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By Root 2206 0

Pine and Kane Hardwoods, one of the U.S.’s largest producers of cherry; Gibson Guitars, one of the world’s leading guitar manufacturers; Seven Islands Land Company, which manages a million acres of forest in the state of Maine; and Andersen Corporation, the world’s largest manufacturer of doors and windows. Major participants outside the U.S. include Tembec and Domtar, two of Canada’s largest forest managers; B & Q, the United Kingdom’s largest do-it-yourself-in-the-home business, analogous to Home Depot in the U.S.; Sainsbury’s, the second largest United Kingdom supermarket chain; Swedish-based IKEA, the world’s largest retailer of ready-to-assemble home furnishings; and SCA and Svea Skog (formerly Asi Domain), two of Sweden’s largest forestry companies. These and other businesses all embraced the FSC because they saw it as advancing their economic interests, but they reached that conclusion through varying combinations of “push” and “pull.” The “push” is that some of these firms were targets of campaigns by environmental groups dissatisfied with company practices such as dealing in old-growth timber: for instance, Home Depot was pressured by the Rainforest Action Network. As for the “pull” factor, companies recognized many opportunities for maintaining or increasing their sales to an increasingly discerning public. In defense of Home Depot and other companies whose motivation included some “pushing,” they understandably had to move cautiously while making changes in the network of suppliers that they had built up over many years. They then proceeded to learn quickly, to the point where Home Depot itself is now pressuring its suppliers in Chile and South Africa to adopt FSC standards.

In connection with the mining industry, I mentioned that the most effective pressure on mining companies to change their practices has come not from individual consumers picketing mine sites, but from big companies that buy metals (like DuPont and Tiffany) and that sell to individual consumers. A similar phenomenon has unfolded in the timber industry. While the largest consumption of wood is for home construction, most homeowners don’t know, select, or control the choice of forestry companies producing the wood used in their house. Instead, the customers of forestry companies are big forest products companies, like Home Depot and IKEA, and big institutional buyers, like the City of New York and the University of Wisconsin. The role of such companies and institutions in the successful campaign to end apartheid in South Africa demonstrated their ability to command the attention of even such powerful, rich, determined, well-armed, and apparently rigid entities as the apartheid-era South African government. Many retail and industrial companies in the forest products chain have increased their clout by organizing themselves into what are termed “buyers’ groups” that commit themselves over a specified time frame to increase their sales of certified products, with preference for FSC-labeled products. Around the world today, there are more than a dozen such groups, of which the largest is in the United Kingdom and includes some of the largest U.K. retailers. Buyers’ groups are also increasingly strong in the Netherlands and other western European countries, the U.S., Brazil, and Japan.

Besides these buyers’ groups, another potent force behind the spread of FSC-labeled products in the U.S. is the “green building standard” known as LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design). This code rates the environmental design and use of materials in the construction industry. An increasing number of American state governments and cities give tax credits to companies adopting high LEED standards, and many American government building projects require companies involved to follow LEED standards. This has turned out to be a significant consideration for builders, contractors, and architectural firms that don’t deal directly with the public and are not very visible to consumers, but that nevertheless choose to buy FSC-labeled products because they benefit