If environmental thrillers are for you, then don’t judge this book by its cover

Timber. Peter Dauvergne and Jane Lister. Polity, €13.75, Unavailable on Kindle

THIS isn’t a book that goes in for the niceties of fancy design, exotic graphics or beautiful colour plates — though any one of those would have enhanced it. Instead, its design is mundane, its academic look off-putting and its tendency to excrete technical terms relentlessly wearying.

But don’t let that put you off. For here is a powerful story, explosive even. It’s cause celebre is the prevention of the ongoing forest destruction wrought to satiate the bottomless lust for forest products by the West. And as such, exotic design eschewed, it wears its heart on its sleeve.

Picture this: Virgin forest, (though a much over-used term, it will have to do) in southern Indonesia. Impoverished farmers hear that there is a killing to be made in palm tree oil. Machetes and tractors at the ready, huge sections of forest are cleared and palm trees as far as the eye can see are planted. A few years pass, these trees flourish and the Western market is supplied, the farmers become self sufficient. Only the forest is gone. And the orangutan, may soon follow, being dangerously close to extinction. Marks and Spencer, recently launched an anti palm-oil campaign.

And in a twist that would make Alfred Hitchcock jealous, that same palm tree oil that ends up in countless products from butter to soap, has been linked with heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and other diseases. Author of the book, Gaia, that imagined Earth as a living being, James Lovelock, might see it as nature’s revenge.

However, it’s not exactly a new story, this ruination of our arboreal heritage. Everyone from Sting to David Attenborough has been screaming it from, well, the treetops, for decades. Where Timber departs from other campaigning literature is in demonstrating the direct linkages between the forest pillaging and the consumer.

So what does the tropical forest give us? A random selection: frames in house building; furniture, packaging, books, nappies, hospital gowns, paint solvents, pharmaceuticals, fuel.

The authors pull no punches, identifying Walmart, Home Depot and IKEA as leading players at the end of the supply chain that to that point has involved workers, producers, packers, shippers, and even traders as essential components in a network that has crisscrossed the globe. Fact: 100 million copies of the bible are sold every year — half the annual print run of the IKEA catalogue. And the final player in the chain is us, the consumer, seeking out a bargain. Canadians, Dauvergne and Lister make an impassioned plea for forest management: “Unlike oil, we will not run out of timber. Brazil alone could meet the world’s total timber demand.”

They argue that supply is not the critical issue facing humanity — fast-growing species can easily match demand. Rather, the increasing loss of ecological services, forest biodiversity and community wellbeing are the paramount concerns. More than half the original forest cover of the world is gone. Deforestation since 1950 is roughly equivalent to what went before. But there is hope. Reforestation programmes in the US and surprisingly, China, are enforcing strict logging rules, reforesting degraded land and extending parkland. But a good story wouldn’t be a good story without a downside. And that is Russia, whose vast boreal forests are in very poor condition and where logging and deforestation are rampant. Maybe China and the US could balance that out? “Not even close,” say the two Canadians.

The network of suppliers and buyers/users is replete with leveraged gains, flouting of tax laws, and contractual enforcement. It gets very messy and very complicated. The authors point out that though 80% of the world’s forests are publicly owned, governments have acquiesced to multinational companies through employment and rent, thereby ceding control. The lesson for Ireland — where the sale of our forests was mooted recently as one of the ways to help pay off the national debt — is tread very, very carefully.

The aforementioned giant retailers exercise increasing “buyer-driven” power to control supplies. A strong claim, footnoted as with the rest of this superbly researched book. This claim is backed up with chapter and verse citations in several books and reviews. What happens in effect, is the end user, puts pressure on suppliers to conform to their price demands and structures. “Most products move through distributed and multi-dimensional networks of ever-shifting players and multiple owners along obscure routes that criss-cross borders and markets.”

And in what increasingly reads like a Sherlock Holmes thriller, the authors unravel the alliances and corruption of the giant multinational players involved in the rape of the forests. They argue that, northern hemisphere timber manufacturers and retail companies are the powerbrokers within the supply chains. They control legal contracts, purchasing agreements, and performance standards. The authors further claim that such companies dictate private and semi-private policies surrounding the production of timber. And not just that, but that they dictate the discourse on the topic through “language, ideas and values” and even policies like “social corporate responsibility”. In other words, we, the consumers are being spun a tale by the very people we should be lambasting. It all reads like a giant conspiracy theory and it is utterly convincing.

A note of hope for the future? In 2005, Walmart chief executive Lee Scott laid out the company’s plans in a document entitled Twenty First Century Leadership. He committed the company to far-reaching environmental goals. For a company that were it a country would be ranked 22nd in the world in terms of GDP, that is a goal we should all pray they make.