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 fter
suffering the brunt of a two-year grass-roots campaign urging
Home Depot to stop selling old-growth wood products, the retail
leader announced last week in Atlanta that the company would
end sales of wood from endangered areas by the end of 2002. Home
Depot is currently the world's largest retailer of old growth
wood products.
 "With
last week's announcement, Home Depot has taken a leadership role
in the US do-it-yourself industry. By phasing out of old-growth
wood products -- or wood from endangered areas, as Home Depot
prefers to say -- the company has joined the growing ranks of
leading companies around the world who agree that selling old
growth wood is unacceptable and must be stopped," said Brian
Vincent, California organizer of the American Lands Alliance.
For the past
two years, American Lands, Rainforest Action Network (RAN) and
Greenpeace have led an international campaign urging Home Depot
to stop selling old-growth wood. The groups have worked with
major institutional shareholders, fought Home Depot expansion
plans at local city council meetings, coordinated a hard-hitting
national ad campaign and organized demonstrations at several
hundred Home Depots across the United States, Canada, and Chile.
"We need
to say thanks to all of the groups and individuals who have worked
on this campaign," said Vincent. "I don't think a single
week has gone by in the past two years that activists weren't
out in the streets protesting Home Depot's egregious wood sales."
Old-growth
forests are forests that have never been logged commercially,
and are the most endangered forest areas on the planet. The giant
trees in some old-growth forests are more than 2,000 years old.
The Amazon rainforest is tens of thousands of years old, large
portions of which have never been touched by commercial logging.
Around the world, less than twenty percent of these original
forests survive, and less than four percent survive in the United
States. The wide array of old-growth products Home Depot currently
carries includes lumber from the ancient temperate rainforests
of British Columbia, old growth lauan and ramin from Southeast
Asia and bigleaf mahogany from the Amazon. Although the company
has promised to sell a small line of products that carry environmental
certification, that volume is surpassed many times over by the
wood it sells from the planet's most endangered forest regions.
Home Depot's
adopting a new wood products purchasing policy is the latest
of forest coalition's recent campaign successes. In 1998, RAN
ended its boycott of Mitsubishi Motors America and Mitsubishi
Electric America when the two companies adopted revolutionary
environmental policies. RAN also worked to get MacMillan Bloedel,
the largest lumber company in Canada, to stop clear-cutting in
old-growth forests. In December 1998, 27 US corporations -- including
IBM, Dell, Kinko's, Nike, 3M, Levi-Strauss, Mitsubishi Motors
America, Mitsubishi Electric America, and others -- announced
their commitment to stop selling or using old growth wood. [See
SDET 4/99 and 12/98 for related stories.] 
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