NW Certified Forestry

I won’t give a detailed account of NW Certified Forestry certification here because it has a thorough web page at www.nnrg.org. But I can recount the experience of becoming certified. NW Certified Forestry (NWCF) was spawned from SmartWood. And then I recall SmartWood being spawned by its umbrella group parent, The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), in 1989. I signed up as soon as my own forest plans were in place, to support green certification and to get in on the “ground floor” of forest certification’s development. Our forest certification became finalized in 1996. It was the first SmartWood Certified forest in Washington. As a plethora of certification agents have manifested since then, the FSC brand has risen to the surface as the most credible one with the people in the environmental community, who support any kind of tree cutting, at all.

It was hard to get, and without the help of our test and control scientific monitoring plots I had Jerry Becker install with grant money, I think I would have become discouraged by its in-depth analyse requirements. But I believe going through it and not just doing good environmental forestry, is worth it because if things are not labeled in the market place how can people discern which wood products help forests and which harm them (by absence of a certified label), and because I see certification as a tool to change forests from being exploited to getting them treated well, as we use them to meet our needs.