Forest Economics
» Considerations
Considerations
Global Considerations: The Ethical Acre
We use a lot of wood, about 200 board feet per person, every year. [A board foot of wood measures one foot square and one inch in height -- 200 board feet can be visualized as a foot square column of wood, 16.5 feet in height]
That wood has got to come from somewhere. We can grow it in California's fertile temperate forests, or we can import it from somewhere else. These days, we are choosing to "save" California forests by supporting policies that restrict the ability of professional foresters to practice sustainable forestry. So we import most of the wood that we use--despite the fact that our borders contain millions of acres of the most productive and renewable forestland on the planet.
Let's look at the environmental consequences of our lack of support for California forestry--acre by acre.
California's best forest soils are capable of growing over 1,000 board feet of wood per acre, every year. As these productive lands are removed from our timber base, replacement wood is coming from other areas of the globe.
Few of these replacement acres are as productive as California's forests. For example, although we think of tropical forests as rich, in fact their soils are generally much poorer in nutrients than are temperate soils. The sustainable rate of tropical forest productivity is closer to only 100 board feet a year--10% of what we can grow in coastal temperate zones.
Simply stated, we need to harvest 10 tropical acres to extract as much merchantable wood as 1 acre can produce in here California. Similar comparisons also apply to other regions of the world, such as the fragile boreal forests of Siberia and Northern Canada.
To make matters worse, biological diversity in the tropics is exponentially higher than in temperate zones. Acre for acre, logging in the tropics is much more likely to disrupt unique life forms than logging here.
The Golden State is a great natural place to grow trees. We can do so while providing the highest standards of environmental quality--taking care of our unique forest ecosystems while carefully putting a portion of them to work, providing the products we need and use everyday.
It's a choice we should make. If you care about forests and the environment, the best place to seek out an ethical acre is right here at home, in the rich and beautiful forests of California.
Source of information:
Dekker-Robertson and Libby, "American Forest Policy: Some Global Ethical Tradeoffs", 1997.