A number of these phrases were repeated so often — largely in ads — that they rose to the status of a meme (in the original sense — a cultural element that becomes so common, that it gets passed down as a fact or belief or ubiquitous icon). Marketing campaigns by forest product companies were more responsible than schools for ''educating' the U.S. population about 'forests' and 'forestry' and, of course, paper and wood products. Along with the headlining "memes" were other, less well-known 'truths': Jobs in timber production were legion, and the management of 'forests' led to more wildlife along with an ever-increasing number of trees.
By the 1980s, most Americans believed that paper was better than plastic, that not only was the supply of wood for buildings and other products infinite, but that using wood was better than using nothing.

This 'education' continues today, with major Big Timber campaigns targeting architects, designers, and even the scientific community, attempting to create new and repointed memes around the benefits of "bio-based" materials over plastic, an optimal carbon balance for wood products over other building materials like concrete and steel, and the renewable (often stated as "sustainable") nature of wood.

Here's how it worked: An LCA, by definition, is purported to analyze a particular factor of a material or product, by assessing its entire "life cycle", sometimes stated as "from cradle to grave". That is, from the moment of extraction (or creation, if it's manufactured from thin air), to the moment of its disposal.

The study of the environmental impacts of consumer products has a history
that dates back to the 1960s and 1970s.

Whereas LCA developed from merely energy analysis to a comprehensive environmental burden analysis in the 1970s, full-fledged life cycle impact assessment, and life cycle costing models were introduced in the 1980s and 1990s…

There are two major components of a product or material's full life-cycle that are difficult to calculate (because one has to assess details of the specific sources) and therefore usually (read: always) missing from LCAs.

One major study estimated that, on average, more than 57% of the carbon contained in a forest ecosystem is in the soil, leaf litter, and deadwood, with only 42% of it in the live biomass. (This exact study was misquoted by one of the most influential papers concluding that substituting steel with wood — tall timber — was of great benefit to the climate, claiming that the majority of carbon in a forest is in the "living tree biomass").

A large part of the live biomass in a forest is the trees' root mass, all of which will be left behind to rot when the tree is cut down. This root mass quickly dies and much of the carbon is emitted into the atmosphere — some of it as methane, which is 86 times as powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Another large portion of that live biomass is the branches and leaves or needles on the trees, all of which are typically left behind as well, to rot on the ground. Eventually, in a relatively short time, most of the carbon in the branches will be emitted into the atmosphere as well. In fact, in a plantation (and often in a clear-cut old-growth forest), it's common practice to bulldoze this 'slash' into piles and burn it, to prepare the area for (another) round of planting. Of course, if burned, virtually all of that carbon will almost immediately go right back into the air, where most of it came from over the last two to three decades (or, in the case of old growth, hundreds or thousands of years).

Also, to conduct what can truly be called a life-cycle analysis, one must look at the life of the tree before it was logged — what I term "pre-extraction". To examine this fully, one must again separate the ecosystem from which the tree is being extracted, as to whether it is a human-managed plantation, a second-growth recovering forest, or an old-growth forest that's been growing, largely without major disturbance, for hundreds — or hundreds of thousands — of years. This is where it gets really difficult for the purpose of performing an LCA. Not only is there a vast spectrum of situations running from one end of those different systems to the other, but this factor is then multiplied, perhaps thousands of times, by additional factors of spatial conditions. For instance, is that forest or plantation in a boreal ecosystem in, say, Kamchatka, Russia, near the Arctic circle, on a mountainside or is it in a tropical ecosystem in, say, Yaounde, Cameroon, in a lowland near the equator, underpinned with peat. What is the altitude of that group of trees? What amount of rainfall is typical there? What soil conditions exist, in terms of nutrient cycling? Is that place a fire-driven ecosystem that has recently burned? If it's a natural forest, how long has it been since a major disturbance, which can encompass any number of occurrences, from landslides to storms, volcanic eruptions, or insect or pathogenic events? Any of these can be a significant factor in that forest's or plantation's current carbon stock and the speed of post-harvest carbon re-sequestration.

All of these factors can determine how much carbon was in that ecosystem historically and currently, and the percentages of that carbon that are in the trees, in the soil, in the leaf litter, and in the branches.

Life Cycle Assessment: Past, Present, and Future. Jeroen B. Guinée et al., Environmental Science & Technology 2011 45 (1), p. 90. DOI: 10.1021/es101316v.

Cover photo Ales Krivec / Unsplash. All other photos © Tim Keating.