If you think timber operations and paper mills cause deforestation, consider this finding from a new U.S. Forest Service study of Southern forests: “Strong timber markets encourage retaining forests rather than converting them to other land uses.”
“Strong timber markets have encouraged forest landowners to keep their forests and forest cover rather than convert them to other uses. Our forecast suggests that the strongest timber markets lead to the least forest losses,” David Wear, a Forest Service economist, said last week at a press conference announcing the findings of the Southern Forest Futures Project. Wear co-led the team of 40 scientists and analysts that produced the report.
“The South’s timber harvesting expanded faster than the Nation’s from the 1950s to 1990s” because of "a technology-driven shift toward outdoor use of treated southern pine lumber,” growth in paper manufacturing, and restrictions on harvesting from public lands in the West, the report says.
The states of the former Confederacy produce 60% of the nation’s timber harvest, according to the report. If the South were considered a separate country (as a few old fellas still insist), it would be the largest timber producer in the world.
“From the 1960s to the 1990s, the period in which timber harvesting more than doubled, the biomass in southern forests also grew steadily, reflecting high growth rates,” according to the report. The increase in biomass has slowed in recent years as timber harvesting declined slightly.
“Under most futures [scenarios] considered, the carbon fixed in the South’s forests and their soils reaches a maximum between 2020 and 2030 and then declines through 2060. Futures with stronger timber markets yield somewhat more carbon but fail to completely offset the carbon losses dominated by land use changes.”
Those “land-use changes” mostly have to do with the effects of spreading urbanization. Home building causes deforestation not so much from the trees cut to make 2-by-4s as from the trees cleared to make way for new developments.
“Our results indicate that urbanization affects forest area but can be offset by market futures that place higher values on forest uses. This logic extends to any other source of forest values, including payments for nontimber forest products and crucial ecosystem services. Often cited examples are watershed protection, sequestration of atmospheric carbon, and habitat protection.”
There’s also a downside to strong timber markets: “Forest landowners have shown a strong propensity to convert naturally regenerated forests to planted pines after harvesting, especially in the Coastal Plain, an investment response that is strongly linked to the condition of forest product markets.”
Often referred to as tree plantations, land dedicated to planted pines constitutes 19% of Southern forests, a number that will rise to 24% to 36% by 2060, the report predicts. Wood-based bio-energy is more likely to cause the kind of demand leading to additional planted pine than are traditional timber and paper production, it adds.
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Showing posts with label logging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label logging. Show all posts
Monday, May 23, 2011
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
An Environmentalist's Defense of Clearcut Logging
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| Steven E. Kallick |
“Frankly, in the boreal forest, selective harvest is impractical because of the nature of the trees. You don’t have the big kind of coastal old growth forest,” Steven E. Kallick, director of the International Boreal Conservation Campaign for the Pew Charitable Trusts, told Yale Environment 360.
“What you have is extensive forest of smaller trees. And in order to be profitable, you need to be able to go in there and take out a significant part of the volume. And ecologically it’s not like clearcutting in a coastal forest. It doesn’t have the same impact because the boreal forest is a vast, fire-dominated ecosystem where large-scale disturbance is not uncommon.”
The logging companies that signed the agreement have agreed to “meet or beat the Forest Stewardship Council standards,” which Kallick calls “the green seal of approval for logging.”
“The reason the Forest Stewardship Council does not prohibit clearcutting in the boreal forest is because it’s not ecologically required.”
Canada’s boreal (subarctic) forest – along with undisturbed portions of the Amazon and Russia’s Taiga – is “one of the three great tracts of forest on the globe,” Kallick says. Pew decided to focus on the Canadian boreal, he told The Seattle Times, because, of the three, “it's the only one in a country with a tradition of conservation, so the most likely to be protected on a scale to preserve the ecosystem and yet allow people to benefit from the natural resources.”
Kallick told The Times he got interested in environmental work when a newspaper for which he wrote refused to publish his story about a hazardous waste dump.
“I thought, ‘I'm in the wrong business. I'm going to law school and figure out how to bust people like this.’”
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Monday, January 26, 2009
Cutting some trees but saving the forest
It’s good news when trees are being planted and bad news when trees are being cut, right?
So that means the Indonesian government’s announcement that it is planting 100 million trees per year is good news for the earth, right? The fact that timber operations in Maine have mostly stopped planting trees where they have cut is bad news, right? And environmentalists should cheer that the current slump in timber demand is putting a lot of loggers and sawmills out of business, right?
The vast majority of people would say “Right” to all of those questions. And they would be wrong.
I can’t blame them. I used to be impressed when paper companies told me (back in the 1990s, when paper companies still owned forests) that they planted two trees for every one they cut down.
It only took me a decade to ask an obvious question: Why do you need to plant trees in a forest? After all, it didn’t take human intervention to start the forest or to replant trees that have died there over the millennia. (As I have explained previously, I'm an environmental idiot.)
A logger gave me the answer: Timber operations generally plant trees when they want an area to have a single species rather than taking the pot luck of mixed species that occurs in a natural forest. That often means clear cutting, then the spraying of herbicides to keep down the vines for a few years until the seedlings are big enough.
The planting of trees in Maine (and many other North American forests) has largely ended because loggers there have generally stopped clear cutting. It’s not that they have suddenly gone green. They have found it’s more profitable to harvest trees selectively, go to the trouble of separating the different species for different markets, and then let the forest regenerate itself. That eliminates expenses for seedlings, planting, spraying, etc. (Isn’t it funny how green practices often end up saving a lot of green stuff?)
Indonesia’s massive tree planting is a symptom of an environmental nightmare: The country has lost about 70 percent of its original forest cover. Cynic that I am, I suspect that much of the tree planting is for sterile palm-oil plantations, not for reforestation.
Many environmental groups are realizing that a key to protecting a region’s privately owned forests is maintaining the viability of the region’s forest-products industry.
“We have to realize private-land timber companies are our friend. Once land gets broken up into smaller pieces, our ability to protect it is eliminated," said Guido Rahr, president of the Wild Salmon Center in Portland, Ore. The center has joined with other environmental groups that want to provide funds or other support to help the struggling timber industry stay in business, according to the The Oregonian.
The Nature Conservancy is involved in a massive effort to ensure that more than 1 million acres of timber-company land in Montana do not get sold to developers. Kirk Johnson of the New York Times recently wrote that “groups like the Wilderness Society . . . say that working forests with controlled harvests are healthier, safer, and more likely to be preserved” and that small forest-region towns with a sawmill as “an anchoring employer are less prone to real estate speculation and development.”
We environmentalists often talk about saving trees, but what we really need to focus on is saving forests.
"The environmental community has spent 40 years perfecting the art of saying no and has almost no ability to say yes," says Lawrence Selzer, president of The Conservation Fund. If we can’t find a way to say yes to private land owners trying to make a living from their forests in a sustainable way, don’t be surprised to see those forests get turned into ski slopes and shopping centers.
So that means the Indonesian government’s announcement that it is planting 100 million trees per year is good news for the earth, right? The fact that timber operations in Maine have mostly stopped planting trees where they have cut is bad news, right? And environmentalists should cheer that the current slump in timber demand is putting a lot of loggers and sawmills out of business, right?
The vast majority of people would say “Right” to all of those questions. And they would be wrong.
I can’t blame them. I used to be impressed when paper companies told me (back in the 1990s, when paper companies still owned forests) that they planted two trees for every one they cut down.
It only took me a decade to ask an obvious question: Why do you need to plant trees in a forest? After all, it didn’t take human intervention to start the forest or to replant trees that have died there over the millennia. (As I have explained previously, I'm an environmental idiot.)
A logger gave me the answer: Timber operations generally plant trees when they want an area to have a single species rather than taking the pot luck of mixed species that occurs in a natural forest. That often means clear cutting, then the spraying of herbicides to keep down the vines for a few years until the seedlings are big enough.
The planting of trees in Maine (and many other North American forests) has largely ended because loggers there have generally stopped clear cutting. It’s not that they have suddenly gone green. They have found it’s more profitable to harvest trees selectively, go to the trouble of separating the different species for different markets, and then let the forest regenerate itself. That eliminates expenses for seedlings, planting, spraying, etc. (Isn’t it funny how green practices often end up saving a lot of green stuff?)
Indonesia’s massive tree planting is a symptom of an environmental nightmare: The country has lost about 70 percent of its original forest cover. Cynic that I am, I suspect that much of the tree planting is for sterile palm-oil plantations, not for reforestation.
Many environmental groups are realizing that a key to protecting a region’s privately owned forests is maintaining the viability of the region’s forest-products industry.
“We have to realize private-land timber companies are our friend. Once land gets broken up into smaller pieces, our ability to protect it is eliminated," said Guido Rahr, president of the Wild Salmon Center in Portland, Ore. The center has joined with other environmental groups that want to provide funds or other support to help the struggling timber industry stay in business, according to the The Oregonian.
The Nature Conservancy is involved in a massive effort to ensure that more than 1 million acres of timber-company land in Montana do not get sold to developers. Kirk Johnson of the New York Times recently wrote that “groups like the Wilderness Society . . . say that working forests with controlled harvests are healthier, safer, and more likely to be preserved” and that small forest-region towns with a sawmill as “an anchoring employer are less prone to real estate speculation and development.”
We environmentalists often talk about saving trees, but what we really need to focus on is saving forests.
"The environmental community has spent 40 years perfecting the art of saying no and has almost no ability to say yes," says Lawrence Selzer, president of The Conservation Fund. If we can’t find a way to say yes to private land owners trying to make a living from their forests in a sustainable way, don’t be surprised to see those forests get turned into ski slopes and shopping centers.
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