Everett Daily Herald

Green builder's practices decried

March 14, 2007

Protesters at Tuesday's Built Green Conference in Everett criticize Weyerhaeuser and its Quadrant Home subsidiary for clear-cutting in Canada.

By Debra Smith EVERETT – An environmental group and members of an Canadian Indian tribe who were furious with clear-cutting on their ancestral lands donned cardboard antlers as "homeless caribou" outside a green building conference at the Everett Events Center on Tuesday. The protest was directed at Weyerhaeuser Corp. and its subsidiary, Quadrant Homes, a leading builder of single-family homes in the state and the recipient of a green building award at the conference. The activists say the builder shouldn't be considered green since it uses a wood product made from logs clear-cut from the ancestral homeland of the Grassy Narrows First Nation, a indigenous tribe from Ontario. The protest included members of the environmental group Rainforest Action Network, some of whom had traveled from San Francisco. Three were members of Grassy Narrows. The Everett demonstration was one stop in a series of protests that have taken a handful of the band across Canada, said Maria Swain of the 1,200-member tribe from Ontario. Swain said she hopes people will hear her message and not buy products from her ancestral lands, which she said are being destroyed by logging. "You don't know what money does to people," she said. "People driven by money don't see the lives of people they are destroying." As Quadrant received an award for using green-building practices, protesters booed and one yelled. Of the more than 1,300 homes the company built last year, all reached at least a three-star Built Green certification. By lunchtime, the protestors posted a video at the online site YouTube, featuring a Rainforest Action Network member wearing a Pinocchio nose and mocking Quadrant Homes for "building today's homes with yesterday's forests." Building green is about more than a single issue. It's also encompasses issues such as energy efficiency and how a home is built, said Frank Mendizabal, a Weyerhaeuser spokesman. "Quadrant Homes builds homes all over Western Washington, and they work hard to mare sure as many suppliers as they can meet certain standards of sustainability," he added. He said Weyerhaeuser doesn't log the land in question; they buy the wood from another company, and can't speak to its practices. The Grassy Narrows band's disagreement is with the Ontario provincial government, the body that grants the permits to log the 2,000 square miles of forest, Mendizabal said. The Grass Narrows people want more control over how the land is managed, but the harvest rights are controlled by the province, he said. Weyerhaeuser has done everything it can to encourage a resolution of the issue, and he and several other leaders in the company met with Swain Monday to hear their stories. "This is outside of our control," he said.