildlife," says Southeast Missouri biology professor Alan Journet, who is among more than 100 scientists who are asking President Bill Clinton's administrator for a ban on new chip mills.

Journet, University of Missouri biologist John Faaborg, and Peter Raven of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, are among a list of a half-dozen Missouri scientists who signed a letter requesting the ban.

The letter to the heads of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says the number of chip mills in the Southeast United States has tripled to more than 140 during the past decade.

The mills grind trees into chips used by pulp and paper manufacturers to make paper for copiers, computers and glossy magazines.

The concern of scientists is that private landowners may improperly cut their wood lots to sell wood the chip mills.

Chip mills in Missouri have caused some concern of citizens, but chip mill officials say they will contract with private suppliers and are not looking to buy trees from publicly owned lands.

One of the companies, Canal Wood Corp., said it will only contract with loggers who have completed a special training course that emphasizes responsible harvesting of trees.

The new scientists group is led by Harvard University ecologist Edward Wilson.

Chip mills, said Journet, can clear a lot of forest land and can be threatening to forests.

"There's a concerted effort in Missouri to persuade Gov. Mel Carnahan to put a moratorium on chip mills subject to a survey on forests," said Journet. These efforts are led by the Sierra Club.

Carnahan has ordered a study by state agencies -- the Department of Natural Resources and the Missouri Conservation Department -- on the impact of the chip mill industry on Missouri forests.

"Steve Mahfood of the DNR encourages a ban," said Journet.

In Missouri, two large chip mills have opened --Willamette Industries of Portland, Ore., on the Black River near Mill Spring and Missouri Fibre (Canal Wood Corp.) at the Southeast Missouri Regional Port on the Mississippi River near Scott City.

Missouri Fibre, which produces hard wood chips for paper mills to use in producing fine papers, just recently started shipping chips out by barge.

Each of the two plants, says the scientists' group, has a capacity of 300,000 tons of chips per year. In addition, an Arkansas chip mill is currently buying oak trees cut in Missouri.

The group adds that more than a million acres of woodlands were consumed in the Southeast in 1996 and that the industry now is turning to Virginia, Tennessee and Missouri in search of oak, which is mixed with pine grown in Southeast tree plantations to make high-quality paper.

Two of those agencies are split over whether the state should impose a ban on new chip mills while the study is under way.

Mahfood said there is "sufficient evidence" to warrant a ban.

Extensive clear-cutting of Missouri's Ozark forests before and after the turn of this century had a well-documented, widespread and devastating effect, Mahfood said in a letter to Carnahan. "The increased competition today for forest resources has the potential to cause very severe impacts now."

The commissioners of the Missouri Department of Conservation recently directed its employees to assist in the study but stopped short of endorsing a ban.

Tom Treiman, the Conservation Department's representative to the governor's chip mill study committee, said the preliminary figures for the amount of forest cut in Missouri last year shows logging is increasing. However, he said more wood is growing than is being cut.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.