James Bell Friends of the Earth ? Extended essay. In this essay I am going to outline the plight of the rainforest in relation to the massive deforestation which Is occurring. It is my intention to bring to your attention some facts about what is going on. All my sources are quoted at the end of the essay. The first fact that should be considered, is that the rate with which the trees in the rainforest are felled. The world economy consumed 3.4 billion cubic meters of wood in 1991, 2.5 times as much wood as was used in 1950. Half of the world's wood is burned as fuel mostly in the developing world, while the other half is used for materials mostly in the industrial countries. Industrial extraction of wood is a principal cause of global deforestation. Each year more tropical, temperate and boreal forests are despoiled to meet our growing demand. The biggest culprit is USA , which itself consumes the lion's share of the world's industrial wood, accounting for 17 percent. Overall the wood consumption in the USAis three times higher than that in much less developed countries and twice that of other industrialized nations, such as England. USAover consumption of wood is causing problems at each step of its cycle, from the destroying forests and watersheds, to fouling the air and clogging landfills. The pace of industrial logging is accelerating, despite its devastating and well documented effects on wildlife, indigenous peoples, and the global environment. It would appear that unless the USA is challenged, wood consumption will increase by an additional 46 percent by the year 2040. This situation leaves us no option in my view, wood consumption must be reduced, but what steps can be taken to achieve this end? Decisions to allow logging in intact forests often do not take into account that intact forests support nearly 500 million forest peoples and countless millions of plant and animal species. Intact forests offer a mass of non-timber resources (game, medicines, fruits, gums, nuts, resins, fiber, firewood) whose values are not reflected on bankers' balance sheets, yet the potential uses of some of these other resources (especially Medical developments) are of sufficient merit to considered. Moreover, these ecosystems provide such important services or "public goods" as maintaining fisheries and watersheds, moderating the global climate, filtering water supplies, and storing the planet's genetic diversity, which medical researchers have scarcely begun to study. Given their immense value, it is should be, that forests are far too precious to be logged for wood. We must and will have to consider other choices/alternatives. Today, many of the world's leading ecologists and thinkers are calling for an immediate halt to industrial logging in all primary forests, and an aggressive campaign to reduce wood consumption by 75 percent over ten years. Until now, policy makers and environmentalists have focused primarily on issues of sustainable forestry and restricting access. Both approaches have proved insufficient in safeguarding forests. So is sustainable forestry even possible or is it merely a term used to make people think something is being done about this situation? The idea of sustainable forestry, is how to sustain maximum levels of timber extraction without causing irreversible damage to the forest ecosystem. Some ideas could be restricting access is the old fashioned approach of the forest protection movement, particularly on public lands. Although this approach has spared some high profile forests, the voracious appetite for wood ends up merely shifting timber extraction to other equally fragile forest regions. For example, when logging in Pacific Northwest forests was severely curtailed to protect critical habitat for old growth dependent species, corporations offset cutbacks in this region by increasing logging in the Northern Rockies and internationally, in Siberia, Canada, and Chile. Logging in these regions threatens equally precious wildlife habitat and affects the earth's climate moderation functions. However, efforts to protect forests through sustainable forestry and restricted access will finally produce minimal overall success unless they are combined with efforts to decrease dramatically the total amount of wood cut from forests. The timber industry is enormous, it is very efficient at securing and extracting an ever increasing amount of timber and producing and marketing a growing number of short-lived wood products. Giant “forest products” companies move easily across political boundaries to the most lucrative forests. In many countries, it seems that governments simply do not have the means, nor the power, to police corporations in remote forest regions. This lack of oversight is why sustainable forestry is not a workable solution for improving industrial logging practices. Furthermore, the industry wields a tremendous amount of power because it is vertically integrated (the film showed a timber company may control all aspects of the production cycle such as rights to timber resources, ownership of systems of extraction, product manufacturing, and sales). The timber industry claims that wood is a renewable resource and that the industry is "managing" the forests. But wherever the industry operates it degrades biodiversity and often cultural diversity. Therefore to halt deforestation caused by logging, an ambitious and comprehensive transition plan is necessary to get corporations out of the natural forests and into the viable alternatives. The campaign to reduce USAdemand for wood, while supporting efforts to restrict industrial access to forests and promote sound eco- forestry, moves towards the source of the problem and questions the nature of demand placed on the forest. This campaign is based on the premise that nearly every use to which wood is put in modern society can either be eliminated entirely or substantially reduced through one or more of the following approaches: 1)increased materials efficiency in product design and production; 2)reduced per capita consumption; and 3)use of alternative materials including annual fiber crops and recovered wood and agricultural wastes. There are two major paths that wood products follow when they leave the forest. One passes through sawmills, plywood mills, veneer, or other wood panel mills, and then into the network of building construction, shipping, manufacturing, and furniture industries. The other path passes through pulp mills into the larger system of paper, paperboard, and fiberboard production. Together, the two paths account for more than 80 percent of industrial wood use in industrial countries. (the other 20 percent includes fuelwood, wood chips and raw logs for exports,). About 50 percent of wood harvests end up flowing into the network of sawmills and plywood mills, etc., while about 30 percent flow towards pulp mills (note: closer to 50 percent of wood harvests end up in paper production, 30 percent directly and the rest in the form of mill waste from inefficient lumber mills). Along these paths lie a number of opportunities to increase efficiency and thereby reduce wood consumption. Some of these opportunities are summarized below. Firstly and obviously one should tackle the problem from the smallest change, and moving towards the largest. So to start, there are significant efficiency gains to be made by improving milling technologies that turn logs into usable products. lumber mills, especially in the USA, are less than 50 percent efficient. This means that for every two trees cut down, only one gets turned into lumber. Although the total production cycle may be efficient (due to recovery and use of residual waste for pulp and fuel), a good deal of precious solid wood is underutilized or lost as it is processed into chips and sawdust. For example, paper produced in British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest is primarily made using pulp from old growth forests. Due to rising lumber prices, industry is now making slow progress in improving the efficiency of its mills. Accelerating the pace of these improvements in USAmills to match Japan's level of efficiency (the world's highest rate at 65-70 percent), could yield huge benefits, mainly in the Pacific Northwest and Rockies regions, where the mills are the least efficient. This measure combined with mandated forest protection, could lead to efficiency gains that translate to over 100,000 acres of old growth forests saved by the year 2000. This is a big first step. The construction industry is by far the largest wood consumer, accounting for 39 percent of all wood used in the industrial countries. (72 percent of all lumber, 92 percent of structural panels, and 72 percent of non- structural panels are for building construction). Old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia contribute a greater share of softwoods for USA construction use than any other forests. As a direct result, these old growth forests are most affected by trends in the construction industry. Trends in the housing industry show that ever-larger homes are being built. It's not just the average size that's increasing, but the percentage of homeowners demanding larger than average luxury homes is growing as well. Since nearly 90 percent of all housing in the USAis constructed of wood and the average new home in the USAuses 1600 cubic feet of wood products, policies are needed to encourage this industry to: 1)adopt wood-efficient building designs; 2)utilize recycled or non-wood building materials; 3)employ earth architecture; 4)reduce and salvage construction waste; and 5)Simply build smaller houses (this is slightly hopeful) . An influx of new building materials made from non-wood or recycled fibers can replace most plywood and woodpanels. Such products as Gridcore and Unicor are sound alternatives and can be constructed using recovered paper waste, plant fibers (agricultural waste), inferior lumber, or mill waste. These fibers can be used to manufacture many different types of products such as plywood, fiber-boards, particle boards; and other engineered lumber products such as glue-laminated beam or laminated strand lumber. Engineered lumber has superior strength and can replace wood beams made from rare old growth trees. Their drawback is that their production relies primarily upon toxic glues, although non-toxic and less toxic alternatives are hopefully being developed and utilized. Another big user which needs refining is that is commercial office work. The average office worker uses an estimated to use five sheets of paper every hour. One source estimated the energy use of this to be equivalent to running a 100 watt lightbulb for one hour. Specific campaigns are needed to reduce overall paper use as well as to promote ecologically sound procurement policies. These efforts should target everyone, from corner shops to government agencies and office workers. Economic incentives are a main impetus for the adoption of wood reduction policies. Reforms in tax structure and subsidies are needed to help to account for the "true cost" of wood, thereby encouraging efficiency. In his book, The Ecology of Commerce, Paul Hawken writes: "the whole key to redesigning the economy is to shift incrementally most, if not all, of the taxes presently derived from 'goods' to 'bads,' from income and payroll taxes to taxes on pollution, environmental degradation and nonrenewable energy consumption." Certainly, the current system of taxes and subsidies encourage waste and must be changed. Within the total calculation of wood reduction, certain forests or wood products will deserve higher priority than others. How will forest activists and a concerned public meet the challenge of achieving a 75 percent wood reduction? Although across the board reductions in wood from all types of forests are needed, not all wood products need to be cut back equally. Products such as phone books from old growth forests or broom handles from primary tropical rainforests could be assigned higher priority, based on the ecological cost. For other products, such as a pine bookshelf made to last a century, a lesser priority could be assigned. With these principles and the will to act, we can meet the essential consumer needs, create meaningful jobs, and save forests. Rainforests cover less than two percent of the Earth's surface, yet they are home to some 50 to 70 percent of all life forms on our planet. The rainforests are quite simply, the richest, oldest, most productive and most complex ecosystems on Earth. As biologist Norman Myers notes, "Rainforests are the finest celebration of nature ever known on the planet." And never before has nature's greatest orchestration been so threatened. Bibliography Computer - Internet “Lycos” search > “Rainforest” “Statistics” - Microsoft Encarta ’95 CD-ROM encyclopedia - Hutchinsons ’96 CD-ROM encyclopedia Normal - Extracts from Paul Hawken’s, The ecology of commerce (photocopies) - Television program, 3 weeks ago late night on path and destination of trees through the - logging companies. I am afraid I only caught this program by accident and cant remember what it was, or what channel it was on - Greenpeace