Green Bans won't Save the Forests

Canberra Times, Australia
By Patrick Moore
July 14, 1997

At the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, and recently at the Earth Summit +5 in New York, climate change, biodiversity, and forests emerged as the top three items in the global environmental agenda. Governments have been able to hammer out agreements on the first two. The Climate Change Convention calls for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and The Biodiversity Convention calls for the protection and sustainable use of biodiversity.

There was no agreement on forests, however, because there is too wide a gap among countries on what such an agreement should contain. Some countries are concerned mainly with forest management issues while others are more concerned with conservation and protection. The environmental movement initially voiced strong support for a convention.

In the wake of the 1992 Earth Summit the Intergovernmental Panel on Forests was formed in order to pursue the idea of an international agreement on forests. The Panel held meetings in Geneva and New York between 1995 and 1997. It became clear that any international convention must address the subject of forest management as well as preservation. As proof of their real agenda, nearly all the environmental groups reversed their position and came out against an agreement. Greenpeace referred to it as the "Chainsaw Convention", as if to say it would be fine to have an agreement as long as it banned cutting trees.

Partly as a result of this sudden about-face, the international community remains in complete confusion regarding global policy on forests and forestry. I believe this is because the environmental movements position is misleading, illogical, and most important, inconsistent with their more reasonable policies on climate change and biodiversity. In fact, their forestry policy is diametrically opposed to their policies in these other areas and is therefore an anti-environmental policy.

The environmental movements opposition to forestry is squarely based on their contentions that it is the main cause of forest loss (deforestation) and of biodiversity loss (species extinction). They are wrong on the facts on both these charges.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, 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". They estimate that 95% 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. Forestry causes reforestation, the opposite of deforestation.

Both the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace have stated that logging is the main cause of species extinction. Yet they are unable to provide the Latin 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 their 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 fully 50% of all wood used in the world is burned to supply energy for cooking and heating, mostly in developing countries where the people cannot afford fossil fuels. And that is probably good because if they could it would only add to 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 environmentalist agenda for wood-use reduction is two-pronged. First, they want us to stop making paper from trees and to use "non-wood fibers" to make "tree-free paper". Some of the candidate crops are hemp, kenaf, 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 tonnes 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. Therefore, the environmental movement's position on paper production is diametrically opposed to their position on biodiversity. Birds and squirrels 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 use 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 these substitutes are non-renewable and have severe negative environmental impacts of their own. But most significantly, because they require more energy, they inevitably result in more carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel use and are therefore contributors to climate change. Again the so-called environmental position on wood use runs 180 degrees 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 their policy on forests and forestry.

There is a simple way to bring the environmental movement's policy on forests in line with their policies on biodiversity and climate change. The fundamental requirement is to take the focus off reducing wood use and to put it on increasing forest cover and wood production. This means growing more trees, putting the millions of hectares of unused and inefficiently used farmland back to forests, and reversing deforestation in the tropics. It means using our international assistance budgets to help developing countries grow their fuelwood sustainably and in the end it means using more renewable wood and less non-renewable steel, cement, plastic and fossil fuels.

It makes no sense at all for environmentalists to be in favour 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 wheat, 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 5.9 billion humans on this earth who wake up every morning with real needs for food, energy and materials to maintain our civilization. Over the past 10,000 years we have helped satisfy those needs by gradually cleared away about 30% of the world's forests and replacing them with farms and pastures. This trend must now be partly 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 forests will be saved.

What thinking people will eventually come to realize is that the present policy of most of the environmental movement on forests is, in fact, an anti-environmental policy. The movement is entrenched in their position, partly because they are very shallow in 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, internally consistent, science based perspective on the issue of forests.