Friday, 15 February 2002
FSC On the Airwaves
KQED, the San Francisco NPR affiliate, aired a one hour show on forest certification on January 9. Michael Krasny hosted the show, which featured FSC Executive Director Hank Cauley; Kate Heaton, Senior Forestry Specialist at FSC-environmental chamber member Natural Resources Defense Council; Cael Kendall, Manager of FSC-certified EcoTimber; and Dan Imhoff, author of a book on alternative building materials. The American Forest and Paper Association’s Sustainable Forestry Initiative was invited to participate but declined.
Go to www.kqed.org and click “Forum" under “Radio Programs" to find the archive of the show. Below is an excerpt from the show.
KRASNY: “The FSC logo has become kind of the gold standard, you have a big public relations campaign going with Pierce Brosnan and Olivia Newton John, and you have certainly had your roots in the environmental movement, but you are often it seems at loggerheads with logging companies, isn’t this why the industry has essentially started their own certification program?"
CAULEY: “The origin of FSC was not only a group environmentalists getting together, but it was environmentalists, loggers, and social groups, saying we need something to define responsible forestry, we need to change the status quo. So as the FSC was developing with a lot of businesses on board, businesses make up about a third of our membership, we were able to define this middle path where environmentalists and business could agree on something. The controversy has come from the fact that there are two groups that historically have come to loggerheads, but the FSC is a solution."
Additionally, the certification of Tennessee’s state forests attracted a lot of attention in the media, including an Associated Press (AP) story that appeared in numerous papers across the country. VT-based FSC-certified furniture makers Beeken Parsons (SW-COC-38,www.beekenparsons.com) also were the topic of an AP article that was picked up in several important newspapers in the Northeast. Contact Lisa Swann at 202.342.1388 or lswann@foreststewardship.org for more information.