ALERT!!!
TAKE ACTION NOW!!!
Calls Still Needed!

WILDWOOD, NEW JERSEY — At a public City Commission meeting here yesterday (August 23), Mayor Ernest Troiano, Jr. of Wildwood assured Tim Keating, Executive Director of Rainforest Relief, that the city would not use rainforest wood for it's upcoming boardwalk renovations.

The assurances came during Keating's comments during the public comment period. Unfortunately for the rainforests, the bid specifications calling for ipê were sent out on August 10th and have yet to be recalled. Town officials have yet to be convinced that ipê is a rainforest wood, so there has been no stated commitment that the bid will be rewritten.

The mayor was quoted in an article in The Press of Atlantic City as calling Rainforest Relief "a bunch of alarmists". In Keating's testimony, he stated that, given the history of environmental action and the fact that Wildwood's bid had already gone out specifying ipê, he was proud to be an 'alarmist'.

In a follow-up meeting after the public meeting, with Tim Keating and members of the south Jersey based group, Friends of the Rainforest, Lou Ferraro, UEZ Coordinator, and Marcus Karavan, City Attorney, also assured us that the town would not use rainforest wood. It seemed that much of the concern was that they didn't believe statements by Rainforest Relief that ipê is indeed rainforest wood and that the logging of ipê is not sustainable.

Rainforest Relief suggested a number of alternative materials, preferring the use of durable and structural recycled plastic lumber. Also suggested were cetified oak and eastern white cedar.

But the bid specs are out there and there has yet been no stated commitment to recall the bid. The specs call for more than 110,000 board feet of ipê. Based on the Rainforest Relief report, Deep Impact, we have calculated that 1500 acres of rainforests will be logged to produce the wood called for in the bid. This bid covers only three blocks of Wildwood's 2 miles of boardwalks.

Ipê is a dense hardwood logged from the dwindling rainforests of the Brazilian Amazon, where it’s estimated that eighty percent of logging is done illegally. Further, all ipê entering the US is logged from old growth rainforests, where trees are between 250 to 1000 years old. No replanting takes place and the roads bulldozed into these old growth forests by illegal loggers allow access by farmers who complete the destruction of these forests.

Studies have shown that estimates of deforestation of tropical forests must be doubled to account for the rapacious 'high-grading' logging from which ipê imports are originating (see for instance The Christian Science Monitor reporting on a 2006 study by scientists at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology and the BBC reporting on a 1999 study by Scientists at Woods Hole Institute.

Recent reports have shown that not only have numerous indigenous groups had family members killed by illegal loggers, been subject to beatings and forced displacement at the hands of loggers and the governments that support them, but also that forced or even slave labor is used to cut wood in Brazil (see for instance The New York Times and Knight Ridder Newpapers).

Yet towns and cities in the US continue to specify tropical hardwoods for boardwalks, park benches, bridge decking, railway track ties and other uses.

Importers continue to lie about the origins of the wood they sell and about what goes on in the forests where it's logged. The International Tropical Timber Organization (renamed the International Timber Trade Organization, or ITTO), formed in 1990 in the face of a global boycott of tropical timber, assured legislators in 1992 that all wood traded from tropical forests would be from sustainable sources by the year 2000. Yet not only has that commitment not been met, but the rate of destruction of rainforests due to logging has increased. ITTO has become nothing more than a front for tropical timber exporting and importing governments.

The Brazilian intelligence agency conducted a sting operation on the Brazilian environment agency, IBAMA and found that dozens of inspectors were involved in graft and bribe-taking. The certificates issued by IBAMA were being falsified to allow for the sales of millions of board feet of wood logged illegally from outside legal concessions, mostly from indigenous lands. This wood, totaling almost five times the volume of legally sanctioned wood, is laundered through the sawmills and ports. Once it's imported into the US, no specific US law requires that it be from legal sources. Importers, governments and buyers wash their hands in one of the largest illicit trade schemes in the world.

Wildwood's City Engineer has recommended ipê based on erroneous information, including a bill written by the tropical wood importers' association introduced into the NJ State legislature in 1992 that never passed! More recent legislation introduced would ban state funds from being used for purchasing tropical hardwoods, especially for boardwalks. Yet $2.82 million in Economic Development Zone funds, provided by the State of New Jersey, are being used for the renovations. An additional $800,000 is coming from a Rural Development grant from the United States Department of Agriculture (how the City of Wildwood qualifies as 'rural' is a question we have yet to be able to answer).

The bid specifications call for the use of an independent certifier, Mallenckrodt Gmbh, based in Brazil, to certify that the wood meets the grade and comes from operations that are not depleting the resource.

But Mallenckrodt does not have the capability to certify anything about the origins of the wood. That's because Mallinckrodt works at the port and only checks that the wood has paperwork from the Brazilian government. But the government has repeatedly admitted that this paperwork is most often falsified and that 80% of the wood leaving the ports — all of it with paperwork — has come from illegal operations. On an independent certification system that employs full chain-of-custody tracking as well as in-the-woods monitoring of forest management.


Rainforest Relief is still calling for your help to stop the wanton destruction that will occur if Wildwood's order goes through. Contact Mayor Ernest Troiano, Jr. (who professes to be an environmentalist) and City Engineer Mark DiBlasio and tell them to not use wood from old growth tropical forests. If they use wood from second growth tropical forests, it must be certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). They should first consider more durable and structural recycled plastic lumber, made from the very recyclables for which towns seek markets. You can click the linked email address below to send a prepared email or write your own. Please copy Rainforest Relief on your emails, info@rainforestrelief.org.

Mayor Ernest Troiano, Jr
609/522-2444 ext. 2252
cwood@wildwoodnj.org
Monday – Friday 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m

Mark DeBlasio
Remington, Vernick & Wahlberg
Wildwood office: 609/522-5150
mdeblasio@rve.com
4907 New Jersey Ave., Wildwood, NJ 08260

We must act quickly as the bids are scheduled to be read on Sept. 7th. If you are in the southern New Jersey region, please contact Rainforest Relief to help, 917/543-4064, info@rainforestrelief.org.