P.O. Box 254 | Bristol, VT 05443 | tel. (802) 453-7728 fax. (802) 453-7729
visit us: http://www.familyforests.org
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What's "environmental" about this wood?Isn't all wood "environmental," since it comes from trees, a renewable resource? While Bicentennial Hall's wood may look just like the hardwoods you can find in any lumber yard, the process that brought it to this point was markedly different. When you go to the hardware store to buy a piece of oak for a home project, chances are you'll have no idea about its past-where it came from, what the ecological health of the forest it came from was before and after harvesting, or whom you are supporting through your purchase (besides the hardware store!). The oak could have been harvested by whole-tree clear-cutting on land where owners paid scant attention to soil erosion and compaction, wildlife habitat, and water quality, or it may have come from a tree carefully thinned from an ecologically intact forest. It could have grown in Vermont or Virginia or a dozen other states. You have little way of knowing. This wood's got history! Middlebury College wanted to be sure it knew the full story of its wood's past. Specifically, the College wanted to be sure that that story was a regional one in which the forest's health played the leading role. As a result, all of Bicentennial Hall's wood meets the forestry standards established by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), and 70% of it meets the even more stringent ecological forestry standards of Vermont Family Forests (VFF). VFF Ecological Forestry Standards Green certification of forest products began in the early 1990s, empowering customers to drive ecological stewardship by allowing them to differentiate between lumber harvested with no guiding ecological standards and lumber harvested from forests under ecological forest management. Green certification also empowers landowners, giving them greater insights into sustainable forestry as they work with the team of local and regional experts who conduct the forestry assessments. In Vermont, The National Wildlife Federation, through its affiliated SmartWood program, oversees the Forest Stewardship Council certification standards. Landowners participating with VFF meet SmartWood standards, as well as the standards of VFF's checklist of 36 management practices. VFF standards go beyond those of established by the FSC and SmartWood in three significant ways, prohibiting clear-cutting, use of synthetic pesticides, and whole-tree harvesting. What is Ecological Forestry? In their book, Principles of Ecological Forestry, Robert Seymour and Malcolm Hunter define the central axiom of ecological forestry this way: "Manipulation of a forest ecosystem should work within the limits established by natural disturbance patterns prior to extensive human alteration of the landscape." Bringing specifics to this general axiom, one of VFF's guiding principles states that "Ecological Forestry should conserve biodiversity, water quality, site productivity, and scenic beauty; use only biological pest control; and mimic natural processes." The chart below, adapted from Ecoforestry, by Alan Drengson and Duncan Taylor, compares industrial forestry and ecological forestry.
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