Felling trees to save the planet
With the rise of environmental awareness and the negative impressions left by past unscrupulous operators, the term “logging” has come to have a stigma attached to it. This is particularly the case in big cities, where one often sees big trees with their branches lopped off. In the minds of many, the timber industry seems inextricably linked to pillaging the forests and devastating the land beneath.
In fact, this is far from the truth. Vic Lin presents aerial photographs of the company’s forests as evidence, showing fully harvested areas being promptly reforested and back to thriving woodland a year later. “This isn’t anything like the extractive process practiced by mining and quarrying,” he emphasizes.
Just as aquaculture can be a sustainable approach to preserving the ocean’s bounty in a time of dwindling fish stocks, given humanity’s inability to give up on wood, the timber industry needs to stop logging old-growth forests and should actively work to develop planned plantations as a substitute source of supply.
In Taiwan, annual timber demand is some 6 million tons, but less than 1% of that comes from domestic sources. At the same time as calling for conservation efforts, Taiwan imports massive amounts of wood from abroad, greatly increasing its carbon footprint through long-distance shipping. And with wood being sold and resold, passing through many hands along the way, traceability can be a challenge, so that illegally logged timber also makes its way into the market.
A few years ago, a Malaysian environmental group came to Taiwan to protest, pointing out that Taiwan is the second-biggest importer of Malaysian old-growth wood, making us a major culprit in the destruction of their rainforest. Only then did the Taiwanese public begin to wake up and pay attention to domestic forestry.
Moreover, a substantial body of research shows that while trees have strong carbon sequestration capacity, as they age this capacity decreases, with older trees fixing far less carbon than younger ones. And obviously abandoning the use of wood for petroleum products out of concern for the environment would be completely muddleheaded. Trees are a renewable resource. After they are cut down and replanted, the land can still thrive. As it says in the Mencius, “If the axes and bills enter the hills and forests only at the proper time, the wood will be more than can be used.” This remains as true today as ever.
After nearly 30 years of the logging ban, in 2017 the Forestry Bureau announced a new start for Taiwanese timber, launching a policy to revive the domestic forestry sector. Bureau director Lin Hwa-ching even said of this decision, “Don’t you think it would be weird not to do this?” Indeed, as global citizens, it is imperative that we shoulder our responsibility to “cut down trees to save the Earth.”
After being milled into sawdust, logging trash serves as a substrate for mushroom growing bags. This represents a new economic model for the forestry sector.