Regarding Bamboo; I would guess that it is “Plantation Grown”, but it does mature in less than 15 years. There is no tree that I know of that is harvest able in that time.
As far as their prejudice against “plantation grown” forest products, I understand wanting to maintain natural forests. On the other hand, wheat and soybeans displace natural prairie, but I don’t know where you can get free range tofu. Lumber also has a negative carbon footprint; when you harvest a ton of wood about half of it is carbon. When you use it in a building and a new tree grows the carbon is removed from the environment. In a wilderness area when the tree rots much of the carbon returns to the system.
Maybe a future version of LEED will take this into account.
When does a planted and managed “forest” become a “plantation”?
Well, when you dig into it, FSC includes among its requirements various social and economic goals that go way beyond merely sustainably-harvested, non-monoculture forests. Yet, no other construction product or material has such far-reaching–and inappropriate for inclusion in sustainable rating systems, in my opinion–requirements. Why not, for example, require all mined minerals and metal ores to have a certification system that requires operators to reconstruct mined-out areas, pays a living wage, respects indigenous cultures and similar types of other ‘stuff’ that comes along with FSC??
No good reason I can see. Where does it end??
John,
You raise some really interesting points.
Thanks.
…this thread has been reminding me (as does so much in life) of an old Monty Python skit, Dennis Moore. If you remember, Dennis was a Robin Hood type character who stole lupins from the rich and gave them to the poor, who ended up thoroughly sick of lupins. The Dennis Moore (John Cleese) gag line is: “Blimey, this redistribution of wealth is trickier than I thought.”
Methinks this sustainable design is trickier than we all thought, too.
I think all of the “do good” stuff in FSC comes from the fact that the goal is to keep out illegally logged tropical hardwoods and prevent de-forestration of places like the amazon basin. One teak log brought out on a truck can bring a very high price and so mom and pop size to guerilla army size illegal logging is a very real problem in the developing countries.
There just isn’t a parallel situation for mining and minerals where people are digging holes in the ground everywhere and trying to sell a pickup truck load of iron ore on the black market.
“When does a planted and managed “forest” become a “plantation”?”…when they start growing cotton trees??
And as far as the Inuit (Eskimo would be akin to calling black person “coloured”) igloo is concerned, surely they can get a credit for harvesting the “melt” water in the summer too?
Ouch!
Paul, I’m impressed that you wood root out an answer. It looks like the other readers were stumped!
So we’re branching out into puns now? (I twigged to that very quickly, don’t ya know).
Or better to just leaf this alone, and nip the trend in the bud?
Oak-y dokey. Yew guys should spruce up and not beech so much. Fir now, orange olive yew plum glad to be poplar?
This new branch is chestnut right!!
There may not be the small-scale problems for mining that there is for logging, but there are plenty of cases of corrupt governments in cahoots with large corporations that despoil the land–often belonging to indigenous peoples who are not consulted and are paid poorly. Waste piles of overburden and processed ores cause pollution of water supplies and toxic air-borne dust. Two other good examples, though non-building related, are the recent ‘diamond wars’ in Africa, and the despoiling of huge areas of forest in Ecuador by oil waste. Gold mining in Peru is often dominated by small-scale ‘independent’ operators working in extraordinarily unsafe conditions for very low wages. The scale of destruction by mineral extraction world-wide is staggering.