Lumber supply is a critical issue in the wood flooring industry right now-news hit earlier this week of yet another manufacturer increasing its prices-and limits on logging in national forests are a sore subject.
Yet The Huffington Post on Wednesday published a lengthy opinion piece calling for an end to commercial logging on public lands. Written by Ellen Moyer, an independent environmental consultant holding a B.A. in anthropology, an M.S. in environmental engineering and a Ph.D. in civil engineering (all from the University of Massachusetts), the column is bound to draw the ire of almost anyone in a business related to wood, as Moyer seems to suggest that logging is akin to destroying the forests:
Can developed countries like our own, with a straight face, ask less-developed countries to preserve their forests to mop up our carbon, while we're mowing down our own forests? We're the ones spewing out most of the carbon. Recklessly destroying our own forests sets a bad example worldwide and displays a lack of basic intelligence and fairness.
And she has this to say about the related jobs:
If we preserve forests, the logging industry will complain that jobs will be lost. But we don't have to lose jobs if we count the economic value of carbon capture by trees. We can transform the logging jobs into better jobs. Logging is the second most dangerous job in the United States, second only to fisheries work. Loggers could be retrained to monitor and document the health and growth of trees.To read the entire piece, click here.
For an opposing view from Dr. Patrick Moore, one of the founding members of Greenpeace, see the HF article "Trees Are the Answer: Why Using Wood is the Answer to Saving Forests."
