Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist

by Patrick Moore

  The science of ecology is partly about how ecosystems develop and how they recover after disturbances caused by fire, drought, floods, disease, volcanic eruptions, and ice ages. The process of recovery is called ecological succession, where landscapes that have been decimated by natural disasters are able to recover and return to their original splendor. Because these processes are natural, ecologists prefer to use the more neutral word disturbance as opposed to the negative term destruction to describe the impact of natural forces. In this light, forest harvesting is just another form of ecological disturbance. But are the loggers “natural”? And is the disturbance caused by logging comparable to the disturbance caused by fire, flood, volcanoes, and glaciers?

  The word natural is one of the most misused terms in our language. The opposite, of course, is unnatural. How do we decide which situations are natural and which are unnatural? Are all human activities unnatural? If not, which human activities are natural and which are unnatural? And are all nonhuman activities natural? What does this word mean anyway? What has it got to do with nature?

  Clearly natural is good and unnatural is bad; in other words these are value judgments, not objective descriptions. Activities viewed as natural by one person might be seen as unnatural by another person. These are ethical and moral judgments. Many people think homosexuality is unnatural, and yet many others think it is natural. Most people believe incest is unnatural but in some cultures, the Hawaiian royalty, for example, inbreeding was purposely employed to produce “superior” offspring.[3]

  The use of the word natural as a judgmental term is entirely different from our use of the word nature to describe the natural world. Here the issue is not so much about whether or not people and their actions are natural but rather about whether or not humans are a part of nature. You might say, of course, humans are part of nature, but you would never know it based on the pronouncements of many activists. They tend to think in terms of “humans versus nature” rather than “humans as nature” or “humans in nature.”

  In the sense that we are part of nature everything we do is natural. So from an environmental and scientific point of view there is no such thing as unnatural. The term unnatural should be reserved for judgments of one’s character and behavior at a social level, not as a way of judging our impact on the environment.

  Looked at in this light, the disturbance caused by logging falls into the same category as disturbances caused by other natural factors. While there are differences in the impacts of fire, floods, volcanoes, glaciers, and logging they are similar in that the ecosystem is capable of recovering from all of them. In particular, when the fire goes out, the floodwaters recede, the volcano stops erupting, the glaciers retreat, and the loggers finish their work, the forest immediately begins the process of recovery. The time it takes to recover depends, to a large part, on the severity of the disturbance. The impacts of logging are generally less severe than a hot wildfire, a prolonged flood, a volcanic eruption, and certainly less than an advancing glacier.

  The truth is, forests and all the species in them are capable of recovering from total destruction without any help from us. They have been doing so for hundreds of millions of years as ice ages come and go and as fires regularly ravage the landscape.

  Forests and Climate Change

  In recent years anti-forestry activists have claimed forest harvesting and forestry in general has a negative impact on climate change. The group ForestEthics (an offshoot of Greenpeace) claims forestry amounts to a “carbon bomb,” referring to the release of CO2 from decomposing wood immediately after harvesting.

  It is true that there is a net release of CO2 as a result of harvesting, but the activists fail to take into account that new trees are soon established and that they absorb all that CO2 back over time as they grow into a new forest. And they fail to take into account the reduction in wildfires in managed forests, which reduce the amount of carbon that goes into the atmosphere. A hot wildfire not only burns trees but it also burns soil, causing a far greater release of carbon than just harvesting the trees. And most important, the wood harvested is used to build homes where the carbon in them remains stored for many years. In addition, when we use wood we avoid the use of nonrenewable materials such as steel and concrete, which require large amounts of energy to manufacture, putting more CO2 into the atmosphere. In the final analysis, the combination of harvesting trees and then reforesting the area, suppressing wildfire, storing carbon and using renewable wood instead of nonrenewable materials has a large net positive impact in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Yet in order to further their anti-environmental aim of curbing the use of wood, activists distort the truth and mislead the public. They make these claims despite the fact that both the Kyoto Protocol on climate and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have clearly recognized the benefits forest management bring to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

  Here is the language used by the IPCC to describe the relationship between climate change and forestry:

  7.2 Technologies for Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the Forest Sector

  Forest management practices that can restrain the rate of increase in atmospheric CO2 can be grouped into three categories: (i) Management for carbon conservation; (ii) management for carbon sequestration and storage; and (iii) management for carbon substitution.

  Conservation practices include options such as controlling deforestation, protecting forests in reserves, changing harvesting regimes, and controlling other anthropogenic disturbances, such as fire and pest outbreaks.

  Sequestration and storage practices include expanding forest ecosystems by increasing the area and/or biomass and soil carbon density of natural and plantation forests, and increasing storage in durable wood products.

  Substitution practices aim at increasing the transfer of forest biomass carbon into products rather than using fossil fuel-based energy and products, cement-based products, and other non-wood building materials.[4]

  The IPCC could not be clearer about the benefits forest management and wood production have for reducing CO2 emissions. And yet anti-forestry activists, including Greenpeace and ForestEthics, continue to spread the opposite story. They will twist the truth in any way they can to support their contention that we should cut fewer trees and therefore use less wood. The IPCC knows that a sensible environmentalist would support a policy of growing more trees and using more wood.

  The Kyoto Protocol on climate change takes a similar view of the role of forest management, pointing out that when we plant trees we pull carbon out of the atmosphere and that when we use wood we avoid putting it in the atmosphere in the first place.[5]

  So the anti-forestry crowd is happy to take the concerns of the IPCC and Kyoto about climate change and exaggerate them into apocalyptic proportions but then fail to listen to the same organizations when they tell us growing more trees and using more wood are solutions to the problem.

  Wood Is Good

  Wood is the material embodiment of solar energy. The chlorophyll in the leaves of trees catalyzes the combination of carbon dioxide from the air, water from rainfall, and a smattering of minerals from the soil to make the miraculous substance known as wood. When we burn wood to heat our homes, we are simply releasing the energy of the sun the tree captured while growing in the forest. When we use wood to build our homes, we are storing solar energy and the carbon the wood contains.

  When it comes right down to it we must recognize that wood is the most abundant and most environmentally friendly renewable source of both materials and energy resources on earth. About 75 percent of all our renewable energy comes from wood, used mainly for cooking and heating but also for making charcoal, drying lumber, and producing pulp and paper. Wood provides more than 90 percent of our renewable materials for buildings, furniture, packaging, and sanitary products. One of the great ironies of the “environmental” movement today is that it claims to support all things renewable on the one hand while at the same time ignoring o
r rejecting the fact that wood is far and away the most important renewable resource. Environmental activists place huge importance on solar panels made from aluminum, silicon, and gallium arsenide when in fact the most important solar collectors on earth are the leaves and needles of trees and other plants. I believe this is one of the most important facts for everyone to recognize.

  With our incredible knowledge of science we are able to produce genetically modified plants and split atoms to make nuclear energy. But we haven’t come close to developing the ability to replicate photosynthesis, the most important process for life on earth. Without photosynthesis not only would our lives be impossible but so would the lives of nearly every other plant and animal on the planet.

  About one-third of the human population, more than two billion people, depend on wood for their primary energy source, mainly in the tropical developing countries, where wood and charcoal are the main fuels for cooking and heating. Unfortunately the practice of sustainable forestry has not been adopted in all of the developing countries. But this is changing quickly as countries like China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, and others begin to understand the benefits of managing forests rather than simply exploiting them. This must be a primary goal of international aid and technology transfer, the conversion from simply harvesting wood for timber and fuelwood to the sustainable management of forests, for forests provide the most abundant renewable resource on earth.

  Building Green with Wood

  There is probably no better way to make trees the answer than to use more wood for our buildings and other infrastructure. Yet much of the “green building” movement has failed to recognize the importance of wood in contributing to the “greenness” of our built environment. Most buildings that get certified as green under the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standard of the Green Building Council are built mainly of steel and concrete. This is due to the anti-forestry attitude of many of the environmentalists who influence the LEED standard. This must change if we are to advance the idea of truly green building.

  The LEED standard for green building requires that wood be certified as originating from sustainably managed forests. This is as it should be but only the Forest Stewardship Council, another activist-oriented organization, is accepted as a certifier. There are a number of other legitimate certifiers of sustainable forest management, including the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), [6] the Canadian Standards Association (CSA),[7] the American Tree Farmers,[8] and the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC).[9] The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) does not recognize these systems. This means most of the wood certified as sustainably produced does not qualify for points under the LEED green building standard. This is clearly discriminatory but the activists within the Green Building Council have so far prevailed against the protestations of the majority of forest owners and managers.

  Even more discriminatory is the fact that the LEED standard does not recognize construction lumber as a renewable material. LEED does recognize all kinds of marginal building materials, such as wheatboard, bamboo flooring, and strawboard. But USGBC manages to exclude lumber by naming the category “Rapidly Renewable Materials.” This term is then defined as “renewable materials that renew themselves in less than ten years.” Because it takes trees anywhere from 25 to 100 years to reach a size where they become suitable for sawmilling they are excluded. These people don’t think trees grow fast enough to qualify as “renewable.” If you needed any evidence that anti-forestry activists have hijacked the USGBC, then this should do the trick.[10]

  The “Green” Olympics

  The 17th Winter Olympic Games were held in Lillehammer, Norway, in 1994 and were the first Olympic Games to have guidelines for sustainable infrastructure. Norwegian leaders and architects quickly realized this meant maximizing the use of renewable wood for the Olympic venues. They pioneered the use of wood to create large arched beams in the arenas for indoor events, such as hockey and speed skating. This marked the beginning of Greenpeace’s campaign against the use of wood in Olympic buildings.

  By the year 2000, Greenpeace had quietly succeeded in convincing the government of Australia that native wood and PVC should be banned from the Games of the 27th Olympiad, the Sydney Summer Games. In return, Greenpeace agreed to let Australia call the Games “The Green Olympics.” Ironically this meant the Olympic venues for the 2000 Sydney “Green” Olympic Games were built almost entirely with steel and concrete.

  The engineers who built the venues could get by without native wood (they imported wood from other countries), but they weren’t going to give up using PVC pipes for water and sewers, electrical conduits, wiring insulation, etc. They laid PVC pipes for water and sewers in the foundations. Greenpeace arrived with a backhoe and TV crews and dug up some pipes, declaring through the media that the government had broken its promise to ban “The Poison Plastic.” This embarrassed the government and caused concern among suppliers and industry groups. Many letters were written and many meetings were held at the end of which the government pledged to conduct materials specification and procurement policies in a more transparent manner in future.

  In 2002 we learned that Greenpeace had gained control of the Sustainability Committee for the Toronto bid for the 2008 Olympics. Working with the wood and vinyl industries we managed to obtain a copy of the recommendations from the Sustainability Committee to the organizing committee in charge of the bid. Building on the Australian campaign the document recommended that most wood products, PVC, tin, and cadmium be banned. We were amazed that Greenpeace seemed to ignore the fact that most cameras, cell phones, and laptop computers use batteries made with cadmium. Did they plan to ban most battery-operated devices from the Games? Even more incredulous was the inclusion of tin in the committee’s list. To this day we don’t know why it was included, but apparently Greenpeace and the committee members were not aware that bronze is made of tin and copper. A few days later, just before Bid Committee was to accept the Sustainability Committee’s recommendations, we placed an opinion editorial in a major Canadian national newspaper that was headlined, “No Bronze Medal at the Green Olympics.” The phones in the Ontario premier’s office lit up and we soon learned that the recommendations had been rejected. Beijing eventually won the bid for the 2008 Games.

  The experience we gained during the Toronto bid put us in a good position to help Canada with the Vancouver bid for the 2010 Winter Olympics, which Canada did win. Canada also won the most gold medals (14) and the gold medal in hockey, our national sport. This last triumph was the most gratifying. At the Greenspirit head office in downtown Vancouver we witnessed more than 150,000 people celebrate the victory in the streets.

  One of the main features of the Vancouver Olympics was the extensive use of native wood in the skating arenas.[11] In addition, the new Convention Center on the waterfront showcased British Columbia wood in a stunning manner. Premier Gordon Campbell, in his third term of office, personally supported the use of as much wood as possible. He linked it to the fact that wood is renewable and beautiful and results in reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Hundreds of thousands of people from around the world witnessed this display of wood’s warmth and beauty and were no doubt impressed. It was a proud moment for Vancouver and British Columbia.

  Wood in Residential and Commercial Buildings

  For many years building codes in Europe and North America restricted the height of wood-framed buildings to three, or at most four, stories. Advances in architecture and an increasing awareness of the environmentally beneficial qualities of wood have resulted in many jurisdictions raising the maximum height to six, eight, and even nine stories in the case of the record-holder in the U.K. Built properly, wood frame buildings of this height have better resistance to earthquakes than similar concrete structures.

  In the United States and Canada, the Wood Works! organization,[12] [13] a project of the Canadian Wood Council[14] and the Binational Softwood Lumber Council,[15] works with arc
hitects and builders to promote the strength, versatility, beauty, and environmental attributes of wood. There is a tremendous potential for wood to replace steel and concrete in low-to-midrise commercial buildings.

  All things considered it makes sense both environmentally and economically to use more wood in our buildings, especially where it is not exposed to the elements and kept dry. If wood is protected from water and sunlight, it will last for hundreds of years. The more wood we use, the more trees we must grow and therefore the more land will remain forested. That is the real win-win solution for the environment and the economy.

  [1]. John Perlin, A Forest Journey: The Story of Wood and Civilization (Countryman Press, 2005), http://www.wikio.com/book/a-forest-journey-the-story-of-wood-and-civilization-0881506761-2996385,b.html

  [2]. UN Food and Agricultural Organization, “State of the World’s Forests,” Rome, 2009, http://www.fao.org/docrep/011/i0350e/i0350e00.HTM

  [3]. Joanne Carando, “Hawaiian Royal Incest: A Study in the Sacrificial Origin of Monarchy,”

  http://www.luckyulivehawaii.com/incest.htm

  [4]. UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Forest Sector: Technologies, Policies and Measures for Mitigating Climate Change,” November 1996, http://www.gcrio.org/ipcc/techrepI/forest.html

  [5]. D. Schoene and M. Netto, “The Kyoto Protocol: What Does It Mean for Forests

  and Forestry?” Unasylva 222, 56 (2005), ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/009/a0413E/a0413E02.pdf

  [6]. SFI, “Sustainable Forestry Initiative,” http://www.sfiprogram.org/

  [7]. CSA SFM, “Canadian Sustainable Forest Management,” http://www.csasfmforests.ca/home.htm

  [8]. American Forest Foundation’s Center for Family Forests, “American Tree Farm System,”