Favoring Foreign Wood Use Over Jobs, Family Farms

In all likelihood, you’ve stumbled upon USGBC LEED certification signs in buildings across the country without thinking much about them.

But what exactly are the USGBC and LEED, and why should you be concerned?

The acronym USGBC refers to the United States Green Building Council, a nonprofit environmental organization that dictates building standards for many federal, state and local agencies through its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system. Because a reported 400 U.S. cities and localities, 39 states and virtually the entire federal government currently mandate builders meet LEED standards, the certification has become a de facto seal of approval on public and increasingly private building projects that purportedly demonstrate sustainability.

More broadly, the USGBC and LEED are part of the growing “green building” movement in the United States. According to that movement’s activists, buildings and homes must achieve greater energy efficiency, pollution reduction and health preservation.

The criteria they employ to determine “sustainable” building materials, however, has come under increasing question not only by landowners and lawmakers, but also conservationists themselves.

One problem is that the USGBC only allows use of wood certified by something called the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) to receive LEED’s “responsible extraction of raw materials” credit. But what is so special about the FSC, as opposed to such alternative programs such as the American Tree Farm System (ATFS) or the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI)? Nothing – only that FSC is the preferred program of activist environmental groups (e.g., Greenpeace, ForestEthics) that have successfully bullied small businesses, Fortune 500 companies, and government agencies into accepting their favored system as the only acceptable method of preserving forests.  

A destructive consequence of the FSC monopoly is that wood from 75 percent of America’s certified forests is placed off-limits. While that single-source arrangement benefits the FSC and activists, it thus imposes significant costs on the domestic forestry industry and discourages competition.

How so? Because FSC holds foreign landowners to lower standards than U.S. foresters, which thereby discriminates against domestic foresters and increases the likelihood of builders seeking foreign suppliers of wood. It is no surprise, therefore, that 90 percent of approved supply comes from abroad. Typically, the government interferes with the market to ostensibly protect American industries. Here, sadly, it is relying on an unaccountable third-party to do the opposite.

That arrangement obviously jeopardizes American jobs. It’s no wonder that the International Association of Machinists and other unions whose rank-and-file members’ jobs are at risk favor recognition of other certifications like SFI rather than solely FSC as a way to ensure the viability of tree farms in rural communities.

Another problem is that FSC certification presents challenges to owners of smaller amounts of land, as they must set aside significant portions of property from development. That lowers potential profits for a small business owner and family farmers since larger forest owners can endure the costs more easily. In contrast, a landowner who cannot sustain the costs of FSC certification and cannot reap the benefits of SFI-certification due to government interference may decide to forego certification altogether and sell land to developers.

Meanwhile, there exists little to no clear environmental benefits to using FSC over SFI. A recent study published in the Journal of Forestry examined the impact of FSC and SFI forest certification in North America and found few differences in land management outcomes of those two alternative systems. Additionally, the League of Conservation Voters, National Alliance of State Foresters, and National Association of Conservation Districts also favor a more level playing field for certification. Those groups possess much better on-the-ground expertise than the activists who come from marketing backgrounds and lack credentials pertaining to land management or environmental science.

Amid continuing economic sluggishness, lawmakers are awakening to the folly of a LEED rating system that favors an internationalist regime (FSC) over its American alternatives (SFI and ATFS). On that basis, dozens of members of Congress and governors have written the USGBC to demand changes to LEED.

The most positive movement in that regard occurred in December 2011, when Maine Governor Paul LePage announced that FSC-certified wood should not enjoy a de facto monopoly over construction of public buildings and projects. That move benefited Maine’s domestic landowners, and gave their products access to new markets.

Other states would be wise to follow Governor LePage’s example and demonstrate some critical leadership. Compliance with LEED, after all, is supposed to be voluntary. Accordingly, we should not sacrifice America’s family farms under false promises of stewardship.