US Forest Service proposes protections for old-growth trees, without logging ban
opb.org
opb.org
A freshly planted tree farm is going to have the highest trees per acre, but be the most useless forest.
I would expect a few old growth trees in an acre would be a substantially better forest, visually, environmentally, and ecologically, than having three times as many young trees.
OTOH, tree farm trees are bred to have few branches and are planted very close together. Tree farms grow tree trunks, not trees.
There is a line of thought, which honestly I think comes from the timber industry, that growing trees are a bigger carbon sink than existing trees. They do argue that the tree farm is actually better because it is growing. I'm extremely skeptical of that claim. Particularly skeptical because the trees in tree farms are so unhealthy, the total amount of green vegetative surface on them is confined to a small canopy and has no vertical depth.
In comparison, old growth vs tree farm is night and day for ecology. Tree farms are very dense, rodents thrive in them but not necessarily much else. Old growth OTOH is generally a pleasure to walk through.
> I would expect a few old growth trees in an acre would be a substantially better forest
There's indeed a mixture of ages unless we are talking a tree farm. A tree farm is a mono-culture with trees approximately the same age all growing like Q-tips together.
Old growth trees are fire resistant. The younger ones trees get overshaded and don't grow, or they burn down before they get tall enough. The young trees that do survive, they go on to become the next generation of old growth trees.
(My experience on the subject: extensive time camping & bikepacking in Northwest forests, I've traveled through a several thousand miles of northwest forests in the last 10 years)
The whole point of farming timber is to harvest wood which is lignin and cellulose aka CARBON.
The green leaves on the tree are not what will store carbon. The green will fall off and become forest duff which gets digested by fungi and bugs and the carbon released back to the atmosphere.
Goal of timber companies == make more timber timber == captured carbon
It's even worse for flooring, trim and casing because people rip and replace those constantly over their lifetime because it's all cheap whitewood or MDF now unless you explicitly pay for hardwood.
Timber often doesn't breakdown in landfills due to the level of compaction
It's like a bathtub where the faucet is pouring out more than the drain can handle, and the "solution" is to throw a bunch of sponges in. Sure, it'll kinda temporarily keep the water level down, but at some point...
> Why would you be skeptical of tree farming leading to less carbon sequestering?
Two primary reasons:
(1) Comparing a huge old-growth northwest tree that towers a hundred feet in the air, and comparing that to 30 smaller saplings. The amount of carbon stored in one ring of bark of a giant tree like that is immense. The amount of photosynthesis, the amount of total plant metabolism - is immense. This is an anecdotal perspective, but to consider a non-intuitive alternative, there really needs to be some good facts behind it.
(2) The Sinclair quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” There is a extremely strong financial interest for tree farming to be considered as ecologically friendly.
> The whole point of farming timber is to harvest wood which is lignin and cellulose aka CARBON.
I agree.
> The green leaves on the tree are not what will store carbon.
While leaves are not the primary store of carbon, they are still largely made out of carbon. What's more, this is a bit to me like saying "your lungs don't store oxygen."
> The green will fall off and become forest duff which gets digested by fungi and bugs and the carbon released back to the atmosphere.
Forest floors do build up over time. This implies there is still a sequestration effect from this alone.
Bringing it back to my skepticism, the amount of carbon in one ring of an old tree, one that is 6 feet in diameter, the amount of carbon in that one ring is immense. The surface area of leaves is what powers all these other processes.
Say now compared to a group of saplings, where half don't make it and are then chopped down and put into a refuse pile. The saplings that do make it are not adding ring upon ring of bark for a couple hundred years, but only for decades, and in much lesser quantities.
> Goal of timber companies == make more timber timber == captured carbon
The goal of timber companies is to grow tree trunks & cut them down. Does that actually sequester carbon though?
Peer comments point out that building materials are not often recycled and wind up in the atmosphere anyways.
Regardless, the impact of going from a bunch of old and really tall trees that have healthy foliage throughout their entire vertical density - to then go to something like a grove of saplings or a grove of Q-tip like tree farm trees that are older - is an immense difference.
First, there is a huge difference in vertical density of foliage. Tree farm trees I call 'Q-tips' because they do not have much vertical density. It's like a grove of bushes that grow tall but never really gain more area for photosynthesis than that. Meanwhile a "natural" forest has trees that are healthy top to bottom. It's very akin to the micro-surfaces in the lungs or gut to drastically increase surface area. It's the difference of the surface area of a pine cone to that of a flat circle.
Then the other side of the coin too, groves of saplings are not fire resistant. Tree farms are not fire resistant. At some point the area can no longer withstand fires because it's all saplings and they all burn clean.
Then, yet another side of the coin, how much carbon is needed to cut down the trees and transport them? I don't think I've ever seen the "tree farming is carbon negative" argument actually take those additional footprint aspect into consideration. It's always a purely mathematical argument based on tree trunk size alone (which is what timber companies care about, they do not care about roots, branches, leaves, forest floor soil quality; and all of those aspects are not counted for in the theory of "it's best to grow trees to then bury them"). Which also comes back to the other point - building materials sequester carbon only for so long - while incurring a large cost (many of which seem to be unaccounted for).
Nonetheless, it’s ignoring the entire carbon-sequestration system that the tree enables. What percentage of buildings are a net carbon-sink (including construction, use, maintenance and eventual demolition), or improve the naturally occurring carbon-sequestration process by merely existing? Any? I really don’t know. It’d be cool if we were constructing such buildings, but I doubt they’d be as efficient as just leaving old growth forests alone.
One could measure the tonnage of tree farm wood extracted per day against the estimated tonnage of the trees in a non-farm environment pretty easily I would think.
Frankly, the claim, to me, seems incredibly intuitive and your skepticism sounds like stubborn environmentalist thought.
Sickness and bad conditions usually slow growth down.
In tree farms almost all the trees are in bad condition. The low biodiversity creates a low quality environment. They catch fire very easily. It's low quality wood that ends up in a landfill (and then in the air via rotting) within a few decades.
Eventually a tree will get sick and die. The most ideal situation would be to harvest the tree when it's dead. I would think there could be a businessmodel that maps dead trees and extracts them from forrests for high quality old growth wood.
This is not about "stubborn environmentalism". Although I do agree with you that some environmentalist ideas are a bit short sighted (like dismissing all nuclear options without weighing the properly), it is generally based in science and research. The anti-environmentalist side are usually mostly based in money and corporate interests...
Old growth has a far deeper and broader root system which is a relatively permanent and ever increasing store of carbon in relation to farmed new growth. Roots and stumps of cut new growth are sometimes extracted and used for biofuel, transferring that carbon back to the atmosphere immediately. At best they are left to decompose or converted to mulch and biochar. But the growth process has been halted and no further carbon sequestration will occur. Any further human processing will itself release additional carbon.
Old growth is itself a habitat for other carbon stores. New growth…not really.
Old growth is a habitat for animals which themselves assist in the storage of carbon through indirect means such as pollination and defecation. New growth…not really.
This is just the tip of the iceberg and what I could come up with quickly off the top of my amateur-environmentalist head. It’s complex. A simple estimation of wood tonnage is not going to account for the complexity of the system at all.
> Frankly, the claim, to me, seems incredibly intuitive and your skepticism sounds like stubborn environmentalist thought.
Nice.
Even the best of them it’s less than 6 feet of carbon containing soil.
New growth pulls carbon out of the atmosphere fast - and cutting it down and using it, gives room for more, fast.
It doesn’t look as nice, and isn’t as pleasant to be around, but the math is clear and easy to verify.
Once it reaches this steady state, how much carbon has it already stored? How long will the average undisturbed old growth forest remain at steady state? 200 years, 1000 years? 10000 years? Surely longer than the average lifespan of all the products a destroyed old growth forest might produce. This is especially true when considering that old growth wood is particularly valuable for use as biofuel due to its high carbon density. This means that that carbon will be released far sooner than it otherwise would have, likely magnitudes sooner. And it says nothing of the carbon that doesn't even make it into a product. The simple act of killing the forest and turning over the soil will immediately release carbon.
But, you might say, we'll plant new growth and that'll absorb carbon at a faster rate than ever. Is that rate fast enough to account for the early release of the old growth carbon? How many cycles will it take to recapture that carbon?
> Even the best of them it’s less than 6 feet of carbon containing soil.
So? Is that an average for old growth forest soil? How does it compare to new growth soil average? A single measurement is meaningless here.
More importantly, what is the comparitive density of the carbon in the soil? Depth of carbon-containing soil without a density doesn't tell me much about the total carbon stored.
> the math is clear and easy to verify.
If you say so, but unfortunately you didn't provide any math whatsoever. You seem confident though so if you have any sources, then please do share. I did a quick search for various numbers and comparisons and the numbers don't look good for your argument unless you are only comparing the rates at a given moment and ignoring the total sequestered carbon over a suitable time range (there's probably a better description for this...something like average years of sequestration for any given carbon atom during the average lifespan of an undisturbed old growth forest vs the same tract of land cyclically harvested and replanted at a profit-maximing rate over the same time period)
Most of these products do actually end up sequestering carbon nearly indefinitely, as unless the house or structure burns down, the product ends up in the landfill or remains on site. Unlike forest products on the forest floor, they don't naturally decompose - we protect them to stop that, as a side effect of how we use them.
Because it is usually pretty well protected, and doesn't meaningfully decompose. Even in most (sufficiently old) landfills, you can dig up newspapers from the late 1800's and still read them. When people print things out, the vast majority of them end up shredded (and tossed in the trash), or just tossed in the trash - which ends up landfilling them, etc.
Once landfilled, what decomposition does happen can be mitigated by processing/burning/storing what methane and the like does come off them.
You're confusing carbon storage (as in total retained) with carbon flux (as in net amounts in/out). Something that old growth folks intentionally also do (first link), near as I can tell, to specifically confuse the issue. If you read carefully you can see them stepping around the issue in the first link I pointed you too.
TOTAL carbon starts to plateau relatively quickly, even as noted by old growth proponents - with total carbon flux dropping and eventually being roughly at equilibrium - usually well before we even consider a forest 'old growth'. If you look at the charts in the second link, you can see the actual curve.
Peak flux (as in total negative carbon) is usually at around 15-20 years.
I'm not proposing we cut down all old growth forests. That would be ugly and counterproductive.
Rather that making a forest that has already been cut down be untouched until it becomes old growth is not the most efficient way to reduce carbon, if we're trying to use forests as carbon sinks.
Be aware however, I've done the math before and even if we turn ALL potentially forestable AND farmable land into forests, it is impossible to sink all the carbon we're currently emitting into forests. Not even close, unfortunately.
But if land has already been harvested (which most has), the more efficient way to reduce carbon is a decent amount of turnover where the products end up going into either durable goods, or landfilled products.
I love trees, and spend a lot of time in nature. I've also done the research, and looked at the reality in front of me, and it's hard to ignore.
The link you did share, has this table: https://oldgrowthforestecology.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/0...
It also states [1]: "On sites like Fairy Creek, old forests are estimated to store twice as much carbon as mature forests and six or more times as much as clearcuts. Productive coastal old forests can store up to six times more carbon than old forests in drier climatic areas."
In that quote "productive" I think means mostly a mature forest (in other places it is noted that only a fraction of area is available for logging, so it's not quite clear what exactly productive means).
From the table of sequestration - it's very interesting how much carbon is sequestered into the ground compared to above ground. Old growth put a lot more into the ground, while new trees sequester almost entirely above ground. The numbers are very different too... The old growth, per same unit area, have a lot more sequestration compared to regen and immature forests.
> Be aware however, I've done the math before and even if we turn ALL potentially forestable AND farmable land into forests, it is impossible to sink all the carbon we're currently emitting into forests. Not even close, unfortunately.
A lot of land cannot be forests. I know this wasn't quite your point - but one thing I think missed by the "grow forests to chop them down and bury them" - is that when a forest is chopped down it no longer is fire resistant. A person can only do that for so long before an intense fire comes along and turns that area into a savannah. The growing trees have no chance, they all burn down - this is how forests become savannahs.
I truly appreciate your comment and the dialog here!
They keep confusing the issue because they keep talking about storage. Because their underlying motivation is to have more old growth trees, and to pull carbon from the atmosphere as a secondary effect. Which hey, I get, they’re beautiful. But it’s still BS to say old growth is extracting carbon from the atmosphere faster than new growth.
To see for yourself, use that table they made and take ‘estimated total carbon’ and divide that (tons) by the estimated stand age. That gives you tons of carbon per year of stand age. The really old growth stands with the impressive (overall) carbon numbers actually have really terrible (relative) tons/year numbers. Like the first one is ~ 2.3 tons/year. Where if you go to the new growth stand and ignore year zero (because that has a super high number/divide by zero), it’s 13 tons/year. About ~6 times higher.
And note, it has to be that way. If you took the rate from the new stand, and multiplied it by the stand age for those old stands, the whole forest would have to be solid carbon with no air or gaps.
And unlike those old growth stands, the new growth stand is also producing useful-to-humans output like lumber as part of that calculation, where old growth stands will be nature preserves in this calculation.
In my experience, it’s useful to think of forests like a carbon ‘spring’, or even dam. They aren’t (generally) sequestering it the way the word tends to bring to mind (locking it in a warehouse somewhere maybe). Wood wants to burn in our atmosphere, especially dry and dead wood. If enough of it builds up, eventually that spring will release, or dam will break/overflow, and that carbon goes right back into the atmosphere. Usually in a catastrophic fashion.
Harvesting it and putting it somewhere it won’t rot is like releasing that spring or the water in the dam, without breaking anything.
Regarding your comment on chopped down forests not being fire resistant - it’s actually the other way around. Non-existent trees and brush can’t burn.
Additionally, not harvesting timber from most forests results in overgrown and sick trees, which are a nightmare forest fire wise. It’s why california (and other western states) keep catching on fire so badly, because logging has been so heavily restricted. I’ve done thinning work, and it’s night and day from disease and fire risk. Almost impossible to burn a forest after it’s been done, and it doesn’t want to.
Before that, it was a complete tinderbox.
Now don’t get me wrong, clear cut logging followed by terrible replanting and management practices are certainly be worse (fire wise) than just letting an old growth forest be. Especially since those tend to be in consistently very wet areas that don’t like to burn. But that isn’t how it’s been done in a long time, outside of perhaps random bandit operations.
In California’s climate, it requires cutting down a significant portion of trees and removing built up brush (or doing a controlled burn), or the whole thing turns into a mini-nuclear explosion waiting to go off.
Also, most of their numbers actually seem weird to me though, because as far as I’m aware, more independent data actually shows even newer growth at more like 1.5 tons/year on average across the US.
Edit - here comes some math (different links this time)
Ok, so the US Forest service says that research shows forested land in the United States sequestered 775 million metric tons of carbon/yr [https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/sites/default/files/2022-04... ], and also that the US has 819 million acres (approx.) of forested land.
Which is approx. 1/3 of all US land cover.
Notably, I don’t think that is discounting carbon released due to wildfires in those lands, but I might be mistaken.
That also works out to (on average) 1 metric ton of co2 stored per acre per year on forested land in the US.
If I remember correctly, another 1/3 of the US by landmass can be considered arable (there is overlap), aka can grow things, with some work.
The US EPA says that in 2021, the US released 6,340 million metric tons of fossil carbon, which was a notable decrease [https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica....]
That means all US forested land sequestered enough carbon to represent a little over 10% of one years co2 emissions per year. Doubling all US forestland would therefore account for around 20% of each years co2 output.
If we figured we could double again efficiency by using fertilizer, etc. we’d still be stuck at only 40% of each years co2 output. And we’d starve, because we converted all our farmland to forests and those trees are generally not a good source of nutrition for humans. Also, we’d have to kill all the cows/pigs/etc.
So barring turning every forest into some sort of super productive co2 farm somehow, and converting all available fertile land in the US to do it while somehow not starving to death - I don’t see how we’d even pass 50%. And even then, I wouldn’t take that bet. :(
That hopefully also provides a more useful idea of the scale of the addiction humanity (and the US in particular) has with fossil carbon, when we’re digging up and burning the equivalent of 10x the rate our forests grow, every year, and we’re one of the top 10 most forested countries in the world.
Meanwhile, a few quicker responses:
> Regarding your comment on chopped down forests not being fire resistant - it’s actually the other way around. Non-existent trees and brush can’t burn.
True, but if we are trying to regrow a forest to capture the next round of resources & sequestration benefits - that area has to go from being a non-forest to a young forest. During that time it's very susceptible to fire. Even worse, if the area is being re-grown as tree farm, AFAIK it'll never become fire resistant.
Though, really the question is how do you continuously regrow trees and never have the area eventually burn and turn into a savannah? Given so much forests have been chopped down a few times since the 1800s in California. We are looking at maybe 2 to 4 rounds of trees being chopped down and regrown. Lots of younger forests create a component for larger forest fires.
> It’s why california (and other western states) keep catching on fire so badly, because logging has been so heavily restricted.
My understanding is fire suppression is more to blame. I'm curious where exactly our views differ & why.
For tinder box fires, I think it's a bit more complex than one factor & the combination of factors is not good. Essentially, forests were logged with impunity and at mass scale (still kinda true today) for a few hundred years, then in North America we started fire suppression on an industrial scale circa 1950. A lot of forest is young'ish and/or doesn't have the same fire resistance as what was before it - and combined with mass fire suppression & young'ish age -> it's a huge tinder box.
Though, you point to the lack of logging as the cause for the tinder box. To what extent would you say fire suppression has played a role in current western fires?
I'm a bit surprised we might disagree here, perhaps I'm ignorant how logging has kept the situation in check. My very (tersely stated) impression of things is essentially Europeans came, logged the crap out of the area, stopped letting the fires burn 70 years ago because we could do something about it and secondly there were then enough people in the area to care. Fast forward, the west coast is now very populated and the forests are kinda young and are regrowing in a full fire-suppression environment. Do you disagree with that (frank) assessment?
> In California’s climate, it requires cutting down a significant portion of trees and removing built up brush (or doing a controlled burn), or the whole thing turns into a mini-nuclear explosion waiting to go off.
I agree. Otherwise when a fire does comes through, it will potentially turn the area into a savannah (mini-nuclear explosion'esque). I've seen a few examples, it brings back memories. There certainly are forest fires, big ones, then even bigger ones that damage the forest, and then there are the ones in California that remove the forest..
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Again, thank you for digging up numbers & references. I want to go through those in a bit more detail before sharing any thoughts/questions
I've travelled along lots of tree farms, on foot and on bike. That is good time to really inspect them. I've also done the same in places that have had healthy burns, California style burns where nothing remains, and have also travelled to some truly majestic red wood groves in California.
A tree farm is a grove of Q-tip like trees where there is darkness underneath and thick nasty underbrush. The 'healthy' forests have trees that are healthy from top to bottom. The Q-tip trees are not healthy, they are too close together.
> One could measure the tonnage of tree farm wood extracted per day against the estimated tonnage of the trees in a non-farm environment pretty easily I would think.
I like the direction of thinking here, namely to try and quantify the effects.
Considering tree farms are left to grow for (AFAIK 40 to 60 years), the "daily harvest" rate needs normalization to account for that growth time (and that needs to be compared against what would happen had those been mature trees instead).
First perspective, plant metabolism. Why do plants use photosynthesis? Namely, to extract carbon so that they can grow. The overall rate of photosynthesis is thus related to the overall rate of carbon uptake. If we then consider the amount of green surface area per square foot (being very careful to consider that healthy trees have immense vertical depth to them) - the photosynthesizing surface area of an old tree is magnitudes more than that of a sapling and much more than a tree farm tree. The area of photosynthesizing surfaces is very important, that's all pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, it's used by the plant. Do plants grow extra leaves for those leaves to do nothing, or for that carbon to be extra?
Thus, area for photosynthesis is a proxy for plant metabolism & carbon uptake. Comparing the total green surface area of a tree farm vs a forest is drastically different. Tree farm trees do not have a depth of canopy. Young saplings have many, many fewer leaves.
So, by one measure, the total area of photosynthesis is very different. How can carbon sequestration be greater for small trees that are incapable of even pulling down the same magnitude of carbon compared to a taller tree that has magnitudes more leaves and surface area?
Thus, the first argument is one purely based on metabolism. A cat needs about 200 calories a day. An olympic athlete needs anywhere from like 4000 to 7000 calories a day. This is the comparison, the metabolism of a giant tree is just huge, compared to that of a 8 foot tall sapling that has a diameter of 3 inches. It's an olympic athlete vs a mouse.
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Second, let's consider a mathematical argument for just wood material. We need to compare the total tree growth of an old tree compared to an equivalent number of tree farm trees in the same area. So, we're just counting here total bark increase over one year (and we're ignoring roots, and leaves - which are significant). For this, a single ring on the diameter of the trunk is huge. The linear length of a ring of tree bark on a 5 foot diameter tree is much more than the linear length of a dozen 3 inch diameter trees. Then, we also need to consider the linear length of all of the branches. A tree farm tree grows short branches and drops most of them. Trees in 'natural' forests have vertical depth, the branches low on the tree are growing and healthy whereas the tree farm tree is not. Comparing the growth of branches, the old trees will be way more than that of young trees, and/or of any tree farm tree (which have been selected for those that grow few branches - makes them easier to process and cut).
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Thus, skepticism is rooted in:
- I see an immense conflict of interest to speculate that tree farms are more carbon negative than a non-tree farm forest.
- Plant metabolism allows for carbon to pulled out of the atmosphere. Plant metabolism is proxied by photosynthesizing surface area, which is magnitudes more in a non-tree farm tree. The rate at which older trees can pull down carbon is just way more.
- The total volumes (per year) storing carbon in trees is much greater for a larger tree than several small ones. That is all of the growth of the roots, the growth of the trunk and all of the branches. It's like what happens when you add half an inch diameter to a baby compared to half an inch on an adult - the half inch on an adult creates a dramatically bigger volume.
If the utilitarian state could not see the real, existing forest for the (commercial) trees, if its view of its forests was abstract and partial, it was hardly unique in this respect. Some level of abstraction is necessary for virtually all forms of analysis, and it is not at all surprising that the abstractions of state officials should have reflected the paramount fiscal interests of their employer. The entry under "forest" in Diderot's Encyclopédie is almost exclusively concerned with the utilité publique of forest products and the taxes, revenues, and profits that they can be made to yield. The forest as a habitat disappears and is replaced by the forest as an economic resource to be managed efficiently and profitably. Here, fiscal and commercial logics coincide; they are both resolutely fixed on the bottom line.
“Seeing Like a State” Jaces C. Scott
https://files.libcom.org/files/Seeing%20Like%20a%20State%20-...
I doubt selective logging can replace regular burns, but unfortunately there's a great deal of opposition to doing that. Mostly by people living in those fire-prone areas.
For those interested in learning the basics, this is a pretty good playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvOmkebY7k2UP4N_BicWV...
They appear to be a private company: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/earth-force-technolo...
They're building a lot of physical hardware, hence the need for cash (it was a pretty huge seed round) - He's a cool dude for real, very decent human, curious what your concern is?
Would you consider tree farms as ecologically sound? (I'll note those are intentionally over-planted, homogeneous, and burn like crazy)
Which key facts caused you to change your mind?
yes, we should most certainly protect old growth stands. they are very rare in the forests that i'm familiar with in the US east, and maintaining that ecology overrides any economic benefit gained from cutting the trees, imo. i'm in no way advocating for cutting down old growth stands, my comment was more in response to how we manage the forests that came after we cut the old growth.
> Would you consider tree farms as ecologically sound? (I'll note those are intentionally over-planted, homogeneous, and burn like crazy)
this depends on how the forest is managed. monocultures are bad and diversity is good (though a lot of stands have predominant species, naturally), forests need disturbances (whether through thinning or fire or naturally), etc. but a diverse forest can still be in rough shape. i'm getting at the edge of my knowledge fwiw.
> Which key facts caused you to change your mind?
i bought forest land and learned as much as i could about forest management, so there is too much information to list. i can share books if you're genuinely curious.
My reading list is already kinda long, I think that spares you from having to dig out any references :)
My curiosity is perhaps most of what would interest a thru-hiker. I always want to learn more about how forests work, things like "bears would live here" - "these types of edible plants would grow here". If there are any books along those lines that jump to your mind - I would be very interested to add those to my reading list.
Thank you again for your responses!
I'm in/around the Pac Northwest
The claim "the public is ignorant" is oft repeated by industry-friendly experts in all levels of academia and government. But the policies of the experts have been an objective disaster in the US West. You appear to promote science that is invalidated in real time.
state and national forests are a shared natural resource owned by the public, therefore the public has input over these things, sometimes overriding the science. a lot of the "objective disaster in the US West" is due to these policies that are informed by a public who only wants to save the trees.
i'm talking particularly about non-old growth stands where the forest needs to be thinned, but it hasn't, like in the west. old growth stands are a whole 'nother thing. here is one such example where this old growth debate is happening with public input in vermont: https://vtdigger.org/2024/01/18/logging-versus-old-growth-pl...
>policies that are informed by a public who only wants to save the trees
I can give citations for a dozen extensive studies and workshops, some years in the making, alongside more recent research papers from California academia. The ones I know of mostly originate in the University of California system. Actual policy as implemented is informed by those studies but not dictated by them.
Due to the rule of law, actual policy on the ground in the last forty years is divided in practice by the owners of the lands. In California, most of the "public" forest lands are owned by Federal agencies. The "desire to save the trees" conveniently dovetailed with a Federal obligation to maximize commercial value of National Forest timber. The combination of those two, different, policy groups resulted in what has happened in the last ten years.. that is, overcrowding of trees, disease, massive die-offs, and catastrophic wildfire.
Another crucial point.. the pine trees of the low Sierra and North-Eastern California are not at all in the same category as the Coastal Redwoods, or South Sierra old-growth. yet this discussion here seems to make no distinctions.
Why is it better environmentally and ecologically?
Ecologically because old growth forrests have a much more diverse system with big fungal networks, ecological nooks and crannies, etc. A system takes time to build.
But logging isn't the answer in the sense that logging companies have no interest in just taking small trees - they have no economic value.
I live in one of these areas, btw (Nevada City). There are lots of stick-like trees, lots of scotch broom, lots of flameable underbrush. Removing that by logging is extremely expensive unless you do something like clear cutting, which uses a titanic lawn-mower thing. Cutting a single tall but thin tree requires a professional.
Really, there's no solution for a situation of houses spread through the urban-wildland borders. The logging companies claim the fuel build up is the from logging restrictions but they will always claim that - actually, logging is no longer profitable in California because most large trees are gone, home owners won't let people clear cut and even clear cutting isn't economical given foreign competition and society's decreased use of paper.
In the california bay area, the beautiful 2000 year old redwoods were almost completely exterminated to rebuild after the 1906 san francisco earthquake.
The regrowth pattern was usually a group of maybe 7 redwoods sprouting around the stump of a former giant. They compete with each other are not and will not replace the tree that was cut down.
It is sad to hike around the hills, see this pattern and wonder what the big one was like.
There are still some amazing old-growth giants, say in Henry Cowell state park. Just walk around there for an hour and your viewpoint on old-growth will probably change dramatically.
The really big ones in Big Basin State Park burned in the fires, and although they are huge, they are very black and much has been lost.
Additionally, they'll open up larger sites to thin out overgrown young growth, though they'll pre-mark what they want taken down in both cases.
The tree density is large because they are all thin and likely to burn.
You can let the forests grow, but you then _also_ have to let the other natural processes take place: disease and fire. Finally, you have to deal with something nature isn't good at: invasive species.
So now we're onto steps 1 and 2: how do we protect these forests that we're rebuilding? We don't really want them to burn the ground (excessive fuel build up), we don't want them to be out competed by invasive species, nor succumb to disease. We have to emulate natural processes then to protect old-growth... which is the core of this proposal.
Does that make sense? I too was pretty anti-interference until I attended university in the plains. For fun, I joined an outdoor club and assisted with nature research which studied many things, including fire, and realized that fire is very much a natural process that many species and ecosystems are dependent on.
I think extra knowledge in the space of the environment often leads to indecision which is certainly it's own drawback but I think these choices are not without tradeoffs that should be acknowledged.
I'm only a software engineer and have no understanding of hydrological cycles, but I suspect the evaporation and precipitation of that alone would have an impact on the nearby watersheds used for drinking water.
Seattle started building water treatment plants in 1961 and they entered service throughout the 1960s: https://kingcounty.gov/en/dept/dnrp/waste-services/wastewate...
Meanwhile, Victoria, BC (Canada) continued to dump raw sewage into the ocean until 2021: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/victoria-sew...
Pollutants don't evaporate with water. They're left behind. Acid rain was from pollutants in the air mixing with water droplets.
We still use lumber, if it isn't locally harvested we buy it from another part of the world, outsourcing those externalities and throwing in all the extra costs of shipping, labor overhead for the various middlemen, customs, etc.
My point isn't that we're screwed and should just chop down forests because we're damned if we do and damned if we don't. But saving one forest won't fix anything by itself and could very well make things worse if we don't do it by simply reducing the number of resources we consume. Paying someone else to own the externalities will never help.
Could this happen in a way that benefits American construction interests but also Canadian lumber exporting interests?
If there's ever some dispute about it could it be mediated somehow?
What would the outcome of that possibly be?
The size of the forests isn't really relevant; compared to lumber demand, they're mostly insignificant. Humans have never had a problem wiping out local forests.
What matters is how much wood a forest can produce per year, not how much has accumulated over the course of the past.
Once you get further north the taigas are colder and slower growing and may take 200 years or longer to grow back.
The best thing for the USA is to use the resources which supports jobs in logging, wood processing, transportation, and have lower costs associated with transportation and fees from importation. I'm not against importing timber into very northern parts of the US but there is no reason to ONLY use canadian timber.
Assuming that stripping resources from other parts of the world is how we got into this ecological mess in the first place.
Isn't that already happening?
https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/USA/Yea...
We need to not be logging, period. There's a huge difference in selectively felling trees locally and commercial logging. The problem is that we have collectively grown so accustomed to immediate gratification and the appearance of unlimited resources that we've completely disconnected from how the world really works.
If we really want to fix anything meaningful it's going to take people realizing that cheap energy from coal and oil, combined with paying someone else to deal with the immediate ecological damages caused, aren't sustainable approaches to living here.
I know when they were first proposing the project the state was going to limit them to a couple hundred acre clear cuts and Campbell had their own limit at less than that. Unless that number increased dramatically, I'd say the project is a success mainly because they just aren't logging a meaningful amount of timber at all.
Someone actually just clear cut a few hundred acres down the street from me before the locals ran the investor out of town. It's terrible to see it cleared and it's basically just a massive, open, festering wound now but st the end of the data a few hundred acres of timber is a drop in the bucket relative to what we actually consume.
Can you elaborate on the problems?
Tree roots also greatly reduce erosion, which means that rainfall is more likely to end up in a few well-established waterways and less likely to be spread across numerous tiny rivulets; it also means that waterways are less likely to change shape over time. Large, stable waterways are much easier to collect water from (e.g., via dammed reservoirs) than small or unstable waterways.
However, I'm not sure how much of a factor erosion is here. I suspect it will only directly impact small communities that rely on minor waterways for drinking water. (Mind you, when small communities connect up to city water because their existing water supply becomes unreliable, that can affect the city's water supply.)
I don't know a ton about forest ecology but my sense is that trees that do the best are a function of what's already there and that it takes much longer than 100 years for the pre-clear cut conditions to return.
Different tree species can also be more or less effective at functioning as a buffer. "Thirsty" trees typically do a better job of taking up water when it's wet and continuing to release water when it's dry. (Unfortunately, many new tree plantings favor more drought-resistant trees because they are easier to grow in clearcut fields, which are drier than forests.)
So, because I don't know much about this region specifically, these are my two questions:
Has there been a change in tree biomass in the region?
Has there been a change in the tree species makeup of the region?
https://www.seattle.gov/utilities/protecting-our-environment...
Specifically, here is the forest management plan, which goes into great detail about the current conditions, their effects on the water cycle, and the long term objectives:
https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/SPU/Environmen...
I spent a few years in my 20s volunteering for ecological restoration projects in the watershed. We dug up old logging roads, removed invasive species (Japanese knotweed, ugh!), deconstructed landscaping left over from abandoned small towns, did erosion control along creeks in logged areas, restored riverside habitats, and planted lots of native trees and shrubs. I am not in touch with the organization anymore, but I'll always feel some pride in the work we did and a sense of connection to the place.
> Specifically, here is the forest management plan, which goes into great detail about the current conditions, their effects on the water cycle, and the long term objectives:
This is a 130 page document. The first few pages mentioning old-growth forest are mostly discussing habitat for fauna. Is there a more specific part of the document discussing hydrological impact?
> I spent a few years in my 20s volunteering for ecological restoration projects in the watershed. We dug up old logging roads, removed invasive species (Japanese knotweed, ugh!), deconstructed landscaping left over from abandoned small towns, did erosion control along creeks in logged areas, restored riverside habitats, and planted lots of native trees and shrubs. I am not in touch with the organization anymore, but I'll always feel some pride in the work we did and a sense of connection to the place.
Very cool! My only connection to this is that my mom worked for SPU in drinking water.
In the case of lottery / casino revenues, the initial messaging was that these would provide additional funds for education. In time, general funds allocations for education have declined, justified by the availability of gambling taxes, funds, and fees. That's on top of further problems and externalities of gambling, including gambling addiction, organised crime, political corroption, and the like.
See for example: "The Big Lie: Gambling and Education Funding" (2012) <https://www.thinkingpoker.net/2012/10/the-big-lie-gambling-a...>.
Aka a scam.
Isn't this just conflating states that do that with other states that don't?
Oregon keeps the general fund and the lottery fund separate, 53% of the lottery fund goes to education (the rest to other voter-approved programs).
Year 0: general fund hands 100m to schools.
Year 1: General fund hands 101m / year and lotteries add 10m to that yay! 111m for school, or except ‘inflation’ was 2% so it’s more like 109m.
Year 2: General fund hands 102m / year and lottery adds 10.2m, ‘inflation’ was 2%. So adjusting for inflation Schools get ~108 million and general fund only spends ~98m.
Repeat as needed until general fund is handing the equivalent of 90m with the slack taken up by the lottery.
> Repeat as needed until general fund is handing the equivalent of 90m with the slack taken up by the lottery.
The lottery picking up the slack so that the general fund doesn’t have to do all of it is the whole point.
That’s identical to the lottery just putting money directly into the general fund. Unless the funding source results in an increase in total funding this stuff is pure theatre.
> That’s identical to the lottery just putting money directly into the general fund.
While that's true, your example upthread seems to obscure the fact rather than illustrate it. Try this one:
1. (19X3) Oregon funds its public school system to the tune of $70 million. This is "not enough".
2. (19X4) Oregon implements a lottery dedicated to funding the school system. In the meantime, it funds the schools to the tune of $70 million.
3. (19X5) The lottery system has been set up; it provides $20 million just for the schools. Oregon makes up the rest by contributing $50 million out of the general fund.
Where did the money from the lottery go? Not to the schools. The cash flow table clearly shows that funding to the schools hasn't increased while the general fund is up $20 million. Inflation isn't relevant. Allocations from the general fund are discretionary.
Bonus: cut education enough, and it even gets easier to do!
The article is discussing federal forests. The timberlands in Oregon are owned by private, federal and state entities.
Forests managed for for timber by the state are protected differently, like, first to get sprinkler lines in a wildfire. They are a crop which is invested in and harvested. Federal forests are easier to log after a burn anyway, and you can log outside the burn with that cover. The United States Forest Service (USFS) is actually, basically, a road building and logging company, but owls and so on really got in the way for a couple decades. We're figuring out how to keep logging. We're capitalists.
The only state forests with old growth are going to be the "experimental" state forests in the Cascades and the Olympic and Coast ranges. Otherwise we woulda logged 'em. I mean there are old growth pine trees and juniper in Oregon and Washington east of the Cascades, a few, but those aren't timberlands.
Then the federal government shutdown most economic activity, and local communities had to shutdown their schools and other government functions (while at the same time losing their lumber mills). Of course no one that mattered cared because it only impacted 'flyover people' and coastal people don't care if they break their commitments (in the form of the federal government that represents them).
I'd love to see sometime in my lifetime the feds get held accountable to keep the promises they made in the past that they just stop keeping, while the feds use the full force of the law to ensure THEIR side of the deals are kept up.
Laws are made by city people, who think of work as something you do sitting by a desk. They see the countryside as a nature reserve to keep beautiful for their vacation trips. So they ban most commercial use of natural resources.
This is part of what makes rural communities poor and desperate societies, surrounded my massive wealth that they "own", but are not allowed to prosper from.
- Loggers were only paid minimum wage.
- International megacorps controlled the whole American logging business.
- Every single trees were chopped down, without any replanting. Because... international megacorps hate future profits?
- Being international (non American), the megacorps made sure to leave pollution behind.
- Old Appalachian mining towns were also ravaged by the same internationalist forces.
Is that how the timber industry works?
Relevant tune
> yes, poor people prosper when international megacorps pay them minimum wage to chop down all their trees
Or, why not let the poor people decide for themselves? In your story, the only illegal thing the megacorp did was pollution. Why didn't existing laws address that?
Logging isn't the only way for a community to profit from a forest, conservation can do this too.
A negative angle is that they used to be able to live off the land with hard work. Then the city people banned that, and now they're reduced to serving those city people on their nice vacations.
I'm in flyover country, in a state with few "cities" and yet the laws reflect the values of a city dweller who uses the countryside as a stop off vacation.
We're dying in the rural part of this country, the towns, the people, all of it. And the arguments that I constantly see are - well just move to a city.
IMO the National Forests are the true jewels of the American conservation system because they set aside some of the most valuable (from a land value perspective) lands in the interest of multiple use.
> The Congress declares that it is the policy of the United States that goals and objectives be established by law as guidelines for public land use planning, and that management be on the basis of multiple use and sustained yield unless otherwise specified by law.[4]
They are managed to balance interests to ensure long-term needs, not cannot simply declare that timber, minerals, etc are off-limits:
> The government must consider "a combination of balanced and diverse resource uses that takes into account the long-term needs of future generations for renewable and nonrenewable resources, including, but not limited to, recreation, range, timber, minerals, watershed, wildlife and fish, and natural scenic, scientific and historical values."
The deal was very explicitly that federal land was to be managed to avoid a tragedy of the commons with regards to resource extraction. Resource extraction was one of the primary goals mandated by congress and no, they cannot simply decide they don't want to.
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_Land_Policy_and_Management_A...
I appreciate this statement, and have one question to ask:
> The deal was very explicitly that federal land was to be managed to avoid a tragedy of the commons with regards to resource extraction. Resource extraction was one of the primary goals mandated by congress and no, they cannot simply decide they don't want to.
Question: if we are going to avoid a tragedy of the commons, wouldn't that mean in some cases you have to say "no"?
In the OP article, the BLM is criticized for being too in the pocket of industry and allowing unsustainable resource extraction. Which brings up the point of old growth forests - there are not a lot of them. It makes sense to say "no" here? There are very few old growth forests around, yet they would be very profitable to chop down (let's recall Paul Bunyon chopping down the redwoods, that activity generated piles of cash). Thus the tension.
I would want us to focus most on the question that whether to have sustainability, at times you have to say no. For example, you can't go on a diet and then say yes to everything you want to eat - there has to be a time to say no.
With regards to how well the BLM has been run, how true it has been to its mission, and particularly over the years as it transitions from various leaders (flip-flopping from conservationist types to industry executives).. (A) I don't know how a coherent policy can be kept when leadership changes like that. (B) Yeah, BLM has a long history that is not great. The National Parks service at Yosemite used to have a bear feeding show that they did daily - where they would have a group of people in an amphitheater watch as they dumped out a bunch of food for bears to come and eat.. I mention that to say that government services/policy do not have a great track record and that I share your feelings that BLM is kinda all over the place and that we both share a lack of love for it.
(Same thing with social security btw.)
I want our government to set policy responsively to democratic forces and in best interest of its citizens.
Anyone who spends any mount of time outdoors at any longitude west of Denver, is sure to drive down these forest and mining roads when camping. Not to mention, these roads often open up access to lands for new towns and communities. And, as we are approaching the season, these roads are used for emergency services and additionally the maintenance of forests through controlled burns and the prevention of further spreading wildfires.
That would be the "other ancillary development that always seems to follow" that the GP comment says there's value in preventing.
There a line of thinking that says that humans are evil and there should be less of them and those that remain should be confined to a more limited area.
> Oregon Wild forest program manager Lauren Anderson called the proposal a good first step.
Perfection is the enemy of progress. I too applaud the plan.
> For some forests, logging small-diameter trees ahead of prescribed burns is necessary, a consensus reached by many tribes and scientists.
> “Letting those forests continue to age and get older and more decadent,” Brown said. “That’s what the wildlife need them to do.”
#2 doesn't seem possible without #1 in most forests and species it would seem. You can either artificially thin and avoid fires, protecting old-growth, or you can let wildfires regularly take place and keep firewood thin. What we want to avoid is logging damage to old growth, or not taking care of the forests allowing massive fires to destroy everything.
How much is likely something we can do with computer simulations, and verify them with experiments. We need to thin the forests to avoid fire, but occasionally allow young trees to make it past the young generation. If any giant company with super computing resources wants to use that "AI" for something that would actually benefit the world, this would be a worthy use of time and energy.
On the issue of BLM lands: If we have strategically important, or exceptionally rare forests on BLM land, it's probably time to declare some new national forests and get them under management. I don't really see BLM being equipped to handle forest management. Maybe a temporary 12 year protection of old growth trees in BLM land would be a good compromise, giving time for study and congress time to act.
Wow, this just confirmed my lack of knowledge around how national forests are administered. As someone in the PNW, are there any national agencies that govern the use of forests besides National Forest Service, National Park Service, and Bureau of Land Management?
> Similar to the Forest Service’s proposed amendment, BLM’s rule was met with mixed emotions, with some conservationists saying it lacks teeth and some timber industry representatives saying it’s too restrictive.
Not even knowing how all of this works I can immediately tell BLM is walking the line on this well, because they are coming up with compromises that everyone grumbles about.
Or put another way, if a human is fearful for their safety due to their proximity to old-growth trees, then they should not live there. Same reasoning as for bears or tigers or sharks: the answer isn't "kill them".
> Officials told the Associated Press that a sweeping ban on logging old-growth would make it harder to thin forests to protect communities against wildfires that have grown more severe as the planet warms.
> “To ensure the longevity of old-growth forests, we’re going to have to take proactive management to protect against wildfire and insects and disease,” Forest Service Deputy Chief Chris French said.
We need a real sustainability plan which reuses that land for trees again, but not garage fast growing genetically similar trees. We need to promote genetic diversity