ยป The Contrarian-Environmentalist View of Forestry
As seen in the National Post, via Will: using more wood incentivizes the Forestry industry to plant more trees.
“We should grow more trees, and use more wood, in that order,” he says. Over the last century, despite harvesting billions worth of pulp and paper products, Canada’s forest cover has actually increased, according to OECD data. And foresters ensure that, unlike unmanaged forests, their trees don’t burn, reducing CO2 emitted by wild fires. Besides, when opponents of forestry, such as Greenpeace, dissuade consumers from using wood, they tacitly promote more harmful alternatives.
I haven’t checked the data or the bona fides of the OECD, and I know that there are hidden costs to having forests that never burn. Still, I often find that contrarian positions actually make the most sense (to me) — and I like being surrounded by wood.
One of the things BC should be doing is growing secondary wood industries. Shipping wood internationally and then importing foreign wood-goods is silly. I’ve often wondered why there isn’t a huge custom furniture business in BC. I think it’s mostly down to cost of living.
Yeah, if you want to have more trees in the world, then use lots of paper and then throw it out. I know there are all kinds of good reasons for not using paper and then having it buried in a landfill instead of recycled, but “saving trees” is not one of them.
If you think that trees are sacred beings and that killing an individual tree is wrong in itself, then that’s your religion and I would never belittle a religion.
Otherwise, if you have more practical reasons for valuing second-growth forests as a whole, then using more wood/pulp products will encourage the replanting and maintaining of more forests.
I mean, if you valued having lots of fields of wheat for some reason, then clearly eating more bread [later edit: and drinking more beer] would be the thing to do.
Don
7 Dec 09 at 3:53 pm
I guess, that being said, I value the aesthetics of old-growth forests. Massive trees are pretty cool, you guys!
Jack
7 Dec 09 at 4:31 pm
The problem is that “forest” as defined by the foresters and “forest” as defined by environmentalists are very different. They could count Christmas tree farms as “forest”, and same with clear cuts filled with sickly, badly-managed monocultures of saplings (y hello mountain pine beetle!). Lumber companies have to replant, but since they only have to manage the trees to a certain height (I can’t remember what right now, but it’s pretty small and means they only manage for a few years) they have no reason to manage the forest in a way that produces healthy trees or ecosystems, just one that gets trees to the cut off height as soon as possible. One improvement I’ve heard suggested is to make lumber leases long term so that the companies have a reason to manage them responsibly. Not that industry isn’t very good at getting out of obligations, but it might help. Unfortunately, the lumber industry isn’t willing to take a chance that the areas they harvest and replant might not be the amazingly productive forest they say it is, so it’s not likely to happen.
Kyla
7 Dec 09 at 6:40 pm
RE: Old growth forests vs replanted forests.
Yes, old-growth forests are great, and my case for using paper was based on the assumption that clear cutting or heavily logging old-growth forests for pulp and paper products was so stupid that it couldn’t possibly be a main source of those products. Was I wrong?
Don
8 Dec 09 at 8:12 am
@Don: Sorry, no. We’re still busy squandering the [inter]national environmental heritage out West
“Clayoquot Sound” and “Macmillan Bloedel” are words that strike deep resonances in my mind. The protests reached me at a formative stage and impressed upon me, somehow, that old-growth forests are holy ground. But as we’ve since come to see once the story is out of the news cycle protests dry up and the logging companies roll in.
Jack
8 Dec 09 at 10:38 am
God damn it.
Don
8 Dec 09 at 11:02 am
When most British Columbians go out in the woods, chances are they’re in a second- or even third-growth forest. Anyone who hasn’t seen a first-growth forest thinks that second-growth forests are totally amazing. I often forget that they haven’t looked that way forever when I’m standing in one.
I take this as evidence that a well-managed forest is holy enough.
But, as Kyla says, they don’t seem to replant them now the way they did 50, 100 or 150 years ago.
Jared
8 Dec 09 at 11:58 am