A large ripple passed through the calm waters of America’s corporate timber offices in the summer of 1999. Home Depot, the country’s largest building supply retailer, announced it would phase out lumber cut from endangered forests. Instead, the 1,050-store chain would give preference to wood products that came from ecologically managed forests certified by the independent, nonprofit Forest Stewardship Council.

The announcement marked a coup for the Rainforest Action Network, a San Francisco–based group that has played a leading role in the battle to preserve what’s left of the world’s pristine forests. The group targeted Home Depot with demonstrations and direct action—even broadcasting embarrassing customer service messages over intercoms telling shoppers that the store’s lumber came from destroyed tropical rain forests.

The Home Depot announcement may also have marked a critical turning point in the extent to which increasing consumer demand for “green” wood products can bring change to the timber industry. Within a year of Home Depot’s announcement, other large wood products retailers and manufacturers signed on with the FSC, including Lowe’s, the second-largest lumber retailer (615 stores), Wickes, and Andersen Windows.

Corporate heads turned again last September when the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page article on the increasing demand for certified wood products. The story pointed out that retailers selling more than one-fifth of the wood used in America’s home remodeling market have signed on with the FSC and that participation in Europe was even greater. The large ripple was becoming a tsunami.

Since its founding in 1993, the Mexico-based FSC has successfully brought together environmental groups, foresters, landowners, timber companies, labor and social groups and indigenous peoples organizations to establish broad principles for responsible forestry. Among its 300 members, it counts Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, Natural Resources Defense Council, National Wildlife Federation and Rainforest Alliance. It also includes the Portland, Oregon–based timber outfit Collins Pine Company, Mendocino Redwood Company and the Swedish paper giant AssiDoman.

The FSC’s goal is clear and straightforward: to support “environmentally appropriate, socially beneficial, and economically viable management of the world’s forests.” It’s a tall order to be sure, particularly considering that the program is aimed at private forestlands, which in some countries (and states) operate in the absence of environmental regulations.

In less than eight years, the FSC has certified 45 million acres of forestlands worldwide, with 6.4 million acres in the United States. The incentive to participate, other than a desire to practice responsible forestry, is the FSC-certified label on a company’s lumber and wood products—and the increasing market share that affords, particularly to owners of smaller forestlands.

“The label is our selling point,” Hank Cauley, the council’s U.S. director, says. “It guarantees to purchasers that the products they buy can be traced back to sound forestry practices.”

Faced with this increasing demand for certified wood, the timber industry trade group American Forest and Paper Association has created the rival Sustainable Forestry Initiative. To further complicate matters, many of that program’s member companies sport their own “certified” labels.

The SFI is big. It covers 69 million acres of industrial forestland in the U.S. and Canada—ten times the FSC’s North American acreage. But it differs radically from the FSC and is arguably a sham. It lacks key guidelines for sound forest practices, it allows companies to develop their own management standards, and independent, third-party verification is not required. Tellingly, companies with multiple forest practice violations, like California-based Pacific Lumber Company, are certified by the SFI.

According to Simpson Timber Company forester and SFI representative John Gorman, the program fits larger owners rather than small. “FSC doesn’t match our needs because of limits on the size of clear-cuts and restrictions on chemical use,” Gorman says (the SFI places no limitations on chemical use and allows clear-cuts averaging 120 acres). “It was basically developed by environmental organizations with only token input from industry.”

Nonetheless, the timber-industry-hatched SFI program has muddied the waters. With a $45 million public relations campaign by the timber industry scheduled to hit media outlets in early 2001, it threatens to further dilute the effectiveness of certified wood labeling. For now, the large retailers are sticking with the FSC label because its standards are high, its coverage is worldwide, and it guarantees independent verification.

According to Cauley, the FSC imprimatur carries weight because of the organization’s insistence on third-party verification. Independent verification is essential, in his words, “to mend the social relationship to forestry”—and to ensure that a logging company that purports to be environmentally sensitive really is.

Certification can be complex. The FSC authorizes nine independent certifiers worldwide, with Scientific Certification Systems in California and the SmartWood Program in Vermont. All are audited annually by the FSC through office and field visits. Cauley calls the process “auditing the auditors,” and he considers it a core part of the respect that the FSC label enjoys.

The certifiers have two roles. They certify forest landowners as managing their lands in compliance with the principles and criteria set by FSC members. And they certify manufacturers and wood products dealers to ensure that their products are coming from approved forests. This is accomplished through a “chain of custody” tracking process, which traces wood from the forests through mills and manufacturers to retailers.

SmartWood’s Larry Nussbaum compares the process to organic certification for food. And just as in the early stages of organic food marketing, demand is outpacing supply. “The marketplace is responding. We’re working with a number of small landowners and mills, but we’re having a hard time getting large and medium industrial owners to come onboard.”

According to Nussbaum, large timber companies in the Northwest are mistrustful of a process they see as environmentalist-driven, but they are also unwilling to make the kinds of changes in their operations necessary to become certified. “They’re worried it will affect their bottom line. For a publicly traded company, that’s a big concern.”

But Nussbaum and Cauley argue that the industry is in transition and that forest practices today are quite different from those ten years ago. The FSC, they say, is just trying to push the process along.

Moving the process in any large way will ultimately hinge on the regional guidelines the FSC is setting up. So far, the process for developing guidelines for the West Coast has not gone smoothly. An FSC working group has been at it for five years. Final guidelines are due this summer. But a draft circulated earlier in the process received some serious criticism from environmentalists.

Paul Kennard, a staff scientist with the nonprofit Washington Forest Law Center finds the draft guidelines lacking. “The stated goals are very good and the scope is comprehensive, but the specifics fall short,” he says.

To Kennard, the shortcomings include inadequate stream protection, a failure to significantly reduce road density, and a lack of restrictions on logging unstable slopes.

Specifically, the draft guidelines call for fifty– to seventy–five–foot buffers along salmon streams, none along upper tributaries. “That doesn’t provide the kind of natural ecological functions salmon need, like shading or large logs to structure the streams,” Kennard says. He cites a tribal initiative in Washington that recommended minimum 170-foot buffers along salmon streams and fifty to 100 feet on smaller streams as more in line with scientific consensus. “Even with these buffers in place, no more than 15 percent of the timber base was tied up, so this kind of protection should be economically feasible for timber companies,” he added.

Kennard acknowledges that the FSC guidelines call for protection of sensitive areas, but he says that without specific restrictions, timber companies will likely log them.

Daniel Hall of the FSC-member American Lands Institute is part of the working group developing guidelines for the West Coast. He admits they are weaker than some salmon-protection measures but stresses they represent a compromise between the various ecologic, economic and social interests that make up the FSC.

“It’s a bit of a balancing act,” he says. “We’re not trying to create standards for ecologically perfect forestry so much as guide exemplary forestry within the context of commercial management. We want to set clear guidance but leave some flexibility for forest managers.”

Flexibility, of course, is open to interpretation. The bottom line in any certification effort is what happens in the forest. That’s where FSC-licensed consulting forester Guy Lusignan comes in.

Lusignan, a solidly built man with short gray hair tucked under a wool cap, manages FSC-certified forests on the eastern border of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, in the heart of Northwest logging country. His clients include several small, family ownerships as well as municipal watersheds for two towns.

On an overcast fall morning, Lusignan turns off the highway just north of the town of Hoodsport and begins climbing. The road winds through a newly clear–cut hillside terraced with freshly scraped building sites. Real estate signs sprout beside them like weeds.

“The McCormick family, who owns the land we’re going to look at, tried to buy this piece before it was logged,” Lusignan says ruefully.

Currently in his fifth decade as a forester, Lusignan—who frequently sports a broad smile—has worked for all kinds of forestland owners, from large corporations to small family operations. He explains how he became interested in certified forestry.

“Most of the small landowners I work with want more than just maximum income from their lands,” he says. “Some want to use it for recreation; some just want to know they are leaving a nice, mixed forest and good habitat.” He sees certification as a way of gaining some extra recognition for his clients for their stewardship of the land. “Maybe someday there will be some extra monetary reward as well,” he ventures.

That’s not likely anytime soon. Most retailers are keeping the price of certified lumber commensurate with other wood products to encourage demand.

Getting certified as a consulting forester was a long process for Lusignan. SmartWood reviewed his books, interviewed mill owners and other people he had worked with, and conducted field inspections of his logging practices. They did an assessment, set criteria for him to meet within a given time frame and identified what he needed to improve.

“They make you work harder, make you think harder, too,” Lusignan recalls. “Uneven-aged management is the goal. But I’ve always believed a mixed stand was a good thing.”

Lusignan has driven past the last of the “view lots” and arrived at the McCormick family’s forest, a fifty– to sixty–year–old mixed stand of Douglas-fir, western hemlock and red cedar. Occasional old-growth trees left from earlier logging tower among the younger trees, and woodpecker-riddled snags thrust up here and there. The autumn-yellow leaves of maple and willow glow softly through the open woods. A northern flicker flies from a tree and flaps across the road ahead of us, its salmon underwings flashing.

Stopping on a landing, Lusignan looks back over a stretch of selectively logged forest. He has managed this 300-acre family holding for timber production since the 1970s, but his footprint has been light. Only by looking closely can stumps be seen.

“In our thinnings, we manage for a mix of species and ages,” Lusignan explains. Each tree is selected and marked for cutting, he adds, pointing to some wildlife trees he had purposely retained. “Selection is too much responsibility to put on a logger.”

Lusignan measures the annual growth rate for the forest and calculates the sustainable cut based on that. A few years ago, he and the owners decided to overcut this stand to salvage trees after a severe windstorm, so he’s given the forest a rest since then.

Walking up a skid trail, he comes upon a pile of fresh bear scat red with huckleberries. Signs of bear, Roosevelt elk and deer are everywhere in this forest. Steller’s jays shout from a nearby cedar, and winter wrens sing from tangled underbrush.

Lusignan points out an old oxen skid trail where trees were dragged to salt water 100 years ago. He also identifies a railroad grade from logging in the 1920s and 1930s. The land was salvage logged again in the 1950s. The forest that has grown in the wake of these activities reflects a mix of age classes typical of coastal Northwest forests. For uneven-aged management he mixes selective thinning with small clear-cut openings to introduce a component of new trees into the mix. He looks at a recent eight-acre cut bounded by older forest on three sides and scattered through with small trees. It was laid out narrowly to allow natural seeding from the surrounding forest.

Just how big a small clear-cut should be has been a sticky issue in the FSC’s regional guidelines. A number of industry foresters singled out the limit on the size of clear-cuts as their main objection to the program. To an extent, Lusignan agrees with them. “If you’re going to sustain uneven–aged management, you’ve got to get your young trees from somewhere,” he says. He thinks the guidelines need to remain flexible enough to allow for this kind of mix.

Late in the morning, Lusignan shows off his favorite part of the forest, a ten- to fifteen-acre stand that had escaped earlier logging. Pale light filters through the high canopy. Douglas-firs and red cedars two to four feet in diameter soar above smaller hemlocks and grand firs. Standing dead trees lean among them, and mossy downed logs crisscross the forest floor.

Lusignan is actively managing this stand, thinning some of the midsized trees and salvaging occasional blowdown. Yet as we walk among the trees, it is easy to see this is still a functioning forest. All the pieces of a natural forest—a mix of species and ages, large and small trees, standing snags, downed wood, small openings and an uneven canopy—were present. He stops by an opening where some trees had been cut and Lusignan points to seedlings working up through huckleberry and fern.

It is an impressive sight.

To be sure, it is not a stroll through an old-growth preserve. After all, this is a working forest managed for a sustainable yield of timber. But compared to other commercial forestlands in the Northwest, it is clearly a forest managed with an eye toward protection.

Environmentally responsible forestry remains a slippery concept. To some it will always be an oxymoron. The FSC certification program is still new to the Northwest. It’s not a panacea. It won’t replace preservation of old-growth ecosystems, nor is it a substitute for responsible reform of state forest–practice laws. But it sets a new, higher standard for management of commercial forestlands—something citizen groups have had only mixed success in achieving.