DDBA 8522 Week 2 Sustainability Definition Paper Example

Graded Twice for the Same Forest: Weak and Strong Sustainability Applied to a Paper Company Replacing Natural Hardwood Forest With Pine Plantation, and the Definition the Firm Should Answer To

Student Name

Walden University

DDBA 8522: Seminar in Sustainability

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Graded Twice for the Same Forest: Weak and Strong Sustainability Applied to a Paper Company Replacing Natural Hardwood Forest With Pine Plantation, and the Definition the Firm Should Answer To

The Decision

A composite paper and packaging company in the southeastern United States owns about 410,000 acres of timberland that supply its two mills. Over the past fifteen years, it has harvested about 60,000 acres of mixed natural hardwood forest and replanted them as loblolly pine plantation, which grows faster and suits its containerboard mills. The company reports that it plants more trees than it harvests, that its total forest carbon stock is stable and that its timberland value has risen. Its sustainability report calls the land base "sustainably managed." Whether that is true depends on which definition of sustainability is applied.

Weak Sustainability

Weak sustainability holds that what must be maintained over time is total capital, the sum of natural, manufactured and human capital, so a forest or an ore body may shrink as long as factories, skills or savings grow enough to offset the loss. Solow (1993) framed sustainability as a duty to hand those who come after us enough productive capacity to enjoy a standard of living no lower than ours, and argued that what matters is the total, not the particular form. The underlying rule, which economists associate with Hartwick, is that the rents from using up natural resources should be invested in reproducible capital.

Graded by this standard, the company does well. Its pine plantations produce more wood per acre than the hardwood they replaced, its timberland is worth more and its mills have been modernized with the proceeds. If natural hardwood forest and pine plantation are interchangeable forms of capital, the company has increased the total.

Strong Sustainability

Strong sustainability holds that some natural capital cannot be substituted by other capital and must be maintained in its own right. Daly (1990) proposed operational rules: harvest renewable resources no faster than they regenerate, and keep waste emissions within the environment's capacity to absorb them, while treating some natural systems as complements to manufactured capital rather than substitutes. Neumayer (2013) set out the debate between weak and strong versions and noted that the critical question is whether particular forms of natural capital provide services that cannot be replaced.

Graded by this standard, the company does poorly on the converted acres. Mixed hardwood forest provides habitat for species that pine plantations do not support, holds soil differently along streams and stores carbon in long-lived trees rather than in a 25-year crop. The company plants more trees than it harvests, but it does not maintain the forest type it removed. Sixty thousand acres of a particular natural system have been replaced by a different system that serves the mill.

Which Definition Should the Firm Answer To?

The company's own reports answer, implicitly, to the weak definition: they count trees and value. But the company's main customers, consumer goods firms that buy its containerboard, increasingly ask suppliers about biodiversity and natural forest conversion, which are strong-sustainability concerns. More fundamentally, Bansal and DesJardine (2014) argue that business sustainability concerns whether a firm's present decisions preserve the ability to meet future needs, and the conversion of natural forest is hard to reverse on any timescale a business plans for. A hardwood stand takes 60 to 80 years to mature.

I argue the firm should answer to the strong definition for its natural forest acres and to the weak definition for land that was already plantation. That split recognizes that the question of substitution is real for some capital and not for others.

What Answering to the Strong Definition Would Require

The company would need to stop converting remaining natural hardwood stands, identify converted acres along streams where hardwood should be restored and report natural forest area separately from total forest area. Its report would then describe the land base in terms both definitions could check.

What the Firm's Customers Are Asking

The question of which definition applies is not only academic. Two of the company's largest containerboard customers, both consumer goods makers, now ask suppliers to report the area of natural forest converted to plantation since 2020 and to commit to no further conversion. Neither customer asks about total carbon stock or timberland value. Their questions are strong-sustainability questions, and the company's current reporting cannot answer them. If the company continues to report only under the weak definition, it risks losing business to suppliers who can document that they have stopped conversion.

Limits

The paper uses the company's acreage figures and does not assess biodiversity on the ground. Some converted acres may have been degraded before conversion, which would complicate the strong-sustainability grade.

References

Bansal, P., & DesJardine, M. R. (2014). Business sustainability: It is about time. Strategic Organization, 12(1), 70-78. https://doi.org/10.1177/1476127013520265

Daly, H. E. (1990). Toward some operational principles of sustainable development. Ecological Economics, 2(1), 1-6. https://doi.org/10.1016/0921-8009(90)90010-R

Neumayer, E. (2013). Weak versus strong sustainability: Exploring the limits of two opposing paradigms (4th ed.). Edward Elgar.

Solow, R. (1993). An almost practical step toward sustainability. Resources Policy, 19(3), 162-172. https://doi.org/10.1016/0301-4207(93)90001-4