"We are the lungs of the Earth," said Anne Kajir, an environmental attorney in Papua New Guinea. "And we play an important role."

The activists are supporting U.S. legislation that would ban the import of illegally harvested wood.

The raw material in question is often logged in areas that are supposed to be off-limits, including tropical rain forests owned by native people. Some of the wood is exported and can find its way into American consumer products such as flooring and furniture.

"When you're buying wood, ask where it comes from," said Roberto Guimares Vasquez, an indigenous environmental activist­ from Peru.

New U.S. legislation would expand the Lacey Act to block the import sale or trade in wood products whose raw material was harvested illegally - including illegal logging in tropical rain forests. U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., is sponsoring the Senate version.

On the House side, the bill is being co-sponsored by U.S. Rep. Brian Baird, D-Vancouver.

Guimares Vasquez and ­Kajir were among activists who visited the Portland-Vancouver area last week with representatives of American environmental groups. The activists later visited Washington, D.C., to directly lobby for the legislation.

"The system is not going to be flawless," Vasquez said, through an interpreter. "But this shifts the balance. It's cheaper to export illegal wood now."

Baird, in a telephone interview last week, said he supports the bill because of "tremendous" losses to ecologically important forests and the native people who rely on them.

Baird finds irony

He also challenged local environmental activists to ease restrictions on timber harvesting in the U.S.

Baird called the Sierra Club's support for the illegally harvested wood import law "ironic," in light of the organization's support for ending commercial logging on national forests here.

"What do people imagine will happen if you lock up domestic timber?" he said. "Where do we get our wood?"

At least one expert points to the equator.

Jerry Franklin, a University of Washington ecologist and Camas native who is widely considered the guru of old-growth forests in the Northwest, maintains that it's only a matter of time before most of the world's wood supply comes from areas along the equator - where it can be grown quickly and cheaply.

"Wood products are going to leave North America," he declared during a forestry tour on the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in 2005.

As wood supply increasingly comes from overseas, Franklin and others believe pressure will increase for industrial forest land owners to sell large tracts of timber - a trend already well under way. The United States is losing working forests, ranches and farms at a rate of 4,000 acres per day, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

Baird contends that onerous environmental regulations are another cause of forest land conversion in the Northwest. As an example, he cited landowner frustration with state rules requiring wide no-cut buffers along tiny streams.

"They're just saying, 'Nuts to this, I'm going to sell out,' " he said.

Americans consumed 60.5 billion board feet of softwood lumber last year, according to the Western Wood Products Association in Portland. Out of the 22.8 billion board feet imported to the United States, almost 90 percent came from Canada.

National forests across the country turn out roughly 2 billion board feet annually - scarcely half the total that rolled out of Northwest forests during the heyday of federal timber-harvesting in the 1980s. The Northwest Forest Plan, brokered in 1994 as a compromise between old growth-dependent wildlife and rural communities that had come to rely on federal timber, has never fulfilled its harvest estimate of 1 billion board feet per year.

"I think we ought to revisit the Northwest Forest Plan, quite frankly," Baird said.