Ft. Bragg, California
July, 1990

I know a lot of you think the CIA is not concerned with the environment.  Well, let me tell you, we are very concerned.  It’s definitely out there.

But I must say, it’s a beautiful place we have here.  The business of America is none of your business.It’s very moving to drive along through the giant, ancient, magnificent standing lumber, and I share the concerns of those who worry that it will rot on the stump.  As for spotted owls, I think you know that I’m for the birds, but I really think they’d be better cared for in a zoo.  I mean, nature is a wonderful thing, but it can never do what man can do:  create a theme park.

Now admittedly there have been excesses.  Some of our people have been clearcutting S&L’s, and dealing junk—bonds, I mean—and so they’ve run up a few debts, which is what makes the economy run, but perhaps a few too many, so they’ve got to liquidate their redwoods—I mean, assets—so they can get on with the business of America, which is none of your business.

You know, some people want the timber industry to diversify, create different jobs, retrain workers with new skills. But that would be quitting.  And it’s not quitting time. Trees are a resource, and so are people.  And we’re going to cut down trees and we’re going to cut down people, as we’ve done all along.  We did that in Detroit and we did that in Pittsburgh.  You don’t see those people complaining that their industries died.  Well, because we don’t report it.

Did we stop making autos and steel just because of a little acid rain?  No, we waited till the Japanese polluted the environment with their unAmerican level of efficiency, then we stopped! And we’re not going to stop logging till the Japanese can build a better Redwood.  Until then, we’re gonna ship them our Mexican-milled logs, because they’re our friends.

But it’s a Third World out there; this is a single crop export-based region, and I think you ought to be proud of that. You’re very lucky really, you’re in the company of other single-crop economies like El Slaveador and Haiti and Peru, and they’re doing all right without job retraining and complaining about owls and so forth.  And look at Brazil, they’re going to cut down the whole rain forest; do you see a bunch of Ozone First loonies running around trying to destroy the economy of Brazil?  That’s right, you do, because you follow the news, for some reason.  Well, that’s another clear-cut case.

But they’ve achieved a compromise. They don’t kill the forest, they buy it. Then they kill it.  Look, you can’t go in there and tell those Indians they can’t have a television and two cars.  We believe in equal opportunity.  Here in America 5% of the world’s population despoils 60% of the world’s resources. So we’ve got to spread that around.

Because really, the question is, do you want your jobs taken away by eco-crazies, or do you want your children’s jobs taken away by the lack of trees. And water. And ozone. Sooner or later we’re going to run out of trees to cut, so we might as well cut them all.  That’ll delay it for a generation.  Or a year, anyway.  Because really, isn’t that what it’s all about?  Getting what we can for ourselves so that our grandchildren can pay the national debt?