Additional Background
UPDATE: Mayor Bloomberg announced in his speech at the Bali climate conference that his government, in regard to ancient rainforest timbers, is going to come up "within the next 60 days, with a plan for reducing our reliance on such hardwoods". And the NYC Parks Department has announced it will no longer use rainforest woods in park benches. These announcements were almost certainly the result of this network's email protests in support of 13 years of effective local organizing. The job now is to get and end to the use of ancient rainforest timbers implemented within law and regulations.
Specifically the mayor said: "Mitigating climate change won't be easy. It will require all of us to change our ways. For example, an important topic in Bali this week is deforestation-a serious problem that is the main component of Indonesia's global warming footprint... New York, like many cities, uses tropical hardwoods-in our case, for our extensive beach boardwalks and also for the walkway on the world-famous Brooklyn Bridge. The physical properties of these hardwoods make them ideal for such uses. So finding adequate alternatives will be difficult. But we must try. And I want you to know that I've asked my Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability to work with the relevant City agencies, and present me, within the next 60 days, with a plan for reducing our reliance on such hardwoods."
New York City's (NYC) Department of Parks and Recreation is one of America's
largest destroyers of rainforests, reports New York based
Rainforest Relief.
Parks and other NYC and state agencies including the Department of
Transportation (DOT) and NYC Transit use hundreds of thousands of board feet of
tropical hardwoods per year. New York City's use of ancient forest timbers comes
at great expense to the Earth's biodiversity, ecosystems, climate and prospects
for achieving global ecological sustainability.
Parks uses ipê logged from the Brazilian Amazon for its 10 miles of coastal
boardwalks (including Coney Island) and for tens of thousands of park benches.
DOT uses greenheart, logged from the rainforests of Guyana for the decking of
the Brooklyn Bridge and the wooden terminals of the Staten Island Ferry. Transit
uses ekki logged from the rainforests of West Africa for subway track ties for
miles of NYC subways.
Despite dire warnings, the Amazon and other rainforests continue to be
industrially logged to meet growing worldwide demand for hardwoods. "In light of
the contribution that deforestation plays in climate change and the 6th Mass
Extinction the Earth has ever known, and the connection between logging for
export and rainforest destruction, we are sending a message to the New York City
government that the use of tropical hardwoods for boardwalks, benches, bridges
and ferry terminals must stop now," said Tim Keating, Executive Director of
Rainforest Relief.
Two decades of environmental advocacy have shown significant gains elsewhere:
the park benches in Los Angeles are made from locally sourced wood, and the
subway ties under Chicago's "L" train from recycled plastic lumber.
Cost-effective, ancient forest free, and ecologically preferable alternatives to
the use of rainforest hardwoods exist. Yet despite rampant illegality, climate
change and mass extinction; NYC Mayor Bloomberg's administration persists in
procuring wood from tropical rainforests, even as he claims the mantle of
environmental leadership.
There is no such thing as ecologically sustainable first time industrial logging
of primary and old-growth forests, and keeping large ancient forest intact is a
requirement to address climate change, maintain global biodiversity and
ecosystems, and achieve global ecological sustainability. Critically, the
campaign avoids greenwashing support for "sustainable" and "certified"
rainforest timbers, knowing that global ecological sustainability depends upon
these timbers staying in ancient forest canopies rather than NYC park benches
and boardwalks.
Please support
Rainforest Relief's and
NY Climate Action Group's campaign
demanding that Mayor Bloomberg end NYC's use of tropical hardwoods. In order to
protect ancient forests, the people who live there, and global climate; NYC
purchases of timbers derived from ancient forests must be stopped and an
important precedent set that all industrial scaled ancient forest logging must end
forever.
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