Save an ancient redwood forest or make a guy a few million $$s richer. It's a no brainer.

I got so infuriated last night after I sat down for a relaxing hour or so to read the local paper. I live in California and have had the pleasure of walking among the giant sequoia. There is something special about redwood forests to me. The magnificence of the giant trees, rising maybe 200 feet above you, the color that reddens the earth all around you as you walk on this soft carpet that covers the forest floor.

Up in Northern California, there is a bit of a struggle going on over 123 acres of ancient growth redwood forest that is part of one of the biggest old growth forests still in private hands. The Save the Redwoods League has reached an agreement with the lumber company that owns the forest to buy the plot. The problem is, if they don’t come up with the $7 million before April 1st, the owner will cut the giant trees down as they are worth a lot of money as lumber.

These ancient giants are also what Emily Limm, the Redwood Leagues director of science calls “ecosystems in and of themselves.” They are home to 40 rare and imperiled species that include fish, birds and plants, bats also make these ancient forest their homes.

The cost of buying this precious heritage is $7 million. Bill Gates is reported to earn anywhere from $7 million to $20 million a day. If he was a country, he’d be the 37th richest country on earth. The owners of the lumber company that would tear down some ancient redwood trees for profit would like to be Bill gates like most capitalists would; they have no credibility with me.

What is bad and needs to be changed, is that it is legal for them to do that. Who made that law? It is the law defending private property. If you thought that meant your home, it doesn’t. Ask all those homeowners that have lost them over the past few years, driven out of them by force, by the sheriffs if need be. It’s the law that protects profit taking.

The owners of the lumber company would argue that they borrowed the money and bought the land and they have the right to cut every damn tree on it down if they want too, and the laws of capitalism give them that right. But that money they borrowed is not their creation or the bankers that lent it to them, It is the product of past Labor and is our collective product. It was stolen from workers in the first place.

The owner shares with us the mentality of the capitalist, or the type of thinking that is necessary if you are to be a successful businessman. “There are people who feel that saving old growth is the most important thing in the world” he says, “but I’ve always felt that if they feel that way they should raise the money and buy it.” There you have it, as Marx said 160 years ago, “no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”.

What is right in society is determined by the class struggle. Might makes right as they say. I have no respect for laws that allow this to happen no more than I respect their laws that put profit before people, that allow individuals to get rich by exploiting others, that force people out of their homes or deny them the right to health care.

We should decide what happens here and for the average worker it’s a no brainer, the ancient forest stays. The two businessmen who own the lumber have the right to a job and a decent life but they don’t have the right to destroy an ancient forest. They take away our rights when it suits them so we can just as easily take away theirs.

That’s the civilized thing to do.