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Unlike fossil fuels, trees - one of nature’s most abundant natural resources – can be used in a sustainable way to tie up carbon, to prevent soil loss and flooding and to support agro-forestry to maintain agrarian communities. What is more, trees and their derivate forest products, can be used to build cities, instead of wasteful and limited concrete, steel and plastics. In fact, the use of renewable timber as a building material leaves the lightest environmental footprint on the planet and, although this message is slowly beginning to creep into the psyche of modern man, there is much work to be done. Sure enough, we are all exposed to the harsh imagery of clear-cutting in rainforests and illegal logging. As a result, somewhere deep in the minds of everyday people, there is a reluctance to accept timber as a renewable and sustainable resource. However, this is simply not true and the problems of over-felling and illegal harvesting can be overcome and, even, reversed in a relatively short space of time. Can the same be said for fossil fuels? In fact, despite what we might think we know about forestry and the over-use of timber from natural forests, Greenpeace data suggests that only 1.01% of all tropical ‘forestry’ is used for industrial purposes, including construction and furniture. Of this figure only about 18% (or less than 0.2% of all tropical forest depletion) enters international trade. The major causes of deforestation are identified as poverty, population pressure, and shifting agriculture. It is, therefore, healthy markets for wood products that will actually help prevent deforestation, encouraging those countries to follow carefully monitored forest management. Suddenly it’s relatively simple economics: a lack of interest in wood products may only serve to decrease the value of the land; thus endangering the future of those very same forests that could play such an important role in the prevention of the world’s impending implosion.
Recognition of the importance of trees and their derivate products is key; whether they are medicines, food, building materials or, simply, wood for furniture, flooring, joinery and construction. A shift away from arable farming to agri-forestry would enable us to exploit one of the world’s greatest natural resources and to produce wood and all the other important forest products, whilst, at the same time, putting much needed oxygen into the atmosphere and providing livelihoods for poor communities. We need to stretch our imaginations and Think wood! where we usually use steel, brick, concrete and plastics. We need to educate ourselves and place less emphasis on the negative implications of clear felling and illegal logging, while stressing the importance of developing sustainable forestry. - - Roderick Wiles, 2007 |
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