Sustainability: a focus on forests and forestry.(Canadian forestry industry)

Publication: Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis

Publication Date: 01-JAN-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Journal of Business Administration

INTRODUCTION

Occam's razor: "Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate"

[William of Occam (1284-1347), an English philosopher and theologian]

Occam's razor is the basis for the law of parsimony and the rule of simplicity: do not posit complexity more than necessary. However, Occam's razor has two "edges": it says as simple as possible but as complex as necessary.

A problem is an issue that does not get solved. An issue that gets solved quickly is not a problem. Problem issues often persist because they are complex and only simple solutions are offered. Complexity must be addressed, as required by Occam's razor.

There are few issues that have united the nations of the world more than concern over the environment and sustainability. Although there are still some countries which have not yet given environmental issues a high priority, their number is declining. Important contributions to this growing international unity over the environment include the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (Our Common Future) which promoted the concept of "sustainable development", and the Rio Summit on the Environment (UNCED) that produced Agenda 21.

There is widespread support for the principle of sustainable development, but not everyone agrees with it. Some consider that the term is an oxymoron: that "sustainable" and "development" are incompatible concepts, and point to the numerous examples in which past industrial development and the application of technology have resulted in environmental damage: deforestation in the tropics, non-sustainable agriculture, over-exploitation of marine resources, air and water pollution, and the alteration of the earth's atmosphere. Many environmentalists have challenged the claim made by foresters that forests are being managed in a sustainable manner; they assert that industrial utilization of forest resources is not sustainable. The current public criticism of forestry demands a careful analysis of what is meant by sustainable use or development of forests. The question, "can we use and sustain our forests", which must be answered by those who manage public forests, transcends the traditional concern over sustaining the supply of timber products, important though this is. Today's society is demanding that a wide range of values be sustained.

A 2003 world human population of about 6.3 billion, with the prospect of another 3 to 4 billion by the end of the century (Lutz et al. 2001), requires that humans learn to live sustainably with their environment and with each other. The "human footprint" per capita (Wackernagle and Rees 1996) must be reduced as the abundance of our species continues to rise if we wish to bequeath to our great grandchildren the future that we think they and their grandchildren will want. Few would disagree with this intergenerational ethical imperative. Equally few appear to agree on what we have to do to achieve this.

There are many reasons for the difficulty. One of the most fundamental is the diversity of definitions of what sustainability is. Another is the dichotomy between the fundamentals of biophysical sustainability and the ideals of social and economic sustainability, a dichotomy that we will see shortly is more apparent than real.

While societies and their economies are certainly dynamic, many of the contemporary goals of society imply the stability of human economies and communities. Continued growth in economic activity and improvement in human well being is currently a fundamental pillar of most western societies, but this is considered by many to be non-sustainable, and basic principles suggest that eventually humans will have to develop stable economies, communities and lifestyles. In contrast to contemporary social goals, one of the key characteristics of ecosystems, especially terrestrial ecosystems, is that they change over time, and it is widely accepted by forest ecologists that shorter-term change is a necessary prerequisite for longer-term constancy in forests. The structure, function, complexity, diversity and the interconnections between components of an ecosystem are undergoing periodic natural (1) disturbance, leading to change and recovery as internal processes return the ecosystem towards the predisturbance condition or some new condition. Maintenance of the historical character, the biodiversity and other values of forests, if this is our objective, requires that we sustain, or emulate the effects of, historical ecosystem disturbance regimes.

The utopian ideal of social stability ignores the continuing momentum of human population growth, international migration, the omnipresent tendency towards urbanization of the world's population (30% in 1950, predicted to be 60% in 2030; UN 2002), and our current addiction to non-renewable energy and material resources. Because humans are ultimately as dependent on their environment and other species as are those other organisms, there is ultimately less difference between social and biophysical sustainability than suggested above. Human societies are a subset of the global biophysical system, and we must not permit social and cultural considerations to blind us to the ultimate biophysical constraints on human endeavors.

The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the complexity of the sustainability issue and the many dimensions of sustainability in forest management. The assessment of sustainability of biophysical systems is both time and space dependent. Whether or not one concludes that a forest is being sustained depends as much or more on the spatial scale at which the assessment is made and on the time period that is included as it does on the actual trends in forest values. Unless the full complexity of the question is explicitly recognized in policy, regulation and practice, it is unlikely that we will achieve our forest sustainability goals, whatever we decide they are. William of Occam was right--we should keep our definitions of sustainability and our actions to achieve this as simple as possible, but as complex as necessary to honor our ethical and intergenerational obligations.

SUSTAINABILITY AND THE ORIGINS OF FORESTRY (2)

Forestry is a human activity that has developed at various times and places around the world, but always in response to the same need: to sustain some forest-related condition or resource value. The desire to maintain wildlife for hunting, strategic supplies of timber to support armies and navies, supplies of fuel wood for domestic or industrial use, or forest cover to protect villages or roads from avalanche are among the many reasons why governments or land owners acted at various times over the past millennium to restrict unregulated forest exploitation. Forestry and the modern forest preservation movements thus share a common ultimate objective and spring from common roots: the desire for conservation and sustainability.

Environmentalists can be forgiven for a moment of incredulity when it is suggested that they share much in common with foresters. Forestry normally evolves through a series of rather predictable stages. The first stage generally fails to achieve its goal of sustaining particular forest values, and the results have often differed little from unregulated exploitation: This is because this early stage is usually characterized more by legal restrictions and an administrative, bureaucratic approach to resource use and renewal than by regulations that reflect the needs and desires of the local people and the spatially and temporally variable ecological character of the forest. One cannot successfully manage a complex, living, changing ecological system such as a forest as though it was coal in the ground or a manufactured commodity. Nor can one expect simple regulations that ignore existing and traditional uses of the forest by local communities, the needs of these people, and their increase in numbers and impacts on the forest over time, to effectively conserve forest values. Most of the early attempts to establish sustainable forestry failed either because of the lack of a sound ecological foundation, or because of the failure to recognize existing and changing social and political conditions, or both.

Because the failure of the first ("Administrative") stage of forestry to achieve sustainability has often resulted from a lack of a sound ecological foundation, the second stage of forestry has been characterized by the development of such a foundation. This ("Ecologically-based") stage has generally focused on the sustained renewal of timber and associated values, and there are many examples where this silvicultural stage of forestry has been successful in maintaining the growth and harvest of tree crops. However, sustainable silviculture does not necessarily satisfy all of the desires of a "post-industrial" society. It may not conserve adequate areas of old-growth forest, and associated wilderness and spiritual values. Depending on how it is done, it may not sustain some aspects of biodiversity, and it may fail to satisfy requirements for landscape aesthetics, wildlife habitat and various other non-timber values. Consequently, the affluent, post-industrial societies of western countries are now requiring that forestry evolve to a third stage ("Social Forestry") in which the requirement for sustainable tree crops is accompanied by the demand that a variety of other resource values, both social and environmental, be maintained.

Canadian forestry only emerged from the exploitative, pre-forestry stage relatively recently--in the middle of the last century. The administrative stage of forestry was put in place in most parts of Canada in the first half of the century or soon thereafter. The subsequent two or three decades confirmed what was already well known in countries with a longer history of forestry: that the administrative approach is not an adequate basis for sustainable development of forests. There was a steady transition to the second (ecologically-based silvicultural) stage over the last three decades of the twentieth century, although in many parts of the country this transition is not yet complete. However, the public now expects that forestry will operate according to the objectives and policies of the third (social forestry) stage and will achieve the results expected of this stage. Herein lies much of the current conflict between forestry and the public.

In comparison to the development of forestry in Europe or Scandinavia, forestry in much of Canada is being expected by the public to skip a stage--to go directly from the administrative stage to the social stage. Some of the results of forestry...

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