Between Science and Politics Lies the Environment.
“The scaler pulled out that stupid cheat stick of his and said the log had only half of what I knew it has.”
For more information on scaling, see FSH 2409.11, the National Forest Log Scaling Handbook
… or very silly if you think about it.
One of the blogs over at EcoFriendlyDaily.com recommends “Creating a Tree-Free Home.” “Tree-free” did not turn out to be as onerous as I thought it would be:
“Tree-free means reducing or eliminating paper products in the house. There are a million places we use paper everyday, from sticky notes to disposable plates. Just spend a day counting how many wood-based products you use and you’ll see; it’s everywhere, and most of the time it’s unnecessary.”
The post recommends replacing paper plates, paper napkins, paper towels with cotton substitutes. It’s the disposable diaper versus the cloth diaper dilemma. Arguing whether the use of water, energy, and detergents to clean soiled cloth is preferable to paper is beyond my capabilities.
But then the post says…
For instance, “Toilet paper with a high post-consumer content (at least 80%) is a healthy medium too. No one wants to get rid of their toilet paper, but by using unbleached, recycled paper you’re helping to keep trees standing. You can also find hemp paper or paper from alternative sources…”
What’s with toilet paper? TP seems to be the latest forest product to be squeezed.
I agree that bleaching (or perfume, for that matter) doesn’t add to TP’s overall function and buying toilet paper with recycled paper is fine. But is it really environmentally preferable to switch from wood to substitutes to make paper?
Paper can be produced from most any woody material. Yet, using substitutes, such as hemp, bagasse, straw, or kenaf, to make paper may be less environmentally friendly than wood, unless it’s the leftovers. As Dekker-Robertson and Libby point out, “It would be erroneous to believe that a plantation of sugar cane, or kenaf, or any annual crop is as environmentally friendly as a plantation of trees. Tree plantations are more biodiverse, even though such plantations may be less complex than a ‘wild’ stand.”
For every complex environmental problem there is a solution that is elegant, simple, and wrong.
We in the stands at Humboldt State University Lumberjack football games yelled, “Dig in Green Chain, dig in” whenever the ‘Jacks were on defense. At least that’s what we did during the ’70s, when I majored in Forest Management at HSU.
Besides being the rallying cry for defense, the green chain referred to the lumber industry term I posted on here. I had a number of friends who pulled green chain during that time, sorting green lumber just out from trimming and edging is a grueling workout. The Green Chain also refers to a movie out of Canada by Mark Leiren-Young. He tells me the movie should be available on DVD here in the US in just over a month.
I love the movie’s tag line, “nothing is ever clear cut.” Wish I’d used it as the tag line for this blog.
We in the stands at Humboldt State University Lumberjack football games yelled, “Dig in Green Chain, dig in” whenever the ‘Jacks were on defense. At least that’s what we did during the ’70s, when I majored in Forest Management at HSU.
Besides being the rallying cry for defense, the green chain referred to the lumber industry term I posted on here. I had a number of friends who pulled green chain during that time, sorting green lumber just out from trimming and edging is a grueling workout. The Green Chain also refers to a movie out of Canada by Mark Leiren-Young. He tells me the movie should be available on DVD here in the US in just over a month.
I love the movie’s tag line, “nothing is ever clear cut.” Wish I’d used it as the tag line for this blog.
Peg Fong from the EcoGeek blog asks “Which is worse? Hummers or toilet paper?” She cites a February 25, 2009 New York Times article, Mr. Whipple Left It Out: Soft Is Rough on Forests. According to the Times’ article, “[F]luffiness comes at a price: millions of trees harvested in North America and in Latin American countries, including some percentage of trees from rare old-growth forests in Canada.” Adding, “Greenpeace, the international conservation organization, contends that Kimberly Clark, the maker of two popular brands, Cottonelle and Scott, has gotten as much as 22 percent of its pulp from producers who cut trees in Canadian boreal forests where some trees are 200 years old.”
EcoGeek says,
So how bad is our toilet paper habit, really? The product that we use for less than three seconds extracts a larger ecological consequence than driving Hummers, according to Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the NRDC. More than 98% of all toilet paper sold here comes from virgin wood. The NRDC’s position is that no forest of any kind should be used to make toilet paper and Hershkowitz wants to see toilet paper go the way of incandescent light bulbs — out of the mainstream.
“No forest of any kind should be used to make toilet paper,” said Dr. Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist and waste expert with the Natural Resource Defense Council. “People just don’t understand that softness equals ecological destruction.”
“Softness equals ecological destruction.” Great sound bite. Such statements give the impression that old-growth trees are being cut down willy-nilly and then masticated down to pulp. It’s not. “[M]illions of trees harvested…” Uh huh…there are trees and then there are trees. Millions of itty-bitty, eensy-beensy trees perhaps.
Co-founder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, now of GreenSpirit points out where we get our wood for paper:
15 percent of the wood harvested is used to manufacture pulp and paper mainly for printing, packaging, and sanitary purposes. Fully half of this wood is derived from the wastes from the sawmills which produce the solid wood products for building. Most of the remaining supply is from tree plantations many of which are established on land that was previously cleared for agriculture. So even if we did stop using wood to make pulp and paper it would not have the effect of ‘saving’ many forests.
He further points out about Canada’s forests:
Canada retains 92 percent of its original forest and has more protected area and third-party certified forest than any country in the world. Only one-quarter of Canada’s forests are managed for commercial use, and only one-half of one percent are harvested annually, including the boreal.
Look, I’m for recycling paper, really, but do it because you want to save money. Not to save the world.
If we want to lower CO2 emissions and deforestation, then we need to equip much of the Earth’s poor with propane or kerosene stoves. Burning carbon products produces carbon dioxide, a Green House Gas; dihydrous oxide, water; and assorted particulate and other stuff. Wood has 10 atoms carbons for 1 atom of hydrogen. Everyday 6.5 billion people get up and many of them start wood fires for cooking and/or heating. Oil (propane or kerosene) has 1 carbon for 2 hydrogen. By switching from wood to oil-based fuel cooking stoves, the amount of CO2 released drops.
Energy content of wood fuel (air dry, 20% moisture) = 15 GJ/t (6,400 Btu/lb) -approximate source – http://bioenergy.ornl.gov
Energy content of gasoline = 43.5 GJ/t (LHV); 47.3 GJ/t (HHV) source – http://bioenergy.ornl.gov
Therefore, gasoline seems to be 3-4 times as efficient as wood (oak has higher energy content per weight). So, on the face of it, if we were to change everyone over to gas fired from wood fires, we could put 1/40 the CO2 into the air from cooking. (and lower deforestation from wood poaching) It’s perhaps a 95% reduction. Not too shabby.
One more thing, trees (and their products) still sequester carbon after they are harvested. The wood studs in my house still have their carbon component. My wooden tables that are close to a century old still have the carbon they had the day the tree was cut. Paper is simply wood (carbon) with the lignons removed. The carbon doesn’t evaporate the moment a tree comes down.
Read an opinion piece on the subject in the Vancouver Sun.
Interesting 60-Second Science about how the “Old Energy Source Wood Be New Alternative.” The money quote:
“If chopping down forests for fuel doesn’t sound like the greenest solution to our energy needs, the scientists note that we’d have to figure out how to manage our woodsheds sustainably, to avoid slashing and burning our way to a toasty home and a bare Earth. But trees are renewable. They’re cheaper than fossil fuels. And they provide more shade than offshore windmills.”
Indeed, “But I’m worried about the effect on global warming,” you may say.
According to the non-profit Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), biomass [e.g. wood] is not only a renewable energy source but a carbon neutral one as well, because the energy it contains comes from the sun. When plant matter is burned, it releases the sun’s energy originally captured through photosynthesis. “In this way, biomass functions as a sort of natural battery for storing solar energy,” reports UCS. As long as biomass is produced sustainably—with only as much grown as is used—the “battery” lasts indefinitely. [source: Scientific American, “Biomass: Can Renewable Power Grow on Trees?“]
The assembly line where (primarily) men pull green lumber off the conveyor and stack into piles for drying. Each puller will have a given size and quality assigned to him for removal from the green chain. The work is physically demanding because green lumber weighs much more than the dried version.
According to US Forest Service (1919) Technical Note B15 Average weights of various species of wood, a cubic foot of conifer (pines, firs, larches, cedars, etc.) will weigh between 25-55 pounds. An 8 foot 2×4 contains around 5 cubic-feet. There are 7.48 gallons per cubic-foot. So an 8 foot 2×4 could hold 35 gallons. If the two by four is only one-quarter water, thats about seventy pounds (plus the weight of the wood). This puts an 8 foot 2″x4″ piece of wood between 125 and 275 pounds.
I put in a full day pulling green chain.
See a mill and real green chain here:
The Green Chain is also the name of a Canadian movie. I love the tag line and wished I’d used it first, “Nothing is ever clear cut.”
The assembly line where (primarily) men pull green lumber off the conveyor and stack into piles for drying. Each puller will have a given size and quality assigned to him for removal from the green chain. The work is physically demanding because green lumber weighs much more than the dried version.
According to US Forest Service (1919) Technical Note B15 Average weights of various species of wood, a cubic foot of conifer (pines, firs, larches, cedars, etc.) will weigh between 25-55 pounds. An 8 foot 2×4 contains around 5 cubic-feet. There are 7.48 gallons per cubic-foot. So an 8 foot 2×4 could hold 35 gallons. If the two by four is only one-quarter water, thats about seventy pounds (plus the weight of the wood). This puts an 8 foot 2″x4″ piece of wood between 125 and 275 pounds.
I put in a full day pulling green chain.
See a mill and real green chain here:
The Green Chain is also the name of a Canadian movie. I love the tag line and wished I’d used it first, “Nothing is ever clear cut.”
People have used the properties of wood for music for plenty of millennia: percussion, acoustic, wind. Now electronic has merged with organic.
Joel Scilley, the owner of Audiowood has a goal “to sell products with eco-credentials including low-power and efficient amplifiers, and products made from sustainable and recycled materials.” The turntables “usually use the Origin Live DC motor controller and quality bearings.” Scilley with a PhD in media studies from Pitt wants to be “America’s premier builder of burlwood turntables!”
See more cool Audiowood turntables here.
If you are in the Bay Area today (Saturday, March 14, 4-8 p.m.), he’s having an Opening Reception at FiveTen Studio831 Broadway
Oakland, CA 94607. phone – (510) 451-9900
That’s the number of jobs the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) said that investing in sustainable forest management could create worldwide.
According to a recent study by the International Labour Organization, unemployment worldwide could increase from 179 million in 2007 to 198 million in 2009, it could go as high as 230 million.
“As more jobs are lost due to the current economic downturn, sustainable forest management could become a means of creating millions of green jobs, thus helping to reduce poverty and improve the environment,” says Jan Heino, Assistant Director-General of FAO’s Forestry Department.
Download Jan Heino’s message of how a greener economy will help everyone.
The main thrust of World Forest Week, March 16-20 in Rome will be meeting society’s changing demand for forest-derived goods and services through improved forest management. Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland, the UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy on Climate Change, will deliver the keynote address, stressing the critical role of forests in society’s response to the challenges posed by climate change. The meeting takes place against the backdrop of an unprecedented global economic crisis. A crisis, which has also severely affected the forest sector.
Improved forest management and new tree planting could significantly reduce the downward trend in forest cover in many countries, thereby reducing carbon emissions from land-use change. According to the FAO, improved forest management has the potential to “have a larger positive impact on climate change than any other initiative currently being planned or considered by world leaders.”
Willie Smits has done just that shown the way to transitioning back to forests in Indonesia. His organization, Borneo Orangutan Survival (BOS) International, has created 3,000 jobs through reforestation at Samboja Lestari in East Kalimantan. His district had been deforested because of the desire for palm oil to make bio-diesel (download a BOS report on the threat from palm oil). Due to Smits, it’s no longer the poorest district and biodiversity has increased.
Watch him speak in this TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) video. Be careful, if you keep your computer in your lap hold onto it because you will want to give him a standing ovation at the end.
Nullius in Verba 