ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the smaller-scale and more sustainable use of the forest based on local sawmills and chainsaws rather than industrial logging. It shows what a large gap there is between the gross and the net returns from small-scale timber milling. Ecologically-minded Westerners with sympathy for the hardships of developing countries are accustomed to assuming that "small is beautiful", whereas the large-scale capitalist alternative is ugly in every way. A world without logging has become a new vision of Utopia. It is in fact not the Seventh-day Adventist Church but the United Church which, in the 1990s, has become the spiritual home for a sustainable forest management project known as Solomon Western Islands Fair Trade. The potential of logging to create as many problems as it solves has long been foreseen, and concern has been widely expressed also on the national level, not least by the Central Bank of the Solomon Islands.