Once again the environmentalists have seized the limelight and launched an attack on the hardwood industry unsupported by facts, figures or anything else resembling evidence.
This time it was Will Travers of the Born Free Foundation. In an interview on BBC Breakfast TV on May 22 he declaimed that the only sure fire way that consumers can guarantee their hardwood products are based on timber from sustainable sources is if they carry the FSC label. The obvious inference was that anything else was sullied, almost inevitably derived from forests being razed to the ground by ruthless loggers bent on nothing but profit and caring nothing for the environment.
What made the situation worse was that the interviewer Jeremy Bowen seemed to endorse what Travers was saying with the suggestion that to follow his advice, and select only FSC-labelled goods, was one thing we could all do to save the forests.
The argument was specious and misguided. As Michael Buckley of the World Hardwoods Consultancy said, it effectively meant that only timber from around 1% of the world’s forests – which is the FSC-certified total so far – can be regarded as ‘sustainable’. No mention was made of other certification schemes around the world, the PEFC in Europe, SFI in the US, the CSA scheme in Canada and Malaysia’s burgeoning sustainable management programme, to name but a few. Nor was anything said of the fact that tree cover in many countries is on the increase and that reforestation is increasingly taking into account biodiversity.
But of course, there’s only so much point in the industry and those of us affiliated to it fuming and complaining about this sort of misinformation amongst ourselves. We need to get to those breakfast TV sofas first and take on the likes of Mr Travers face to face. Otherwise there’s a danger we’re just going to be reacting after the event, by which time the media and the public may have moved on to the next one.
