A Close Look at the Certification of the Forest Industry
11/25/99
*******************************
RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: If Certification is the Answer; What Was the Question? A
Close Look at J.D. Irving & the Certification of the Forest
Industry
Source: Understory, the newsletter of the Certified Forest Products
Council.
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Byline: Mitch Lansky
The 1998 certification of J.D. Irving's holdings in the Black Brook
District of New Brunswick, Canada shows the profound differences that
exist in the world of forest certification. Irving is a family-owned
Canadian conglomerate that manages 4.5 million acres of forest land
in New Brunswick and 1.5 million acres in Maine, where it is the
state's largest landowner. It also owns pulp mills, and sawmills,
potato farms, oil refineries, gas stations and convenience stores,
television and radio stations and newspapers.
Traditionally, Irving's dominant silvicultural style has been to
clearcut, plant black or white spruce and spray herbicides and
insecticides on a large scale. In the 1980s, several towns in
northern Maine passed local ordinances to restrict the company's more
aggressive cutting and spraying policies. Irving's practices are not
what most laymen would think of as "sustainable," though some argue
they are the best example of intensive, plantation-based, forest
management in the region.
In August 1998, Scientific Certification Systems (SCS) - the
California company that certified Seven Islands Land Company in Maine
in 1993 - certified 20 percent, nearly half a million acres (188,678
hectares) of Irving's holdings in the Black Brook District, the most
intensively managed of all Irving properties. Black Brook is located
in the northwestern corner of New Brunswick. Because regional
standards were not yet in place, the local interpretation of
international Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) criteria was made by
the SCS team. Irving intends to get all of its holdings certified by
the end of 2000.
SCS did an initial assessment of Black Brook and found that the
company could not meet certification guidelines without making
certain specified changes. One suggestion was to add more structure
and diversity to Irving's spruce plantations by leaving dead trees,
volunteer species (such as poplar) and scattered mature trees.
Another was to set up benchmark reserves for at least 10 years,
totaling at least one-tenth the area held in plantations, to study
the difference between plantations and the forests they replaced.
When the SCS team returned, they found that Irving had implemented
these and other changes and they deemed the company certifiable.
While this example demonstrates how certification can be a positive
tool for change, it also illustrates why forest certification can
send confusing signals to the public. Unlike organic vegetables,
trees have lifespans greater than those of the certifiers. Even
dramatic improvements in management practices can take decades to
prove on the ground. Irving's changes, however, represent alterations
to an industrial model, rather than a fundamental shift. Any walk in
the woods will reveal as much or more about past forest practices as
about current management, and the results of Irving's past practices
will be on view for decades to come. How long, then, should a
landowner be expected to practice good forestry to be considered
"green?" If an overweight man is to be certified "physically fit,"
must he lose the weight first or is it sufficient that he has started
dieting?
To find out more about Irving's past silvicultural practices, I spoke
with forester Gordon Mott, who spent many years in the Black Brook
region working for the Canadian Forest Service. The shade-dependent,
Acadian forest landscape includes over 30 species of trees, many of
which live more than 300 years. Back in the 1950s, Mott said, 85
percent or more of the softwood lowlands were comprised of balsam fir
with some white spruce and even less black spruce. the uplands were
mainly northern hardwoods, with a strong component of beech, sugar
maple, and yellow birch.
Mott told me that many of Irving's spruce plantations were
established in the hardwood uplands. This, he said, involved a
conversion of natural forest type, and extensive herbicide spraying
was used to eliminate hardwood competition. The fir lowlands, by
contrast, were naturally even-aged, due to outbreaks of spruce
budworm, which periodically defoliate vast quantities of fir and
spruce. By the 1950s, however, the fir trees in Black Brook were
quite large, with some specimens exceeding 90 feet in height. Irving
sprayed this vulnerable region heavily during the budworm outbreaks
that occurred from the 1950s until the infestation receded in the
early 1990s. Although the condition of any "natural" forest is the
result of a cyclical process of forest succession, according to Mott,
Irving's management practices caused a significant shift in the
natural succession of the forests in the district.
Mott observed that much of the surrounding forest had been severely
highgraded by other landowners and that, in Irving's holdings, forest
management is conducted with much greater thought and planning for
the future. Others who have been to Black Brook have made similar
comments. Cutting is done very carefully, for example, and it results
in minimal stand damage. Logs are intensively sorted for the highest
value products. Milling makes use of every possibly saw log, even to
the extent, I'm told, of sawing small logs on the curve and
straightening them out during the drying process. Workers are given
direct incentives for quality performance. Company personnel
regularly evaluate every phase of harvesting and wood utilization to
ensure quality and efficiency.
Foresters from Irving also assured me their management in Maine would
not lead to the degree of planting I saw in the Black Brook region.
They gave me two reasons: 1) Maine forests contain a higher
proportion of red spruce, which is capable of living much longer than
fir and provides greater management options; and 2) The tax system in
New Brunswick allows landowners to write off planting and spraying as
an annual expense.
How Much is Enough?
Despite the company's laudatory practices, the question of Irving's
ongoing conversion of natural forests to plantations in Black Brook
has serious implications. Plantations are controversial because,
except where they've been established for ecological restoration,
they often violate many of the ecological principles that define a
natural forest. These include the maintenance of a native diversity
of plants, multiple level canopies, large old trees, dead-standing
and dead-downed wood, natural succession and ecological rotations.
50- or even 60-year rotations fall well short of the hundreds of
years that naturally separate stand-replacing disturbances in Acadian
forests.
According to FSC Principle 10, plantations may be certifiable if they
"reduce pressures on, and promote the restoration and conservation of
natural forests." The central assumption of this logic is that if
more wood is grown on plantations, less wood will be cut from natural
forests. Opponents raise a number of rebuttals:
1. It does not address the impact of short-rotation plantations. If
these sites diminish in soil productivity over several rotations, due
to whole-tree harvesting and the removal of a high percentage of
nutrients, the whole system is not sustainable.
2. It does not consider whether productivity can be increased using
less drastic forestry systems that maintain a greater level of
biodiversity, wildlife and other values.
3. Short-rotation wood is often inferior in quality to longer-
rotation wood for both paper and lumber. But the certifier insists
that, technically, these areas should be considered "planted stands,"
not plantations.
4. Demand is not a constant. It has been rising, with no apparent
limits to growth.
FSC criterion 10.9 states, "plantations established in areas
converted from natural forests after November 1994 normally shall not
qualify for certification. According to the Black Brook management
plan, Irving will have about 85 percent of its softwoods in
plantations by the year 2020. Some of these softwood plantations will
represent a conversion from hardwood and mixed wood sites. But the
certifier insists that, technically, these areas should be considered
"planted stands," not plantations.
By FSC definition, a plantation results in "conditions in which only
a few of the characteristics of the indigenous natural forest
ecosystem remain." SCS claims that Irving's spruce-planted forests do
not qualify as plantations because they use native spruce and
maintain more than a few of the said characteristics. Critics,
meanwhile, point out that Irving is planting these species on sites
and in concentrations that are not natural to the region. These
plantations or "planted stands" appear to also violate FSC criterion
6.3, which states that "Ecological functions and values shall be
maintained intact, enhanced, or restored, including: a) Forest
regeneration and succession; b)Genetic, species, and ecosystem
diversity; c) Natural cycles that affect the productivity of the
forest ecosystem."
FSC criterion 6.6 states that "management systems shall promote the
development and adoption of environmentally friendly, nonchemical
methods of pest management and strive to avoid the use of chemical
pesticides." For plantation establishment, Irving uses a variety of
pesticides in the nursery, regularly employs two herbicide
applications for site preparation and release and sprays insecticides
as needed. If the company reduces pesticide use from its previous
levels but still sprays more than most other landowners, is it
fulfilling the intent of this criterion? (Elsewhere in the region,
industrial forest managers such as Kimberly-Clark, Bowater and Stora
are less dependent on both herbicides and plantations.)
It is also troubling that, according to Irving foresters I
interviewed, the company's current harvest is in excess of current
growth. Irving appears to be banking on anticipated future yields
from its intensively managed softwood plantations, which may not come
to pass if there is a serious recurrence of spruce budworm. The SCS
certification document clearly identifies this risk: "The very high
harvest levels for spruce and fir species appear to be supportable
under `best-case' wood supply scenarios, but lack robustness to
[withstand] any substantial perturbation such as poor foliage
protection during a large-scale budworm outbreak."
Defining "Green"
Certification is supposed to provide market-based rewards and
incentives for exemplary forestry, but the movement has yet to come
up with transparent standards that most people can grasp in the same
way as the concept of organic farming. The Northern Forest Lands
Council admitted that certification programs "have potential, if not
done well, to harm markets." The certification of Irving may send
confusing signals to the marketplace. Not everyone shares industrial
forestry values.
I was curious to know if Seven Islands was concerned about the impact
of Irving's certification on others certified by SCS. John McNulty,
vice president of Seven Islands, is not worried. "We have faith in
the process, he said. "If Irving successfully goes through the
process, then its certification is valid."
This confidence is not universally shared. David Coon, policy
director of the New Brunswick Conservation Council, suggested that
many New Brunswickers who have lived with the results of the
company's aggressive management will be perplexed by this
certification and will question the validity of the entire FSC
program. Some of the very practices they object to most strenuously
are now certified "green." As of this writing, the Sierra Club of
Canada has appealed the SCS certification of Irving's Black Brook
District. It claims the certification veers from international
standards, won't meet regional standards when they are finalized and
generally lowers the bar for forest certification. J.D. Irving, for
its part, has appealed the draft regional standards and the process
by which they have been established in the Maritime provinces under
the auspices of FSC-Canada. Among other things, Irving claims the
draft standards are inconsistent with provincial policies and that an
imbalance on the standard-setting committee has expressed itself in a
strong bias against the industry.
Clearly, forest certification has a ways to go before it is out of
the woods. One hopes the challenges raised by the Irving case will
stimulate a much-needed debate that will help to define the content
of forest certification and its potential impact on forest management
in the future. The problems are not simply tech philosophical. It's
not easy defining, let alone being, "green."