LETTERS: CHIP MILLS HAVE ACTED IRRESPONSIBLY

To the editor:

I read with interest the report that Missouri's chip mill industries are appealing to the Missouri Supreme court to obtain relief from rules and regulations imposed on them by the Department of Natural Resources.

It is unfortunate, indeed, that the behavior of these industries is such that regulations are necessary. If they were to accept responsibility for the environmental and natural resource management devastation they generate, rules governing theri behavior would not be necessary. it is to regulate rogue corporations such as many in the chipping business that state or federal rules are required.

To hear the chip-mill representatives tell it, they either help out sawmill operators by taking sawmill waste -- the disposal of which would otherwise cost money -- or they "improve" Missouri's forests by removing the bent and inferior trees. Neither, however, is the case. On one hand, many chip-mill opeations refuse to accept sawmill waste. On the other, meanwhile, a visit to our local chip-mill staging area at the Southeast Missouri Regional Port Authority, some five miles south of Cape Girardeau, will reveal piles that are definitely not composed of bent or inferior trees, but represent the smaller-diameter trees that would, if left, become the saw logs and timber of the next generation.

To acquire the vast input of wood fiber that represents the fodder for their chipping process, the millers cruise large areasof the state searching woodlots that they can buy and denude. In many cases, they are persuading forest owners to allow the clear cutting of tracts of forests many hundreds of acres in size while hiring loggers who employ the worst imaginable harvest techniques. These techniques all too often leave behind moonscapes where soil erosion and creek destruction are promoted, where compacted logging trails supress forest recovery and where huge, festering skidder ponds consume the landscape. one does not have to travel far out of the Cape area to see the results of chip mill industrial irresponsibility. To undertake this destruction, only a handful of workers are employed while the saw timber that could employ future generations of responsible loggers is chipped into oblivion.

It is in response to the pattern of irresponsibility and evasion of accountability for their actions that the chip-mill industry now finds itself regulated. If the industry had performed in a socially responsible manner, did not promote the destruction of hundreds of acres of forest and wildlife habitat at a single sitting, had insisted that its hired loggers employ only best management practices and had avoided damage to the state's fragile water resoures, regulation would be neither demanded nor needed. Given the anti-social behavior of these companies, it is little surprise that they now seek relief from reuglations thatonly require them to do what they should have been doing voluntarily all along.

ALAN R.P. JOURNET

Cape Girardeau