Forest Ecosystem Management and Timber Production

Divergence and Resource Use Resilience

Russell Warman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429941153
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Forestry
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Timber sourcing is shifting from extraction from natural forests to forms of cultivation that are increasingly agricultural in nature. This book takes a multidisciplinary approach to examine the socio-political, biophysical and discursive dimensions of this divergence of wood production from forests. This analysis challenges the historical integration of wood production and forest ecosystem management exemplified by the institutions of forestry with their inherent wood/forest connection. This has significant implications for how wood and forest socio-ecological systems confront change and challenge ideas about how to achieve sustainability.

Historically, the institutions of stewardship forestry were founded on ideals of sustainable systems in long-term equilibrium. However, these occur within rapidly evolving social and technological contexts that constantly challenge the maintenance of any equilibrium. This creates considerable tension within wood and forest socio-ecological systems and their institutions and governance. Moving beyond adaptation to transformation, however, requires a willingness to consider post-forestry conditions, such as integration of emerging wood cultivation systems into agricultural and landscape approaches, and increasing management of extensive forest ecosystems for non-wood values in the absence of wood production. This book includes four case studies: a global modelling of shifts in wood production and three national case studies (Australia, Indonesia and New Zealand), each analysing shifts in resilience in wood and forest socio-ecological systems using a different disciplinary approach.

This book will be of interest to advanced students, researchers and professionals in forestry, land use, conservation, rural studies and geography.

1 Wood and forest social-ecological system resilience – setting the scene

The rudimentary enterprise of entering a forest, selecting a tree and removing wood has been a staple activity through much of human history. But the sourcing of wood is now undergoing a fundamental shift. From a history as long as humanity’s, wood has been collected from natural forest. But increasingly this is shifting to cultivated wood sources such as plantations and trees not from forests. Much as other food and fibre agriculture emerged from earlier methods of collection from wild ecosystems, the same is now happening for wood (Binkley, 2003; Carle et al., 2009; Sedjo and Lyon, 1983). This process began to occur in the last several centuries in a few densely populated parts of the world such as West Europe, Java and Japan. However, the shift to cultivated trees¹ for wood production rapidly gathered pace in the twentieth century (Evans, 2009).

A large body of literature is focused on the environmental, economic and social values and impacts of timber production in both natural forests and plantations. Despite this, knowledge about the process of the transition itself is limited. In part it is speculated here, this is because there has been a tendency for wood production, forestry and forest conservation thinking to be grounded in ideals of sustainability, balance and equilibrium – not dynamic evolution and change. And also because of institutional biases towards the assumption of the natural integration of extensive forest management and wood production. However, this work will demonstrate that this assumption of the wood/forest nexus is being fundamentally challenged. As with any paradigmatic challenge this allows new insight and opens up new opportunities. In addition, there is a tension between goals of sustainability and systemic equilibrium and the siting of such goals in systems of profound social, technological and biophysical change. This work is undertaken with an assumption that better understanding of these processes of change will improve policy in response to evolving natural resource regimes.

At the outset it is worth briefly noting the personal origins of this work in order for you, the reader, to understand where I am ‘coming from’ in choosing this topic, this approach, this data and the conclusions I reach. In the case of this book much of the research was undertaken as part of my PhD candidature. But the research questions themselves grew from over 20 years work in various forms of natural resource management (including forestry and forest conservation). During these experiences I became interested in understanding how society responds to limits of natural resources through changes in technologies and institutions and the political and economic contestation involved over limited resources and conflicting values. I was also struck by the paradox of systems of resource use displaying seeming opposing qualities of both fragility and resilience in the face of change.

It was from these observations that I launched into the broad research aim of this book: to improve understanding of transitions in resource use regimes. This has been delimited to the case of a single global resource use system here – wood and forests. And specifically, an examination of the global transition of wood production, from extraction of wood from natural forest to cultivated wood sources. The inquiry asks three questions related to this transition: Why is the transition occurring? In particular, what are the changing historical, environmental, social, political and economic factors driving this? To what extent is the transition occurring? Including, to what extent is it likely to occur into the future? And finally, what are the implications of this transition? This last question has obvious relevance for systems of wood production and forest use. But, it is also pertinent to other natural resource use transitions.

These research questions are approached with an open attitude to discipline. This book could be said to be a political economy analysis in the traditional use of the term. It is economic, in the sense of pursuing questions of how people maximise the utility of limited resources (wood and forests), and political, in the sense of pursuing questions of how people utilise and seek power over access and use of limited resources. In this multidisciplinary spirit the research here delves into economics, politics, sociology, geography, ecology, conservation biology and, of course, forestry. It eschews the institutional reflex to delimit the research project by focusing on a singular approach, discipline or set of data. Instead, it seeks what can be illuminated when the phenomenon being considered and critiqued is approached as a woven network viewed from multiple directions. Of course, this still requires delimitation, undertaken as set out in the following description. But it allows an immersive approach into the networked nature of the phenomena of evolving forest and wood production systems.

Three key areas of theory are used to frame this work. First, actor network theory informs a multidisciplinary approach to complex systems being studied. Second, resilience thinking is drawn upon to describe the complex systems being studied and how they change. Finally, particularly in Part III, this work draws on the theory of reflexive modernity to consider how these complex systems, and the contemplation of them, are shaped.

The actor-network theory’s distinctive approach to treating the social, discursive and natural in complex networks (Law, 1992) provides a helpful framework for undertaking multidisciplinary analysis of complex adaptive systems. The limits of singular approaches that actor-network theory seeks to address are noted in this paraphrased quote from Bruno Latour:

[Forestry is] too social and too narrated to be truly natural; the strategy of [foresters, timber companies and forestry bureaucracies] too full of [yield analyses and forest mensuration] to be reduced to power and interest; the discourse of [forests and wood] is too real and too social to boil down to meaning effects.

(Latour, 1993, p. 6)²

For the study of wood production and forests this approach provides a useful conceptual basis for the multidisciplinary and grounded approach that is taken. It recognises the multi-faceted nature of the problem and the phenomenon. The topic of study is approached from multiple directions. None alone reveals an understanding sufficiently removed from the subject, but, taken together, there is the potential for a deep analytical penetration.

Resilience thinking (Holling, 1973, 2001) provides a useful conceptualisation for exploring the formation and evolution of forest use and wood production social-ecological systems (hereafter, wood and forest social-ecological systems). It considers how these social-ecological systems develop certain configurations (a state or basin to use the language of resilience thinking) that give the system resilience in the face of pressures on system conditions. Further, this conceptualisation supports analysis of how systems maintain resilience in the face of change, but also transform or transition into new states. Resilience thinking lends itself to considering whole systems and how they move from one state or condition to another. Resilience thinking also provides a place where the path-dependent nature of institutional and technological processes can be considered in relation to social systems, as it can explain systematic resilience and transformative capacity (or fragility). Resilience theory, too, has come to better incorporate the feedback complexities of the social actors in its social ecological systems. Together, both actor network theory (with origins in social sciences) and resilience thinking (with origins in natural sciences) provide useful ways of thinking about complex social/natural systems such as the wood and forest social-ecological system.

Finally, reflexive modernity (Beck, 1992; Beck et al., 1994; Giddens, 1990) also provides theoretical framing for understanding and thinking about the social institutions being studied here. The central idea of this theory is that a contemporary modernity has emerged that reflects on the challenges and problems (risks) of key features of modernity, such as rapid technological change, capitalist and industrialist economies, a pre-eminence of rationality and reason, and the nation state. These features of modernity will play an important role in describing the evolution of wood and forest social-ecological systems. Related to this, reflexive modernity within the ‘risk society’ points to the need for resolution of emerging conflict about how to resolve tensions within social-ecological systems through risk negotiation. Appeals to higher authorities (including an objectively detached science) are limited in their ability to reconcile the normative tensions that exist in the systems being studied. Reflexive modernity also serves as a reminder that this work itself will be an act of reflexive modernisation – it is not only dealing with problems of modernity, but the work itself exists within and affects the system being studied. The work here recognises that the making of choices in an environment of political contestation and negotiation is key to resolving tensions between understandings and values acting on the social-ecological systems of study.

For this book there is a need to address part of this contestation up front. At the heart of this book’s topic are the distinctions between various wood sources, ranging from natural ‘virgin’ forests to industrial plantations and trees not from forests. Forests and trees (as wood sources) occur within a broad spectrum of characteristics across the globe. Furthermore, many forest definitions have been established within institutional frameworks focused on wood production, but are found to be wanting when researchers and policy makers direct attention to forest restoration, conservation, agroforestry and management of mosaic landscapes (Chazdon et al., 2016). This presents real definitional challenges. To address this there is a need for creating definitions that are fit-for-purpose (Batra and Pirard, 2015; Chazdon et al., 2016). This is particularly true for this book – there needs to be a clear distinction between natural and non-natural wood sources.

What is meant by natural? Joseph Pitt (2011) observes that the terms natural and artificial are problematic, with the distinction itself ‘contrived’. Much that we label natural is influenced in some way by human agency, while the artifices of humanity have entirely arisen from within nature. Pitt (2011, p. 82) suggests that ‘we should finally give up that worn out old distinction between the natural and the artificial’. Hodgson (1993. p. 34) concurs, noting that ‘the Cartesian and Newtonian worldviews have sanctioned habits of thought which involve an ultimately untenable conceptual division between humankind and the remainder of the natural world’. Yet forests and wood sources differ, and these distinctions are useful and important. Central to the questions of this book are the natural or cultural qualities of forests and wood sources.

For labelling different forests, the conceptual opposite to natural, cultural (or artificial), is not generally used, but rather plantation, or more recently planted forest, referring to a planting of areas of trees for wood production or other purposes. However, as will be explained in more detail later, many forests that are considered to be natural have had significant human influence in their development. Fire, as well other wild food collection and hunting support processes of forest disturbance – undertaken to encourage preferred species for food and other uses – have all influenced the nature and structure of forests. Because of this, the present condition of those forests cannot easily be said to be purely natural (in the sense of being somehow free of human affects).

However, there are qualities to forests (or other assemblages of trees) that can be distinguished as natural that describe key features which different forests have to a lesser or greater extent. For this work, the key quality defining naturalness is the presence of an ecosystem containing a complex suite of species that are largely indigenous to the area and whose presence in that locale can be largely attributed to past processes other than human intervention. For further refinement it might also be useful to consider that the trees that dominate the forest are primarily the result of natural regeneration, or that human processes of disturbance have nevertheless maintained complex forest ecosystems with their suite of primarily indigenous species. In this work these forests will be referred to as natural forests or forest ecosystems. Natural forest will be used in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Wood and forest social-ecological system resilience – setting the scene
• PART I Participation and power
• PART II Case studies: countries, regions and themes
• PART III Transitions and resilience
• Index