In an artcile in the Wall Street Journal, by Tom Wright and Jim Carlton, the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) "acknowledged that some companies using its label are destroying pristine forests…"

Rainforest Relief has stated as much for some time. Our policy has diverged from many other organizations regarding support of the FSC.

Rainforest Relief does not support the imports or use of wood originating from old growth tropical forests. This includes most of the tropical wood products imported into the US.

Rainforest Relief, along with Friends of the Rainforest have been fighting against the proposed use of FSC-certified ipê in Ocean City, NJ for renovations to the town's coastal boardwalk. Scientists have found that even so-called "low impact" logging in old growth tropical forests is damaging to biodiversity and other forest functions.

Groups like FSC-Watch were founded to highlight problems within FSC and help move FSC to clean up its system.

There's a lot to clean up. Some of the shortcomings are highligthed in an op-ed (below) written by Tim Keating, Rainforest Relief's director.

To read the Wall Street Journal article, click here.


Problems Emerging with FSC and Certification


As one of the folks campaigning in Ocean City and elsewhere against the use of old growth rainforest wood, I concur with Steve that the big groups have really dropped the ball.

There are so many problems with the idea of certification and its implementation that it's hard to know where to start.

Rainforest Relief began fighting the use of tropical hardwoods in the US in 1990, just a few months after our founding in the year before. Certification of logging had just begun, with Rainforest Alliance weighing in in a big way (and remaining to this day the largest FSC-accredited forest certifier). A co-founder of Rainforest Alliance, Ivan Usach, once stated that he thought certifying the state-run teak plantations in Java, Indonesia as the first SmartWood certification, was a mistake.

The mistakes have continued.

One of the major flaws of certification is that the certfiers ignore the science. The science is in: commercial logging in old growth rainforests cannot be done sustainably, period. One scientist, heading the longest study ever done of so-called 'certified' logging in an old growth rainforest in Uganda found that not only is low-impact logging destroying biodiversity but it is 'permanently' damaging the forest ecosystem. He has suggested that logging *can* occur, but must mimic natural conditions — that is, the extraction of one or two trees per hectare… per century! And removed by hand! Obviously, there aren't too many companies out there that would give that a try.

These forests simply cannot be logged if we are to retain what's left of the world's critical biodiversity and other critical forest functions.

Another major flaw in the forest has been a shift away from reduced quality standards and promotion of lesser-known species. In the beginning, certifiers and those promoting it were pushing buyers to support a range of lesser-known (but sometimes more common) timber species. This allowed certified loggers to make the same money from logging fewer acres.

Similarly, marketers of certified were working to convince buyers to stop ordering FAS, four-side-clear and other standards that were, in effect, forcing high-grading and massive waste at the mills. These important actions have all but ceased as certification has gone 'mainstream' and allowed the market demand for high-value species to dictate who gets certified and what they log. Certifiers have even been shown to look the other way when certified loggers diverge from management plans or buy from outside their concessions to meet orders for ipê or other high-demand species.

Secondly, there has been a huge failure on the part of the certifiers to enforce the system in the market — also in more ways than one. Rainforest Relief has on more than one occasion reported to the FSC the use of language by a reseller that touts their Chain of Custody (CoC) certification in such a way as to confuse potential customers that *all* their wood is certified. We even reported on one COC certified company that lied about getting certified and then, when they couldn't, worked to get the buyer to *not* use certified wood. Yet FSC has never followed up on this, instead asking us to do their job for them (RR is completely volunteer-run and we certainly don't have the resources to research the failure of certified entities to be honest about their participation in certification).


Another failure in the marketplace is the continuing translation and confusion of what is sustainable. Hundreds of articles have been printed that call certified logging "sustainable". Yet the certifiers do not certify "sustainable" logging. They certify operations that they claim are "well managed". "Well managed" is a term applied to an arbitrary definition (albeit peer-reviewed), the definition being decided upon by any number of mechanisms. A group of people can get together and lay out an agreed-upon (by them) definition of "well managed".

"Sustainable" is not arbitrarily defined but is, in fact, observed (often not accurately). Either an activity is sustainable or it isn't, typically defined by whether there is a large-scale impact that can be observed to persist over a long period of time. In other words, if the forest is different two hundred years after a given activity, on can pretty much guess that that activity wasn't sustainable.

That's why Richard Donovan, director of SmartWood, has stated to me on a number of occasions that they do not certify "sustainable" logging because they don't know what that is.

Yet the certifiers allow the marketers, resellers and media to continue to call certified wood "sustainable". And, in a major breakdown of the system, even someone at Rainforest Alliance, in a letter to Ocean City, called the resulting wood "sustainable".

This is a massive failure on the part of the certifiers that has had tragic results. But since the certifiers and marketers are *never* out there losing campaigns promoting alternatives over old-growth wood, they continue to skid along blithely ignoring the reality.

Certifiers and the FSC should be out there educating the public and the media so that no one confuses this and thus makes the leap that certification is the be-all-and-end-all of forest conservation. After all, if logging is sustainable, then why bother leaving any forests unlogged?

This leads one to the other major flaw in certification. Begun around 1988 as a means to 'exempt' small-scale (often indigenous but most certainly local) operators from the global boycott of tropical hardwoods, within a few years, certification had become something else entirely.

While forest activist groups (like RAN) were at first reluctant to even consider certification (after all, it was saying that logging was okay, at least in some cases), these groups have not only shifted to embrace it, but have *given up* actions focused on other ways of conserving forests — and indeed, nearly given up on even promoting other alternative materials.

When's the last time you heard RAN or Forest Ethics (FE) or Greenpeace campaign on non-wood alternatives? There was a time not too long ago, when RAN had laid out a 10-year plan to reduce the consumption of wood and wood-based products by 75%. I was at that organizing conference. But no one mentions pure avoidance anymore. Hardly anyone even *talks about* non-wood alternatives and no one (except Rainforest Relief) actually campaigns in support of them.

To give credit to FE, at least their paper campaigns have included a call to increase the use of recycled content (possibly because the organizing meetings for the first major paper campaign (Staples) were attended by Rainforest Relief and other, smaller organizations that were still considering reduction as an option on which to campaign).

Given the conversion or destruction of more than half of the world's old growth forests and given the intrusion and disturbance of 80% of the world's so-called "frontier" forests (those large enough and in-tact enough to support their entire range of ecological functioning) and given the massive overuse of wood as a 'resource', and given the massive marketing of disposables and wasteful use of paper and wood, the use of wood and wood-based products should now be (and for some time, have been) considered at the lower end of a hierarchy of options.

First option: pure avoidance. "Do I need to make that structure at all? Do I need to buy that product?" "No" can often be the answer and should be promoted as such by organizations. But this is considered "too hard" and certainly there are no foundations out there supporting it. After all, not-buying would destroy the economy, wouldn't it? Groups have fallen right in line with the wishes of multinationals and governments and fallen prey to what the foundations will and won't fund. Instead, organizations with resources should be coming up with plans that will lead to true conservation and inspiring foundations to come along for the ride.

Second option: used, reclaimed, salvaged. "Does this thing exist already? Can I make due with that which has already been converted to a product?" Are there wood or wood-like materials being wasted? Rainforest Relief is the only group of which I know who is promoting the use of coconut palm hardwood, a material salvaged from coconut plantations that is otherwise burned or left to rot on the ground. The UN estimates that there are 80 billion board feet of coconut timber available for harvest annually in the coconut plantations in the South Pacific. That's 80 *billion* board feet!

Third option: recycled. When's the last time you heard about an environmental group talking about the recycling of wood into usable wood products? Yet the technology is certainly out there to do it. We have dropped the ball for more convenient (and conveniently fundable) certified logging.

Fourth option: non-wood. I have come to consider recycled plastic lumber (RPL) as the most environmentally preferable newly-manufactured material on Earth. The use of true RPL (as opposed to plastic-wood composite lumber — something we rarely recommend) can not only sequester carbon but can offset new logging and logging in plantations from 5 – 20 times over, depending on what's being avoided. If it's substituting for pressure-treated plantation pine, it can not only offset logging and the inherent energy use converting pine trees to lumber up to 20 times in the life of the plastic, but also offset the production and use of a gallon of hazardous substances used to make the pine last longer. If it's a substitute for tropical hardwoods, it can offset logging in old growth rainforests 5 times over, thus avoiding the construction of new roads and skid trails into pristine forests, and the ensuing total deforestation that results.

Yet as far as I know, Rainforest Relief is the only national organization promoting and campaigning on the use of RPL. Over and over, we continue to see the campaign 'ask' by the big groups be the use of certified wood. For Rainforest Relief, this has sometimes been a compromise, but has not been the initial demand since 1991 (and since we saw the shift by the certifiers to certify old growth rainforest logging). The only time we consider FSC wood a victory is when it's clearly not coming from old growth forests.

Even though FE called on Staples and Victoria's Secret to use recycled, they eventually negotiated the use of paper from FSC certified logging. There's absolutely no reason paper should be made straight from trees. The fact that this continues is a clear failure on the part of the environmental movement. We are in a constant state of retreat when what's needed is a massive charge forward. The US generates enough agricultural residue each year to supply our entire paper industry with 'virgin' fiber. Yet groups have retreated from any talk about the use of "ag-res" (which had been initially spurred by Rainforest Relief and a few others).

I consider the lack of fortitude among the major ENGOs in the US to be shameful. Combined, their multi-million-dollar/year budgets could create a true shift in materials use (and non-use) in the US. Yet, they have taken the easy road, promoting quick fixes as if they are long-term solutions; market band-aids as if they are revolutions.

It is clear that across the board our society needs to reduce the materials we use. What we *do* use should be durable, recycled, salvaged, reclaimed, reused, and/or biodegradable. Wood should be seen as a last choice. When we do use it, it should be local if possible, never disposable, and obviously only from well-managed operations.

Certified wood comprises less than 1% of US wood imports. Certification was never meant to be the grand solution to forest conservation. It should never be seen as the be-all-and-end all of such. Certification is a convenience at best. It should allow for a buyer to be able to trust that a wood or wood-based product has come from a well-managed operation, without having to either go to the forest himself or herself or hire someone directly to do so.

Not only has certification way overshot this initial purpose, but given that certifications are being made in old growth forests (in contravention to the science), the lack of consultation with indigenous and local people and the lack of strict adherence to FSC's own P&Cs, unfortunately, certifiers can no longer be trusted to provide even the basic service for which they were founded.

Tim Keating, director
Rainforest Relief