SITE CONTENT: Forest - Planted
Planted Forests
From Christmas tree farms on five-acre lots in Pennsylvania to million-acre swaths in Quebec and the Canadian Northwest to pine tree plantations in the Carolinas, planted forests are big business in North America, and on other continents.
Companies such as Weyerhaeuser, Louisiana-Pacific, Bowater, Potlatch, Boise-Cascade, Fort Howard, Sappi, Timberwest, Plum Creek and Longview Fiber either own and manage their own forests, lease them, or process wood into various products, or a combination of these activities.
Although the forest products industry record is not perfect with regard to land use, its practices today are markedly different, and many would say markedly better, than they were a generation ago, and very different from those of the mid-twentieth century. The concept of renewable resource management has taken root, at least in North America.
In the U.S., much of the timber plantation country is in the southeastern states, where the growing season is long, and the climate is moist, encouraging rapid growth.
Despite increases in the nation's population, affluence, and timber removals, US forest area has remained constant and timber inventory has risen 30 percent since 1952, according to an article in the Journal of Forestry. Industrial ecology, which analyzes the flow of timber through systems of production and consumption, seeks to explain how that happened; it also shows the leverage that consumers, sawmill managers, and foresters have to reduce harvested area and continue the rebirth of the American forest. Changes in demand by consumers, wood utilization by sawmills, and management by foresters can help conserve forests for uses other than timber. Of the three actors, however, foresters can exert the most leverage by increasing the growth rate of trees.
In the tropics there has been some movement toward growing tropical timber in plantations, due to the increasing rarity of these valuable trees in the wild. According to the RIC Good Wood Project and Bruno Manser Foundation, there are some questions as to the ethics of establishment and management of such plantations. Sometimes rainforest is deliberately cleared to make room for timber plantations. Some claims that tropical timbers have originated in plantations are true. These would qualify as reasonably ethical sources of timber, if one is sure that the claims of their producers are true. This can be difficult, as there is a high monetary return and therefore great incentive for producers who provide misleading information.
Most Indonesian teak is grown in plantations in Java. Most of the Central American teak comes from Costa Rica, where, as for Indonesia, it is also an exotic species. The main teak-growing countries are Burma, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand, little of it in plantations. Illegal cutting is booming in these areas.
Rubber trees have been cultivated in plantations for about the last 100 years in 24 tropical countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. However, after 25 to 30 years, the tree ceases to produce latex at an economic level. Such plantations are therefore systematically cleared and prepared for replanting over a 25 to 30 year cycle.
About Forestry
The
USDA Forest Service (National Forests)
The
Bureau of Land Management
The
Forest
Products Society
Global
Forest Watch
The
Temperate Forest Foundation
Society
of American Foresters
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