Saturday, 15 February 2003
National Wildlife Federation
Partner Profile
The National Wildlife Federation’s support for the FSC goes back to the beginning. In 1992, NWF staffer Barbara Bramble (now Vice Chair of the FSC-US board) built a partnership between NWF, Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club and formed the Global Forest Policy Project, which was directly involved in the Toronto founding assembly to create the FSC. Soon after the founding assembly, and on the heels of a major Congressional study to examine problems and trends issues in the Northern Forest region, NWF’s northeast office, spearheaded by Eric Palola, began to actively promote the concept of 3rd party certification.
In collaboration with the Rainforest Alliance’ SmartWood program, NWF completed some of the earliest FSC resource manager, state lands, and paper mill certifications in the U.S. on this mostly privately owned 26 million acre land base. This work led to roughly 1.5 million acres certified in the northeast, roughly half of the certified acreage in this region. In addition to assisting FSC standards development in the northeast, NWF staff also played an early critical role in the development of international FSC Principles 9 and 10, and served on FSC-International’s first strategic planning committee.
A natural extension of NWF’s work in the Northern Forest has been the effort to extend FSC certification to small non-industrial forest owners. As one of ten projects under the Ford Foundation’s national community forestry demonstration program, NWF’s Mark Lorenzo has been working with Vermont-based groups in using FSC certification to promote local wood manufacturing and purchasing by in-state businesses. Parallel to this work Eric Palola has served as a member of FSC’s international technical committee to develop risk assessment and procedural changes for improving access to FSC for “small, low-intensity managed forests" or SLIMFS. While today NWF is less involved in the direct management of certification projects, NWF’s Stacy Brown (former FSC-US Promotions Coordinator) works closely with SmartWood to recruit working forests into FSC in sub-regions of high biodiversity under the LINC project.
Most recently, NWF has turned its sights on helping bring FSC to a broader consumer audience as part of the Lifestyle Action program. NWF’s publications director Laura Hickey, has worked closely with the FSC paper group to develop strategies for stimulating demand for green paper containing FSC fiber. NWF’s Campus Ecology program developed an online discussion with campus purchasing agents on FSC wood and wood products, and the FSC will be the subject of a future articles and films produced by NWF. Via its merchandising arm, NWF is increasingly promoting green product alternatives such as FSC-certified wood, shade grown coffee, and Fair Trade certified chocolate.