Tuesday, August 19, 2014

‘Big Green’ Lobby Wants to Cut 2 of 3 Forestry Branches

Pay your protection money. Do the secret handshake. And, kiss the ring. Otherwise, forget having green activists attach their environmental seal of approval to the wood products harvested from your forest. That’s essentially the message organizations such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, Friends of the Earth, and Greenpeace will be in a position to transmit if the U.S. timber industry submits to a monopoly in forest certification, free market economists argue. The “Big Green” lobby—mainly the organizations listed above plus the World Wildlife Fund, Rainforest Action Network, and a few others—wants a relatively new player to assume monopoly control of the market. Today, three share the action: the Sustainable Forest Initiative, seen as the closest to the forest industry of the three, the American Tree Forest System, and the new guys — the Forest Stewardship Council. The concept of forest certification initially gained traction during the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, when it was adopted as part of a “smart growth” strategy known as “sustainable development.” If the Forest Stewardship Council takes over all forest certifications, it would mean higher prices, more jobs lost, and reduced economic output, according to a study last year from George Mason University’s EconoSTATS program...more

No comments: