Sunday’s Washington Post top-of-the-fold story was about illegal and ecologically damaging logging in China, Burma, and Russia. Just before the jump, the Post had these two paragraph:

Mountains of logs, many of them harvested in excess of legal limits aimed at preserving forests, are streaming toward Chinese factories where workers churn out such products as furniture and floorboards. These wares are shipped from China to major retailers such as Ikea, Home Depot, Lowe’s and many others. They land in homes and offices in the United States and Europe, bought by shoppers with little inkling of the wood’s origins or the environmental costs of chopping it down.

“Western consumers are leaving a violent ecological footprint in Burma and other countries,” said an American environmental activist who frequently travels to Burma and goes by the pen name Zao Noam to preserve access to the authoritarian country. “Predominantly, the Burmese timber winds up as patio furniture for Americans. Without their demand, there wouldn’t be a timber trade.”

Without their demand, there wouldn’t be a timber trade? That may be true. It’s also true that one of the reasons there is so much logging in China, Burma, and Russia is because developed countries have stopped much of their logging because of environmentalists. One reply to Zao Noam is that, western environmentalists are leaving a violent ecological footprint in Burma and other countries. There wouldn’t be a demand for as much Burmese timber if western environmentalists didn’t shut down so much logging in the west. Without the environmentalists there would be a much smaller Burmese timber trade.