Dear Jason and others in the Collective Action Working Group:
First, thank you Jason for providing real clarity about your goals for the summit, this working group and feedback on the vision statement. I still lack the clarity and direction I need to successfully contribute to this process. I thought yesterday’s session was helpful, though incomplete; we need more time together. Merrick provided a good starting point with the four questions. I heard some level of agreement in our group that it might be too early for a vision statement, that we have work to do before we could get to a unified vision. I think Jason’s comments really validate that.
Ultimately, I joined this process because there is a strong desire in the architectural/engineering/developer community to utilize more wood in the built environment and reduce embodied carbon in buildings. People are hungry for solutions to address climate change through credible carbon sequestration with a back-story they can trust. The architectural/engineering/developer community have questions. We need to be able to answer them. If we in the forest community can provide the credible story through science and analysis we will thrive and be recognized as the most relevant and proximate tool to address climate change. That’s why the Endowment continues to invest in life cycle analysis, environmental product declaration development, blockchain technology and other tools to tell the carbon story of forests and forest products. With the right tools we can show the spectrum of what forests, forest management and forest products do to help reduce the impacts of climate change. And it will be a spectrum.
Right now, we could add cellulosic nanomaterials to concrete and reduce the CO2 emissions from one of the most CO2 intensive building materials by at least 18 percent. We can treat five tons of concrete with nine pounds of cellulosic nanomaterials to see that kind of reduction in emissions. While it will be important to tell the sustainability story of those nanomaterials, and I truly want those materials to be the most sustainable they can be, I could live without forest certification to produce them. Would FSC’s controlled wood be good enough? Certified sourcing from SFI? Tree Farm? Or is the climate threat so dire that the objective ought to be sustainability of the forest and utilization of these materials to tackle the bigger threat? I know the next response is going to be: But what if harvest produces too much CO2? I think that requires some intellectual honesty. Every acre in the U.S. may not be certified. Every acre may not be sustainable. However, we can calculate the carbon balance of U.S. forests and it’s a pretty remarkable story. When you consider that we have a very similar amount of acres forested today as we did 100 years ago while tripling the population on the U.S., that tells an incredibly important story about carbon balance. And we can talk about volume separately because volume gains on a lot of those acres are truly remarkable. Yes, it’s not the same forest. No, not all the ecosystems are functioning as they did, but there is a positive story to tell about sustainability and the carbon balance. While the national carbon story is good, there are definitely improvements and differences at different scales, and that is important. We need to address those issues and make every improvement where we can and provide the kind of incentives that produce results. But do we start with our map so zoomed in to one spot that we don’t have the view of the full picture?
If it is a spectrum, maybe there is an aspirational outcome we can think about while we address climate issues through one of the most realistic immediate solutions we have available. There are options along the spectrum. Perhaps that’s how we build our map?
There is a lot of work to do and of course I do not have all the answers. This is an impressive, passionate group of people. We can make an impact here. It may not be perfect, but we can put ourselves on that path.
Respectfully,
Michael