The platform, on which Labor's more detailed federal election policy will be built, calls for a sustainable forest industry in the state, with no overall job losses, and further protection of some forests. He vowed to end logging in the "overwhelming majority" of Tasmania's old-growth forests - 240,000 hectares of forests with disputed high conservation values, offering an $800 million package. And on some of the valley's upper slopes, logging is under way as it has been in more accessible...

The demand for materials like softwood at the mills is way down. A majority of those responding said they are in danger of downsizing or going out of business because of the current business climate in the logging sector, said Gene Francisco, GLTPA executive director, in a press release. In the past few years fuel prices increased 100 percent, stumpage prices are up 75 to 100 percent and the costs of doing business are all on the rise. Nearly all of today s logging contractors are...

The federal government yesterday released a draft plan to save the northern spotted owl, nearly two decades after the bird's listing as a "threatened" species crippled the Northwest timber industry. The proposal offers two alternatives to recovering the population on 7 million acres of national forests in California, Oregon and Washington in the next 30 years. One option would continue the policy of designating certain areas off-limits to logging, while the other option would grant more...

Blackfeet hope to make up to $4 million from salvage logging after recent forest fires. The tribe hopes to harvest 20 - 25 million board feet of timber, Mad Plume said, although the fire damage is expected to reduce its value. Another setback is the tribe's new $7 million casino, Glacier Peaks, which needed a $50,000 tribal loan last fall to cover an operating revenue shortfall. Most of that money ''came out of our trust income,'' he said, which includes timber sales. There are stories and...

More than 21 million hectares of rainforest are now allocated to the logging industry, an area nearly seven times the size of Belgium. But Greenpeace, which exposed the practice in a report released earlier this month, says companies rarely follow through on those promises and take advantage of people who don't know the true value of the forests in which they live. The trees they fell are worth millions of dollars on the international market and are essential to maintaining the planet's...