AF&PA Not Doing Enough

AF&PA Not Doing Enough

I read with interest and some misgivings your review of the American Forest & Paper Association’s (AF&PA) Sustainable Forestry Initiative in the News & Developments section of your May/June issue. While I agree that it is encouraging that the AF&PA’s membership appears to be taking steps to ameliorate forestry practices that have decimated more than 95% of this country’s primeval forests—replacing them more often than not with chemically saturated monocultures—at times your assessment seems uncritical if not somewhat naïve.

As you point out, in implementing its guidelines for “sustainable forestry,” AF&PA members will not be subjected to external review or oversight of any sort. Moreover, the guidelines leave it to individual AF&PA members to “define [their] own policies, programs, and plans” to achieve objectives such as promoting habitat diversity and minimizing the visual impact of harvesting. Is this not just another example of appointing the fox to guard the chicken coop?

And though it is true that the guidelines call for riparian protection, prompt reforestation, support for research into ecosystem-based forestry, and other laudible measures, they also sanction clearcuts as large as 120 acres and the “prudent” use of chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and so forth. This may be a step in the right direction, but it is not “sustainable forestry” in any meaningful sense; on the contrary, the AF&PA guidelines countenance what from an ecological perspective has to be the worst aspect of industrial forestry-as-usual: the wholesale conversion of complex, biodiverse, self-regulating and perpetuating forest ecosystems to chemically depen­­­dent, even-aged, single-species tree farms.

If AF&PA members are genuinely interested in embracing sustainable forestry, they will adhere to the Forest Stewardship Council’s (FSC) Principles and Criteria and allow themselves to be audited by a credible, FSC-accredited third-party certifier.

Jason E. Grant

EcoTimber International, Inc.