Sweden’s `new forestry’ still fraught with dissent

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Editor’s Note: News reporter Susan Young accompanied a group of foresters to Sweden in June to learn about forest certification in the first country to use it extensively.

For years, when foresters talked about exemplary forestry, they talked about Sweden. So, it wasn’t surprising that the heavily forested Scandinavian country was one of the first to jump on the certification bandwagon.

But the Swedish experience shows that even in a country where consensus and trust in the government are the rule, forest certification can be a process fraught with dissension and rancor.

Twenty forestry professionals from Maine and eastern Canada traveled to Sweden in June. They went to see what lessons could be learned from that country’s efforts to certify much of its forestland just as the certification phenomenon begins to catch on in North America.

Although the Scandinavian country is georaphically six times larger than Maine and is a much bigger player in the global timber market, there are many parallels between Sweden and the Pine Tree State.

Landing at Arlanda Airport in Stockholm, one of the parallels was obvious – thick stands of evergreen trees lined the runway, much as they do in Bangor.

Sweden, like Maine, is developed in the south, with the north covered in a vast swath of forest dotted with small villages. Ninety percent of the country is covered in trees, most of them spruce and pine. Much of the northern timberland is owned by large private corporations that use the wood in their paper mills. Moose are prevalent and hunted feverishly.

In the past, many Maine foresters have traveled to Sweden to learn about the country’s use of high-tech equipment and highly trained loggers.

One of the first to go was Chuck Gadzik, now Irving Woodlands district forester for Maine and formerly the director of the Maine Forest Service.

He made his first trip to Sweden after graduating from the University of Maine in 1979 with a forestry degree. Gadzik said he learned more during his year in Sweden than he did during four years of college.

“They were way ahead of what we were doing in the United States,” Gadzik recalled of his first visit to Scandinavia.

This summer, he was part of a contingent of Irving foresters who went on the Sweden trip to learn about certification.

Irving is only the second large landowner in Maine to have its land certified as well-managed by the Forest Stewardship Council. The state’s largest landowner had about a third of its ownership certified and plans to have the remaining land certified next year.

Twenty years ago, the Swedes relied heavily on plantations and clear-cutting, hoping to grow trees as quickly and efficiently as possible. Harvests were done with computerized equipment that allowed precise cuts and did little damage to surrounding trees and soil.

However, it’s generally accepted today that not everything the Swedes did was good. In an effort to maximize growth and cut costs, vast plantations of single-species trees were created. Huge clear-cuts were common.

Under pressure from environmental groups, the Swedish forestry industry realized it had to do things differently, Jan Remrod, head of Skogsindustrierna, the Swedish Forest Industries Federation, told the visiting Canadians and Americans.

So, in the early 1980s, a movement referred to as “new forestry” began in Sweden.

Today, clear-cuts are smaller and contain fallen trees and clumps of live trees left behind for wildlife habitat. There is less planting and more emphasis on growing a mix of native species. Herbicides and pesticides are used sparingly.

The changes were costly but necessary, Remrod said, standing next to a picture of an old-style ugly clear-cut in a conference room at the Swedish World Trade Center.

With the conversion to new forestry under way, it was only logical for Sweden to lead the march to certification. Nearly half the acres certified by the Forest Stewardship Council are in Sweden.

Sweden was the first country to develop its own standards under the FSC, a Mexico-based group that promulgated a set of forestry goals that take into account not just trees, but local economies and environmental concerns.

The group, which began in 1993, grew out of concerns that South American rain forests were being cut down at an alarming rate.

In 1994, Sweden formed its own FSC working group to begin developing standards tailored to its own forests. The working group was made up of representatives of the forest industry, private forest landowners, native groups and environmental interests.

When the process began, the agreement was that if any groups did not concur with the outcome, they would drop out of the standards writing process.

In the end, two groups walked away. They were the environmental group Greenpeace and the private forest-owners group, whose members own 50 percent of Sweden’s forests and are somewhat akin to Maine’s small woodlot owners.

They stopped participating in FSC because they did not support a stipulation to allow reindeer belonging to the native people in northern Sweden to graze freely on their land. Instead, they developed their own certification system and standards.

Asked if this didn’t indicate that the process was a failure, the chair of the Swedish working group insisted that Sweden has standards in place that are widely accepted – and demanded by Swedish-based furniture maker Ikea.

During a dinner conversation, however, Canadian forestry professionals wondered if FSC was all it was cracked up to be.

Noting that Sweden is the FSC “poster child,” one forester said: “If there is so much wrong with the poster child, you have to wonder what’s wrong with the program.”