Santa Delivers Thousands of Kids' Letters to Boise Cascade
Kids' Holiday Wish: "Please Stop Cutting Old Growth Wood"
December 21, 2000
Contacts: Jennifer Krill: 415-398-4404, Martin Stephan: 208-343-5872
For Immediate Release
Boise, Idaho--Today Santa Claus delivered more than 3,600 letters from children across the country to Boise Cascade’s CEO George J. Harad at the corporate headquarters. The kids asked the logging company to give them their holiday wish: an end to the destruction of old growth forests. The colorful letters sent by kids from the U.S. included drawings of plants and animals and heartfelt messages to the CEO to protect forests.
“Please stop logging old growth wood,” asked one 10-year old. “The animals need the forest to live in.”Joining Santa were local kids, parents and other concerned citizens at the lunchtime event. Christmas cookies and caroling rang in the holiday season with a message to the company that old growth logging must end and responsible logging must begin
.“Kids love forests and Boise Cascade is destroying them,” explained Jennifer Krill of the Rainforest Action Network. “In defiance of children’s concern and U.S. public opinion, Boise Cascade continues to be the largest logger of old growth forests in the United States.”
Responding to increasing customer concern for the environment, hundreds of leading companies in the US, including top wood retailers Home Depot and Lowe’s, have committed to rapidly phase out the use and sale of old growth wood. These corporations represent some 20 percent of the wood market in the US. Boise Cascade, however, continues to be major seller of wood products from endangered forests around the world, including the Amazon Basin, Southeast Asia, and British Columbia's Great Bear Rainforest, and the company is looking to increase its overseas business.
Boise Cascade has expressed its strong dislike of the children’s holiday campaign on its web site: http://www.boisecascade.com/enviro/ran1027.html
For Rainforest Action Network’s response, please visit:
http://www.ran.org/ran_campaigns/old_growth/boise_index.html
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Rainforest Action Network works to protect the Earth’s remaining rainforests and the rights of their traditional inhabitants through education, grassroots organizing, and non-violent direct action.
Shannon Wright
Media and Communications
Rainforest Action Network
221 Pine Street, Suite 500
San Francisco, CA 94104
415/398-4404 fax 415/398-2732
www.ran.org