Doing a little research of my own tonight has yielded a rather fruitful harvest. Basically, I found out some more interesting history on our friends over at Weyerhaeuser. Apparently, back in 1995 they were involved in a shady (thats putting it nicely) land trade deal in Arkansas with the Forest Service. The deal was brokered by local congressmen. The public was left completely out of the loop and before you know it, over 350 square miles of forestland was turned over to one of the world’s largest timber companies. And, they never bothered to do an EIC (environmental impact statement) before or after the deal went through. Here’s the kicker:

Shortly after the filing of the deeds that made the trade official, aides in the regional Forest Service office in Atlanta gathered up all the papers relating to the trade and shredded them. Gone was whatever information had been used to assess the value of the deal – prices of neighboring parcels, timber prices and volumes, notes from a visit to the property by Forest Service appraisers. The records were shredded, Forest Service officials say, because they don’t want the public second-guessing complicated land deals.

The federal organization left to manage OUR nation’s forests decided to shred any evidence of a public deal with Weyerhaeuser because they didn’t want us to be “second-guessing complicated land deal(s).” Seeing as corporate ethics has been in the news recently, I’m hoping no one out there owns Weyerhaeuser stock as there are obvious red herrings popping up here that say this company could be headed for an ugly ending. What can we expect from a corporation dependant on a natural resource yet doesn’t believe in a (truly) sustainable way of using it? A speedy and dramatic ending.