Now being served in classrooms across America: Project Learning Tree, an educational entree cooked up by big timber. But before this is served to students, the ingredient list should be exposed to the fullest of light:

* Omit crucial data that reflects negatively on multinational timber corporations

* Hone it with "Madison Avenue" semantics leading teachers to believe that the nation's forests should exist as fiber farms for profit

* Sprinkle in a dash of credible activities to hide the bitter taste of glaring omissions.

Now you have the best curricula blood money can buy. This self-proclaimed preeminent environmental education program has all the ingredients for success: corporate money, overburdened teachers in search of free curricula, and alliances with all the politically correct organizations. How could this project of the American Forest Foundation now be in the hands of almost 20 million students and 500,000 teachers?

Project Learning Tree appears altruistic, yet its omission-riddled approach to forest education is simple: whatever science data that might reflect poorly on the likes of forest pillagers such as Weyerhaeuser, Sierra Pacific, and Georgia-Pacific is absent, and crucial ecological dilemmas created by logging are avoided. PLT's mantra is: without human intervention forests will suffer. Of course, all that is needed is the prescribed medicine of roaring chainsaws.

Our students need to know this: much of the world's remaining intact forests are at risk. With more than 23 million acres of the world's forests disappearing yearly, some nations will lose their native forests in less than 10 years! Embarrassingly, the US has only 4% of its native forest still standing; a penchant for replacing forests with tree farms is a tragedy that needs to be reversed.

PLT was created in 1970 by the American Forest Foundation and has received millions of dollars from a rogue's gallery of multinationals:

* Boise Cascade, one of the largest cutters of public timberlands and outspoken foes of Clinton's roadless plan. According to the EPA's Toxic Release Inventory, Boise Cascade is also a major polluter of our air, water and land.

* Weyerhaeuser, which has, according to researchers, clearcut over four million acres of forestlands since 1990. They were also under investigation for illegal timber cutting on public lands.

* Pacific Lumber, which has razed thousands of acres of old growth redwood despite damage to Coho salmon habitat and other endangered species.

* Sierra Pacific, friend to large-scale clearcuts in the state of California. Sierra Pacific is a major lobbyist in Washington DC seeking to further weaken environmental law.

* Georgia-Pacific, a major polluter of air and water. In a 1997 study it finished second to International Paper, another PLT supporter.

* Plum Creek, referred to as the "Darth Vader" of the Pacific Northwest timber companies. They clearcut hundreds of thousands of acres in Montana, knowing that it was unsustainable and would not only cause ecological havoc, but destroy workers' lives.

Defenders of PLT use a myriad of lies. Lie number one: PLT is funded by a diverse group of private, public, and even environmental groups. Closer scrutiny tells a different story. With over 151 donors, the list is dominated by timber, paper, energy, and oil trade groups, including ExxonMobil, Weyerhaeuser, and the American Petroleum Institute.

Lie number two: PLT defenders boast that their 400-page curriculum is not meant to be all-inclusive. A former state PLT representative in Oregon often chided me, telling me that no curriculum can "cover it all." Yet, page VI of PLT's own manual states, "PLT is a comprehensive environmental curriculum."

Lie number three: Some say the biggest form of a lie is omission, and this curriculum is living proof. Where is the discussion on habitat fragmentation, use of herbicides, the downside of clearcutting, or the abysmal record of timber multinationals? PLT's goal is "teach students how to think, not what to think."

But the omissions are glaring and damning. In four hundred pages of "activities and data" where is the information on fragmentation of habitat, the world's most pressing problem for wild species? The word is not even in the glossary! Nowhere does the PLT curriculum show our nation's "jigsaw puzzle" national forests, pocked by rampant clearcut logging. Where is PLT's comparison of native forests to replanted forests? Shouldn't students be aware of critical tradeoffs?

My students love to do labs and a favorite is comparing native forest soils to tree plantation soils. The frontier forest soil is darker, thicker, contains more mutualistic fungi, holds more water and is more fertile. Where are PLT's activities on this issue? I could not find them.

Project Learning Tree should be ashamed. Their "energy module" was constructed with the help of purveyors of greenwashing: the American Petroleum Institute, an organization that was exposed trying to downplay the fears of global climate change in a recent EPA document.

Who else played a role in this PLT/API pseudo education program?

* Red Cavaney of the American Petroleum Institute, who wants to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, more public lands to exploration, and opposes global warming treaties like the Kyoto Protocol.

* Mary Butterworth of the American Coal Foundation. ACF has put out bogus data on global warming and downplays this issue.

* Jo Cooper of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. AAM is opposed to California's plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

PLT's bias is a clear and present danger, especially in the hands of unsuspecting teachers. This is indoctrination, not education.

Teachers must say no to PLT, demanding that PLT have a frank discussion about their omissions. Our forests, especially our national forests, are to be jealously guarded by their absentee landlords: the nation's taxpayers and future taxpayers. Building ecologically fluent children translates into active, knowledgeable and voting citizens. Curriculum like Project Learning Tree seeks to dull our children into comfortably numb and passive pawns. Educated teachers have the truth in their slingshots.

-John F. Borowski is a teacher in Philomath, Oregon.