Edited, paraphrased, and details elided for confidentiality.
"You'll meet people who say we shouldn't log tropical forests at all. Greenpeace, lots of NGOs. Just say no.
"Logging is one of the biggest employers in the Congo. Three hundred thousand people. It's mostly legitimate, registered companies that are paying a legal wage. They're businesses, they're not angels, they're not perfect. But they have addresses. You can find them. Most of them have been in the business for decades -- there are family firms going back a century or more. They're long-term thinkers.
"A mature tropical hardwood tree will gross you around fifty thousand dollars, F.O.B. Antwerp. That's a lot of money. Somebody is going to cut those trees.
"You can do this sustainably. In fact it's easier to do sustainable logging in a tropical forest, because it's more diverse. You have ten or twenty different species on a hectare instead of two or three. So you say, this time we're going after this species, only. And you harvest one or two or three trees per hectare. It's the farthest thing from clearcutting you can imagine. Come back in a year, take another species. One, two, three trees. The forest recovers.
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