Establishing a local circular economy based on wood as ‘urban commons’
This is the story of how an academic, Stephan Kampelmann challenged the norms of power structures in the city of Brussels to get the culled wood from the Sonian Forest re-used locally. I visited the forest in 2020 and met Stephan, and I find this a wonderful example of working with complexity. It demonstrates how ‘embracing complexity’ translates into practice and illuminates the power of thinking systemically, working contextually, and seizing opportunities.
The back story
The Sonian Forest has been managed, but never been laboured; its soil is unchanged since the last Ice Age. It spans the district of Brussels (38%) and the two adjoining regions of Flanders (56%) and Wallonia (6%). In total there are 4,421 hectares of mainly beech trees, and, since 2017, this is a Unesco World Heritage Site. These forests go back centuries to the early Middle Ages, the time of Charlemagne, and have a rich historical and cultural significance. They were used as hunting grounds for the nobility. The part of the forest I visited was within the region of Brussels was bequeathed to become a public park – the Parc Duden – by a wealthy businessman in 1895; he had made his money through trading lace. His beautiful house sits overlooking the woodland and looking down towards the city.
At more than 100 years old, many of these trees, beech trees, are now coming to the end of their lives and need to be culled. The authorities are committed to this undertaking, but the issue is what to do with the wood. Currently most of the wood is sold and shipped to China, from where it is subsequently transported thousands of miles overland to be made, primarily, into sticks for ice lollies, or toothpicks. Beech is good for these uses as it does not splinter. Much carbon is used in this transportation, amounting to around 10% of the carbon sequestered in the wood.
Kampelmann initially came to this story concerned about carbon footprints and felt there must be a better solution for the felled wood other than to ship it across to the other side of the world.
He started to explore if there were ways in which the wood could be used locally. The supply is substantial at, typically, 20,000 m3 per year. He found that the public authorities in Brussels (who did not see this as a significant commercial venture, as it was only a small part of their budget) felt very differently about the resource compared with the authorities Flanders, who were more concerned with the commercial potential of the felled wood. So, the strategy for engaging with each region needed to take these differing attitudes into account.
In Brussels, responding to local concerns and connecting the economic with the environmental
In the Brussels region, local people were brought into consultations. The parkland is much loved and its legacy to the city much valued, so there was local resistance to felling the trees at all. Even with those citizens who understood that older trees are dangerous and falling branches could kill, there was a desire to leave felled trees as part of the landscape to enrich the ecology. Rather than ignore the concerns of the first group, some parts of the forest were fenced off so that trees could die and not be dangerous to visitors, whilst in other parts, felling commenced.
For those people focused on the local ecology, there was a need to widen the frame of their thinking. Wood is needed for many uses – furniture, floors, building construction – and is a more benign material than plastic or many other manufactured materials. Is it ideal to import wood from Canada, Scandinavia, Russia and other faraway places, when there is wood available locally? Does this wider ecological perspective suggest that using local wood commercially, rather than leaving it to rot in situ, make more sense, even if the local ecology is slightly poorer as a result? The wider ecological perspective when integrated with the economic perspective (we do need buildings, furniture and so on) gives a broader systemic overview and lead to different strategies than if the ecology of the forest is viewed in isolation.
Using local media to pressure local politicians
When it came to influencing the Brussels constituency, Kampelmann decided to use local television to put pressure on local politicians to act. He merely had to make it clear that wood from these important forests was being sold abroad to create enough local outrage and political pressure for politicians to take notice and support the project. It was clear that its importance to them was political rather than economic; they could not be seen not to act.
A different approach in Flanders
This was in contrast to the approach with the constituency of Flanders where there was acceptance that there could be commercial gain to be had from the wood and the issue of concern was price. Local companies found they could buy wood more cheaply on the open market. The strategy here was to undertake cost-benefit analyses and argue from a commercial standpoint. They analysis showed that, despite the fact that local wood could be slightly more expensive to buy than on the global market, wood was a relatively small part of the cost of manufacture, and so was still worth exploiting. In addition, the unique cachet of using local wood enhanced its value, particularly as Kampelmann and his team came up with the idea of developing burnt-in trademarks were so that people would know, in perpetuity, that this was local wood.
A circular economy
Kampelmann was interested in the idea of a circular economy. This term is often applied to circular business models within individual companies; if applied to the creation of a local value chain for wood, it requires cooperation across a range of actors – public sector, politicians, local businesspeople (lumberjacks, sawmills, wood merchants, furniture and floor manufacturers) and local communities. To provide a missing link in this value chain, Kampelmann, with others set up the Sonian Wood Cooperative to buy the wood and bring it to the local market. They developed a narrative of ‘wood as urban commons’.
The cooperative found customers for the wood in education departments who were interested to use the local beech in new schools for furniture and floors. The cooperative was also interested in what could be done with single felled trees. It was too expensive to move them singly, but they could be sawed into rings onsite and turned for salad bowls. There was crowdsourcing to get the cooperative going and these salad bowls – and cheese boards in the pentagonal shape of the Brussels district – were given to crowd-sourcers as recognition of their contributions. The cooperative also noted that they were setting up a commercial venture which incorporated limits to growth (in that only a certain maximum level of wood would be available each year).
Responding to head and heart
Much attention was given to the heart as well as the head, to the way this story felt to people, to the place of these forests in the hearts of local communities, to the sense of these trees as unique and individual. For example, the cooperative developed the idea of recording the DNA of each tree so that people could trace the source of their table or floor in the future. Fabrice Samyn, a local artist with an international reputation, came forward and suggested that transparent slivers of wood from each tree could be mounted into the windows of public buildings, so that trees would be remembered and honoured as living entitites not just as items to be exploited.
Stephan made one more point. That the project captured people’s imagination and pulled in support from all over. As he said, ‘I didn’t always know what was needed, what to ask for, but people would contact me and say, for example, ‘you need some support in writing a constitution for the cooperative, I can help with that’. Or ‘you need help in maintaining interest in this project into the future, incorporating wood slivers into windows in public buildings can help support that and I have contacts who can help.’’ The ‘strategy’ he adopted is better thought of as ‘creating intention that pulled in support’, rather than aiming for a rational plan that needed resourcing.
A serendipitous visit
Another interesting aspect of the story was how it began. Stephan had known that the fallen wood from the Sonian Forest was exported to China, but a report commissioned by the regional government had come to the conclusion that nothing could be done in light of global economic market forces. So he had felt that nothing could be done. Then he was invited to spend four months at University of Montréal. He said: ‘I was interested in the urban economy of Montréal and started visiting interesting projects and talking to entrepreneurs. It was by accident that I stumbled upon the company Bois Public who organised the local value chain for the ash wood in Montréal. When I came back, I knew it was economically feasible to do something similar, and indeed felt it would be even easier in Brussels where the wood was not diseased and there would be a regularity of supply over a number of years. So, I rolled up my sleeves and got the Sonian Wood Coop going.’
How this project illustrates ‘embracing complexity’
The project illustrates many aspects of working systemically in a complex world:
- systemic thinking – linking the environmental with the economic, or the ecological with the political – surfaces more integrative solutions and amplifies impact.
- surfacing the underlying historical narrative of the forests was important in understanding their legacy and value and in informing how to approach the project.
- desire and intention (to tackle the urban wood situation in Brussels) then puts us in a position to seek out relevant information (e.g. visiting projects in Montreal) and how this can give insight and strengthen resolve.
- how to tackle the project emerged as things become clearer; it was through weaving clear intentions (to sell local wood locally) and holding clear values (to retain heritage, to sustain a solution into the long-term, to reduce carbon footprint, to work collaboratively with the community) that pulled in many solutions (e.g. to preserve wood slivers in windows), ones that could never have been developed in advance.
- the importance of recognising working with xin – the heart-mind – valuing the contribution of emotions (the love of the forests) as well as focusing on rational argument (cost benefit analysis of the wood use).
The approach required the interplay of many actors and stakeholders and sometimes the focus is on how to bring these together, how to slowly ‘knit together the system’. And yet, equally, change is often catalysed by seizing opportunities or seeing ways to pierce through the status quo – like going on television to shame politicians into acting or taking advantage of friends and contacts who can help in unanticipated ways. Change is not always about rational planning and overarching solutions; it is often particular to circumstances and context.
The story is a wonderful example of the value of systemic thinking, and of the way hearts and minds, imagination and passion, need to come together, and of the differing ways we can approach systemic change.