According to a new kind of certifier, you can help conserve forests with your purchase dollars Five years ago, Chip Chapman didn't give much thought to creatures like the marbled salamander. For almost two decades, Chapman has been a forester in central New England, with small-landowner clients trying to earn money from their woodlots. It has also been, Chapman and others now say, a biological disaster. Cutting down the big oaks on a piece of land, for example, means eliminating its best acorn producers.
Fewer acorns mean fewer deer and other mammals that depend on the nuts for food.
Fewer big trees mean fewer nesting sites for large birds. In recent decades, many foresters in the East, including Chapman, have shifted to sustained-yield forestry. In this approach, a forester uses core samples from typical trees in a client's forest to calculate their recent rate of growth and translate it into the amount of lumber that could be sustainably removed. Then Chapman discovered a new approach to forestry involving third-party certification, based on the premise that some consumers will pay a little more for products made from wood that originated in a forest managed for biological diversity as well as for harvest. And I recommend cutting only 70 percent of a forest's growth.