This article is not intended as a book review, but perhaps it should be. It draws inspiration from a remarkable book by Fred Pearce called “A trillion trees: how we can reforest our world” just published in paperback. Pearce is a real heavyweight in the field of environmental journalism, being the former news editor of New Scientist magazine, writing regularly for national newspapers in the UK, and contributing articles to National Geographic and the Washington Post, amongst many other US publications. He’s a lifetime achievement award winner from the Association of British Science Writers and was voted UK Environment Journalist of the Year in 2001.
With this background, you might expect his latest book about the current condition and future of the world’s forests to be a depressing read. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is notable for its optimism. Pearce in no way underplays the challenge of deforestation, stressing that old growth forests, where they exist, need protection as reservoirs of biodiversity and carbon, and for their direct role in moderating the climate. In the opening section he explains the essential role played by the world’s remaining natural forests to sustain “flying rivers” that deliver rain across the world. But he also emphasises the natural resilience of forests.
The book’s main message is introduced in just one sentence: “In most places, to restore the world’s forests we need to do just two things: to ensure that ownership of the world’s forests is vested in the people who live in them, and to give nature room”. Pearce does not believe that the answer to the world’s forest problems lies in a big planet-wide project to plant more trees. In fact he reckons this “would be bad for people, bad for forests and in the end bad for the planet too”. He also thinks it is unnecessary: “We don’t have to do the planting. We shouldn’t do the planting. Nature will mostly do it for us. And she will do it better. If we stand back and give them room, forests will regrow”.
Pearce refers to the eastern US in making his case. He observes, for example, that “little more than a century ago, there were virtually no trees in Pennsylvania. Half a century of clear-cutting to supply everything from ships’ masts to charcoal, and construction materials to tannin, had left one of the founding states of the US arboreally bankrupt. Today, there are seven million hectares of forest in the state – not all of them native, but most of them in rude health”. More widely, Pearce quotes Karen Holl of the University of California, Santa Cruz: “The entire eastern United States was deforested 200 years ago, much of that has come back without actively planting trees.”
Pearce explains that reforestation in the US is partly because forest land increasingly has been seen as valuable real estate, and worthy of protection for environmental reasons. However it has been driven “at least as much by declining demand for land to grow crops”. Pearce notes that in 30 years, arable land in the US has declined by almost a fifth. Marginal agricultural land has been taken out of production in the eastern states as more efficient agriculture has expanded, particularly on the US plains further west.
This narrative will be familiar to many involved in the hardwood trade – not least because it is frequently told by AHEC – but perhaps less well known is that the eastern US is not an isolated example. In fact, it may be closer to the norm. Using a wide range of examples, drawn from his 30-year experience of travelling and speaking to forestry folk in all corners of the globe, and much recent academic research into “environmental history”, Pearce shows that forests all over the world have been declining, and recovering, for generations.
The US example may be only the most familiar for reasons of timing as the forests there are just now reaching maturity. Elsewhere, agricultural land is in the early phases of abandonment and natural forest re-establishment has only just begun. Pearce notes that in a large swathe of Europe, from Poland and Slovakia to Romania and Ukraine, and extending into western Russia “economic dislocation and the withdrawal of socialist support for farming led to an exodus from rural communities, especially from remote or mountainous areas”. At the same time rural populations are ageing and young people are migrating to cities. According to Pearce, “even as loggers have ripped up old-growth forests in the mountains, new growth has been returning” and that “in most places, as the fields are abandoned, scrub and trees return”.
While most prevalent in eastern Europe, the same process is under way in northern Portugal and across the border into western Spain where big agricultural areas have been deserted. Pearce quotes work by Francesco Cherubini of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology showing that in the past 30 years Europe has seen a net loss of fields equivalent to an area larger than Switzerland and four times more could go by 2040.
The story Pearce weaves around tropical forests is even more startling. He refers to an accumulating body of evidence from the Amazon, South-east Asia and Central Africa to show that large areas of what is today seemingly “pristine” rainforest were in precolonial times a landscape dominated by human activity and are, to a large extent, “rewilded”. And while forest conversion continues at an alarming rate in many parts of the tropics today, vast areas are naturally regenerating. Drawing on recent analysis of global satellite imagery by the University of Arkansas, Pearce notes that “only about a quarter of forest loss so far this century is obviously permanent, with the land taken for commercial agriculture, mining, infrastructure or urban expansion. The remaining three quarters divide equally between forests consumed by wildfires, cleared temporarily for shifting cultivation and logged but with clear evidence of regrowth”.
Pearce suggests these naturally regenerating areas face new threats because they are below the radar, often classified by governments as “degraded”, so not qualifying for protection and more likely to be cleared for plantations of oil palm or acacia. Much of the area is also outside forest reserves and on farms. He argues that these areas which may look like degraded or abandoned land, are “actually the cutting edge of a global reforestation” and that the “trick for policymakers is to find ways of protecting and making good use of those new forests”.
For Pearce, a large part of this “trick” lies in giving local people control over these forests. He provides numerous real world examples to show the inherent advantages of vesting ownership rights with local people and communities. He references a review of 130 local studies in 14 countries, conducted by the World Resources Institute (WRI), a Washington think tank, and the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), which found that community-owned forests suffer less deforestation and fewer fires, while storing more carbon than other forests. He notes in the closing chapter that “we used to be told that forests have to be saved from the people who live in them, but the opposite is usually the case”.
Pearce stops short of exploring the implications of this new frontier of natural reafforestation for the forest products sector, understandably as that is not his focus. But for an insight into those implications, it is worth returning to the eastern US as the one area of the world where a vast naturally regenerated hardwood forest, in the hands of millions of small family owners, is just reaching maturity. The American hardwood sector demonstrates very clearly how sustainable use of this type of forest helps to conserve biodiversity, forest carbon stocks and other environmental values, while also providing a reliable supplementary source of income for non-industrial forest owners.
The US hardwood sector also shows that this form of sustainable use is not inevitable. Indeed there are persistent threats to the resource from outside the sector, not least the pressure to convert for housing and other urban development, and mounting threats from pests and wildfires. Ensuring landowners have secure property rights goes some distance to ensuring forest remain standing, but these owners also need to be nudged in the direction of forest conservation through sensitive application of property taxes, provision of forest extension services for smallholders, and work to build markets for sustainable wood products and other ecosystem services from standing forests. Also essential is good quality data on forest condition, extent, and species composition, combining data from satellite imagery and regular assessment of on-ground sample plots, together with regular owner surveys.
To ensure sustainable wood production and use, these naturally regenerating forests distributed across numerous landholdings require processing facilities, supply chains and markets able to handle a wide range of log sizes and grades, and a high diversity of species with varying technical qualities, colours, and grains. This is a very different proposition from plantations where large vertically integrated, often capitally intensive, industries can be built drawing on large volumes of largely undifferentiated wood fibre. The US hardwood sector, which has evolved over generations to handle this more complex and fragmented resource, comprises a distributed network of several thousand sawmills, mainly small and often family owned, each typically sourcing from a wood basket of thousands of forest owners within a 25 to 100 mile radius.
Alongside this network of small sawmills, a free and large internal market for wood products in the US plays an important role to facilitate the aggregation, sorting, and filtering of raw materials from a large number of smallholders and small companies, allowing efficient delivery of large commercial volumes of precisely graded materials into a wide range of end use sectors and for export.
The structure of the resource and industry is strongly reflected in the marketing activities of AHEC which celebrate the diversity of US hardwoods and focus heavily on encouraging use of those species and grades that are still underutilised and underappreciated. This is well illustrated by AHEC’s “Guide to Sustainable American Hardwoods” which covers 18 commercial hardwoods providing comprehensive data on their technical properties, forest distribution and availability, alongside case studies of their use in a wide range of applications.
Making good use of these new forests also requires new thinking around certification. Experience in the US hardwood sector has shown that there can be insurmountable technical barriers to FSC and PEFC certification systems – that impose a long list of technical requirements on individual “forest management units” – when forest ownership is highly fragmented. Less than 2% of private non-industrial forest area and much less than 1% of ownerships are certified in the US.
To overcome these challenges, new forms of risk-based certification at jurisdictional level are required that impose no additional costs on individual smallholders, and no unnecessary constraints or excessive transaction costs on trade in wood from low risk regions. This year, AHEC has initiated an ambitious programme of work on this issue, building on an accumulating wealth of experience of jurisdictional risk assessment and operator due diligence in the US and elsewhere. The intent is to develop an innovative certification framework for hardwood from low intensity nonindustrial forest operations based on high quality forest inventory data, independent expert analysis of forest condition, carbon content and governance, and that leverages new technologies such as Stable Isotope Ratio Analysis (SIRA) to guarantee wood provenance.
The hardwood industry is too often dismissed as rather quaint and outmoded. The future, we are led to believe, lies in large “modern” industries built on vast uniform intensively managed industrial plantations established in place of “degraded” natural forests. Pearce’s book, and the insights from the eastern US, suggest that the real “cutting edge” may in fact lie in the hardwood sector, with its high dependence on smallholders and low-intensity harvesting of diverse natural forests, supported by networks of smaller wood processors, traders, and manufacturers, and making most efficient use of the wood that regenerates naturally.
It’s a matter of taste, but for me it’s a more inspiring vision of the future.
