In Events

A conference at the Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West, Stanford University, February 2-3, 2006. 

The forest industries of Western North America have undergone a sea change in recent years, as both commercial and regulatory interests have begun to look beyond their declining stocks of old growth timber.  The long-raging debates over the protection of Northern Spotted Owl habitat in both the Northwest United States and British Columbia are just the best-known of many recent hindrances for the logging industry.  While tree plantations and overseas timber sources have become more important, they have not been able to completely replace the whole-wood products from the West’s major timber trees.  Furthermore, the western logging industry’s social and cultural traditions, as well as the increasingly serious threat of governmental regulation, have hindered any attempts by commercial interests to change their role in the region entirely.   

In the face of mounting problems, logging companies have begun to seriously consider an idea which voices in government and the environmental movement had advocated without success for decades: the maintenance of a permanent forest industry under the aegis of “sustainable forestry.”  Sustainable forestry has become the consumer-friendly watchword for many wood products companies with interests in the United States and Europe.  However, the phrase itself remains nebulous, with competing definitions and certifications.  Practices classified as sustainable forestry may include everything from the simplest reforestation efforts to complex selection regimes and deep ecological understanding. 

This conference sought to define sustainable forestry, and to examine it both in theory and in practice. The conference’s attention focused specifically on the ways sustainable forestry has been conceived of and implemented in was the forests of western North America.   The conference attendees included people from across the academic spectrum as well as individuals working in non-academic settings such as land use policy research and sustainability education.  By bringing together individuals who think about sustainable forests from a wide variety of perspectives, participants could make new intellectual connections and a new interdisciplinary understanding of the topic could be formed.

Click here for a list of conference participants and their primary professional affiliations. 

The keynote address for the conference was given by B. Bruce Bare, dean of the School of Forestry of the University of Washington. Click here to see the text of Dean Bare’s address. 

The conference focused on three main topics: definitions of sustainable forestry in western North America and around the world; global markets and sustainable forests; and regulation and oversight of the forest industry for long-term forest health.   

There have been many definitions of sustainable forestry in western North America and around the world.  Several participants offered their own definitions of the term to begin a discussion which delved into the role such definitions have on forest practice.  The term was traced back to its roots in the United States’ 1897 Forest Management Act, by which the federal government both authorized commercial logging in public forest lands and demanded the assurance of “continuous use” of forests for future generations of Americans.  The basis for contemporary ideas of sustainable forestry came from the concept of sustained yield forestry, an ideal by which an economic steady state would be established between forest harvest and forest growth.  This utilitarian heritage of the term sheds a different light on a phrase which has more recently come to denote something as much based in ecology as in economics. The continual pressure on optimization of the forest resource in the short term has always gotten in the way of the long term sustaining of the forest’s health. 

The slippery nature of the definition may be in part because the term is used by people with many different agendas, all of whom seek to use the ideal of sustainable forestry in their own interest. Conference attendees postulated that there are three elements at stake in forest-use decision making: ecological health, economic vibrancy, and community stability. While many assume that the ultimate goal of sustainable forestry is to maximize all three of these elements, some conference attendees suggested that maximizing all three at the same time is simply not possible.  The concept of sustainable forestry, then, may not solve our forest land problems but rather re-frame those problems in new ways. 

Among those living and working in Western forest regions, there are a number of commonly held understandings of sustainable forestry.  Many pointed to a large difference in the way modern sustainable forestry is understood in the western United States and the way it is understood in western Canada and the rest of the world.  This difference was described as a lack of esteem for professional foresters and other experts in sustainable forestry in the United States, which led to reluctance to heed their advice and prescriptions.

Conference attendees explored the role of regulation and oversight by the Canadian and US governments in maintaining long term forest productivity and health.  Wildlife habitat regulation on either side of the border was discussed, as it often points to deep-running differences between US and Canadian conceptions of the forests.  The group discussed how each nation works to create a space for sustainable forestry in its regulatory framework, and discussed the effectiveness of those strategies.  The strong province-level influence on Canadian forest decision making changes the equation, as the Canadian communities often have a different, more hands-on relationship to the land use decisions than do their American counterparts.  Both the academics and those working in the policy sector agreed that there was a great deal still to be done to streamline regulation and policy in both nations to create effective sustainable forest policies.  However, there was a common sentiment that before such streamlining could be put into effect, the realities of sustainable forestry would have to be understood more widely.  Without a more widespread exploration of the underlying ecological and economic realities of sustainable forestry there would never be any hope of implementing a coherent policy.