Beyond the Beyond
A Reader Response
Editors’ Note: We always welcome and encourage responses from our readers. The following piece is a response to the Beyond the ‘Illusion of Preservation’ report, featured in Looking for Balance: Wildlands, Woodlands, and Wood Consumption from our Spring 2024 issue. Read other responses.
The excellent recent report, Beyond the ‘Illusion of Preservation,' uses systems thinking to describe how land preservation in our region can result in unintended consequences if it shifts wood production elsewhere, perhaps leading to worse environmental outcomes. The authors examine a future scenario in which we reduce our wood consumption and balance our production. But is merely meeting our regional needs the best we can hope for?
The Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands and Communities vision takes a systems approach to a big problem: How do we protect and manage our forests and farms in a climate emergency? To do that, we must address the larger social and economic systems that operate within New England. We need to determine how much wood we consume and how we obtain it. If we expand our systems thinking, we can envision another scenario that goes beyond “net balance” in the production and consumption of our wood. What if we could increase the production of wood-based materials and use them to substitute for more climate-polluting materials like concrete, steel, and plastic?
That would mean increasing our current harvest by managing New England forests more productively. Some conservationists may recoil at the notion, since it involves cutting more trees. But it might be the best scenario for the climate emergency, if it could be accomplished within important ecological guidelines.
To meet our climate goals, we will need to address all the physical products we manufacture and use. We have made great progress on developing renewable electricity and shifting to more climate-friendly transportation. But we have paid scant attention to the third leg of the climate stool: shifting from carbon-polluting products like plastic, concrete, and steel to climate-friendly biobased products. Our nation has a goal of 30x30 for land conservation but no goal for this critical third leg. The entire infrastructure of New York City is replicated globally every 30 days, and we are destined to do this for the next 40 years. If we don’t shift to biobased materials, we will cook the planet. Our forests must be a central piece of the shift to a bioeconomy, here in New England and globally.
Courtesy United States Department of Agriculture
Over the last half-century, the global use of steel, cement, aluminum, and plastic has gone up 4.9, 12.7, 12.7, and 25.8 times respectively. Wood? Only 1.6 times more wood was consumed in 2017 than in 1961. Our economy is still racing away from the use of biobased materials like wood toward highly polluting plastic, steel, and concrete. We need to turn this around and get it headed in the other direction, both by consuming less overall and by relying on the bioeconomy for a much greater part of what we consume. That will require introducing new products and implementing new forest practices that are more productive and more ecologically sensitive.
“To meet our climate goals, we will need to address all the physical products we manufacture and use.”
Consuming less of everything is a necessary goal, but insufficient. Our mantra should go beyond “consume less” to “consume as little as possible and make the right climate-friendly choices.” We should be less wasteful of all products, including wood. For example, wood consumption could be reduced by building smaller homes. At the same time, we might responsibly increase wood production to build large public and commercial buildings out of wood (mass timber) instead of steel and concrete. Similarly, we might responsibly increase wood consumption in order to replace plastic packaging, or to replace that funky pink insulation with wood fiber insulation now being produced in Maine.
The John W. Oliver Design Building, University of Massachusetts, was completed in January 2017. At its core, the Design Building has a contemporary, heavy-timber (“mass timber”) wood structure. Designed by Leers Weinzapfel Associates. Courtesy University of Massachusetts.
While we can work for lower consumption in the long term and build a scenario reflecting this goal, in the near term we should also be prepared for increasing consumption. Global population will rise by almost 2 billion in the next 30 years; consumption is accelerating in developing countries; and the trends are away from biobased materials. We must go beyond balancing production and consumption within our region. What would happen if Kansas or Ukraine decided to balance its grain production with its respective population? We can’t generate the kind of wood surplus in New England that Kansas can in wheat, but we should nevertheless produce as much wood as we can—after we set 10% aside for wildlands—if that production can be accomplished within ecological limits.
“Our economy is still racing away from the use of biobased materials like wood toward highly polluting plastic, steel, and concrete.”
The first priority on the conservation community’s climate mitigation list should be growing the bioeconomy. We cannot pull a lever to quickly reduce consumption, but there are some very big things that we can do to manage our lands better and produce more in short order. This is where climate-smart forestry comes in. Practice excellent forestry within the ecological bounds of our forest. Produce more biobased materials. Use those materials to replace carbon-intensive and frighteningly toxic products like plastic. Shift to a circular bioeconomy. Win the climate crisis. It is a systematic conservation approach that involves consumers, foresters, land protection advocates, wild reserve advocates, and climate guardians.
Thompson Exhibition Building Structure, Mystic Seaport Museum, Connecticut. Mass timber design by Centerbrook Associates. © Jeff Goldberg/Esto
“We can’t generate the kind of wood surplus in New England that Kansas can in wheat, but we should nevertheless produce as much wood as we can—after we set 10% aside for wildlands—if that production can be accomplished within ecological limits.”
At New England Forestry Foundation we are focusing on this expanded alternative future scenario. Our climate-smart Exemplary Forestry standards manage forests to improve wildlife habitat, increase tree stocking, and produce more biobased products, thereby achieving another 30 percent solution: storing enough carbon to offset 30 percent of our region’s carbon reduction goal. We are working under a $30 million dollar USDA grant to prove the concept. We have already received many requests from large commercial owners in Maine to implement these practices, and we have chosen six landowners to pilot these practices. We can all make an enormous difference to climate over the next 30 years not by reducing our production of wood, but rather by introducing improved practices that lead to a healthier forest and a new bioeconomy. This scenario would go beyond meeting our region’s needs to finding better ways to help meet the needs of the planet.
Robert (Bob) Perschel joined the New England Forestry Foundation in April 2012. Previously Bob was the Eastern Region Director for the Forest Stewards Guild, of which he was an original co-founder. In his 40 years as an environmental professional, he has worked on forestry, large landscape conservation, and wilderness issues. Bob worked for the forest industry before establishing his own forestry consulting business and founding the Land Ethic Institute. He then worked for The Wilderness Society, serving as Chair of the Northern Forest Alliance and Director of TWS Land Ethic and Network of Wildlands Programs. Bob has a master’s degree in forestry from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and a psychology degree from Yale College.