Logging Effects
From WikiDemocracy
HAS BIG TIMBER FINALLY BROUGHT USGBC TO HEEL?
Environmental groups, forward-thinking companies, and social interest groups concerned about the destruction of the world’s forests come together to form the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). FSC’s goal was and is to promote environmentally and socially responsible forest management practices globally. FSC’s governance system is organized into three chambers with equal power—an environmental chamber concerned with protecting forest ecosystems, an economic chamber concerned with making a profit from forest products, and a social chamber concerned with human and worker rights.
Beyond the Timber Wars
by Lisa Bramen 31/7/15 The Nature Conservancy
It's a rare mild February morning in southwestern Washington, a place so famous for winter squalls that beachfront hotels here offer storm-watching packages. A few miles inland, project manager Tom Kollasch is following faint elk trails through a stand of coastal rain-forest on The Nature Conservancy’s Ellsworth Creek Preserve.
Tree Keepers: Where Sustaining the Forest Is a Tribal Tradition
by FRED PEARCE 24/7/23 YaleEnvironment360
Mike Lohrengel looks up in awe at trees he has known for 30 years. “This is one of the most beautiful places I know. This forest has it all: the most species, the most diversity. Many trees I know individually. Look at this one behind us. It’s got a split way up there. I’ll never forget that tree till I die.”
Timber Wars
In the 1980s and ’90s, loggers and environmental activists faced off over the future of old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. In this episode, Reveal partners with the podcast series Timber Wars from Oregon Public Broadcasting. Reporter Aaron Scott explores that definitive moment in the history of the land – and the consequences that reverberate today.
The ‘timber detectives’ on the front lines of illegal wood trade
by Peter Yeung 9/3/22 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
Hamburg, Germany — Under tungsten light on a bleak winter day, Gerald Koch gazes up from a black microscope, adjusts his rimless glasses, and gestures at a monitor displaying a slice, thinner than a hair, of suspected illegal timber.
Corruption, Forestry Workers, and Siberian Tigers: the Story of Illegal Logging in the Developing World
There’s a dark past behind the pieces of paper sitting right in your printer, right in your notebook— may be right beneath your pencil. Potentially dark, that is. According to the EIA (Environmental Investigation Agency), up to 90% of timber logged in some developing countries is done so illegally. Therefore—assuming you didn’t buy some specialty paper from a country without rainforests and a fragile government— there is a strong likelihood that the wood products you’ve purchased in America are more tainted with corruption than you’d like to believe.
Illegal Logging
Illegal logging is an immense, multi-billion dollar industry threatening forests worldwide.
Illegal logging is the catalyst to deforestation around the globe, threatening some of the world’s most important forests in terms of conservation value. Predatory logging brings roads deeper into the forest, which in turn fuels more logging, impacts Indigenous Peoples and traditional local communities, as well as harming wildlife. Illegal logging is a global-multi-country issue Greenpeace offices around the world have worked to investigate, document, and stop.
To Save the Redwoods, Scientists Debate Burning and Logging
by Becki Robins 16/12/19 UNDARK
Redwoods draw crowds, but they are also ecologically important. They act as natural water filters, processing trillions of gallons of clean, drinkable water every year. Redwood forests store at least three times as much carbon as any other kind of forest, and because the individual trees live for thousands of years, the carbon storage is long-term. That makes them important actors in the story of California’s changing climate.
Saving the Trees for the Forest
On a crisp, sunny morning in early March, Tonya Enger scampered through a clearing near Washington’s Yacolt Burn State Forest. The soil was so soft that it sank as she walked through the lush understory. Enger, the founder of a local civic engagement group called Vancouver Forestkeeper, frequently leads tours here. “It’s beautiful in the fall,” she said. “And in the summer, the huckleberry bushes are full and bright red.” She pointed out thriving mushrooms, moss, and lichen as she made her way. Tree snags, still charred black from one of the largest recorded wildfires in Washington history, tower over the landscape.
Why deforestation matters—and what we can do to stop it
by Christina Nunez 7/12/22 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
As the world seeks to slow the pace of climate change, preserve wildlife, and support more than eight billion people, trees inevitably hold a major part of the answer. Yet the mass destruction of trees—deforestation—continues, sacrificing the long-term benefits of standing trees for short-term gain of fuel, and materials for manufacturing and construction.
About Clearcutting
Clearcutting is an extreme logging method in which resilient natural forests are harvested and replaced with man-made tree plantations that do not replicate the ecosystem services of a healthy forest.
Inside the faltering fight against illegal Amazon logging
by Scott Wallace 28/8/19 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
On July 4th, along a dusty backroad in the southwest Brazilian state of Rondônia, near the logging hub of Espigão d’Oeste, unknown assailants stopped a tanker truck, yanked the driver from the cab, and set it ablaze. The truck was carrying aviation fuel to resupply government helicopters supporting an operation against illegal loggers. Fearing further attacks, government agents suspended the operation and withdrew from the area.
Burning questions raised over logging
Clearing the remaining trees after a forest fire can increase the chance of further flames.
Environmentalists Battle Loggers to Protect One Last Old-Growth Forest
For weeks, activists in the temperate rainforest on Vancouver Island, near the town of Port Renfrew, have been blockading a logging road. On one day, more than 40 logging trucks were turned back. If and when the police finally free the protesters and clear the blockade, it is likely another will take its place. This is the last card being played in an effort to protect one of the last large swaths of old-growth forest left in a Canadian province that, environmentalists contend, has lost its way.
Timber salvaged from New York City buildings reveals ancient climate
by Nathalie Alonso 22/10/21 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
Old-growth forests once covered the eastern United States, but they were almost entirely decimated by the early 1900s after centuries of commercial logging. Yet wood from those forests survives, much of it tucked behind the walls of New York City buildings. The tree rings on these timbers are sources of historical climate data, which is why researchers are working to recover them.
Gem of the North Woods
by The Nature Conservancy 22/11/19
The St. John River Forest is a very special place in Maine, supporting previously unknown populations of rare plants, the elusive Canada lynx, and important native fish that are increasingly under pressure in Maine from non-native species. Among natural discoveries made here are the largest population of the purple false-oats plant in the United States, stands of black spruce over 300 years old and a dozen rare dragonfly species.
How Sweden's Logging Practices Affect the Environment
by Rebecca Clarke 15/8/21 Treehugger
Sweden is known as one of the world’s most environmentally conscious countries. The International Energy Agency (IEA) called the country a global leader in building a low-carbon economy. Sweden's logging practices and policies, on the other hand, require a closer look.
Let’s Fight Fire with Fire
by The Nature Conservancy 15/7/22
Thanks to Smokey Bear, a century of fire exclusion and the forced removal of Indigenous forest stewards, California’s Sierra forests are dangerously overgrown. Now, trees are packed together at up to five times their natural density, and fires that should regenerate our forests explode into infernos that destroy them. These forests help provide 60% of our state’s developed water supply, and losing them would leave millions of people without clean drinking water.
Reducing Logging Impacts in the Congo Basin
by The Nature Conservancy 12/1/23
The tracks were fresh in the mud. A leopard had walked across the logging access road between dusk and dawn. And it wasn’t the first animal sighting of the week—forest elephants and western lowland gorillas carried out their daily routines in the forest just as the loggers carried out theirs. Stingless sweat bees made their presence known, too, congregating by the hundreds on any exposed skin perspiring in the midday sun.
Illegal logging in decline
Preventing illicit cutting is a cheap way to reduce carbon emissions.
Climate Clues from the Past Prompt a New Look at History
by Jacques Leslie 20/12/21 YaleEnvironment360
Relying on new geochemical techniques for analyzing ice core sediment to determine the dates of ancient volcanic activity down to the year or even season, the paper, published in Nature in 2015, showed that major eruptions worldwide caused precipitous, up-to-a-decade-long drops in global temperatures. Later research pegged those drops at as much as 13 degrees F.
Logging in disguise: How forest thinning is making wildfires worse
by Chad T. Hanson 24/8/21 Grist
Fire has always been a concern for communities like Greenville in the northern Sierra Nevada mountains. And, for decades, the U.S. Forest Service and the timber industry told the townspeople that logging tens of thousands of acres — under the guise of “thinning” — would create “fuel breaks” to slow or even stop wildfires and prevent flames from reaching Main Street.
How Widespread Logging in Canada Is Escaping Scrutiny
by Courtenay Lewis 18/3/19 NRDC
In recent years, Canada has had the third highest rate of intact forest landscape loss in the world, behind only Russia and Brazil. Yet widespread logging in Canada has managed to fly under the radar of international scrutiny.
CHIP MILLS INDUSTRIAL LOGGING RETURNS TO THE OZARKS
by Ken Midkiff 17/12/13 SIERRA CLUB
About one hundred years ago, the forests of the Ozarks Plateau were being leveled. Huge milling operations, established along the streams and rivers, took in logs floated down the rivers or hauled in by mule teams and converted them to railroad ties and lumber to meet the demands of the country’s westward march. Rail lines crisscrossed the area to haul away the milled lumber.
For the Love of California
by MIKE SWEENEY 16/12/19 The Nature Conservancy
When The Nature Conservancy first bought a nature preserve in California back in 1959, I can guarantee those supporters never imagined the innovations it would lead to. We started with the acquisition of the Angelo Coast Range Reserve, a beautiful stand of old-growth forest in Mendocino County. Since then, we’ve protected more than 1.2 million acres of land, 5,000 miles of streams, and 3.8 million acres of ocean habitat in California and off the coast. And we do a lot more than protect land, water and ocean.
Why are old-growth forests important?
Forests absorb and store carbon — in soils, organic matter, and living and dead trees — better than any other ecosystem. Generally, older trees absorb more carbon each year than their younger counterparts, making old forests one of our most valuable tools for taking on climate change. Forests also provide habitat for wildlife, support reliable drinking watersheds for nearly half of all Americans, preserve cultural legacies and traditional uses, and offer recreation opportunities.
From Roots to Timber
by The Nature Conservancy 5/2/24
"In understanding the past of enslaved Africans in the longleaf pine forests, we are able to better grasp the importance of conservation, especially in the role of minorities in conservation today. Even though the forests once expanded the use of slavery, The Nature Conservancy, in its restoration efforts, shifts the role of the forests from their troublesome past to a more positive role in protecting the climate." — Emmy Dasanaike.
=====HAS BIG TIMBER FINALLY BROUGHT USGBC TO HEEL?===== by USGBC
Galvanized by this new organization that gives environmentalists and social advocates
a say in how forests should be managed, major North American timber companies, under the umbrella of their trade association, the American Forest and Paper Association (AF&PA), move quickly to form their own system, calling it the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI)
Fish in hot water: decades of logging tied to warmer temperatures in unprotected salmon-bearing streams
by Ainslie Cruickshank 7/3/23 The Narwhal
Globally, fish are feeling the heat from climate change, but in interior B.C. decades of logging in the headwaters of salmon streams has cranked those temperatures even higher, new research shows. As trees are cut down along waterways, small streams are exposed to more direct sunlight, while logging across watersheds can change the way water flows throughout the whole system. The combined effect can leave wild salmon swimming in waters that are warmer than they’d like.
Can Old-Growth Forest Survive a Timber Bias?
I retired in 2002 as deputy chief of the US Forest Service with 35 years of experience, and I was stunned, happily, when President Biden unveiled Executive Order 14072 during his second year in office. On this Earth Day, the future of mature and old-growth forests looked bright. Among the EO’s numerous measures, one stood out to me: “Conserve America’s mature and old-growth forests on federal lands.” I’ve worked with dozens of environmental groups to see how the Forest Service would address this opportunity.
Cutting Carbon With Greener Chainsaws
by The Nature Conservancy 24/2/19
Few environmental issues are more pressing than the protection of our tropical forests. These forests have the highest rates of biodiversity on earth and hold significant carbon stores that are released into the atmosphere when they are converted.
Tillamook and Clatsop State Forests
The rich history of the Tillamook and Clatsop State Forests revolves around abundant fish, natural beauty, clean drinking water, timber harvest, and outdoor recreation. Unfortunately, recent years have seen these lands managed with timber production valued over other social, environmental, and economic outcomes. These forests, which are still recovering from devastating logging and fires, need a balanced management approach that protects all their inherent benefits and provides Oregonians with the Greatest Permanent Value.
A journey through Virginia’s iconic forest habitat.
by The Nature Conservancy 31/8/23
These pinelands should be the characteristic ecosystem one thinks of when they imagine the Southeast. Yet, today, longleaf pine occupies less than 5% of its original 92-million-acre range.
Europe awash with wood from billion-dollar Russian illegal logging scandal
London, 16 December 2020 – More than 100,000 tonnes of lumber linked to one of Russia’s largest illegal logging scandals has entered Europe despite strict import laws and mounting evidence of wrongdoing, an Earthsight investigation can reveal.
Forests & Climate
The creation of a Forest Carbon Reserve would be an essential part of any future Green New Deal. It would result in a substantial reduction in, and avoidance of, carbon emissions from forest degradation and fossil fuel production, would be integral to a broader green jobs program.
Campaign Urges Agencies to Keep Big Trees Standing
by Juliet Grable 6/2/23 Sierra
When Chandra LeGue first toured the Flat Country project, a logging and forest management project planned for the Willamette National Forest in Oregon, US Forest Service reps showed her a stream they planned to restore and a “plantation”—a deliberately planted, uniform stand of trees—that they planned to thin.
News in brief
The national monument east of Porterville contains more than half of the world's sequoia trees. Their huge size, beauty and long life led to a drive to protect them, and President Clinton in 2000 gave them permanent protection by designating 328,000 acres, about one-third of Sequoia National Forest, a national monument under the Antiquities Act.
Sierra Club Founders
John Muir, one of the Sierra Club’s founders, sparked the movement to preserve millions of acres of land from logging and mining, and inspired generations of people to protect nature. The Sierra Club recognizes the importance of Muir’s conservation efforts with regard to designation of national parks, national forests, and rangelands, which prevented hundreds of millions of acres from being privatized and transferred into the hands of white logging, mining, and livestock grazing corporations enabled by 19th century colonization laws like the Timber and Stone Act, Homestead Acts, and Desert Lands Act.
Can barcodes enforce sustainable logging in Liberia?
Liberia, semi-miraculously, is still covered in rainforest, even though at one point in its history, warlord Charles Taylor was more or less giving arms traffickers logging tracts in exchange for weapons. The U.N. eventually noticed this problem and ended up saving the country's forests by putting an embargo on the country's "logs of war.”
President Biden Restores Logging Prohibitions in Tongass National Forest
by Lindsey Botts 29/1/23 Sierra
In one of its most important conservation decisions to date, the Biden administration last week announced that it would ban new logging and road construction across 9.3 million acres of the Tongass National Forest, the largest national forest in the United States. The move repeals a Trump administration rule that gutted protections for the forest and opened up Southeastern Alaska to more logging.
Indigenous people battle squatters and timber poachers in Peru's Amazon
by Lyndsie Bourgon 12/4/19 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
Puerto Maldonado, Peru — On March 14, 2018, an alarm sounded in the ears of Jose Vargas, who was sitting at his desk in this Peruvian Amazon city. Embedded in the amber wood of a cedar tree, a small tracking device developed to spring to life at the whir of a chainsaw or crunching of boots on earth sent an alert via satellite to the offices of the Peruvian Society for Environmental Law (SPDA), where Vargas works as a GIS specialist.
Rain Forest Threats
More than half of Earth’s rain forests have already been lost due to the human demand for wood and arable land. Rain forests that once grew over 14 percent of the land on Earth now cover only about 6 percent. And if current deforestation rates continue, these critical habitats could disappear from the planet completely within the next hundred years.
Congo Basin Forests
Stopping illegal logging and forest exploitation in Central Africa’s threatened tropical rainforest
The vast forest of the Congo Basin is the second-largest tropical rainforest on Earth and serves as the lungs of Africa. It’s an incredibly rich and diverse ecosystem that provides food, freshwater, shelter and medicine for tens of millions of local and Indigenous Peoples and is home to critically endangered wildlife species.
Thresholds for adding degraded tropical forest to the conservation estate
by Robert M. Ewers 17/7/24 nature
Habitat degradation has seemingly contradictory impacts on the biodiversity of tropical forests. Human disturbance of tropical forests has resulted in the same amount of biodiversity loss as outright deforestation6, leading to a widespread view that logged, degraded and regenerating tropical rainforests are depauperate environments relative to primary forest5.
