Our View: Tropical Woods Lovely, but What’s Real Cost?

In the seemingly more innocent times of centuries past, the harvest of tropical hardwoods was the peaceful, almost leisurely work of elephants, the mahouts driving them, and strong-armed and patient woodcutters wandering the jungles in search of just the right tree.

As logs, as beams, and sometimes as boards, the wood made its romantic journey to streambanks, riverports and ocean harbors, thence to the industrialized nations of the world — there to become handsome and enduring furniture or intricately carved, finely finished walls and ceilings.

Today, screaming chain saws and growling diesel equipment make fast work of the slow-growing hardwoods — and turn the world’s rain forests into wasteland lying at the mercy of the next wet season’s awesome erosion.

In an eerily fascinating report by the Chicago Tribune’s Evan Osnos in last weekend’s New Mexican, and in so many grim reports from the scenes of environmental crimes, the consumers of America and other wealthy nations are getting clear looks at the real costs of woods once limited luxuries — and now the must-have flooring and furniture of the vast middle class.

From Papua New Guinea alone, the focus of the Tribune report, the equivalent of 1.7 million cubic meters of logs are shipped to our nation’s West Coast ports, and on to the manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers catering to our taste for the opulent. Much of it is in the form of plywood, but plenty of it shows up as indoor and outdoor furniture, as well as solid-wood pieces for hordes of do-it- yourselfers.

Many governments of the tropical Third World have awakened to the march of destruction through their nation’s rain forests. Little by little, laws have been passed in an effort to save ecosystems crucial to their survival and, very likely, that of the entire planet.

But in China, the world’s most populous country and one emerging from half a century of totalitarian communism into a capitalistic behemoth, the demand for natural resources is trumping any sense of global ecology. Forced to look beyond its borders when it realized that its stripped forests led to a recent rash of floods, Beijing cast an eye southward. There lay the seemingly endless forests of New Guinea and other equatorial jungles.

Soon, deals were cut with the locals; environmental laws, in their infancy, went largely ignored. Forests fell. Rivers turned from clear to murky; fish disappeared, and drinking-and-cooking water was contaminated.

Did we say “was?” It’s still happening — at an alarmingly faster rate, turning mighty forests, once huge generators of oxygen, into broiling scrubland producing precious little of that vital element. As for the people, their country sees only one-eighth of the money generated from logging away their heritage.

Policing the wild backlands is all but impossible — so if anything is to stop, or at least slow, the stripping, it will have to be worldwide economic pressure.

The World Bank recently canceled $30 million in loans for an environmentally suspect project. And some international timber traders have agreed to avoid wood products from Papua New Guinea. But wood, like most cargoes of natural resources, can be shifted around to the point that few know, and fewer care, where it came from. As customer concerns grow, count on increasing supplier subterfuge.

Forest-industry products carry stamps and tags to get them to their destinations, and careful research can expose wood’s area of origin. Discerning customers of the kind so prevalent in Santa Fe can do their part toward reducing rain forest damage by looking for products from the environmentally more responsible nations — or by choosing furniture and material made from responsibly harvested wood; perhaps even by avoiding wood in favor of bamboo, a grass, and recycled plastics.

At the diplo-economic level, our nation’s leaders must make ecological responsibility part of our international trade agreements — even in the face of conservationists’ complaints from emerging industrial powers that we haven’t been, and still might not be, good environmental citizens of a planet looking smaller every day.

(c) 2007 The Santa Fe New Mexican. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.