WWF supports “responsible long-term forest management”

This is from a June 18 press release from the WWF (World Wildlife Fund):

“The focus of efforts should shift from combating forest fires as they arise to preventing them from existing, through responsible long-term forest management. Responsible forest management is more effective and financially more efficient than financing the giant firefighting mechanisms that are employed every year.”

The press release was about recent fires in Portugal.

Aside from The Nature Conservancy, what environmental groups have called for “responsible long-term forest management”?

19 thoughts on “WWF supports “responsible long-term forest management””

  1. It’s a start, hopefully more will follow, although I have my doubts. I believe that if the issue was truly about forest health, the idea of long term management would be a no brainier. The problem is that much of Environmental activism is fronted as “save the forest”, but it is really anti-capitalism, anti-corporation, anti-establishment. For 25+ years we in the PNW have been “managing” under the NWFP and the results are right there for everyone to see on the ground. Species aren’t being saved, “fire resilient” old growth is now burning up, and fuel loadings are still rising. Yes we have climate change, yes we have changed fire suppression tactics, but the fuel build up is the real cause of the larger and larger fires. Spending Billions on fire suppression and Millions on fuel reduction projects, that aren’t followed up on, is not working.
    The real irony is the amount of deforestation taking place in the State’s that have legalized pot. A lot of this deforestation is being done by the very people I’ve had the pleasure of seeing at the protests and meetings stating their “displeasure” with commercial harvesting. I’ve personally visited hundreds of these sites in the last few years and none of them have been replanted with seedlings………..

    Reply
  2. Sierra club is a long term member of the Forest Stewardship Council and supports their vision of responsible forestry. It is always a work in progress.

    Reply
    • ‘Aside from The Nature Conservancy, what environmental groups have called for “responsible long-term forest management”?’

      Thanks Steve,
      “(R)esponsible long-term forest management” is standard Free Market Environmentalist (FME) coinage couched in now-stereotypical foundation PR-speak, notable for its Rorschach/ Edward Bernays’ feel-good, psycho-linguistic ambiguities which, like current legislative parlance, are given titles reliably intending to accomplish the antithesis of the generally accepted meaning of the Act’s title words and phrasing.

      This of course includes standard neoliberal foundation phraseology such as “win-win”, “collaborative”, “market-based solutions,” “Stewardship and Restoration,” PERC’s “enviropreneurial”-speak and many other billionaire foundation-meme-speak significantly powered by grant cycle money streams dominating “charitable” funding of the sell-out “greens.” They are noted for resorting to the funder’s “low-hanging fruit” (eg. “donor-advised, restricted grant funding with “deliverables” — amounts, to which the unsuspecting Board of Directors may be held personally accountable.)

      The FME list of sell-out greens is long, (but which of course as you note,) include The Nature Conservancy (TNC). Then there is the Environmental Defense Fund(EDF), Conservation International(CI), Sierra Club(SC), The Wilderness Society(TWS), Trout Unlimited(TU), Natural Resource Development Council(NRDC), the Cato Institute’s, Property and Environment Research Center (formerly, Political Economy Research Center– (PERC), EcoTrust, and many, many others.
      They are actually easy to spot once one masters their Orwellian crypto-capitalist PR-newspeak, then researches the most recently admitted annual salaries of the so-called, green executive directors and CEOs:

      EDF: $545,247.00 Frederic D. Krupp President
      NRDC: $440,198.00 Frances Beinecke (former president??) + Rhea Suh (current president) ?? $53,798 =
      $493,996.00
      TNC: $696,134.00 Mark R. Tercek President, CEO
      Sierra Club: $198,920 Peter Martin Executive Director
      Conservation Int.: $547,250.00 Peter Seligmann, Chair, CEO
      PERC: $152,500.00 Lawrence Reed Watson Executive Director (??) + $135,850 Terry L. Anderson Former President (??) =
      $288,350.00,
      Ecotrust: $186,614 Spencer Beebe, President
      TWS: $327,548 James Williams, President
      TU: (ah, TU… well, not so easy because they now understand how to avoid Charity Navigator’s rating system — which pretends all their multitudinous individual chapters are autonomous, independent entities — — however, I do have Charity Navigator’s explanation: “This organization is not eligible to be rated by Charity Navigator because it does not meet our criteria of having at least $1 million in revenues.”

      Public records indicate otherwise.
      The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation grant funding history has over $7 million “invested” in TU for the purposes of selling-out on core environmental principles in the state of Alaska alone. And remember: foundations are tax havens for the wealthiest 1% of Americans, such as Gordon and Betty Moore — who have personal assets of, $5 billion or more, an amount roughly equal or greater to their foundations. The wealthiest 1% of Americans, of course, are not coincidentally, massively invested in environmentally destructive industries and the fiduciary obligations to the maintenance of Business As Usual.)

      (FSC, btw, has been a long-exposed, industry-approved, classic bait and switch greenwashing confidence trick riding the foundation trustee coattails’ funding streams. According to Wiki:
      “Since it was founded, FSC has been criticized for a range of different reasons. In recent years, a number of well-known NGOs and environmental organizations have canceled their support for FSC.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_Stewardship_Council
      However, obviously not including the Sierra Club or any of the aforementioned eNGOs.)

      Reply
      • David, regarding TNC, here’s a bit from an interview in The Forestry Source, Feb. 2016, “The Nature Conservancy Aims to Increase the Scale of Forest Restoration: A conversation with Chris Topik, director of TNC’s Restoring America’s Forests program,” which is online here:

        http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/saf/forestrysource_201602/index.php#/1/OnePage

        Excerpt:

        Q: Many people view the Nature Conservancy as a so-called environmental group, and yet the conservancy supports active forest management. Does that put your organization in a unique position?

        A: I don’t think so. We’re a conservation group. My understanding of conservation is that it’s not preservation, it’s not about not cutting timber. In fact, if you want to conserve a forest in a pyogenic ecosystem, you’re going to have to do something, otherwise it’s not conserved. So I don’t think we’re in a unique position. There are other conservation groups that may be seen as more left-leaning but that also agree on the need for forest treatments, although they may be more restrictive in their goals. But there are people out there who just have no trust in entities that want to cut trees, and there are some people who just can’t stand the thought of cutting trees. We wholeheartedly disagree.

        Reply
    • So, where is that support for allowing National Forests to be certified? Which are some of the most regulated forests in the world?

      Reply
    • Commercial Logging on Federal Lands
      The Sierra Club support[s] protecting all federal publicly owned lands in the United States and advocate[s] an end to all commercial logging on these lands. Adopted in the Sierra Club Annual Election, April 20, 1996

      Clear enough? Not so fast. Read this convoluted “clarification” of the long-standing Sierra Club policy. It’s entitled “Guidelines on Implementation of the Sierra Club’s Policy Advocating an End to Commercial Logging on Federal Public Lands (ECL Policy)” and you can find it at https://www.sierraclub.org/sites/www.sierraclub.org/files/forest.pdf.

      Additional “clarification ” can be found at :
      http://www.sierraclub.org/policy/energy-policies/biomass-guidance.

      While these documents are masterpieces of obfuscation, is it possible hat the Club has seen the error of its ways?

      Reply
      • My post of July 29 was rather cryptic. Here’s an extract from a one of the club’s more recent policy statements that will demonstrate the extent of the club’s policy shift.

        From the “Sierra Club Guidelines for Activists Engaging in Proposals for Forest Biomass Energy Plants Sourcing Biomass from Public Lands”

        “The Sierra Club may support the renovation of existing biomass plants or the construction of new plants and subsequent operation if they are properly scaled and designed to accept shrubs, branches, tops of trees, and small diameter trees that are the byproduct of ecological restoration. Additional forest biomass may be supplied in cutting shrubs and trees in the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI), and creating defensible space around buildings. Each proposed forest biomass plant should be evaluated individually to fully assess a number of factors (such as noise, air quality, public health and safety, biological resources, etc.) to decide if Sierra Club support is merited.”

        Reply
  3. Larry hit a key point that is ignored by every Enviormental Group I’ve met with. Economically viable! The idea that there can be private infrastructure to support forest management, that isn’t economically viable is unrealistic.
    The reality is infrastructure is being driven out and/or scaled down to operate off of privately owned forest lands without a reliance on federal lands. The result is a diminishing interest in forest health projects and a diminishing return to the agency.

    You now have companies whose sole purpose is to mediate – oops I mean collaborate – and manage projects, that require millions in subsidies and a net loss to both the agency and local counties. BUT the mediator makes hundreds of thousands, the logging companies still manage a profit, mills offer a market rate with no premium for logs and it’s touted as “success”.
    This is an unsustainable model that is growing like a pyramid scam, first in will make millions but most, including the public will lose. Yet this method of business has environmental and tribal support…….

    Reply
  4. Howdy folks. I tried not to look at the computer very much this past weekend. However, I did notice that 7 comments written and posted after David Beebe’s comment above were actually approved and made visible on this blog before David’s comment. Perhaps it was just an oversight that 7 comments written after David’s were approved before his. However, perhaps at least one, or a couple of the moderators, really aren’t being very fair. Please knock that off. I have approved thousand of comments on this blog over the years, even all the comments I disagree with. Hopefully all moderators will continue to do the same. Thanks.

    Reply
  5. Here’s something recent from the National Wildlife Federation on their support of restoration to prevent wildfires: http://www.nwf.org/News-and-Magazines/National-Wildlife/Animals/Archives/2017/Scorched-Earth.aspx

    “Forest ecologists also suggest thinning out overcrowded woodlands by cutting small-diameter trees and allowing larger ones to grow” (citing the Arizona Four Forest Restoration Initiative as an example).
    It’s from their general purpose magazine, so it glosses over some things that are important. I agree with the author’s statement that, “It can be difficult to generalize about the impact of fire on wildlife because each blaze and ecosystem varies.” But then he does that by implying that lynx and spotted owls are included in a generalization about “traditional, low-intensity fires.” The math for species that depend on areas that don’t “traditionally” burn at low intensity is more complicated than this article and policy suggest, and I suspect what NWF would consider “responsible long-term forest management” to be different there (including recognizing that mechanical treatments may have adverse effects similar to wildfire).

    Reply

Leave a Reply to Forester 353 Cancel reply