Certification Can we learn from CaliforniaP

By DonnZea

I'TOLLOWING decades of a

I-' Massachusetts policy not to manage its forests, a group of Harvard University forestry experts is encouraging people there to embrace sustainable forestry practices.

Their goal: ensure that forests in Massachusetts remain for future generations. rather than be converted for some other use.

Ironically, the forest-management techniques they advocate are already used here in California, although they are neither widely understood nor embraced. Too often, sustainable forest management is fought by so-called environmental activists and hindered by contradictory regulations.

The result for California: more land converted to other uses, lost jobs, an increasing dependence on imported wood and an unprecedented forest health crisis as we enter this year's fire season.

Having opened minds in Massachusetts, perhaps the lesson of Harvard's forestry experts can benefit California as well. In a new report, the Harvard team recommends harvesting to "supply a steady stream of quality wood products while environmental values are maintained or enhanced."

Massachusetts today imports 987o of the wood used there. The report notes the consequence of not harvesting is the harm it does to others.

"Failing to harvest the forests effectively, we place a disproportionate burden on other places in the world, from British Columbia to Brazil, and from Chile and Malaysia to Siberia," the report states. "This approach also forfeits the economic benefits, so vital to rural towns, which come from producing value-added wood products here at home."

To paraphrase the Harvard professors, it is not only good to harvest trees from naturally forested areas; it is environmentally and economically beneficial to do so locally. In other words, think globally, act locally.

In California, less than a third of the annual new growth in all forests here is harvested, according to a report recently released by the California Forest Products Commission, based on 2004 harvesting statistics compiled by the California Board of Equalization. The report also noted that Californians consumed about five times the amount of wood harvested here.

If California had poor conditions to grow and replant trees, this disparity might be understandable and environmentally sound. But our growing conditions are ideal, our harvesting equipment high-tech and our science worldrenowned. What the Harvard experts and California Forest Products Commission point out is that it is possible to manage trees as a renewable resource. maintaining forests as places of abundant biological diversity while meeting much more of the wood consumption demands in perpetuity.

For Massachusetts, this new approach will take considerable effort-including fostering the rebirth of a forest-products industry that went out ofbusiness decades ago amid antiharvesting sentiment.

In California, we're struggling to keep our forest-products industry alive. We have foresters well-trained and practiced in replanting and caring for dynamic forests. We have stateof-the-art mills to process wood, forestry companies dedicated to sustaining our forests for future generations and the highest environmental standards in the world.

Unfortunately, we also have forestry politics and some self-proclaimed environmental activists dedicated to obstructionism. We can't afford to let politics and obstruction win while we lose our forests. Today, unmanaged forests are overgrown and at severe risk of catastrophic fire.

A recent California Department of Forestry & Fire Protection report called land conversion one of the major challenges facing the state, estimating that over the next 40 years l0%o of current forest and rangeland will be affected by development.

Not coincidentally, recent studies by researchers from Cal Poly at San Luis Obispo have found that duplicative regulations increase costs and drive family-owned forestry companies out of state and out of business. The regulations meant to protect the environment are instead leading to conversion of forests to other uses.

A recent conference organized by UC Berkeley and the Pacific Forest Trust examined this land conversion consequence, bringing together forestry company representatives, environmental groups, academics and govemment officials to explore how to keep forests productive and bountiful for future generations.

For Californians, losing forestland forever and increasing our reliance on imported wood from places where there may be linle or no environmental protections should be shocking. It should spark a movement to care actively for the natural resources with which we have been entrusted, not complacency that lawsuits have essentially shut our forests down.

What California needs today, like Massachusetts, is public and government support to promote responsible forestry and an awakening to the consequences of policies that discourage sustainable forestry-consequences that hurt our forests, our economy and our global environment.

We can lessen the impact of our consumption on the global environment by taking care of forests-and making good use of them-at home.