Wood is a renewable, energy efficient resource, which can be managed on a sustainable basis without depletion. Genetic resources and forests (including forest plantations) which provide wood and non-wood forest products are renewable, if adequately managed: they can be used without ever being used up (Ledig 1986).
Some of those in the environmental community who are opposed to cutting trees and harvesting wood from forests, and the marketing departments of the steel, aluminum, cement, brick and plastics industries, have made common cause in urging people to substitute some or all of these latter products in uses previously satisfied by wood. Sutton (1999,2000) has made the case that all of these products require substantial multiples of the energy required for wood to satisfy the same needs. Koch (1992) made similar observations, and he and others have extended the comparisons to toxins produced and released into the environment during extraction and manufacture of wood and these other products, and to the relative amounts of fossil carbon and CO2 added to Earth’s greenhouse gases by each. In all comparisons, wood is the preferred alternative on environmental grounds, although some of the (non-renewable) alternatives are currently less-expensive than wood in simple monetary terms. As energy costs increase, and proper accounting of the monetary costs of toxins and greenhouse-gas release becomes more common, then it is likely that wood will increasingly be substituted for these other products, not the reverse as now urged.
When the argument is made to substitute agronomic crops such as kenaf and hemp for wood in products such as paper, one should consider the total areas needed to produce a given amount of fiber, and the relative amounts of erosion from agricultural fields versus forest plantation sites, the relative amounts of pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers used in these two systems, and the relative amounts of associated biological diversity sustained by them. When these comparisons are carefully made, most arguments for substituting agronomic crops for wood fail, and wood is the preferred alternative on environmental grounds. Exceptions might be the use of bagasse and other such agricultural byproducts for papermaking, rather than treating them as unwanted waste.
Indigenous forests are important as major reservoirs of Earth’s biological diversity. There are compelling practical, scientific and ethical reasons for maintaining the majority of that biological diversity. In addition, indigenous forests are important to many people for their aesthetic and spiritual values. Although the main cause of deforestation is the conversion of forests to agricultural land-use, development of alternative sources of wood and non-wood supply can considerably assist to reduce the pressures on indigenous forest resources where demand for these products is high.
In the New Zealand and Colombia examples cited in Section 3, where forest plantation-grown wood was substituted for wood that otherwise would have come from indigenous forests, allowed the indigenous forests to be reserved for other purposes and values. If Sutton’s predictions are even approximately correct (Sutton 1999, 2000), all of Earth’s forests will soon be under increasing pressure, as the human population and its per-capita use of wood both increase. If Sutton’s timeline on these events is even approximately correct, then very large areas of new forest plantations should be established soon, and the productivity of those areas now in forest plantations should be increased. The best way to defend some or even all of Earth’s remaining indigenous forests is to supply civilization’s needs for wood from efficient and productive forest plantations.
