Fred Gale

... Sierra Club's most recent mapping project, over half of British Columbia's ancient coastal rainforest ... of biodiversity where cut levels remain unchanged.7 During the 1980s, timber production peaked ... sector, for example, the industry responds to global price and supply cycles that ...

The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is an international, civil society-based organisation headquartered in Oaxaca, Mexico, that promotes certification of forest management practices. To ensure well-managed forests, forest managers seeking FSC certification must adopt practices that conform to its ten principles and 56 associated criteria (P&Cs). FSC recognises, however, that its generic P&Cs need to be ta ilored to specific forest ecosystems and socio- economic circumstances through the development of regional certificati on standards. Several North American regional standards have been endorsed by, or submitted for endorsement to, the FSC and a comparison of their similarities and differences is timely. The paper reveals that significant variations exist across FSC's regional standards in North America and argues that the composition of the negotiating group is an important factor in explaining the noted differences.

The authors examine the commodity‐oriented nature of the British Columbia (BC) forest industry in the context of domestic policy changes and globalization. An analysis of primary data on the volume and value of wood products highlights the degree to which BC firms depend on the export of four products (softwood lumber, pulp, newsprint, and paper) for sale in three markets

... According to Kratochwil and Ruggie, by the early 1970s, liberals had been forced to ... Structuralrealists and structural liberals (or neo-realists and neoliberals) began to employ the regime ...Neorealists, in their elaboration of the hegemonic stability hypothesis, were among the first ...

Public policy has been infiltrated by private regimes of regulation in the past decade. Such private regimes include industry codes of conduct and voluntary certification and labelling schemes. One such scheme is the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC‐AC), an international, civil‐society‐based organization headquartered in Bonn, Germany, which promotes forest certification. To ensure that forests are well managed, FSC requires forest managers

Environmental politics is not always the outcome of the complex interplay of interests and institutions mediated by ideas. Sometimes naked self-interest prevails and proponents manipulate environmental institutions to achieve their goals. The way in which economic interests can trump environmental ideas and institutions is illustrated by the case of the proposed Bell Bay pulp mill in Tasmania, Australia, where Gunns

The author contrasts the economic principle of specialization found in trade theory with the ecological principle of diversification that underlies the ecosystem approach to natural resource use. He argues that current ecosystem decline is a consequence of the over-extension of the principle of specialization from the factory setting to nature. When the specialization principle is applied wholeheartedly to natural systems to speed up their delivery of desired commercial products it leads to ecosystem simplification, loss of integrity and stress. This occurs, for example, in modern approaches to forest management, when clearcutting and replanting with genetically modified seeds occurs with heavy inputs of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. What is required is a re-balancing of the application of the principle of specialization with the principle of diversification, as occurs when forests are managed according to an ecosystem(-based) approach. This re-balancing occurs at the level of production, however, not at the level of trade. Consequently, the focus of environmental reform must be production policy, not trade policy.

ABSTRACT On 14 March 2007, Gunns Ltd withdrew its Tamar Valley pulp mill proposal from the environmental assessment being conducted by Tasmania’s planning authority. The proposal subsequently underwent three other assessments: by consultants hired under the provisions of the State’s specially legislated Pulp Mill Assessment Act 2007; by the Department of Environment and Water Resources under the provisions of the Commonwealth’s Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999; and by a specially commissioned Scientific Panel chaired by Australia’s Chief Scientist. The mill was finally approved for construction on 4 October 2007. Given this level of scrutiny, one might reasonably conclude that the pulp mill’s impacts have been comprehensively evaluated. But have they? Situating the pulp mill proposal within its broader historical, political, legal and philosophical contexts, the book’s 15 contributors investigate the rigour with which the mill’s impacts on natural heritage, Aboriginal heritage, the sea, the air and the economy have really been assessed.