The Post-Gazette's Patricia Sheridan has written a story about sustainable forestry--a certification process for landowners who pass stringent environmental inspections. It's a good thing to write about. Only this story relies pretty heavily on an example from Peru. Thing is, she could have used an example much closer to home:
Kane Hardwood, a Collins company, manages the 126,000-acre FSC-certified Collins Pennsylvania Forest. These lands sit in the center of the finest black cherry hardwood forests in the world, the Allegheny Mountains of northern Pennsylvania. Mixed with red and white oak, soft and hard maple, ash, beech, yellow poplar, and basswood, this thriving hardwood forest is the result of the Collins family’s commitment to sustainable forestry, ecosystem management, and natural biodiversity.
Let the land dictate the practices, not the mill’s need for logs. Be patient, be prudent, be good stewards of the whole forest—the watersheds, the birds, the plants, the animals.
Lots of corporate landowners talk that way. But Collins Pine actually received the certification, which is neither easy nor cheap.
The larger question surrounding sustainable forestry, of course, involves money. There are cheaper ways to manage timber. The idea (or the hope) is that environmentally conscious consumers will pay more for wood certified as sustainable.
Would you? Would you pay $1000 for a dining room table is an identical, nonsustainably procured one is on display right next to it and costs $100 less?
What about if you are building a house and that extra $100 becomes an extra few thousand?
We shall see if American are as interested in the environment as they say they are.
As for Collins Pine, it is worth noting that all of its land is open to public recreation such as hunting, camping and fishing. And the company has long donated proceeds from the management of one huge tract of forest to Methodist missionaries.
It's an interesting company, to say the least.
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