China Feeds U.S. Demand for Wood as Forests Suffer
Photo by Stephen Toner/Getty Images
From the Chicago Tribune: “The demand for cheap Chinese goods is driving destructive logging around the world, threatening livelihoods and dividing fragile nations.”
Night and day, the timber ships reach this Yangtze River port, one of the world’s busiest clearinghouses for logs from every corner of the globe: Southeast Asia, the Amazon, Russia, the Congo.
Soon, this wood will be yours.
It will be your hardwood floor and your coffee table, your bedroom dresser and your plywood—all stamped with the most successful label of our time: Made in China.
In less than a decade, China has transformed the global timber trade, importing more wood each year than any country in history and quadrupling the amount of wood products it ships around the globe.
And no one is consuming more of it than Americans. U.S. shoppers have become the world’s best customers of low-cost Chinese flooring, furniture and plywood, buying 10 times as much as a decade ago.
You can trace just one log’s journey to the port at Zhangjiagang from 3,000 miles of the Pacific across to Papua New Guinea, which “nearly abandoned logging until China came along.” The article tracks the log to the nation’s remote northwest province of Sanduan, where “millions in timber profits and payments have left children without shoes and schools without plumbing.” Then the log’s trail ends at its origin: a specific patch of forest where “the torn landscape of logging has left a tribal leader unsure [of] where to hunt for food and fearful for the future.” (And this is in addition to landslides due to soil erosion, as well as greenhouse gases from deforestation and the loss of our “carbon sinks,” both of which further contribute to global warming.)
Besides the socio-economic reasons for why we should care about where our wood comes from—and how responsibly it was harvested—is the fact that forests are our planet’s richest stores of biodiversity. The article continues:
Such tropical rain forests cover barely 6 percent of the planet but hold 50 percent of all the known organisms on Earth. Half of the world’s tropical forests have been felled already, leaving researchers to speculate how many species are going extinct before they are discovered.
That prospect makes New Guinea even more of a treasure in the lucrative world of biomedical research. Tropical forests hold unique value for researchers who rely on new genetic ingredients for cures and vaccines. By one count, no less than 40 percent of all prescriptions written in the U.S. are for drugs derived from plants, animals and microorganisms.
Loggers in Papua New Guinea are cutting so fast that experts calculate that the rest of its accessible forests will be cut down within 16 years.
“Those are some of the finest remaining forests in the tropical world,” said American biologist Bruce Beehler, who has made more than 40 research trips to New Guinea.
“If you take just 1 hectare [2 1/2 acres] of it, it probably has thousands of species living there—plants, animals and other life-forms—that haven’t been described by science. So we don’t even know what’s in that box that is being meddled with.”
Related articles:
1. Logging Decimates Africa’s Forests
2. Mail Call: Toxic Wood
3. Bring Your Ever-Lovin’ Own
4. It’s Getting Hot in Here: Act Now
Further resources:
1. Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC certification assures you that your product was made with wood from sustainably managed forests)
2. Sustainable Forestry Initiative
3. Co-op America’s Woodwise program
Venessa said,
December 19, 2006 at 10:28 am
My husband is a forester. This stuff really gets his goat. This is how we get around sustainable forestry in this country.
The Worsted Witch » The I’m Not Bored Anymore Art Jar said,
April 27, 2007 at 11:03 am
[…] I’ve written twice now to the Land of Nod to try and ferret out if its furniture is made with wood from sustainably managed forests. Both times, no response was forthcoming, which is usually corporate code for “No, now go away and leave us alone.” This is a pity because even Land of Nod’s parent company, Crate&Barrel, has dipped its toe into bamboo construction and Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)-certified woods. […]