120 Acres?!?!?

I spent much of Today at the Appalachian Sustainable Development office in downtown Abingdon. I was researching carbon markets and sustainable forestry certifications. This is the main research component of my internship, with the ultimate goal of getting the forestry operations certified so we can get carbon credits for them.

There are two main certification systems that allow a firm to claim that their wood is "sustainable." The Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) was designed by the wood and paper products industry, is the most popular system in the U.S. and seems to be only marginally better than nothing. For example, there's this little quote:

"Average size of clearcut harvest areas does not exceed 120 acres, except when necessary to respond to forest health emergencies or other natural catastrophes."

120 Acres?!!? Average?!! Except??

I took a few minutes to compose myself after reading this amazing example of greenwashing, and then took heart that although SFI is the most popular standard in the US, it is not generally accepted as "green" by anyone reputable. From "LEED," the green building standard that stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, to environmental groups like the National Wildlife Federation, most legitimate environmental organizations do not consider SFI to be a true standard for sustainability.

Instead, these organizations and many others use the Forest Stewardship Council, or FSC, standard. FSC was designed by environmental organizations and is generally considered to be the greener of the two standards. However, not everyone agrees with FSC. When I mentioned to Chad the Horse Logger the other day that part of my internship was to get FSC certification, for Sustainable Woods, he told me that he didn't think it went far enough because it allowed for some clearcutting.

I've just started my research, so I don't know the extent to which FSC allows for clearcutting. I only hope its less than 120 acres...

-Peace and Plants

Andon

Sources:
Sustainable Forestry Initiative: www.sfiprogram.org/
SFI vs FSC (pdf): www.yale.edu/forestcertification/pdfs/auditprograms.pdf

Quality Control

We've been having some quality problems as of late*, so I spent all day today going through every piece of flooring in an order to look for defects. Thankfully I did not do this alone. Allow me to introduce a couple of my co-workers:

Kathlyn's job is to make the business operations of this non-profit more, well, profitable. This includes both Sustainable Woods and ASD's agricultural operations. My main boss, she is a bright-eyed, energetic woman whose attempts to avoid cursing can be extremely amusing.

Nick takes care of sales for sustainable woods, and seems like he might be more at home on a college campus than a sales seminar. He knows a lot about sustainable wood products, and he has to: his job is to convince people to buy our products rather than, say, bamboo flooring. From the fact that bamboo is invasive in the US to the fact that its disappearing in China, the reasons to go with a local, sustainably harvested floor are many, and Nick's job is to explain them all.

-Peace and (Native) Plants





*This post was written in December 2008. Sustainable Woods has since switched their milling contract and resolved the quality issues described here.

Sustainable Woods

On the first day of my internship in Southwest Virginia, I went over to the wood processing center for Sustainable Woods. Part of Appalachian Sustainable Development, the wood processing center focuses on making and marketing flooring from sustainably harvested logs. They help landowners apply a forest management plan to their land and take far less wood than a traditional logging operation. They even use methods like horse logging, the practice of pulling logs out of the woods using horses. This reduces soil compaction and other disturbances compared to using heavy equipment. Sustainable Woods is my main interest in ASD and the focus of my internship.

It was a wet, cold, miserable day and yet I still learned a ton! For starters, running a "Sustainable" wood processing plant is a lot like running a regular processing plant. It takes saw operators, laborers and managers, all of whom can still wear camouflage and continue to be "joe six pack" while contributing to the efforts of an environmental non-profit.

In a way, ASD defeats the stereotype of environmentalists as "hippies" or "outsiders" by creating local sustainable jobs. For example, Chad is a horse logger on a contract with ASD. His accent is more Southern than Appalachian, his demeanor friendly and intelligent. Because the big loader wasn't working, Tim (a hardworking laborer with a sometimes incomprehensible accent) had to unload a truckload of huge logs with a tiny forklift. Since this took a while, Chad and I got to talkin'.

I wrongly assumed that sustainable logging was more of a side job for Chad, so I asked him how often he logged. "Every day," he responded, "we log full time." Chad has a distaste for environmental activists who "do nothing but talk." He considers himself an "active-ist," someone who's out there "doing the work, practicing good forestry" rather than just talking about it. When I told him that part of my internship was seeking Forest Stewardship Council certification for the forests he logs, he revealed that he doesn't think FSC goes far enough. "These people allow for clearcuttin'," he told me.

Chad doesn't like it when people talk about horse logging in terms of going back to an older way of logging. He considers horse logging to be very modern, and explained to me that the horse breeds have gotten bigger and the tools more efficient since the old days. Chad represents what ASD is all about-changing the system from within rather than from without. When someone like Chad talks to his friends and neighbors about sustainability, they listen in a way that they would never listen to a liberal college boy like me.

---- More dispatches from the hills soon, so stay tuned!