Demand Reduction: Cutting Waste Before Cutting Trees
It is neither necessary nor possible for consumption of wood products to increase geometrically into the future. Forests have limits. The question, therefore, arises as to when to start to sustainably live within those limits—now, when there are more options for management (including “passive management” of uncut reserves)—or later when there are fewer such options.
Wood product extraction, processing, manufacture, transport, use, and disposal can have serious impacts to forest integrity and the environment in general. A study in Oregon found the timber industry to be the largest single source of net carbon emissions in the state. These impacts were not just from the operation of heavy equipment, but also from the release of carbon from slash and soil organic matter after intensive clearcuts. These forest net carbon emissions can persist for more than fifteen years.
Millions of acres of forest in Maine have been simplified, converted, or fragmented by logging. The acreage of seedlings and saplings has increased, but late-successional stands—which were once the forest context for Maine—have declined. Older, bigger trees have been truncated.
Over 40 percent of some landfills consist of paper.
The Chinese sage, Confucius, is reputed to have said: “Unless we change our direction, we will wind up where we are headed.”
Throw-away forest products lead to throw-away forest ecosystems and throw-away workers and communities. Do we really need to bequeath damaged forest ecosystems to our children and grandchildren because we give a higher priority to single-use wrapping paper or advertising circulars than to living forests?
Einstein is reputed to have said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” If those solving the problems have the same economic priorities as those who created the problems, feedback will become distorted, and the “solutions” might intensify the problems.
In the last few years, we have heard the argument that the way to save the planet is to get more markets for wood products and use more wood. Wood, by this thinking, is “renewable,” so, by magic, anything made from wood is renewable, including wooden skyscrapers. But cutting more than is grown is not sustainable. Whole-tree clearcuts followed by short-rotation monocultures are not sustainable. Never-ending growth in a world with limits is not sustainable.
Maine does not have any restrictions on cutting more than growth, short rotations, understocking, or “high grading” (cutting the best and leaving the rest). I suppose the idea here is to trust that forest landowners will not engage in these practices even if they are legal and profitable (in the short term).
As Kenneth Boulding wrote: “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”
Windhover, Oil on canvas, © by Susan D. Szwed
Years ago I interviewed low-impact logger Bill Dauphinee, when he was in his late 80s. He told me, “Contentment is one of the most valuable things a man can have. Some people think they can get it by buying more. I get it by wanting less."
Investing in efficiency and finding ways to use fewer raw materials need not lead to deprivation. It can sometimes lead to more comfort at less cost.
The United States, with less than five percent of the world population, uses around 30 percent of all the world’s paper products. Switzerland, Japan, Finland, and Sweden all have a higher GDP per capita than the US, but they have lower per capita paper consumption rates. The fact that Americans use more paper does not mean they are proportionately happier than those who use less paper.
A couple of local boards that I’ve been on made investments in their buildings. In both cases, we had a contractor spray cellulose insulation in the attics. In both cases, the savings from reducing heating costs paid off in less than five years. That is more than a 14% return on investment.
Demand reduction is a strategy to cut waste before cutting trees. It establishes a set of priorities and opens up new strategies. A coalition of groups in 1995 in the Pacific Northwest wrote a report that demonstrated that if the United States adopted the goal of reducing cutting trees for paper and lumber, it could reduce the demand for raw timber by 75 percent in just ten years.
It helps to do the accounting for what this generation passes on to the next generation. It acknowledges that some forms of wealth are not best measured in dollars but instead are a form of biological wealth—a part of our life support system.
As Henry David Thoreau said: “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”
Mitch Lansky is author of Beyond the Beauty Strip: Saving What's Left of our Forests (1992) and editor of Low Impact Forestry: Forestry as if the Future Mattered (2002). He co-founded the Maine Low Impact Forestry Project in 1994.