Big Business and the Environment

Hi everyone!  Sorry it's been so long since I've posted on here.  Been busy tending to pets and working on other writing projects elsewhere on the Internet. 

Today I'd like to paste a section from Jared Diamond's book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed(2005) where he discusses forestry and the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).  This is relevant information for anyone buying lumber from Home Depot or Lowe's or elsewhere who wishes to make environmentally-sound purchases.  I read this section over lunch today and feel it's worthwhile to share with others.

Beginning on pg. 473, here are a few excerpts:

More than half of the world's original forests have been cut down or heavily damaged in the last 8,000 years.  Yet our consumption of forest products is accelerating, with the result that more than half of those losses have occurred within the last 50 years--for instance, because of forest clearance for agriculture, and because world consumption of paper has increased five-fold since 1950.  Logging is just the first step in a chain reaction: after loggers build access roads into a forested area, poachers follow those roads to hunt animals, and squatters follow them to settle.  Only 12% of the world's forests lie within protected areas.  In a worst-case scenario, all of the world's readily accessible remaining forests outside those protected areas would be destroyed by unsustainable harvesting within the next several decades, although in a best-case scenario the world could meet its timber needs sustainably from a small area (20% or less) of those forests if they were managed well.

Those concerns about the long-term future of their own industry impelled some timber industry representatives and foresters in the early 1990s to launch discussions with environmental and social organizations and associations of indigenous peoples.  In 1993 those discussions resulted in the formation of an international non-profit organization called the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), which is headquartered in Germany and funded by several businesses, governments, foundations, and environmental organizations.  The council is run by an elected board, and ultimately by the FSC's membership, which includes representatives of the timber industry and of environmental and social interests.  The FSC's original tasks were three-fold: to draw up a list of criteria of sound forest management; then, to set up a mechanism for certifying whether any particular forest satisfied those criteria; and, finally, to set up another mechanism for tracing products from such a certified forest through the complex supplier chain all the way to the consumers, so that a consumer could know whether the paper, chair, or board that he or she was buying in a store, and that carried the FSC logo, actually came from a soundly managed forest.

To learn more about the Forest Stewardship Council of the United States, please visit their website: http://www.fscus.org

Returning to the book, now on pg. 476: