Jim Drescher
Certification of good forest management is all the rage these days. Some say FSC, some say CSA, some say ISO, some say WHS, some say SFI. Fights break out over different initials. What system is best? Is there any common ground? How should standards be developed? Where is the sense?
We are at a point today where the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the certification system enjoying the most widespread credibility in the marketplace, has endorsed the first regional forestry standards in Canada, for the Maritime Region. Standards development processes are in place in Ontario (Great Lakes-St. Lawrence and the boreal) and BC; initiatives will begin soon in Quebec and Alberta. Needless to say, these efforts and accomplishments are not without controversy.
Those who are interested in the gritty details of one standard’s development process could read the "Maritime Process Document," which chronicles the four-year saga leading up to FSC endorsement of standards for the Maritimes. It is an ecological/sociological/cultural/political drama which unfolds very slowly, punctuated by displays of territoriality and materialism, minor neurotic upheavals and mild excitement. Of course, the story is shot through with the blood of basic goodness common to all participants.
This article, slightly updated from my recent presentation to the Yale School of Forestry, is an attempt to offer some value context to the current kerfuffle around certification and standards development. I hope the drift of my thoughts is more than tangential to the hottest forestry topic of the day. In any case, I know of no other way to approach questions of whether "green certification" is a good thing, or how to go about arriving at reasonable standards of performance, than to refer back to basic values and try to find relevance.
The good news is that everyone in the forest wants to do the right thing. The bad news is that everyone is confused about what that is, and how to do it. That confusion is a result, on the one hand, of our preoccupation with our own comfort and security. On the other hand, it also is due to our lack of experience, understanding and skill.
Often we hear that forestry is the way it is because of rampant greed and hunger for power. However, if we examine the situations and motivations of each individual, we don’t find evil monsters. What we do find are basically good people with selfish desires. Most of us tend to rationalize, often in terms of sustainability, actions we think will give us what we desire, what will make us happy. For example, we might try to convince ourselves and others that clearcutting mimics fire and that fire was the natural extensive disturbance regime in our region. Therefore, the most profitable way to log is in fact "sustainable." This is questionable logic, but serviceable rationalization, especially if repeated often enough.
Even if we are able to put our selfish desires in the backseat, we still have confusion based on lack of experience, understanding and basic forestry skills. In other words, we have not maintained, or restored, our personal connections with "forest," that intimate heart connection which comes from just hanging out in the forest, open to perceive without preconception. Out of this simple and essential practice can come direct experience of one’s own mind and one’s place among all other beings.
Perhaps we have spent our lives in the forest and have maintained that direct connection, but we haven’t studied, thoroughly enough, the relevant science and economics. Or if we have studied geology, soil chemistry, hydrology, botany, conservation biology, watershed ecology, full-cost accounting, community economic development, bio-regionalism, home economics and so on, maybe we haven’t assimilated these things and applied them to real situations.
Even if we are well-connected forest animals and great students of science and economics, we still may be lacking in hands-on experience. Do we know how to fell a hemlock tree so as to minimize damage to other trees? Do we know how to buck the logs to maximize the economic value? This is not a question of "knowing" theoretically, but have we done it enough so that our sinew and bones know? If not, we are still subject to the confusion that results in bad forestry.
Finally, the accomplished ecoforester who has cut through personal desires, is continually reconnecting with the forest at a non-conceptual level, has mastered the relevant science and economics and has done the physical labour in the woods and mills, reaches a final opportunity: to communicate with others. If these skills are not developed, then the benefit will be needlessly limited.
You may say, "Wow, this is a tall order. I can barely handle the rigors of family and work. How can I do all this?" First you have to see the benefit for yourself and others. Then you have to commit yourself to doing whatever is necessary. Then, realizing that this is a life-long path, you could relax and enjoy your life of working for the benefit of all other beings.
If your genuine motivation were to nurture a sane and compassionate human society within the context of healthy forest ecosystems, then I would be so bold as to suggest a core practice, which could continue for your entire life. It has four stages which are circular, recurring, and mutually supporting.
Stay in touch with your own basic intelligence, gentleness, and fearlessness.
Reconnect with the forest – deepening that intimate heart connection with all other beings.
Leap out of your skin to identify directly with the centre, which is the ecosystem itself.
With genuine humility and confidence, think and say and do whatever comes out of this, without too much regard for what anyone else has told you.
So, what does sustainable forestry mean in this context? The aspiration is noble. In fact, it is a direct manifestation of basic intelligence, gentleness and fearlessness. We want to get to a good place for all beings, and stay there. However, our understanding of sustainability is confused.
One of the fundamental truths of existence is impermanence. The term and concept of sustainability imply denial of this basic truth. The forest is not sustainable. The forestry industry is not sustainable. Society is not sustainable. We are not sustainable. Those who genuinely believe in sustainability are called eternalists.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, some people may see very clearly what is happening in the world today: 1) widespread ecological disruption resulting from indiscriminate resource exploitation; 2) rapidly increasing poverty resulting from continuing concentration of power and wealth; and 3) loss of economic viability for local and regional populations, resulting from the global trade craze. They might conclude from this that
any efforts toward discovering, practising, and describing good forestry is futile – might as well jump on the market economy bandwagon, "get my share while there is still some left." Those who believe in the utter futility of trying to make a better world are called nihilists.
Then there are those who think that the direction in which we are headed is the best possibility, that the natural ecology isn’t being significantly damaged, or, even if it is, it is of no great consequence; that there is not a rapidly increasing proportion of the world’s human population suffering in poverty or, even if that is true, the benefits offset the misfortune; that regional sufficiency and community stability are not being undermined or, even if they are, the benefits of globalization will help everyone in the long run. Those who believe we are on the right course are called muddled.
An important goal of studying and practising forestry is to eliminate confusion by seeing things as they are. As we wake up to smell the juniper, we have a fine line to traverse and it is easy to fall off either side: one way is eternalism with no earth; and the other is nihilism with no air. In either case, there is no future.
This may seem a bit philosophical, but I think it is very practical training to which we must submit if we are to be effective in reducing the impact of human activity on the forests of the world.
In this context, "measures of sustainability" become mere sophistry. What we really need to be concerned about is distinguishing good from bad forestry, communicating the difference, and doing the physical work of "least-risk forestry," in the woods.
Most people with even a rudimentary understanding of habitat and water quality issues could walk into most harvesting operations and say with conviction, "This is bad forestry." In fact, of the thousands of visitors to Windhorse Farm and surrounding area over the past 10 years, after touring a variety of harvesting sites and methods, not one has thought clearcutting was a good idea from the point of view of ecosystem health. If you asked these "unsophisticated" people, ages 8 to 80, to develop sustainable forestry standards, their document would cover less than a page.
On the other hand, the regional technical standards writing committee for the Forest Stewardship Council, Canadian Maritime Region, has produced a document of more than 50 pages. It is an interesting question whether this group of "experts" has produced a better document in four years than a few ordinarily sensitive people could have developed in 10 minutes.
If we decide, for whatever reasons, that is would be a good idea to write down a "standard" for good forestry we must decide on a baseline or reference point. In other words, what is the "good" forest? In this we have two choices: the old "natural" forest or some new, human-designed forest. The precautionary principle says that the safest approach is to model the old forest, which has been tested over thousands of years. The argument that climate, human population density, and other things are changing and so the old forest is not a valid reference point may be true from an absolute point of view, but certainly we have no scientific or industrial model which is as good. Until we have a model for a human-designed forest which is demonstrably superior to the natural forest, in terms of biodiversity and stability, we must keep the tried and true reference point.
If we choose the natural forest as our baseline, then the measure of our standard will be how successfully it nudges forestry toward restoration of the natural forest. In other words, the standard must be "ecosystem-centred;" the forest must be regarded as the primary product, and all the so-called "forest products," whether timber or non-timber, must be regarded as by-products. Their extraction or use must not degrade the value of the primary product, the forest itself.
We might ask, "What about the balance between ecological, social, and economic values?" I suggest to you that this balancing act is bogus. Socio-economic benefits, in the long run, can only flow from healthy forest ecosystems. Economics of the human species rests within the realm of economics of all species, the study of which is called ecology. In order for anything to work in the long term, the priority must be ecosystem health. Within this context, social benefit, including material wealth, must be distributed widely and equitably.
When the basis for "sustainability" is seen in this way, things fit together quite easily. The need for "dilution-by-compromise" disappears, and the quest for greater understanding of science and traditional wisdom becomes a mutual exploration. The building up of arsenals of conflicting evidence to support different points of view is transcended when there is a common vision of restoration of the forest to the most recent evolutionary stage.
The basic principles and objectives come out of our vision quite easily, but how should we do it and how can we measure our success? The effects of various forestry practices are extremely complex, and it would be futile to attempt to identify and measure them all. We need practical methods to accomplish our objectives and simple indicators by which to measure ecosystem health. We can find these methods and indicators through observation (the naturalist’s approach), controlled experimentation (the scientist’s approach) or common sense (the old forester’s approach). In the best of circumstances we can jump out of our human skin and experience the phenomenal world directly.
Although, in the interest of time, space and attention span, I am shortening the process and skipping some steps, it can be shown theoretically and empirically, that diversity promotes stability and that simplicity undermines it. So, if we are managing for stability, or sustainability in the current jargon, we must manage for diversity. So, early in our quest for methods and indicators, we realize that forest restoration means managing for total ecological diversity: species, age/size, structure, genetics. Because structural diversity is more indicative of total diversity than the others, and, for example, within structural diversity, canopy height and closure, and dead wood are particularly diagnostic parameters, we can begin to pare down the number of things we have to measure. By the way, some refutations of this relationship between diversity and stability have been advanced based on artificial species "packing" experiments and other measures of only one or a few diversity parameters. Here, diversity means all aspects of indigenous species composition, age/size, structure, and genetics for a given site.
At Windhorse Farm, on the LaHave River in Western Nova Scotia, there is a long-standing forestry experiment in progress. The study began in 1840 and continues today. This past winter, the 160th timber harvest took place, according to a very simple and practical set of ecosystem guidelines.
Protect the sensitive areas: wetlands, riparian zones, steep slopes, thin soils, corridors, and representative areas.
In harvest areas, protect the key elements of ecosystem health: tree species diversity, canopy height and closure, dead wood, and soils.
A central hypothesis of this experiment is that if we take care of these, ecosystem health will take care of itself.
Only if we have ecosystem health is it possible to attend to socio-economic concerns, and the simple socio-economic guideline is to spread the benefits as widely as possible, beginning with people and communities "closest to home."
You may think this is simplistic, but it is useful to work at this level of generality first, and then become more specific as the situation requires.
In our situation in the LaHave River watershed, this generality leads us to a fairly rigorous set of objectives and methods, or prescriptions. The broader and more diverse the region covered by a "standard," the more flexible must be the rules because we must always allow for management creativity in accomplishing the objectives. For any one stand, or small watershed, the prescriptions could be more specific. On the other hand, for managed land over an entire region, prescribed methods must be more flexible, allowing for a great range of different ways of accomplishing the objectives, based on site specificity and management creativity. In any case, once we have agreed upon the vision, the practicality is directed by that.
For use in woodlands we manage, we have developed "The Windhorse Standard for Restoration and Maintenance of the Natural Forest of Western Nova Scotia." This is a very simple standard with sections for ecosystem health, socio-economic benefit, management planning, and impact monitoring/assessment. For the key elements within each of these, we have specified objectives, recommended methods for accomplishing them, and suggested indicators by which success can be measured. We have found this standard to be quite useful.
Now let’s talk about certification. The need for certification arises because of the expansion of trading distances beyond where we personally know the producer of our wood and paper products. No longer can we judge for ourselves how good the forestry practices are. So, if we care, we must rely on someone else to tell us. Usually that has been the forestry or forest-products company. Recently, due to obvious conflict of interest and resulting abuses, that assurance has lost any semblance of credibility. Consumers and their retail suppliers are demanding independent third-party certification that their wood and paper products are derived from well-managed forests.
Of course, this raises a host of questions including, "Who will give that credible assurance?" And "By what criteria will they judge the quality of forest management?" Much has been written about the various possibilities and certification programs. Some seem more or less credible, but some are just rehashes of old industry "self-certification" schemes. However, even in the best of circumstances, certification of sustainable forestry is somewhat suspect.
Fundamentally, it is just another tool of the global marketplace, a rationalization for consumerism. It gives us some guilt relief while we pursue our desires in the name of sounding virtuous. From the consumers’ point of view, certification is not about reducing consumption; it is about reducing guilt while continuing to seek a larger slice of the finite "resource" pie.
From the small woodlot owner’s point of view it is about being acknowledged for doing the right thing, as if that isn’t enough in itself. What is it in us that needs such confirmation?
For the industrial forestry company, the rationale is material reward: increasing price, greater market share, or easier access to markets.
For environmentalists the whole thing is a wonderful opportunity to trick other materialists into doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, as an accomplished martial artist uses the momentum of her opponent to advantage.
And for certifiers...what a grand entrepreneurial opportunity!
If we are going to write regional standards for certification, we must understand these different points of view and the pressures they will bring to bear on the process. The consumer will want standards that relieve as much guilt as possible without increasing the price of the end products, so that consumption can continue unabated. The prideful woodlot owner/forest manager will want standards that s(he) can meet, but that not too many others can, so that flattery will rain down as confirmation of success. The big industrial players want standards they can meet with a minimum in disruption to their established practices and processes: the stamp of sustainability for the status quo. The environmentalists will want standards strict enough to protect the environment and perhaps punish the industrial giants. The socialists will want standards that protect workers and the viability of rural communities, and so on and on.
The development of regional standards, through a broad consultative process is a long and frustrating experience. On the other hand, it can also be rewarding, as it has been in many situations around the world. The result of the process will depend on many things, luck not the least of them. Certainly, a most important key is beginning with a strong common vision. In any case, my experience is that the process is worthwhile whether or not it results in a "standard" which will contribute to a discernible movement of society toward sustainability. I hope this is not too esoteric.
If the optimists are correct, certification may slow the pace of forest degradation, and certainly this would be good. But will the results actually turn the tide, or could they, in fact, stifle any real change by promoting an illusion of sustainability. In any case, do the ends justify the means? This market-based approach doesn’t change anything fundamentally. Materialism still reigns.
To accomplish anything really beneficial, in terms of reducing our ecological footprint, we must do it the long way, making personal, lifetime commitments to care for all beings. The path is one of connecting with the forest and ourselves: contemplating, studying, practising, and communicating. The goal must be to leap out of our human skin to view things from the centre and the fringe at once. From that place, we can act directly, with confidence and compassion; we are free of territoriality because no one is home. This is the ecoforestry journey. Enjoy the trip.
We can’t accomplish everything, but we can accomplish something. I suggest that the most important thing to do in a forestry career (or even a short-term forestry job) is to continually reconnect with the forest: hang out here as much as possible, doing as close to nothing as possible. This will provide a stable platform from which we can leap out of our own skin.
Jim Drescher is the caretaker of Windhorse Farm in Western Nova Scotia and manager of the forestry and wood products manufacturing businesses there. He teaches at The Maritime Ecoforestry School, also at Windhorse Farm.
© 2000 Ecoforestry Institute
Originally published in Ecoforestry 15(1):14-21