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COPYRIGHT 2002 Journal of Business Administration
INTRODUCTION
The management of forests is not only contentious, but also complex. Forest ecology is dynamic and dependent on patterns of unpredictable natural disturbance. Market valuation of forest benefits is only partial, and the values that societies assign to forests are variable within and between communities. Sustainable forest management (SFM) is about integrating each of these uncertainties into multi-criteria decision-making processes in order to generate forest plans that will provide optimum economic and social benefits to present and future generations while maintaining the long-term ecological integrity of the forest ecosystem. The challenge is enormous. There is no single unit of measure that can capture the competing spectrum of forest interests. Criteria for determining the weighting of forest values and management trade-offs are inherently subjective, and institutional assumptions and organizational structures introduce rigidities and biases into decision-making paths.
The bottom line is that to be sustainable, forest management must be adaptive. It must evolve in response to changing social preferences, advances in scientific understanding, fluctuating market conditions and unpredictable ecological disturbance. There is no generic formula for achieving sustainable forest management. Rather, the effective management of the forest resource and ecosystem requires a consistently flexible and responsive process that is based on open social dialogue, ongoing forest research and education, and integrated consideration of ecological, economic and social criteria.
The purpose of this paper is to highlight several principles of sustainable forest management that arise from an examination of certain myths of the traditional timber management paradigm. Rather than focusing on one 'patch' of forest management (e.g., the economics or the ecology of forest management), the paper provides an integrated examination of several key intertwined ecological, economic and social considerations that together form the landscape of an SFM approach. The nature of the shift from a traditional single-criterion focus on maximizing commercial timber production to the new sustainable forest management paradigm of managing the forest to optimize multiple values is described. The paper begins with a brief discussion of the evolving paradigm and then turns to address five specific myths of traditional forest management and the associated ecological, financial and social reality. The paper concludes with a summary of the SFM principles emergent from several institutionalized assumptions of the traditional forest management paradigm.
THE 'STICKY' PARADIGM
Forest management has traditionally focused on the goal of maximizing commercial timber production (Kimmins 1992, 2004; Adamowicz and Veeman 1998; Dellert 1998). Private interests have typically sought to maximize the net present value of their capital investment through timber harvest, and governments have supported this approach by traditionally pursuing "maximum sustained yield" policies (1) (Toman and Ashton 1995; Kant 2003). Maximizing timber volume and market value were assumed to maximize forest value to society. As Pearse (1967) described,
... as long as the value of the forest resource lies in the economic value of wood production, a forest policy that aims at maximizing any magnitude other than wood values will tend to prejudice the real contribution of forests to society, as well as to the forest owner.
In recent years, increasing evidence of the deterioration of forest health and ecological functioning (e.g., riparian damage, soil erosion, forest fragmentation and species extinction) has been accompanied by growing public interest and concern for the protection and maintenance of the forest for values other than timber (e.g., recreation, scenic beauty, potential medicinal products, flood protection, carbon sequestration, biodiversity, etc.). These trends have created higher expectations of forest operators and managers, forcing a shift from a singular focus on timber towards sustainable management for multiple forest values (Toman and Ashton 1996; Adamowicz and Veeman 1998).
Sustainable forest management (SFM) is defined as "management to maintain and enhance the long-term health of forest ecosystems, while providing ecological, economic, social and cultural opportunities for the benefit of present and future generations" (CCFM, 1995). If successful, SFM is ultimately ecologically appropriate, socially acceptable and economically viable. Within the paradigm of sustainable forest management, as with other areas of sustainable development, there are those with "weak" and those with "strong" sustainability interests (Adamowicz and Veeman 1998). "Weak" SFM is a resource management approach focused on maximizing sustained commercial timber production through technological innovation and potential substitution of manufactured capital for natural forest capital (e.g., replacing non-timber ecological services with man-made services). "Strong" SFM is an ecosystem management approach that emphasizes the optimization of multiple forest value objectives subject to the precautionary principle of maintaining the ecological integrity ("natural capital") of the forest.
In practice, sustainable forest management criteria...
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