By Matthew Hirsch

Fifteen years ago San Francisco was one of a handful of cities that banned municipal purchases of tropical hardwoods, like cocobolo and fragrant Bolivian rosewood. Some environmental activists say we can now safely ditch the ban and keep cutting the trees – so long as it's done in an eco-friendly manner.

Not surprisingly, other enviros fervently disagree.

The market-based approach was Greenpeace's recommendation to the San Francisco Department of the Environment, which has been soliciting opinions on the Forest Stewardship Council, an international body that certifies forest-management practices. Another Bay Area green group, Rainforest Action Network, also says buying FSC-certified wood is the way to go.

Have these greens, by endorsing the FSC, found a smart new way to steer the timber industry toward sustainability? Or is this proof that the environmental establishment has totally lost its spine?

For years San Francisco bought wood treated with arsenic, because that was the cheapest alternative to tropical hardwood (which has natural resistance to water damage and doesn't need to be slathered with nasty chemicals). That changed in January 2003, when the Board of Supervisors moved to add arsenic-treated wood to the list of building materials banned from city purchasing.

Pam Wellner offers a unique perspective on all this, since she helped initiate the 1990 tropical-hardwood ban and is now making the case for change. A senior Greenpeace campaigner, Wellner told the Bay Guardian the hardwood ban was the best option available 15 years ago. Now she says the FSC, which was founded in 1993, is one step better.

"Had we had something like the Forest Stewardship Council back then, we would have put it in [the legislation]," Wellner told us.

In the early 1990s the environmental movement adopted a carrot-and-stick approach to the timber industry. The idea was to make life miserable for the worst companies while offering a green seal of approval to those that would accept some environmental and social standards.

Early on, green groups used forest certification as the measuring stick for their success. Among the companies that signed on to purchase FSC wood were Home Depot, Ikea, and the Gap. But over time, critics say, the organizations supporting FSC have lost sight of just how precarious the rain forests' future has become.

"We feel it's wrong to delude yourself, to be in denial about the state of the Earth," Mary Bull, of the Greenwood Earth Alliance, told us.

A strident critic of industrial logging, Bull said the FSC label is confusing to consumers and doesn't guarantee that forest products were harvested using the best environmental practices. She noted two major flaws with the FSC: the FSC certifying bodies have a direct economic relationship with logging companies, and some FSC forest products include noncertified wood.

If San Francisco weakens the tropical-hardwood ban, Bull said, it will be a step backward – whether the wood it buys is FSC-certified or not. "We should not be touching the last 20 percent of primary forests left on the face of the Earth at this point," she said.

Grant Rosoman, Greenpeace's representative on the FSC board of directors, told us he shares some of the concerns about the council, especially the FSC's complaint process. But he said there needs to be certification to keep the timber industry in check and that, compared with other forest certification groups out there, the FSC is by far the best. "The option of doing nothing is really not an option," Rosoman said.

Looking back, Wellner said the tropical-hardwood ban made a fine political statement but hasn't made the least bit of difference in slowing deforestation in places like the Brazilian Amazon.

But neither, for that matter, has the FSC. (The latest figures, released May 19, show 10,088 square miles of the Amazonian rain forest were destroyed in 2004.)

Is it the least bit surprising, then, that as greens have been duking it out over the best way to save one of the world's most precious resources, the folks who've made out best are the loggers?

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