The Myth of the Disappearing Forests.

Concerns about the disappearance of the world's wood supply are largely unfounded. In fact, there is evidence that the situation is better than it has been in a long time.

The world is not running out of wood. The basic fact is that the use of wood by industrial countries is stable, almost all of it is produced in these countries on a sustained basis, it uses a small part of the land, the technology is advancing, the area of forest is stable, and the volume of the forest is increasing. The situation in the underdeveloped tropical world is different. Large amounts of land are still being converted to agriculture (about 0.8 percent is converted per year). As these countries advance, we can hope that their situation will become more like that of the northern industrial countries.

Here are some facts taken from the article, "Forests: Conflicting Signals," by Roger Sedjo of Resources for the Future. The article appeared in The True State of the Planet.

* Though nearly 75 percent of the total industrial wood production comes from Northern Hemisphere industrial countries, the temperate forest lands of this region are expanding.

* Almost all of the timber harvested in the United States, Europe and Nordic countries comes from second-growth/plantation forests.

* The world's current industrial wood consumption requirements could be produced on only 5 percent of the world's current forest land.

* Fully two-thirds of the deforestation in the United States occurred in the sixty years prior to 1910, and most of the other third before 1850.

* Although the United States has been the world's number one timber producer since World War II, U.S. forests have experienced an increase in volume in the past 50 years and have maintained roughly the same area over the past 75 years.

* In recent years, private forest lands have accounted for 85 percent of total tree planting and seeding in the United States. The expansion of American forests has been made possible by improved tree-growing technology, the advent of tree plantations, improved control over wildfire, and the reversion of many agricultural lands, especially in the south and east, to forest.

* Commercial logging is not a major cause of deforestation; expanding agriculture is. In temperate countries, which provide over three-fourths of the world's industrial wood, reforestation is the rule, while in tropical forest land conversion to agriculture remains common.

* The developed countries in the temperate regions appear to have largely completed forest land conversion to agriculture and have achieved relative land use stability. By contrast, the developing countries in the tropics are still in a land conversion mode. This suggests that land conversion stability correlates strongly with successful economic development.

Further Evidence

A more recent article with similar conclusions is Searching for Leverage to Conserve Forests: The industrial ecology of wood products in the United States, by Iddo Wernick, Paul Waggoner and Jesse Ausebel. It appeared in Journal of Industrial Ecology, vol. 1 no. 3, 1998.

All this assumes that basic energy needs will be satisfied without increased wood for fuel. Some "soft energy" advocates want to increase use of fuel wood, because they don't like coal and hate nuclear.

I have read that the availability of high quality wood for furniture will improve in the near future because of plantations.

Logging the Northwest

As I presently see it, the flap over logging in the Pacific Northwest is a tempest in a teapot as concerns the sustainability of human material progress. Here's why.

If the loggers win, the amount of forest protected by previous laws covers most of the forest area. It will not be greatly reduced. The idea that logging in national parks will come next is just a fantasy.

If the environmentalists win the issues currently being disputed, the amount of wood available for paper, construction and furniture will not be enormously reduced. There is enough available from privately held and managed land. Only a minority of environmentalists want to take over this land also.

Of course, the issue matters to some people directly involved. The loggers now logging will indeed lose their jobs if the environmentalists succeed in their campaign. I don't know whether the environmentalists personally stand to gain or lose from one outcome or another.

As a matter of taste, I admit to liking loggers better than environmentalists.

Editor's note: Mr. McCarthy is a professor in computer science at Stanford University in Palo alto, CA. Send comments to [e-mail].