What is wrong with using wood furniture? Nothing, if you do not care about how we can sustain the consumption of earth wood resources. As a starter, the world as we know it is losing its forests fast. This is causing environmental decline and extreme difficulty to secure resources for wood furniture.
On September 1, 2011 German Prime Minister Persson, who is also a member of World Resources Institute's board of directors, said "Restoring 150 million hectares of degraded lands represents an exciting and largely untapped opportunity to create more jobs and economic growth, while also protecting our climate." The Bonn Challenge builds on a New Global Assessment, a World Resources Institute's project, identifying that more than 2 billion hectares of the world's deforested and degraded lands are available for restoration. For further clarity, the earth land mass is about 14.9 billion Hectares (36.8 billion acres). So, more than 13.4% of the land on earth meets the criteria as recoverable from deforestation and degrading. The target of "The Bonn Challenge" is actually aiming at one percent of the earth land mass or 7.5% of the deforested land. There are four categories of forests depending on the latitude and climate, namely, tropical, subtropical, temperate, and taiga forests. During the last century, the world lost 20% of its forests. The remaining forests are evenly divided between tropical/subtropical forests in developing countries and temperate/taiga forests in developed countries. According to Lester R. Brown, in his book, titled "Plan B 3.0 -Mobilizing to Save Civilization," the developing world has lost 13 million hectares of forest a year since 1990, an area roughly the size of Greece, and the developed world actually gained 5.6 million hectares of forestland each year during the same period. He went on to describe that this net loss is worse than it seems because of the loose classification of forestland. Only 40 percent of the world's remaining forest cover qualify as natural forest systems capable to support all of their biodiversity.
What are the reasons for the over deforestation? They are described in the following points:
- Firewood: developing countries in Africa, Haiti, Madagascar, etc. have a high demand for fuel and resort mostly to woods used as firewood, over half of the forest disappeared in exchange for fuel;
- Paper: this is still a major use of woods even though recycling in the developed world has reduced the overall consumption of wood for paper and even caused some paper mills to close but remains a major player of this arena;
- Lumber: construction and wood products still rely primarily on the forests, in the furniture area, China has taken the lead of wood products industry and has searched in the world for resources beyond Nigeria and the Philippines where the forests were exhausted, the recent exploited forests in Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, and Siberia, and into the Amazon and the Congo Basin. Forest Trends, an NGO, predicted even those recent mother lodes won't last more than 20 years.
- Ranches and farms: Many developing countries like Brazil, Malaysia, and Indonesia exchanged forests for ranches raising cash producing animals and farms for commodity crops like palm oil for human consumption or diesel fuel, causing a term by Lester R. Brown, called "ecological/economic downward spiral" of no return.
Wood products include furniture, flooring, roofing, particle board, and other construction materials. Traditionally, we either stick with it or replace them with other materials like aluminum, cement, gypsum, plastics, etc. for many other good reasons. However, in furniture, bamboo is the only one that is organic and has been made from ancient times to the recent decade of "green" movement into environmentally sustainable bamboo furniture. The bamboo forests are also spread in all continents primarily in tropical and subtropical regions. They are already part of the eco-systems like the wood forests but they really belong to grass species, which mean they can grow right back after being cut from the stems. The world population continues to expand and the demand for furniture will continue to rise above the lagging supply by the wood furniture industry. Granted the developing countries will always strive to leap-frog and catch up with the developed countries because the latter seem to set the standards. How does our world connect with the rest of the world? One way is through the use of imported furniture, which is the rule than the exception in the last decade.
Needless to say, there is a long way to go before the furniture market is tipping over to bamboo. It is time however to make a personal statement in support of the "green" or environmental sustainability. Use more bamboo furniture than cutting down the last tree in the forest near you (you are lucky to find it).