October 7th 2015
by: Frank Hartzell Willits News 10/7/15     tMendocino Redwood Company land treated by “hack and squirt” Photo by James Sibbett
Locals questioned The Rain Forest Alliance at an August Caspar public meeting about whether the non-profit was part of “self certifying greenwashing.” The RFA was in town as part of its process of a green recertification to Mendocino Redwood Company. Audits happen every year. MRC has passed the last 14 audits. Every five years, including 2015, a full onsite inspection and recertification is done. If the RFA and its cohorts are greenwashers, it’s a global tragedy, as RFA is active on forests and farms all over the world. The extent of its global reach revealed in its tax returns is stunning. Locals demanded to know who provides the money to the RFA and who is behind the non-profit? A review of available information found that RFA was the pioneer in the business of rating forests. Currently it’s among the most open operations in what is a much more secretive business than if the same work were done by public agencies. The RFA (and its competitors) operate more like the corporate boardroom than old style environmental activism, linking friendly companies and non profits into a well funded interlocking self-regulatory global framework of consultants and contractors that is difficult for someone sitting in Caspar to access. Two of the three members of the team who came to Caspar, including the lead auditor, were not RFA employees but contractors hired for the job.
Founded a style
This now ubiquitous corporate style environmental NGO was a new idea when current RFA board chairman Daniel Katz co-founded the Rainforest Alliance in 1986 at the age of 24. Timber companies voluntarily submitted to paid consultations which would help them learn better practices. In turn, they would be certified as green, a message popular with consumers. In an increasingly global world, with less information than in the past from the news media, the idea of an independent auditor was a winner. Green agencies that operated more in skyscrapers than the forest became more common. In 1993, the RFA helped found the Forest Stewardship Council, the organization that now issues the best known green certification for forest products. The RFA acts as auditor, using the FSC standards to judge firms such as Mendocino Redwood Company. The RFA also founded another non-profit to do farm certifications to meet the growing demand for filtered information. The acronym soup has thickened in recent years, as more and more private companies and non-profit entities got into the business of certifying and auditing. This competition involving a number of private corporations is not generally viewed as a good thing. To attract business, competitors offer easier certifications that some say are meaningless. Because all of this is private business, it’s hard to know who is doing the best work, as all those in the business provide glowing reviews for themselves on their own websites. The fading independent news media has done little critical reporting on any of the companies or review processes.
How transparent?
One test this newspaper can give RFA and FSC is the amount of voluntary disclosure they do. By that measure they do very well. With FSC, the records of past Mendocino Redwood Company audits are extensive and posted to the website at http://info.fsc.org/details.php?id=a0240000005sRR6AAM&type=certificate&return=certificate.php. (the search engine is difficult). RFA has also opted for maximum disclosure, its website proclaims. The non-profit follows up on this promise in its online tax return information, where they voluntarily post all the salaries of top employees, for example. The highest paid RFA employee is President Hortense “Tensie” Whelan of Brooklyn whose salary was $287,777 in 2013. Many of those in RFA seem to be from NYC. (a full list of board members of RFA is included at the end of this article). Tax returns show RFA spent just $5,741 on lobbying in 2013. Annual income was between $21-$27 million every year since 2015, rising each year. The Rainforest Alliance has certified about 100 million acres of forests worldwide, making it the largest FSC certifier of forestlands in the world. The ten FSC standards seemed to be interpreted more like the Ten Commandments than scientific principles, at the recent meeting. Like a preacher, auditors can choose one standard over another when making decisions. So how does the reader rate such a firm? With no independent media to ask questions, Greenpeace has raised newspaper-like questions about manipulation of the standards. “There is growing concern with the increasing number of certificates being awarded to controversial forest management operations that do not meet the standards of the system,” Greenpeace wrote in 2013. “Increasingly, the poor performance of some companies holding FSC certificates is beginning to overshadow the cases where the FSC has led to a substantial improvement from status quo logging practices and supported the increased on-the-ground protection of forests. These ‘bad apple’ FSC-certified operations present a reputational liability to the FSC brand, and will likely undermine consumer trust of the label.” Greenpeace took on MRC as a case study. Greenpeace found that MRC was an example of following the FSC standards and doing it right. Greenpeace took a look at the issue that has most inflamed locals about MRC - its hack and squirt killing of tan oak in its redwood forests. “The most common critique of MRC is its use of the herbicide Imazapyr to remove tanoak. Areas that were clearcut by MRC’s predecessor now have excessive amounts of tanoak. MRC, in order to restore the “original conifer balance” on the lands, manually applies Imazapyr, allowable under the FSC, in relatively small amounts (2ml per tree via syringe) to use Imazapyr came after the company had first invested heavily to explore alternatives and ways to commercialize tanoak.” “MRC argues that other methods of removal of the tanoak, such as manual control with chain saws, could introduce greater amounts of chemicals in the ecosystem. MRC lists the amount of chemical usage on its website, monitors chemicals in the water table, doesn’t use the herbicide within the watercourse protection zones, and plans to phase out the use of the chemical by 2020 … Although there is room for improvement in this area, MRC invested substantially in exploring alternatives, made its decisions carefully weighing environmental concerns and MRC uses the herbicide in minimal amounts and in a transparent manner,” Greenpeace wrote. Since that report was made, the issue of fire danger from the dead standing tan oak has become much more controversial.
MRC Audit
The 2014 audit update by RFA found that Mendocinog Redwood was doing what it could about the issue. “Interviews with both MRC staff and fire control agencies provided recognition that the standing dead tan oak increases the fire hazard in the short-term; however, it is recognized that in this region the tan oak is a species that decays relatively quickly. Thus the increased fire risk is short-term. MRC also provided an example of a fire burning through standing dead tan oak in which the fire behavior was similar to the adjacent untreated forest. MRC does mitigate the short-term fire risk created by management by leaving a green belt along property boundaries,” the 2014 RFA report states. Locals, including firefighters, have contested the idea that the hardwood trees rot quickly and do not pose long-term fire danger. There are 557 companies certified to FSC standards in California. Mendocino Redwood Company is among those. The certification process is a test that happens every year. Does anybody ever flunk this test? The audit team could not name any cases where companies got decertified by them at the meeting, although spokesman Stephen Grado said he had been in on 88 audits. He said the audits has made companies do much better. Can a test that nobody flunks mean much? That question was posed to Brad Kahn, spokesman for the FSC. He said companies that take on certification will sometimes pay to do a self-assessment ahead of time just to make sure they don’t flunk. “If they think they might fail, most companies wouldn’t take the test. They don’t want that blemish,” Kahn said. He said companies that choose to seek the voluntary certification are those that have already been working toward the goals. “We do not have data on how many companies were denied certification. Most commonly, companies are able to be certified if they address Corrective Action Requests. Sometimes the CARs are minor, sometimes major. It is almost unheard of for an audit to find no CARs.” If a company does fail, there is no way for the reader to know about it. The Greenpeace report reveals that MRC failed to be certified on its first attempt in 1999, achieving it the next year and every year since. Kahn mentioned Resolute Forest Products, a company that was decertified, impacting more than a million acres of forest in Canada. RFA was also the auditor on the suspension of their status over failure to show enough action on its CARs, which brought legal action. So some companies do fail. What do companies get out of FSC certification when they pass?
True believers and risk management
Kahn said some companies are “true believers” who want to do the right thing. Kahn said others view it as global risk management against buying from loggers that may be logging endangered forests or other environmental issues that could hurt the company. Others get access to markets from the green certification or are able to sell the wood at a premium, Kahn said. He said most companies go for the certification for a combination of those reasons. He pointed to MRC’s deal with Home Depot as an example of the green certification providing access. Home Depot stores in the Bay Area have sought only green certified wood and made the deal with MRC for its wood, based on that certification. Some locals have directed protests at Home Depot in an effort to get MRC to halt “hack and squirt” tanoak management. Is Greenpeace really independent like a newspaper might be on a good day? Big Green environmental agencies, including Greenpeace, do business differently today than their founders did. Naomi Klein, in her recent book, “This Changes Everything” documents how Big Green collaborations with industry have provided a blessing to business as usual, prolonging problems with market-based solutions. Deals are sometimes done on one end of the globe by groups like the Nature Conservancy that allow development in one area in exchange for something else elsewhere. RFA is proud of its market-based approach in everything from bringing more eco-tourism to Central America to certifying Chiquita to sell its bananas with a green label. Does that tip the scale in favor of a giant conglomerate with a dark history and against a rising movement of independents? What are the economic ties between all of these closely bonded non-profits and private companies? Those questions are not likely to have answers under the modern dealmaking environmental paradigm.
Report on MRC
Grado, the man who did the talking at the Caspar meeting, was asked for a report on what he had seen in the MRC forests as he left town. “In the two days in the forest…..We could not smell anything, as was alluded to at the public meeting. We have also seen areas where herbicides have not been used and trees have been cut and slashed and spread. Neither of these areas look ‘nice’ but restoring the redwood forest will occur either way. Transitioning the forest is always a challenge. We also saw areas were tan oak has been left in the forest for species diversity, with some of them marked as wildlife trees. Some areas of tan oak were left alone as there were just not that many of them. My opinion is that tan oak is not disappearing from this forest,” Grado said. Rainforest Alliance is an accredited certification body, overseen by Accreditation Services International, which is an independent body that regulates FSC accredited auditors. FSC sets standards, certification bodies (like RFA) audit to the standards, ASI oversees the auditors to make sure they meet the standards. RFA is also a member of FSC in the environmental chamber. In this role, RA gets a vote on FSC policy, bringing their experience as auditors to discussions about forest management policy, Kahn said. If any local ever feels an auditor is not meeting FSC standards, that person can enter a complaint into our dispute resolution system. This can trigger a review by the auditor (if the complaint is about a certified company), by Accreditation Services International (if the complaint is about an auditor) or by FSC. Members of the Rainforest Alliance board of directors. Daniel Katz- chair; Roger Deromedi- vice chair- Non-Executive Chairman of Pinnacle Foods, former CEO of Kraft Foods; Wendy Gordon- In 1989, she and Meryl Streep co-founded Mothers & Others for a Livable Planet; Labeeb Abboud- general counsel of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative; Peter Schulte- managing partner of CM Equity Partners, a private equity investment firm; Annemieke Wijn- Long time coffee industry veteran retired from Kraft Foods; Tasso Azevedo- Founder and former director of the Brazilian NGO Imaflora; Sonila Cook- Global head of energy and environment at Dalberg Global Development Advisors. Dan Cohen- Former TV producer and former senior vice president of advertising for The New York Times; Seth Cohen- Partner at Valinor Management, a hedge fund based in New York; Daniel Couvreur- International banking executive; Count Amaury de Poret- Co-founder of NAXS Nordic Access Buyout Fund; Larry Lunt; Marilu Hernandez de Bosoms- Co-founder of Grupo Plan, a Mexican real estate company specializing in the development of hotels and resorts; David S. Ross- Mediator at JAMS, the largest private alternative dispute resolution provider in the world; Eric Rothenberg a partner in O’Melveny & Myers LLP’s New York office and directs the firm’s environmental practice; William Sarni – Environmental consultant with Deloitte Consulting; and Kerri A. Smith –Environmental fundraiser and former employee of RFA.