Grace Jeffers explains that, while trees are renewable, forests are not.

The John Deere feller buncher is an amazing machine; its giant saw blade can slice and dice a forest that took 4,500 years to grow in just one hour. Architect Maya Lin made a video showing what would happen if you let this machine loose in those places we know and love, noting that 90 acres of rainforest are lost every minute, that deforestation threatens half the world’s species, and that it is responsible for 20 percent of global warming emissions.

We clearly now have the technology to simply erase our forests, and architects and designers have a responsibility to think about the wood that we use and where it comes from. Grace Jeffers spent ten years writing an encyclopedia of materials and learned a lot about wood, and how little most of us know about it. More importantly, even if we know something about the wood itself – its strength, its properties and its appearance – we know almost nothing about the forest.

Lloyd Alter/ Grace Jeffers presenting/CC BY 2.0

Here on TreeHugger and like much of the industry, we call wood a renewable resource. But Grace Jeffers notes that “Yes, we cut down trees, replant them, they grow, and in this way wood is a renewable resource. But by cutting down trees, we are destroying forests and their unique, unquantifiable ecosystems; therefore, a forest cannot be renewable.”

This is the single most important concept: Trees might be renewable, but forests are not. So it is not good enough to simply know about the wood we use; we have to know where it comes from, and we have to preserve what is left of our original forests. We have to ensure that they are not chopped down and replanted, because it is not the same thing, the same place.

Jeffers tells architects and designers that they must ask three questions every time they specify wood:

  • What is this wood’s conservation status?From where did this wood originate?What is the state of the forest from which the wood was harvested?

It is often hard to tell. Some woods like teak are now plantation grown, but you don’t necessarily know what was chopped down for the plantation. A third of the teak harvest is cut in Burma, smuggled into Thailand, and sold as “Thai teak.” Or it is sent to China and turned into finished goods where it is almost impossible to determine origins.It’s not just the tropical forests that are endangered. The Boreal forests in Russia are full of non-threatened species of wood like oak and coniferous trees, but it is also the habitat of Siberian tigers and and Amur leopards.

In the end, Jeffers tells architects that we should avoid all the woods on the IUCN red list, many of which are still available at your local flooring store. Sometimes it’s hard because they keep inventing new names so you have to dig a bit to find a chain of custody. But it is the architect’s job to follow the paper trail and ensure that wood that they specify can be legally imported into the country, and Jeffers says that “it’s only a matter of time” before the authorities start going after architectural firms.

Unfortunately, sometimes architects don’t know or don’t care; according to a survey done for Wilsonart, 70 percent of architects and designers say they prioritize using responsibly sourced wood, but 24 percent are still using illegal rosewood – and guess what?

© Wilsonart Survey

Jeffers picked an interesting example; I have always admired Rem Koolhaas’ Prada store in New York, but Jeffers notes that it is made out of zebra wood, which is akin to “upholstering a chair in Siberian tiger.” Zebra wood is that endangered.

In the end, it would be best if we all stuck to non-threatened North American woods like maple, walnut, cherry or oak. And of course, every wood that we use for anything should be third-party certified by SFI, FSC, or other standards approved by the International Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC), like CSA in Canada.

Global forest Loss/CC BY 1.0

There were many lessons for this TreeHugger in Grace Jeffers’ presentation. The amount of pink representing deforestation in the boreal forests is shockingly large. We promote the use of wood as a renewable resource, but it has to be truly sustainably harvested and must be third-party certified. And when it comes to those fancy finishes and imported woods, we really just have to stop using them. As Grace says,

The presentation, and my visit to New York, were sponsored byWilsonart, which not coincidentally manufactures high pressure laminates that, in many cases, can be a good substitute for exotic woods. I have called laminate the greenest choice for kitchen counters because it is 70 percent paper and, while the other 30 percent is phenolic resin, the sheet is really thin so there is not much of it. After listening to Grace Jeffers and reading her White Paper, it is looking better than ever.

Here is the full infographic from the Wilsonart National Survey looking at what architects, designers and specifiers knew about wood.