Upshot of Boy Scouts’ Anti-Gay Policy: Logging Their Forests

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From the San Francisco Chronicle:

“The Boy Scouts had to suffer the consequences for sticking by their moral values,” said Eugene Grant, president of the Portland, Ore., Cascade Pacific Council’s board of directors. “There’s no question” that the Scouts’ anti-gay, anti-atheist stance has cost the organization money, he said. As a result, he said, “every council has looked at ways to generate funds. . .and logging is one of them.”

According to an investigation by the Chronicle and four other Hearst papers:

  • Scout councils have ordered the logging of more than 34,000 acres of forests–perhaps far more as forestry records nationwide are incomplete.
  • More than 100 scout groups–one third of all Boy Scouts councils nationwide–have conducted timber harvests.
  • Councils logged in or near protected wildlife habitat at least 53 times.
  • Councils have authorized at least 60 clear-cutting operations and 35 salvage harvests, logging practices that some experts say harm the environment but maximize profits.

I was a Scout as a kid, and this is not the Boy Scouts that I used to know. It’s sad that an obsession with what should be an irrelevant social issue has sabotaged their core principles. We’ve seen the same thing happen with other organs of the Religious Right as churches that should be doing good works have become obsessed with gay marriage and abortion. But while many evangelicals have begun moving back toward the center–look at Creation Care–the Boy Scouts are inexplicably going the other way. Let’s just hope their vast land holdings aren’t destroyed as they they slowly implode.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

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And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

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