A foresters work is never done

• To: forest@nic.funet.fi
• Subject: A foresters work is never done
• From: zooey@mailbox.syr.edu (james f. palmer)
• Date: Wed, 30 Nov 1994 14:03:10 +0200
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 I thought I would pass this along from another list:

The following is an excerpt from the December issue of Harpers Magazine, in
turn from the September issue of the trade magazine Timber Processing.
This is what we are up against, folks.

YOUR WORK IS VALUABLE TO GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT
by Carl Jansen

As a participant in the forest-products industry, have you ever reflected
on how your efforts help to improve the global environment?

Almost all scientists agree that we are experiencing global warming due
to increased amounts of carbon dioxide in the air.  We in the forest-products
industry have a significant impact in reducing that carbon dioxide.  Consider
how trees grow:  they grow by absorbing carbon dioxide.  When wood is
burned as fuel, that carbon dioxide is returned to the atmosphere.

We in the timber industry are carbon stewards; we convert trees into building
materials and other products that last a very, very long time.  Have you ever
considered the fact that by producing buildings or furniture we are actually
keeping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere?  When we convert a 70 year-
old tree into a building product we are extending the carbon-preservation time
frame significantly.  The resulting buildings could be with us for centuries:
in

Europe there are a number of well-preserved wooden structures that are more
than 800 years old, and in New England there are houses and commercial
buildings that are more than 400 years old.  In the US and Canada, we have
built over 110 million housing units, amounting to an estimated 880 million
tons of trapped carbon.

Moreover, without proper management, forests are consumed by forest fires,
which release significant volumes of carbon dioxide back into the air.  Only
by trapping carbon dioxide in a wood product can we as a society prevent the
release of that carbon dioxide.

We in the forest-products industry should be very proud of our mission:
planting trees and converting mature timber into products for relatively
permanent use by consumers around the world.  In your conversations
with people outside our industry, try to incorporate these issues in order
to show how important our industry is to the global environmental picture.

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