As fast as timber flows
out of the Russian Far East, consumer goods are pouring in from Japan,
China and Korea, wrapped in packaging produced from Russian pulp. What
can be done to challenge this crazy cycle of consumption?
Despite being the key incentive for
increased logging over the world, consumption of timber products is one
of the least attractive issues for the environmental movement in highly
developed countries. Since the global environmental revolution of the
1960s when the core forest conservation NGOs were established, few of
their communities have adopted low consumption levels nor have they
succeeded in changing the consumption ideology of the capitalist world
in general. Moreover, with the failure of the socialist system, which at
least tried to keep consumption to a moderate level, the race for
increasing quality of life through increasing consumption has become
completely global and serious. This is generating a series of threats to
the environment. First is the timber itself, and the pulp used as the
source of the megatonnes of paper in offices, shops, homes and
factories. Another is carbon emission, from fossil-fueled waste
incineration. Next is the energy required for recycling, and finally the
land area wasted for dumps in countries with no or inadequate recycling
industry.
Japan, being one of the biggest
resource consumers in the world, and with a highly developed recycling
industry, remains at the same time one of the most culturally stubborn
in terms of packaging and use of non-recyclable paper. There is also a
legal, cultural and economic system of destroying and rebuilding private
houses every 25 years. This creates a huge threat to the forests
supplying high quality timber to Japan from all over the world, a
significant part of which consists of timber coming from Russian Far
East and Siberia. In such a strictly regulated, culturally closed and
numerous society as Japan, wasteful habits of consumption become
business as usual, and any public discussion on such issues seems
abstract, if possible at all.
A train is loaded up with timber:
Disappearing Forests on their way to millions of consumers, who often do
not yet realise the immense destructive impact our wasteful habits have
on the Natural World we all depend on.
Some progressive Japanese companies
have for many years paid attention to environmental conservation both
overseas and in Japan. There are well known cases of improving air
quality in Japanese cities by strict requirements on the quality of
gasoline, as well as clean-ups of coastal marine ecosystems and rivers.
Now car companies like Toyota invest remarkable funds into promoting
solar cars and the solar energy industry to reduce fossil fuel use.
Finally, companies involved in Japanese forestry are now actively
looking to get environmental certification of their products by either
ISO 14001 or FSC standards, which means that they are seriously
interested in avoiding consumption of timber produced by environmentally
destructive methods.
| All these initiatives, undoubtedly
positive and respectable though they are, do not mean that Japanese
society is ready to reduce per capita consumption of timber and pulp
products. Even though increasing production by a certified company may
not contradict existing criteria and indicators of sustainable forestry,
it certainly contradicts the idea of a sustainable world. According to
the World Resources Institute, we are currently losing about 12 million
ha of natural forests annually by all methods, including forestry
certified as sustainable. |
Another lorry ready to
carry away its load:
We can only wonder just how much additional fossil fuel it takes
to cut down the forests, transport them all over the world, process
them, transport the products once more, etc. etc.?
|
The only realistic way to save natural
forest ecosystems, with all their values like endangered wild species
and endangered indigenous cultures, is to reduce the culture of
consumption in key developed countries like Japan. These countries
already have experience of selective waste management and recycling. The
consumption issue is becoming one of the hottest global problems,
particularly as hundreds of millions of people in rapidly growing Asian
countries aspire to achieve the same high levels of consumption as in
developed countries.
Japan as an island-based, highly
populated country, operates like a global pump of natural resources. By
using rubbish to fill in seashore bays, it uses other countries’
resources to reclaim land. This may not seem to be a bad solution for
Japan, enabling it to generate even more rubbish, create more jobs to
deal with it and thereby have more land to live on. But in the global
context this wasteful society needs to be deeply re-educated to a more
modest culture, sensitive to the resources which are wasted for one-time
use as packaging for each tiny consumer product.
The culture of the former Soviet
society was to re-use cans, bottles, jars and bags for all consumer
goods. Only now, flooded with globalised goods in non-biodegradeable
packaging, littering our cities and towns, are we becoming aware of the
destructive nature of this shady garbage. What is ironic is that much of
that flood comes from the neighbouring countries of Japan, China and
Korea, using timber officially and illegally logged in the Russian Far
East for producing the packaging.
It is doubtful whether the newly
capitalised Russian society will ever be able to accept this tragic
feedback for what it really is: not as a sign of prosperity, but as a
challenge to invest the profits from this wasteful trade into the
recycling industry. The investment needed is huge, and that means local
entrepreneurs will need to cut more and more forests in order to get
enough profit to pay for processing all the rubbish that we’ll be
getting back ...
Yet another patch where illegal
logging has begun.....
Article by Anatoly Lebedev, Bureau
for Regional Outreach Camp [swan1@marine.su]
Photos Courtesy of Anatoly Lebedev.
The text of the above article was
reproduced from Taiga News Issue 41 Winter
2002.
Read more articles by clicking the link below:
http://www.taigarescue.org/TaigaNews/index.php?main=issues&issue=41
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