Forest certification: a management tool for Alaska? How can consumers be sure their wood products come from a properly managed forest?

• Author: Swagel, Will

Six years ago, Catherine Mater, a leading U.S. timber-industry engineering and market researcher, told her forest-products clients that forest certification was probably just a "flash in the pan" that would soon fade. "Boy was I wrong," she says now.

Mater is president of Mater Engineering of Corvallis, Ore., and a senior fellow with the Pinchot Institute for Conservation in Washington D.C. She has given presentations on value-added, timber-manufacturing trends and sustainable forest-management practices at the request of the president for the U.S. Timber Summit and the White House Pacific Rim Economic Summit. She works with companies and countries throughout the world on sustainable-forest practices, an area where she is seeing forest certification take hold.

As a result, Mater has become a leading expert on forest certification, spearheading pilot projects across the U.S., testing forest certification as a tool that may reduce the need for government regulation, promoting a more sustainable industry, heading off environmental legal challenge and answering consumers' questions about where their wood product comes from.

WHAT IS FOREST CERTIFICATION?

Simply put, a certified forest is one that has been assessed by an independent third-party organization on a number of criteria. These criteria may include environmental standards, such as guaranteeing that timber activities have not hurt water quality or that biodiversity be maintained. The criteria could limit the size of clear cuts, versus more selective logging techniques. They could even take social values in account, such as traditional uses of the land. Two main forest-certification programs presently operate in the U.S., the Sustainable Forest Initiative (SFI) and the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). When one of these two "Good Housekeeping Seals of Approval" for sustainable-forest practices certify a wood product, it can bear a sticker attesting to that fact.

"The Forest Stewardship Council is introducing an international labeling scheme for forest products, which provides a credible guarantee that the product comes from a well-managed forest," states FSC's Web site, www.fscoax.org. "All products carrying our logo have been independently certified as coming from forests that meet with internationally recognized FSC Principles and Criteria of Forest Stewardship."

SFI also has a labeling program, described with its other programs, at www.aboutsfi.org. "If you go into the stores in the...