New West Feature
Is Wood A Green Building Material?
During the West's timber wars, wood was hardly seen as green. But with better timber practices, and amid carbon concerns, wood's reputation is getting a remodel in Idaho and other parts of the Rockies.By David Frey, 4-10-11
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| Photo by Flickr user theslowlane. | |
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Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack chose an unusual way to celebrate the International Year of the Forest – unusual, at least, if you’re a tree.
Vilsack announced plans by the Agriculture Department and the Forest Service to use more wood in its buildings – part of a three-year plan to step up the department’s green building practices.
“Wood has a vital role to play in meeting the growing demand for green building materials,” Vilsack said.
Just how green is wood, though?
For decades, it was demonized by environmentalists who complained about logging companies clear-cutting acres of forest, polluting rivers and destroying wildlife habitat. Logging supporters jabbed back, saying environmentalists who lived in log cabins shouldn’t throw stones.
But with the Pacific Northwest’s timber wars mostly quiet, and amid growing concerns about the carbon footprint of other building materials, wood is finding a new place as a green material.
“There is no one-size-fits-all, but oftentimes wood really is going to be a very good choice,” said Brendan Owens, vice president, for LEED technical development for the U.S. Green Building Council, the organization that developed the popular LEED green building certification system.
Owens recommends looking at the lifecycle of the materials to be used in a building, and by lots of measures, he said, wood performs well. It is natural, renewable and recyclable. Compared to a steel mill, which burns carbon, a forest sequesters carbon. Local wood means an even lower carbon footprint. And it lasts for a long time.
“The house I’m standing in is 100 years old,” said Owens, speaking by phone from the home he was remodeling. The carpet, the plaster, the sheetrock had to go, he said, but “when we pulled back the walls, the dimensional lumber, that is going to last another hundred years.”
But many of the factors on the plus side of wood depend on it being harvested properly, Owens said. Intensive logging, poor reseeding efforts and replacing virgin forests with fast-growing timber monocultures can erase its benefits, particularly in parts of the world where slash-and-burn is a common approach.
“The desire to maximize a return on the investment their managing causes some people to make bad decisions,” he said.
As part of the government’s new green-building strategy, the Forest Service says it will prefer wood in new buildings and “look for opportunities to demonstrate the innovative use of wood as a green building material” for buildings over 10,000 square feet.
“Forest Service studies show that wood compares favorably to competing materials,” Vilsack said.
He directed other USDA agencies to adopt the Forest Service policy of using “domestic sustainable wood products” as its preferred green building material.
Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell directed units in his agency to use more locally-milled timber in its buildings.
Not surprisingly, the timber industry was pleased by the announcements.
“This is good news – for the environment, for rural economies and for jobs in the woods and building industries,” said Marc Brinkmeyer, board chairman of the Idaho Forest Group, the state’s largest lumber manufacturer. “We have known for many years that wood is a green product and a fully renewable resource.”
Wood hasn’t always been seen that way, though. Environmentalists say forests across the West still show scars from decades of clear-cuts and poor timber practices that made the logging industry one of the top nemeses of conservationists.
Timber harvests can be done sustainably, but “for a long time it wasn’t,” said Terry Harris, executive director of the Kootenai Environmental Alliance, Idaho’s oldest environmental group, which began as a response to logging practices.
“Up here we’re paying for it,” Harris said. “It takes a long time for forests to come back. There are places that were clear cut 10, 20 years ago that are now coming back dysfunctionally.”
Certifications exist now for green timber practices, Harris said, often created by the industry itself, which offer assurances about how the wood was harvested, where it was milled and processed and how far it was shipped.
“Our efforts up here on forestry tend to be about the types of forest harvest practices: whether the soils are preserved, the waters are preserved, whether wildlife habitat is preserved during logging,” Harris said. “Those are complicated issues, complicated questions. Logging isn’t always sustainable unless those things are taken into account.”
A recent Forest Service lifecycle study found harvesting, transporting, manufacturing and using wood in buildings produces fewer air emissions, including greenhouse gases, than other materials. It found using wood for walls can require significantly less energy in manufacturing than other materials.
The agency is also encouraging the use of wood-to-energy power systems and other renewable energy techniques. The measures are part of President Obama’s executive order mandating green building techniques.
“Our country has the resources, the work force and the innovative spirit to reintroduce wood products into all aspects of the next generation of buildings,” Tidwell said. “As we move forward with restoring America’s forests, we are getting smarter and more efficient in how we use wood products as both an energy and green building source, which will help maintain rural jobs.”
Timber groups estimate wood product businesses support more than 1 billion jobs.
Brinkmeyer said the USDA’s action will “put people back to work in rural communities and help our environment.”
Those are good reasons to consider wood, Owens agreed.
“You’re looking at local job creation, local investment in communities, particularly in green jobs,” he said. “Those are benefits.”
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Comments
Not one of your better stories. Taking peoples' word that something can be done so it will be done is not good journalism.
The damage, particularly to soils, done by unsustainable logging in the western mountains after WWII is still with us half a century later and will be with us for the rest of the 21st century. Bringing back the timber industry, which means bringing back industrial scale logging, scares me to death.
Forestry can be done sustainably, but it has to be strictly local, that is, tied into the local fabric and needs of a community and not to distant markets. When you're bound to distant market though, it won't be sustainable, for the reason, as you note above, “The desire to maximize a return on the investment their managing causes some people to make bad decisions...” I would only expand this quotation to say that the desire for profit will cause almost all people to make bad decisions; in forestry, that's industrial strength, cut and run logging or tree farming. I've seen the tree farms of the Southeast. Those aren't forests.
Been there, done that. I have no interest in seeing it come back.
The buzzword now is biomass, taking advantage of the beetlekill as a means of "bringing back the timber industry," by which is meant bringing back the industrial timber mills. Trouble is, as we're seeing here in northwest Wyoming's Shoshone National Forest, the beetle kill is mostly in watersheds that had never been previously logged before because of fragile creekbeds and banks, friable volcanic soils, and steep slopes. That is, Roadless Areas.
Now the pressure is to go into these Roadless Areas to cut millions of board feet for as yet unbuilt wood to energy" power stations. There is no doubt in my mind that the damage done from expanded biomass logging in the Shoshone will exceed that done in the last century by an order of magnitude. All so some greedy investors can make a profit while destroying a community.
Finally, the forest products certification process has gone the way of organic agriculture--turned into a marketing scheme with little reality behind it. It was a good idea gone bad. The profit motive does that to good ideas.
The irony is that after the timber industry went into terminal decline about twenty years ago, local logging by family-owned businesses has more or less prospered because there is always local sustainable demand for lumber. Why not leave it that way?
RH
RH
Then I guess you can't be having any customers at that there "retreat" for guiding services, either. Unless they want to walk from the railhead at I guess Shoshoni. But then, with nothing but "local" traffic, the railroad would be pulled up PDQ.
And I'd sure love to know how you'd power your internet, your lights, or even where your wires were dug from, and where rolled.
One of these days, the American people are going to figure out that you can't have a modern society without industry of some form. Limiting forestry to just local users would severely constrain the income per stick, plus wreck any chance of management on a fiscally-rational basis.
Managed forests perform best, period. And management costs. If you don't have an economic basis to the scheme, the management doesn't happen and you take what the forest gives you -- which very well might not be what you need -- much less WANT.
In case haven't you noticed, modern industrial society hasn't been all that sustainable. We're seeing the beginnings right now of the return of feudal society, with a few lords and ladies at the top and a lot of serfs.
RH
65 years later what trees have grown back ( the area was reseeded ) are barely ten footers, and sparse. It still looks like a clearcut, with some stubble.. The soil was largely limestone based and poor, but the old growth trees are no more. The soil is slow growth. It will take 300 years to restore what was cut. The forest-wide average to regenerate a cuttable tree in the north half of the Shoshone Forest is about 125 years. In the yellow soft pine country of the southern Appalachians that figure is 35 years.
The lumber company even started a major forest fire by their negligence that almost wiped us out.
That mountain is permanently scarred for the rest of my life and the next couple generations just so Cody Lumber could have two years work. They have since gone broke and vanished.
Largescale Logging is not really worthwhile in my neck of the woods , only at a small scale...that local mill local sale of green 2x4's and planking scenario is about the top end of it.
I also recall that Montana was pretty hellbent on clearcutting in the 70's and 80's and was really pleased with itself that it was exporting trainloads of WHOLE LOGS to Japan. Whole logs, not value added finished product or cut lumber. Exporting. What is wrong with that picture?
Finally, I would ask any of you sawmill and wholesale loggers who still have " clearcut" in your small working dictionary to take a field trip to British Columbia, where rampant clearcuts are du rigeur. If you can't afford the gas, just use Google Earth. I recommend " flying" up the dammed lakes of the Columbia River from Revelstoke north to Mica Dam, then just circle Kinbasket Lake , country I am very familiar with . Actually , most of the Canadian Rockies not in a National or Provincial Park are clearcut.
Even though B.C.'s wetter climate and lower elevation can grow back a tree in about half the time as Wyoming and Montana, the rate of tree falling is beyond alarming. It's not sustainable.
B.C. is probably where most of your local lumber yard's milled boards and sheetwood were derived. The Canadian government subsidizes logging and the mills. Domestic US mills cannot compete, except locally in small board-feet forest sales and pickup loads.
Logging in northern Wyoming is a classic example of the rapacious ruin reaked by the Robber Barons, some even in my lifetime. It was never done right or in good measure.
( So before the think tank of Skinner and Todd lays its redneck rhetoric on me about where I get my forest products, clean water, and internet from , I, too, have a wand.
I can use it to turn them into a pig. That doesn't even require magic. Just undressing.)
And dredge up a 65 year old mistake to condemn current forestry practice.
And don't mention that the EXPORT MARKET is perking right up as the Chinese decide wood is good....wood we don't want....wood that doesn't have longhorn beetles in it. Wood that I hope to heck is added value, but I wouldn't mind if it was simply taken off. I know the Canuckistanians are really hoping to sell serious tonnage of deadkill as pallet wood logs. And that would NOT be an option without a -gasp- global market.
So yank your wand all you want -- magic is one thing, reality is another, especially for you.
Who'd have thought Dave Skinner wanted to turn North America into an ecologically blighted China.
RH
And, Canada actually has closer to 40 million acres of bug kill. We have only a mere 22 million acres, which converts over to 33,000 square miles of dead forests. While many of the pure lodgepole stands are in the higher elevations, the lower elevation mixed conifers have too many flammable trees in the understory, stealing water from old growth and providing ample fuel ladders. Removing the invading lodgepoles and returning frequent prescribed fires are essential to restoring the historical conditions of healthy and resilient forests that survive drought, bugs and wildfires.
No matter what happened to that tree, another of its size will not be there for decades. Few if it is a high site, and many if it is a low site for tree growth. It takes 100 years to replace a 100 year old tree. At the least. And it does not matter how or why the tree died, or whether it was burned, or killed by disease or bugs, or a chainsaw. The only difference is that the one killed by a chainsaw will end up being used to make lumber or energy, and somebody will work to cut the tree, yard it to a landing, load it on a truck, haul it to a mill or chipping site, create the end product, and transport the end product to it end use, where someone else will work to pound nails in it to create something, or glue it together, or will have the energy to plug in their hybrid car or the sewing machine or the food processor, or whatever needed electricity to make it work. And the used energy will produce some more heat, and the product made from the wood will be a part of something structural, or maybe just the frame around a painting, or the fiber for the paper on which a watercolor is painted. All you get from fires is a lot of green house gases, and the same empty space slowly being filled by another seral stage of conifer reproduction which will be revered in 75 years as some sort of holy shrine to nature. The Tillamook Burn in Oregon was replanted because a newspaper editor railed against letting it go to pasture for cattle and sheep. The people of Oregon voted on a $13 million bond sale to finance growing and planting trees in the burn. Only they didn't have any screening process as to where the seed came from. So doug fir seed from Idaho, Montana, Eastern Oregon, and Southern Oregon, along with seed collected in the Willamette Valley and in the Cascades was all used to grow seedlings that were planted in the burn area. Now there is this forest of wonderful trees planted in the last 40 years from site matched seed, and the failing trees of before that from the dubious seed sources. Those trees need to be cut, turned into lumber, and the areas planted with seed of all the species native to that area, from native seed sources by slope aspect, elevation, and nearness to the coastal fog belt or even from inside it. But this worship of "wilderness" created from off site seed sources is what you get from uninformed urban tree huggers who don't want one tree cut, one feral cat removed from the land, one cow to graze on public land. Now we have the lowest cattle numbers since I don't know when and 600 lb steers sold for $145 per hundred weight this week, and cow calf pairs are over $1500. House cats are killing a billion birds a year in North America (if a farmer killed a thousand, he would be tried in criminal courts). For every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction. And lumber prices are rising even though housing starts are still Great Depression era low, because China is using some of their US Dollars to buy enough lumber (some lumber companies are selling a million board feet a day to China) and logs to raise the market prices and serve their growing middle class housing needs. But, by the Hoskins way of thinking, people are better served by a Mobile Dimension mill and a Victory garden and the saturday Farmer's Market than lumber from some large mill and groceries from Albertson's. He must be pensioned from a government job, because they are the only people with guaranteed incomes for life, health care, and all for providing the public with crappy faux solutions to real problems.
The late T.J. Starker. One of America's first academic foresters. Yale graduate degree in Forestry. Oregon State College Dean of Forestry School, and very, very successful tree farmer and entrepreneur, replied to a story in the Corvallis Gazette-Times about horse logging in a small patch of young timber. T.J. wrote that "a horse logger is an ambitious, hard working young man trying to make enough money to buy a cat." (For those of you in Missoula, a "cat" is a tracked machine to drag logs that runs on diesel and can work all day, whereas a horse can only work half a day logging, and then has to be rested, thus requiring two horses, or planning logging to cut for half a day, and yard for half a day.)
Hoskins is terminally against any and all logging. He and millions like him. Their best efforts, now, would be to make sure their grandchildren are conversant in Mandarin. The Hispanics won't care, because the Chinese can learn Spanish if they want to talk to them. They haven't even found the irony in the fact that the richest man in Mexico is Lebanese. And we haven't seen the irony of the sawmillers and tree farmers pulling themselves out of this recession by exporting the very materials we will need to rebuild our economy. Only this time, there isn't going to be a Barney Frank liar loan in Congress, to make sure people who didn't work, won't work, can't pass a piss test to work, can buy houses with no money down and phony documentation. Poor people will live near the green ocean of trees, living the "water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink" life of serfdom. The bankers are still making billions investing the trust fund money to make the NGOs happy. Eco-Obsessive elitists are the very same people the far left heaps scorn upon for their wealth and ability to avoid taxation. They give enough to the Green NGOs to limit their tax liability, even avoiding the constant snapping of lefty jaws that want to gnaw off the very hands that feed their appeals and lawsuits. The Circle of Life. Trickle Down. The Hoskins of the world are created, coddled and cuffed by the wealthy, including the heirs to the Weyerhaeuser fortune and others from old timber money. Like, how can people who are so stridently anti everything about extractive natural resources take a cent of Pew money?? Pew made it with his Sun Oil company...A pollution making greedy capitalist billionaire. Hoskins isn't for much, and agin' a lot. It must be a happy life. Not.
Just FYI, I didn't retire from the Army, I resigned my commission on a matter of principle--the abandonment of the Shia and Kurds to Saddam Hussein's brutality after the Gulf War ended. I realize principle is something you can't understand. Anyway, no military pension. No inheritance either. I work for a living, and if I make $20K a year I'm lucky. But I'm pretty happy, hunt elk in the fall and grow potatos and onions out back in the summer, buy wood from the logger down the road.
You know Bearbait, when you actually become bearbait, you'll at least be fertilizer and worth a lot more to the world than you are now.
RH
But let's not forget the Chinese have always been ruled by warlords and never had defined property rights, nor may we forget that they don't have even a shred of Western idealism in their souls.
Will a tradition of environmentalism rise in China -- one that doesn't need AMERICAN foundational support to survive? Hmmmm.
In the meantime, I have no compunctions whatsoever selling our Chinese friends all the crummy wood and every lump of shiny clean American coal they'll buy. The wood, we have no use for. The coal is a Hobbesan deal -- our nice stuff or their crummy, sulfurous guck. And once we get them hooked, hooked hoooooooked on having the lights come on....THEN we'll REALLY make deals. Rare earth?
Wood is good. Get over it.
And RH, would you have finished Gulf War One the first time? I agree -- nations like that, you fight to unconditional surrender or fight not at all. In fact, it seems any war must be fought to the end or it really isn't finished.
In the 80's spotted owl debacle (Barred owl-what's that), it was convenient for the radical chic enviro's that Canada and the south picked up the slack, so there wasn't much of a "sticker shock" to go with the owl. Lets see, the USFS used to produce 18% of the timber harvest. That went down to 5% while Canada went from 15% to 30%. It's going back down to 15%. Where's the other 15% gonna come from?? I'm buying Weyerhauser. A perfect storm. Me has a funny feeling that the public is gonna demand MORE timber harvest from the USFS in 5 years just to bring the skyrocketing price of lumber from Home Depot down. It's gonna be 1950 all over again.
It must be depressing for a radical enviro that peoples enviro idealism goes out the window when they have to pay more. Don't believe for a second that anyone is really gonna sacrifice for the environment.
Too bad about your clearcut Dewey. I've seen beautifull 50 year old clearcuts covered with trees 30-40 foot tall. Right in the Shoshone. Perhaps you can tell me what percentage of "the forested acreage" was logged in the last 50 years on the Shoshone? 3%? 5%? The only green forest left in Colorado is the "green islands" from the young regenerated clearcuts. In fact, the only hiding and thermal cover left is those clearcuts.