Wood in Our Future: The Role of Life-Cycle Analysis Proceedings of a Symposium (1997) / Chapter Skim
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POLICIES TODAY AND FOR THE FUTURE
POLICIES TODAY AND FOR THE FUTURE
Pages 92-100
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From page 92... ...
There are no easy solutions because any adjustment in the environmental impact will have its own consequences: on production costs and consumer expenditures, on substitute materials that have their own environmental sources, and directly on the forest environment itself. Therefore, our real problem is not just to control the environmental impact of industrial wood production, but to control it relative to the financial, political, and environmental costs of the control activity.
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From page 93... ...
I will argue that, in our case, industrial forestry, a simple area measure of land actively used for timber management and harvest, is sufficient and that, generally speaking, the smaller the total land area in commercial wood production the more environmentally friendly the forest practice. Of course, this is a general rule.
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From page 94... ...
This means that the world opportunity is great for using our increasing environmental concerns to shift our timber harvests to ever more marginal forest lands, and it means that we take large advantage of this opportunity now and we will continue to do so until at least 2050.
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From page 95... ...
REDUCING LAND USE AND ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS The three possible approaches to decreasing the environmental impact of growing and harvesting wood are increasing on-site environmental protection or improving timber management and harvest practices, restricting timber management and harvest activities altogether from the most fragile sites, and decreasing the demand for industrial timberland. We discussed the first in the previous section and rejected it because it often expands the harvest area and, therefore, increases the environmental impact.
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From page 96... ...
Their summary judgment is that technical change in the wood products industries is "wood neutral," which means its resource-saving impact on wood has been approximately the same as its general impact on all other inputs or somewhere in the range of 1.75 to 1.90 percent annually. Loosely speaking, this means that technological change in the wood products industries annually saves more than three times, and perhaps more than five times, as much land as new silvicultural technologies save.
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From page 97... ...
The structure of the forest and wood products industries is a third reason to prefer technological change as the path to environmental improvement. Consider, first, industrial structure and the problem of enforcing on-the-ground environmental regulations, and then consider the incentives necessary to induce additional technological change.
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From page 98... ...
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIVENESS The final question concerns the effect of forest protection on international competitiveness. Environmental regulation increases on-site protection, and environmental compliance also will raise production costs (and extend timber removal to additional forest lands as well)
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From page 99... ...
I would suggest that a powerful coalition of environmentalists, consumers, the wood-processing industries, and wood technology equipment manufacturers would each obtain advantage from supporting publicly funded wood technology research. Furthermore, the sharply focused targets of wood technology research provide a real administrative advantage over the dispersed targets of regulation in forest environments.
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From page 100... ...
1982. Technical change and productivity growth in the lumber and wood products industry.
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