CA Bill Defends Consumers Right To Know On Wood Purchases

The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) hailed California Senate Bill (SB) 1727, which calls for labeling lumber by country of origin and species, as a key step towards mobilizing market forces to protect threatened forests around the world. The bill will be heard on Tuesday in the California State Senate Natural Resources Committee.

“SB 1727 is an important step toward giving the consumers of California the right to choose whether their wood purchases will be part of the problem or part of the solution to the global forest crisis,” said Steve Schwartzman, senior scientist with the EDF.

Global forest destruction has reached new levels in recent months with massive forest fires in Indonesia and Brazil burning millions of acres. Fires, smoke and drought have created a public health calamity in Borneo and the northern Brazilian Amazon with tens of thousands going hungry and suffering severe water shortages. Scientists have now found smog levels in the middle of the South Pacific similar to those found in Los Angeles.

Logging is a key cause of deforestation and fires in the tropics. The US, as the largest timber market in the world, fuels the flames through imports. About half of US hardwood plywood imports come from Indonesia, while the US is the largest export market for Brazilian mahogany. Scientists fear that coming months may bring even more massive fires in the Amazon, as previously logged forests begin to burn. New research by the Woods Hole Research Center and the Institute for Man and Nature in the Amazon shows that an area of the Amazon roughly half again as large as the state of California is particularly fire prone this year. This is about 30 times larger than the region in which unprecedented forest fires raged out of control last month. Almost all of the South American mahogany sold in the US comes from this threatened region. Logged forest, with gaps and wood and leaf debris left by timber extraction, is a tinderbox for forest fires. The area of the Amazon most at fire risk this year contains approximately 35 billion tons of carbon, or the equivalent of six years worth of northern industrial emissions of the carbon dioxide which contributes to global warming.

“Logging in tropical forests is the key catalyst to deforestation and a critical factor in forest fires,” said Schwartzman. “It is also the direct link between California’s consumers and one of the greatest ecological threats facing the planet today. Consumers have the right to know what their wood purchases mean for the future of the world’s forests.”