To encourage this shift, they issued a raft of incentives for forest conservation, such as tax breaks for non-timber forest products like rubber, palm hearts and nuts.
The Forest Timber Camping Decks comprise of raised platforms among the trees, making for great spots to scan the canopy for Knysna loeries while the boerewors (beef sausage) sizzles on your braai (barbecue).
"The controls we had put in place were inadequate due to the unusually high rainfall, which resulted in surface water flowing onto a track that was being used by heavy machinery to extract timber from the forest, " added Mr Garson.
In the winter he fed his stock on hay cut and dried on the mountainside, and for a little extra income, he cut timber from the forest and floated it downriver - just as the Krivecs of Perk Farm do today.
Earlier this year, Muddy Waters released a report on Chinese timber company Sino-Forest, listed in Canada, arguing it engaged in fraud by overstating assets and revenues.
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But Cleaves argues that removing biomass from a forestry site a forest managed for timber as opposed to an old-growth stand or conserved park is a way to reduce the risk of forest fire.
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Irving (a Canadian conglomerate that is now the largest single landowner in Maine), intend to harvest the timber in the usual way, but others, such as Plum Creek Timber, will use the forest a bit differently.
For centuries, the chunks of forest owned by the timber companies have been open to a wide variety of recreational uses, from hunting to snowmobiles.
The answer is not to promote boycotts of tropical timber or insist, as the Forest Stewardship Council does, that the same forest management rules apply to planted softwood as rainforests.
For example, Mitsui announced recently that it has acquired two Australian forestry companies: Great Southern Timber Holdings, which specializes in forest planting, and Hansol, a company that processes and exports wood chips.
"The main objective was to find an alternative income for the local community in the surrounding village and forest, and also relieve the pressure on the forest of people cutting timber, " says project manager Amiri Saidi.
In the markets, as in the forest, when someone yells "timber" it always is wise to exercise caution.
That, in turn, will mean facing down the planters, who prefer to bag forest land for a windfall of timber.
These settlers gaze hungrily upon Bhutan's primeval land and see a forest of dollar signs: rare timber waiting to be logged and farmland cleared.
Through the timber company Irving Woodlands, the Canadian family owns forest land in Maine, most of which is sustainably harvested.
The same problem haunts the main forest-related certification scheme, for timber.
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He was one of the first people to alert the government to the activities of timber bandits who had stripped hundreds of acres of forest in Negros.
Meghalaya's enormous forest cover is community-owned, but timber merchants often bypass the local leaders to strike up deals with foresters.
"One example is the Forest Stewardship Council which is now a global timber certification scheme which in the last 10 years has managed to certify as well manage an area of more than 25 million hectares of forest, " he said.
Some take two or three hundred years to fully mature - and no timber licence lasts that long - so the diversity of the forest is being eroded.
Hoping to recoup some of the timber and toss much-needed work to sawmills, the Forest Service proposed to sell 370 million board feet of lumber from dead trees and replant 30, 000 acres.
Mr Garson said the commission carried out hundreds of forest operations and harvested about 700, 000 tonnes of timber every year, but this was the first pollution incident resulting from harvesting operations for more than 10 years.
Second, environmentalists have been effective at stopping timber sales because courts and agency officers have recognised consistently that the Forest Service, in catering mainly to logging over the decades, has failed to comply with scientifically sound resource-protection laws that govern forest management.
They concentrated on Yunnan Province where Sino Forest claims to have purchased 200, 000 heactares of standing timber from one specific company.
But there's the rub: they have to wait for the Forest Service to sort out the appeals against public sales of timber.
But the American Forest Resource Council, a lobbying group that represents members of the timber industry, believes that forests should be managed to control fires and also to store carbon.
They claimed that the Forest Service was too busy considering environmentalists' appeals to push through sales of timber, and that the delay cost them money.
On June 2, Muddy Waters, a short-selling firm, sent the stock of Toronto-listed Sino-Forest Corp. tumbling after charging the Chinese company with substantially misrepresenting its rights to timber acreage and massively overstating revenues.
Sino-Forest tumbled in June after Carson Block, a short seller, said the company exaggerated its timber holdings.
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When America first created forest reserves, more than a century ago, its goal was to create a sustainable supply of timber as well as to protect the woods and the fresh water reserves within them.
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