The Wealth of Forests: Markets, Regulation, and Sustainable Forestry

Patrick Colgan is the former executive director of the Canadian Museum
of Nature.

The Wealth of Forests records a June 1995 Environment Canada workshop
that had western academic forest experts as contributors. Past failures
and future possibilities are examined from community, economic,
environmental, and legal perspectives, both generally and with case
studies from British Columbia, particularly the newly introduced Forest
Practices Code.

Within each perspective, the book offers balanced evaluations of the
strengths and weaknesses of specific approaches. The pittfalls both of
regulatory mechanisms and of “leaving it to the market”
appropriately receive much attention, as do topics like
eco-certification of products. Noteworthy are the considered analysis of
economic instruments by Peter Pearse and the two very different chapters
by Michael M’Gonigle, one a broad approach to “political ecology”
and the other targeting a shift in power to communities.

The need for a “new forestry” is a recurring theme. Debate centres
on such issues as choice of economic instruments, reform of arrangements
like tenure (well examined by David Haley and Martin Luckert) and zoning
(Jeremy Rayner), and dealing with community and international pressures.
Tollefson’s opening and concluding chapters provide a welcome
synthesis for the book, which exhibits the inevitable redundancy and
unevenness of multiauthored works.

This book is for specialists in resource economics. All taxpayers will
regret that, despite the 1995 workshop, “where the growing pressures
to reform Canadian forestry will lead is no more certain today than when
we embarked on this project.”