Money talks. At least, that’s the hope of environmentalists in Texas, who are appealing to taxpayers’ economic self-interest in an effort to stop commercial logging in the state’s four national forests. After 15 years of failed efforts to stop the logging through legal action, the Sierra Club turned to a different tactic, commissioning and going public with a study on the logging’s economic and environmental impact. The recently released results show that Texas taxpayers lost more than $300 million because of logging in the forests between 1987 and 1999. While the U.S. Forest Service claims it has been making a pretty penny from the cutting, economists commissioned by the Sierra Club and the Texas Committee on Natural Resources accused the agency of “creative accounting,” finding that costs exceeded revenues from the state’s national forests by as much as $32 million, and that taxpayers took another $300 million hit from “lost recreational uses.”
