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Friends: Early in 2004 environmental and conservation groups
worked hard to assure that the third party certification of Michigan’s 4
million acre State Forest system include the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)
certification process because it is the only system that assures public input,
requires protection of High Value Conservation Forests, and truly looks at
sustaining diverse healthy forests, not just sustaining the timber
industry. Now, in what has become an on-going attempt to weaken the
standard to which wood products are considered truly sustainable, there is a
proposal to effectively gut these sustainability criteria when it comes to “green
building” standards set under the LEED system. This fight, coupled with the announcement that the Forest Service
is effectively gutting its own regulations to allow the timber industry and
other exploitative industries to get those pesky environmental standards and
public input out of the way so they can cut and drill almost at will, shows
just our bad the US timber industry is compared to the rest of the world. Certification
of wood products FSC, which was created largely by environmental groups in an
effort to assure that third world forests would not be destroyed, has been
exceptionally effective in much of the world, in part because the largest
market in the world, the European Union, has demanded that certified woods be
used in most or all of the products they deal in. As efforts to begin to
introduce FSC certification to forests in this country came about, the industry’s
reaction was to try to create their own system – Sustainable Forestry
Initiative (SFI) – which not surprisingly falls far short of the standards
of FSC. Now, the timber industry wants to see its inadequate certification
system put on par with that of FSC in the premier program for standards for Please take time to comment on this, but even more important is to assure
that YOU are a discerning buyer – Look for FSC certified wood and wood
products and ask for them when they are not immediately available. Anne Woiwode ACTION ALERT December
22, 2004 Please
forward as appropriate Protect Imperiled Forests and
Wildlife— Don’t Let the
Timber Industry Destroy the Nation’s Leading Green Building Standards Comments Needed by February 1
The
construction and renovation of commercial and residential buildings in the Unfortunately, the timber industry’s
American Forest & Paper Association (AF&PA) is now pressuring the Green
Building Council to also promote wood from forests logged under the
AF&PA’s weak “Sustainable Forestry Initiative” (SFI)
standards. This change would make LEED misleading and ineffective at
reducing environmental impacts, since the SFI allows and
certifies destructive, business-as-usual industrial logging, such as
large-scale clearcutting and logging of old growth and other endangered
forests. The SFI also doesn’t track most of its wood, and allows non-SFI
wood to be marketed as SFI certified. Please urge the 1. Not give credit or
recognition to wood certified by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), the
Canadian Standards Association, or other weak, industry-dominated logging
standards. The SFI allows and certifies non-renewable practices
like: the logging of old growth, imperiled species’ habitats, and
unprotected wilderness/roadless areas; the elimination of
biodiversity through the conversion of diverse natural forests to
monocultural tree farms; and logging rates that exceed timber growth
rates. The SFI also allows other harmful, business-as-usual logging
practices like gigantic clearcuts, excessive use of toxic chemicals, and
management for only a few of a forest's native tree and wildlife species.
The SFI also lacks a mandatory “chain of custody” system to verify
the sources of SFI “certified” wood. 2. Only give credit and
recognition to wood from forests certified by the Forest Stewardship Council
(FSC) and other systems that provide equal or greater protection to sensitive,
non-renewable forest resources and forests’ long-term ecological
productivity. Public
comments on the proposed revised LEED standards ( To comment, go
to:
http://www.usgbc.org/News/usgbcnews_details.asp?ID=1156. The standards are
at: http://www.usgbc.org/Docs/LEEDdocs/NCCC%20v2%202%20MASTER_public_1.pdf More on the AF&PA SFI: Visit www.dontbuysfi.com for: ·
Photos
of SFI certified forest destruction. ·
Factsheets
with examples of SFI certified companies that destroy endangered forests. ·
Factsheets
and reports explaining problems with the SFI’s standards. ·
Factsheets
comparing the SFI and the Forest Stewardship Council. The SFI is also considering some minor
changes to its standards. For an analysis, contact the American Lands
Alliance at 503.978.0511. More on the LEED Standards:
The LEED New Construction (NC) standard is the
USGBC’s flagship standard, and influences other standards like the new
LEED standard for homes. The proposed changes to Standards for renewable materials need to
look beyond whether new trees are grown, and examine whether the ecosystems
that produced the trees are also renewed. The FSC is the
only forestry system that meets LEED’s goal of transforming building
practices by recognizing the most (i.e., top 25%) environmentally responsible
practices. The SFI, by contrast, certifies business-as-usual logging on
most industrial forests in the |