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NHLA News
Certification And Those Pesky
Private Landowners
by MARK BARFORD, CAE
Executive Manager
National Hardwood Lumber Assoc.
Memphis, Tenn.
These days when the industry talks of lumber
certification, they truly mean forest certification
and that is where the problem begins.
In order for a company to certify lumber, they
must purchase the raw material (trees) from
an independently certified sustainable source. A source, except in
rare cases, neither owns nor controls. In fact, the suppliers of our
raw material are millions of private landowners who are making
decisions about their land and may or may not have any motivation
to become certified. They may cut their timber once a generation,
and the bother and expense of forest certification in many cases
makes no sense to them.
We should begin this discussion by looking around and realizing
how proud we are of the forests of North America. They are a
tapestry of healthy, diverse and natural sustainable stands of trees.
The U.S. Forest Service tells us that in the United States overall we
are replacing our forests at a rate of 1.6 new growth versus
removals. We have a myriad of rules and regulations in place that
ensure that the forest is cut legally and with protections to assure
that the forests will be in place for future generations.
But the real heroes in this story are the millions of small private
landowners who each and every day have to make the “right” decision
for their lands. Due to our system of private property rights,
that “right” decision is judged by each individual landowner who
knows his assets and his needs best, and manages the land to meet
them. What we end up with is a wonderful patchwork of various
management schemes and land use decisions that supports a wide
variety of ecosystems.
For instance, some landowners choose to do nothing to their lands,
and create wild areas. Some enjoy the sound of birds, and cut large
or small openings in the forest. Some want a road system for
access, while others want just a walking trail network. There are
tracts of well-managed forests where the objective may be timber
production where maximum growth is the priority. But for many
landowners neither money or timber is a motivating factor, and tree
cutting is an incidental use of their ownership.
In my 28 years of Hardwood lumber industry associations, I have
been involved and battled successfully to protect private property
rights. Our system is the envy of the world and each and every day
new landowners come on board to share in the dream. These new
forest landowners total several hundred thousand per year. They
need to be educated and encouraged to take care of that newly
Please turn to page 46
12 Hardwoods...The All-Purpose Material