The following letter was published in the Moscow Pullman Daily News, weekend edition 13-14 September 1997. It is presented here with permission of the Author, John Grasham, a forester retired from USFS, now employed as a forester for Bennett Lumber Co. Princeton Idaho.
In the local newspapers you read almost daily about the forests in the Northwest. Should you cut trees, old-growth, clear-cuts, ecosystem management, endanger species? The list goes on. Most of the articles favor doing nothing when it comes to forest management.
The co-founder and now ex-member of Greenpeace recently wrote an article about the forest-management issue, and I would like to share some of his comments with you.
At a recent Earth Summit meeting the issue of forest management came up. There was so much disagreement among members and countries that an Intergovernmental Panel on Forests was formed. The panel held a series of meetings from 1995 -1997. Because the issue of harvesting trees came up, the environmental groups called it a "chain saw convention," as if to say it would be fine to have and agreement as long as it banned cutting trees. The result: No global policy was reached regarding forests and forestry.
The environmental movement's opposition to forestry is squarely based on contentions that the industry is the main cause of forest loss and of species extinction. Both charges are incorrect.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, which is responsible for both agriculture and forests, defines deforestation as "the permanent removal of forest cover and conversion of the land to another use, such as agriculture or human settlement." The organization estimates that 95 percent of deforestation is caused by clearing for farms and towns, not forestry. This only makes sense, as the whole purpose of forestry is to grow trees, i.e., to keep the land forested.
Both the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace have stated that logging is the main cause of species extinction. Yet they are unable to provide a name of a single species that has gone extinct due to forestry. The truth is species extinctions are generally caused by deforestation, hunting and introduced species of predators and disease, not by forestry. Why do these groups accuse forestry of causing extinction? I don't know their precise motivation, but consider the question from another angle. If logging is not responsible for species extinction what other good reason is there for opposing it, provided it is done sustainably?
Based on these two false allegations, the movement has adopted a policy that would see a major reduction in the use of forests as a supply of wood. They argue, unfortunately with apparent logic, that by drastically reducing the use of wood the forest will be saved along with all the creatures that live there.
How could we reduce wood consumption? First it is important to note that half of all wood used in the world is burned to supply energy for cooking and heating, mostly in developing countries where people cannot afford fossil fuels. And that is probably good, because if they could afford other fuels, it would only add to the greenhouse-gas emissions and climate change. The environmental movement is surprisingly quiet on this major use of forests even though unsustainable fuel-wood gathering is a major cause of deforestation in the tropical countries.
The environmentalists' agenda for wood-use reduction is two-pronged. First, they want us to stop making paper from trees and to use "nonwood fibers" to make "tree-free paper." Some of the candidate crops are hemp, cotton and wheat straw. This may sound good at first, but there is a serious problem. Where will we grow all these exotic, annual, monoculture farm crops, enough to provide 300 million tons of paper per year. Unfortunately, we would have to grow them where we could be growing trees. It simply makes no sense for groups who say their main concern is the protection of biodiversity to advocate massive monocultures where there could be forests. It's not as if there is a huge surplus of extra land in the world. Therefor, the environmental movement's position on paper production is diametrically opposed to its position on biodiversity. Birds and wild animals prefer trees to hemp farms. The plain fact is if you don't use wood to make paper there is less reason to grow trees.
The second prong of their agenda is to reduce wood as a building material and substitute it with so-called "environmentally appropriate alternatives." Just what are these alternatives? The only viable substitutes for wood as a building material are steel, cement, plastic and bricks. All of these materials require a great deal more energy to make than wood. Why? Because wood is renewable and is made mainly with solar energy in a factory called the forest. All of these substitutes are nonrenewable and have severe negative environmental impacts of their own. But most significantly, because they require more energy, they inevitably result in more carbon-dioxide emission from fossil fuel use and are therefor contributors to climate change. Again the so-called environmental position on wood use runs opposite the position that would support climate-change policy.
All resource use has environmental impacts, but wood is the most renewable material we use and forestry is the most sustainable of all the primary industries that supply us with our materials. It is time the environmental movement recognized the basic contradictions in this policy on forests and forestry.
There is a simple way to bring the environmental movement's policy on forests in line with its policies on biodiversity and climate change. The fundamental requirement is to take the focus off reducing wood use and put it on increasing forest cover and wood production. This means growing more trees, putting millions of acres of unused in inefficiently used farmland back to forests and reversing deforestation in the tropics. It means using our knowledge on forestry and resources to help developing countries grow their fuel wood sustainably and in the end it means using more renewable wood and less nonrenewable steel, cement, plastic and fossil fuels.
It makes no sense at all for environmentalists to be in favor of renewable energy such as solar and wind while at the same time being opposed to renewable materials that are produced by solar energy. This is the case whether the material is used for fuel, as in the case of ethanol made from sugar cane and corn, or for fiber as in the case of cotton, flax and wood chips, or for building materials such as wood timbers.
There is no doubt, that from the point of view of preserving biodiversity, trees are the best of all crops because forests provide more habitat than any other environment. There is also no doubt that when it comes to making a positive contribution to climate change, trees are the best, both because trees are the greatest absorbers of carbon dioxide and because using wood results in lower carbon-dioxide emissions from fossil fuels.
Many environmentalists seem to forget that there are about 6 billion humans on this earth who wake up every morning with real needs for food, energy and materials to maintain our civilization. During the past 10,000 years we have helped satisfy those needs by gradually clearing away about 30 percent of the world's forests and replacing them with farms and pastures. This trend must now be partially reversed if we want to protect biodiversity and prevent climate change. It cannot be reversed by the idealistic notion that if we stop using wood the forest will be saved.
The present policy of most of the environmental movement on forests is, in fact, an anti-environmental policy. The movement is so entrenched in its position, partly because it does not have a knowledge of forest science, and partly because it has proven so effective as a fund-raiser. A major effort is needed to give the public and our political leaders a more logical, common-sense, science-based perspective on the issues of forests and forestry
John Grasham
Moscow Idaho
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