6. Towards a Sustainable World

2007

2007 November. The Story of Stuff: a 20 minute video about our production and consumption patterns showing the connections between a number of environmental and social issues, and the idea of systems on planet Earth.

Fall 2007, Forest Magazine. Blight on the Land. By James Johnston. Excerpt:
It's May, and signs of spring are everywhere along Salmon Creek in northwest Pennsylvania's Allegheny National Forest. The knobby buds of hardwoods are unfolding into brilliant, lime-green leaves. ...
Cherry blossoms float lazily downstream in shallow pools of crystal-clear water.
It'd be an idyllic scene, except for the dark, heavy smell of oil.
And the squat, angular oil rigs resting on freshly cleared pads every 500 feet for miles.
Oil and gas booms are nothing new to the area-they're older than the national forest itself. Years ago, the primeval eastern hemlock and American beech forest was private land, logged off by the end of the nineteenth century, leaving barren hills and muddy streams as far as the eye could see. In 1911, Congress passed the Weeks Act, which authorized the federal government to purchase denuded forestland in the eastern states. The Allegheny National Forest was established in 1923. The locals mockingly called it the "Allegheny Brush Patch"; no one thought it would ever recover.
But a second-growth forest of sun-loving species like black cherry, red maple, black birch and sugar maple did grow back. By the 1950s the U.S. Forest Service was planning the first black cherry clear-cuts. By the early 1990s black cherry, ideal for furniture and veneer, was selling for astronomical prices: close to $5,000 for a thousand board feet of the rich, reddish-brown wood. Black cherry harvest eventually declined in the late '90s in the face of falling prices and environmental litigation-just in time for the current oil and gas boom.
TO UNDERSTAND HOW SALMON Creek could have been overrun by an oil field, it helps to know the unusual history of the Allegheny. When Congress purchased the land eighty years ago, it only purchased the surface. The mineral estate underlying the forest, the enormous caverns of black gold-an uncommon "sweet" crude ideal for refinement into valuable lubricants and wax products-remained the property of oil companies who can, by law, demand and receive "reasonable access" to their underground property...
OIL AND GAS DEVELOPMENT ON THE Allegheny is so rampant that even snowmobilers-long the bane of respectable environmentalists-are starting to [complain] ...
... awake to the roar of truck traffic and the angry whine of pump jacks. Roads, gravel pits and well pads have replaced quiet woods ....

2006

November 14 2006. Studies Find Danger to Forests in Thinning Without Burning. By JIM ROBBINS, NY Times. Excerpt: MISSOULA, Mont. - Thinning forests without also burning accumulated brush and deadwood may increase forest fire damage rather than reduce it, researchers at the Forest Service reported in two recent studies. The findings cast doubt on how effective some of the thinning done under President Bush's Healthy Forests Initiative will be at preventing fires if the forests are not also burned. The studies show that in forests that have been thinned but not treated with prescribed burning, tree mortality is much greater than in forests that have had thinning and burning and those that have been left alone. Another study, on Blacks Mountain Experimental Forest in Northern California, had similar findings. The studies, combined with other recent research showing that climate change is reducing snowpack and making the fire season longer and more intense, have prompted researchers to urge the Forest Service to use prescribed fire more. "We need fire on the ground," said Dr. Ronald H. Wakimoto, a professor of forestry at the University of Montana who studies fire. "The only thing that stops fires is previous fire or prescribed fire."...

18 April 2006. Forest on the Threshold. By Holli Riebeek for NASA Earth Observatory. Excerpt: ...Scott Goetz ... spent at least a decade studying and exploring the boreal forests of North America. ... Goetz was using satellite data to study how the spruce-rich forests of northern Canada and Alaska recover after large fires. The burned forest was re-growing as he expected, but the unburned forest was behaving strangely. Since the 1990s, scientists have known that increasing global temperatures have lengthened the growing season in the Arctic. With carbon dioxide, one of the key ingredients in photosynthesis, also on the rise, the forest should have been thriving. But it wasn't. The forest was getting browner, not greener. ... the same theories that predicted that global warming would increase forest growth in the Arctic ... also predicted that the forests would eventually reach the limits of the water supply and go into decline. "We knew something like this would happen," [Rama] Nemani says. "We didn't expect that it was going to happen so quickly." What is happening to the forests of northern Alaska, Canada, Europe, and Siberia? Why have they slowed their growth when everyone thought they should be expanding for several more decades? ... Is it a sign that global warming is changing Northern forests more quickly than anyone thought possible?...

7 February 2006. Canada to Shield 5 Million Forest Acres. By CLIFFORD KRAUSS, NY Times. Excerpt: HARTLEY BAY, British Columbia, Feb. 4 - In this sodden land of glacier-cut fjords and giant moss-draped cedars, a myth is told by the Gitga'at people to explain the presence of black bears with a rare recessive gene that makes them white as snow. ...On Tuesday, an improbable assemblage of officials from the provincial government, coastal Native Canadian nations, logging companies and environmental groups will announce an agreement that they say will accomplish that mission in the home of the spirit bear, an area that is also the world's largest remaining intact temperate coastal rain forest. A wilderness of close to five million acres, almost the size of New Jersey, in what is commonly called the Great Bear Rain Forest or the Amazon of the North will be kept off limits to loggers in an agreement that the disparate parties describe as a crossroads in their relations. The agreement comes after more than a decade of talks, international boycott campaigns against Great Bear wood products and sit-ins in the forests by Native Canadians and environmentalists, who chained themselves to logging equipment...."It's like a revolution," said Merran Smith, director of the British Columbia Coastal Program of Forest Ethics, an environmental group. "It's a new way of thinking about how you do forestry. It's about approaching business with a conservation motive up front, instead of an industrial approach to the forest." ...By 1999, when the Home Depot announced it would phase out sales of wood from the Great Bear and other endangered old forests, some lumber companies were shifting their approach, agreeing to work with the environmentalists. MacMillan Bloedel, before it was acquired by Weyerhaeuser, broke ranks with the industry and promised in 1998 to phase out clear-cutting on the British Columbia coast. Other companies gradually fell into line. "The customer doesn't want products with protesters chained to it," said Patrick Armstrong, a consultant who served as a negotiator for the lumber companies...

2005

15 November 2005. China Is Bright Spot in Dark Report on the World's Diminishing Forests. By ANDREW C. REVKIN, NY Times. Widespread tree planting in China has slowed the rate at which the earth's forested area is dwindling, but the clearing of tropical forests, much of it in areas never previously cut, continues to grow, according to a new United Nations report... The slowing rate of forest loss is encouraging, some forest experts say, but biologists contend that most acreage gained by plantation forestry contains a fraction of the plant and animal diversity destroyed with virgin forests...The report said that worldwide just over 50,000 square miles of forest - an area a bit smaller than New York State - had been cleared or logged annually since 2000. Nearly half of that annual loss affected tracts with no evidence of previous significant human use, the report said.

1 November 2005. Malawi Is Burning, and Deforestation Erodes Economy. By Michael Wines. Malosa, Malawi. Excerpt: Lovely and lissome, the masuku tree rises maybe 35 feet at maturity, its wood the hue of a rare steak, its branches dotted with sweet golfball-size fruits that ferment into a tasty wine...Once heavily forested, Malawi is only about 20 percent covered by tree canopies, and the pace of deforestation is faster than almost anywhere else. Working just after sunrise atop a small mountain not far from here, Injes Juma and his nine friends needed less than five minutes to sever a masuku at its base and send it crashing to the ground. Another five minutes of furious hacking with axes and machetes reduced the tree to a stack of five-foot logs, ready to be carried down the steep grade to the highway below...Because of them, experts say, Malawi loses nearly 200 square miles of its forests annually, a deforestation rate of 2.8 percent that the Southern Africa Development Community says is one of the highest in sub-Saharan Africa.

Spring 2005. Europe's Black Triangle Turns Green. by Bruce Stutz. NRDC: OnEarth. Who says environmentalism is nothing but bad news? ... The trees survive on the western edge of the notorious Black Triangle, the heavily industrialized region where Poland, Germany, and the Czech Republic meet. During the Communist era, this 12,000 square-mile area was one of the most polluted industrial landscapes on the face of the globe. ... Barrett Rock, a professor of natural resources at the University of New Hampshire, ... briefs the researchers on their procedures and they set to work, some at branches, some at trunks, some at roots, like a Lilliputian surgical team operating on a giant. Their patient, however, is not one tree or a single group of trees but the forest itself. They want to know what effects the region's pollution has had on it. And then, they hope, if their measurements and instruments are sensitive enough, their analyses can be used to chart the pathology of this or any other forest.... I watch Rock drill into one of the tree trunks with a hollow bit. He removes a pencil-thick core more than a foot long and holds it up to show me the growth rings. "You see how they get wider?" he asks. "I can read the changes in government in the record of the tree rings."

2004

Spring 2004. Protecting the Heartwood, By Colin Woodard. Nature Conservancy Magazine, page 42. In the forests of northern Maine, The Nature Conservancy is undertaking a grand experiment aimed at preserving forests for future generations-and for those whose livelihoods depend on them now. See related article on Katahdin Forest, Maine

29 February 2004. In Alaska, Help for Logging Comes Late. By FELICITY BARRINGER. Economists doubt that companies turning to the recently opened old-growth trees in the Tongass National Forest will find buyers who will pay enough to keep local loggers going. ... Global timber markets have undergone fundamental shifts. There is a worldwide timber glut. Logging costs in this region are historically much higher than in other parts of the world, making profits elusive at best.

8 February 2004. NY Times. Critics Say Forest Service Battles Too Many Fires. By JIM ROBBINS. Critics of the service say fire is as important as rain in maintaining the health of forests, and that the agency should allow many more fires to burn in unpopulated areas.

Winter 2004. The Tennessee Tree Massacre. By Alex Shoumatoff for OnEarth (NRDC). Excerpt: The paper industry is destroying one of America's last great stands of native forest to bring you fresh shopping bags and toilet paper. If there were an international tribunal that prosecuted crimes against the planet, like the one in The Hague that deals with crimes against humanity, what is happening on the Cumberland Plateau in eastern Tennessee would undoubtedly be indictable. The crime -- one of many clandestine ecocides American corporations are committing around the world -- has taken place over three decades. About 200,000 acres on this tableland have already been clear-cut by the paper industry, and the cutting continues. Where once grew some of the most biologically rich hardwood forest in North America's Temperate Zone (which extends from the Gulf of Mexico to southern Canada), there are now row after row of fast-growing loblolly pine trees genetically engineered to yield the most pulp in the shortest time. But the paper industry's insatiable appetite for timber has met with unexpected competition from an equally voracious insect. In the last four years, an estimated 50 to 70 percent of the pines planted on the plateau have been devoured by the southern pine beetle. Download the full article in PDF format (1.25 MB) to continue reading.

2003

Winter 2003-2004. Inner Voice (FSEEE newsletter). Lives on the Line. Too many firefighters die each year in a fruitless and self-defeating war against fire. Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics has filed the first-ever lawsuit challenging U.S. Forest Service firefighting. It is time for the Forest Service to take a deep breath and assess how fire is to be managed in our national forests.

Action for Nature -- Young Eco-Hero Award -- for 8 -16 year olds. The deadline for applications for the Young Eco-Hero Award for 2004 is Feb.29. Description of the award, application, and additional information about Action for Nature (a non-profit organization in San Francisco) is at: http://www.actionfornature.org. Sally Douglas Arce -- Action for Nature

Summer 2003. Forest Magazine. "The Shelton District: How a Community-Based Forestry Agreement Led to Ecological Ruin". (How a supposedly sustainable logging program cut itself out of trees in a few decades.) By Tim McNulty. Go to http://www.fseee.org/. Choose "Forest Magazine" (left navigation list). Choose "Current issue" or "Back Issues". In the same issue are: "Point of View: Simply a Job?"; "Inner Voice: Skeleton Crew to Manage Forests".

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