photo by Sarah McDevitt
Not a simple issue
Figuring out what is a bona fide green material is so confusing. Often there is no simple answer. Take wood. It must be a sustainable material since it’s renewable. Heck, it grows on trees!
But can it be replanted and grown fast enough to meet our needs? And just how is it being replanted and what are the consequences of these practices? Another facet of the question is: what kind of wood and for what purpose? Again, it’s complicated.
Types of logging
Cutting down whole areas of forest—clear cutting—is has devastating effects on wildlife, watersheds, and fisheries, soil conservation, and possibly global warming. Yet it still is practiced in this country, as well as around the world.
A better approach is a tree plantation. When the trees are cut down little trees are planted to replace them. This is a sustainable practice, but it’s not a forest. No other trees grow there and they are not natural habitats —more like a tall field of corn. So wildlife is adversely affected. But it is a way to help produce the wood we need to build our houses.
A third approach is selectively harvesting a few trees in each area of a forest. However the rain forests of the Amazon Basin, Indonesia, Burma, and other places have old growth teak, mahogany, and ipe trees being cut that would take ages to regrow. And it turns out even this small amount of logging can have surprisingly negative effects in rain forests.
FSC vs SFI
How do you tell if your wood is from a sustainably harvested forest? There are two popular certifications in the U.S. to guide you. FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) and SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative). The FSC is considered much more legitimate than the SFI, but that is a subject for another day.
As I said, it’s a confusing subject with no clear cut answer. But it is worth considering when you are adding a deck to your house (redwood, ipe, or composite?). Or wondering how to reduce the total amount of lumber in an addition or new home.
Where do you stand on the question: is wood a sustainable material?
Wood can be an extremely sustainable material. We are building an unmilled timberframe home this year using trees from our own land. We selected them with our architect last summer by walking the woods looking for trees of the right dimension that were also growing too close to their neighbor, struck by lightening, dying of disease or had some other aspect that made their removal a positive thing for the health of the woods.
Most of them were peeled standing so that they would begin to dry and become lighter and easier to handle when they were felled and dragged out of the woods in the winter when the ground is frozen – doing the least damage to the forest floor.
Many areas of our nation have an enormous resource of overcrowded woodlands. When working with whole trees, you don’t need to cut down the biggest and the best. You can thin the woods and have plenty of building materials besides.
There is more labor involved in working with natural timbers instead of dimensional lumber, but this is a way to use wood sustainably.
Denise Thornton recently posted..ARE THE NEONICOTINOIDS YOU ARE USING IN YOUR GARDEN KILLING YOUR BEES?
Denise–Thank you for your comment. My post was from the point of view of using wood in the form of lumber as the typical approach to building the structure of homes in America.
Your home is a great example of using local materials in a way that has essentially no impact on the land. Kudos to you and yours!