Want More Carbon Emissions? Try To Recreate An Old Growth Forest

If one really wants to do a bang up job of assuring we emit more carbon to the atmosphere, one should work hard to try to recreate an old growth forest. 

In my corner of the woods a number of activist groups, individuals and other pop-environmentalists are trying to do just that as they struggle to convince policy makers to convert about 8,700 of working forest to park land today and, tomorrow, place additional tens of thousands of acres on the figurative chopping block.

An 1860s Rendering Of A Western Forest

The activist’s approach is a great way to assure increases in greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere continue into the future.  In addition to generally being less bio-diverse than newer forests (albeit old growth supports a different range of plant, animal and other life), old growth forests offer the advantage of lots of dead and dying trees rotting away to contribute the carbon they’ve stored to the atmosphere and, at some point, the likelihood they will burn and, in burning, will emit that carbon in a short term burst of CO², methane, nitrous oxide and other gasses to what some claim is an atmosphere already overburdened by those compounds.

Stereo View Of The Forest Near Mt. Hood Oregon - Late 1800s

The Whatcom County effort involves removing a middle aged forest stand, a stand that is generally about 100 -125 years or so old, from the harvest cycle of a state agency charged with using the forest to provide funds for schools, libraries, port districts and local government. 

The fetchingly labeled Lake Whatcom Forest Preserve Park is then to be essentially left free of the footprint of man, woman and child until it becomes an “Old Growth Forest.” 

It should be understood that of Whatcom County’s approximately 1,400,000 acres, about 1,000,000 acres is already set aside as National Park, National Forest, State owned forest, private forest, and State and local parklands.  About four acres of park exist for every man, woman and child living in the county.

The term Old Growth Forest should also be explained as it is a misnomer as used by the various activists interested in the new park.

A 50 - 100 year old stand of alder trees is an old growth forest.  The older the stand the more likely most of the trees are beginning to rot or are already rotted at the core and likely to die within half the lifetime of the ordinary citizen.

When the pioneers began arriving in the western United States, a large variety of old growth forests made up perhaps as much as 15 - 25% of the forested area of the west.  In some areas coastal redwood forests were predominant while in others the “old-growth” might be predominantly fir and/or cedar.  Interior forests were heavily populated by species like the various pines, larch, or other species. 

Something has changed in recent years.  In decades past, old growth forests were defined by stand structure and the kinds of flora and fauna inhabiting the stands.  Today, just as global warming has been replace by climate change by the spin doctors of the environmental movement, the terms traditionally defining old growth forest are changing.  Stand structure and the inhabitants of the stand as definitional are being replaced by the number of years the stand has remained undisturbed.  To the pop-environmental community old growth is defined by big trees and lack of human contact.

The pop-environmental community interested in the Lake Whatcom Park wants to recreate a particular kind of Old Growth Forest, one mostly based on the “new” definition as understood by the pop-environmental movement.

So what happens to a forest simply left alone to grow old and, eventually, die?

Well, as is the case with most life forms, nature is not very nice.  In the natural world, most forests do not survive to reach “old growth” status. 

The Forest On Fire In The 1860s

By way of example, the entire 8,700 acres contained in the Lake Whatcom Reconveyance burned sometime in the late 1800s.  As is the case with most burned forests, pockets of the old forest survived the fire but, early photos of Whatcom County at the time and, the analysis of the forest by the U.S. Geological Survey in the last years of the 1800s demonstrates that most of Whatcom County’s lowland and foothills forests were thoroughly burned before the turn of the century in 1900.  A huge part of Whatcom County’s forest products industry in the first decades of the 1900s consisted of cutting down burned trees and converting them to shakes and other products.

The Lake Whatcom forest is already known to have insect infestations.  Across Washington insect infestations have reached epidemic proportions and are responsible for the intensity of some of the wildfire the state is becoming increasingly prone to so, it is at least a 50-50 proposition that fires will ignite in the new “park.”

Early settlers also reported massive blow downs of the original forest, ice storm damage and other natural occurrences. 

So what happens then?

Well, if we are really trying to recreate what is in our mind, original conditions, we would let the forest incinerate when lightening or some other factor starts a fire.  That then creates large areas of ash, tree parts and other materials that will fill streams for years and then, eventually, during the often devastating storms the county is prone to, will run off in the form of earth and debris slides ending up in the lake at the bottom of the hill where it will impact lake water characteristics for decades. 

The burning forest also will pump huge quantities of greenhouse gasses and other chemicals into the atmosphere as it incinerates both endangered and not endangered species, boils water and elements like mercury out of the soil and, starts the natural process of reforestation over again.

The whole thing is, of course, a gamble.  The future Lake Whatcom Forest Preserve Reserve Park could be the lucky one that doesn’t burn and, of course, those of us alive today don’t have to worry; we are gambling with the resources of future residents so we really don’t have to care what the odds of success are; it all makes us feel really, really, really good today and that is all that really matters.

A more logical thing to do would be to manage the forest for a variety of natural characteristics even as carbon is sequestered in the lumber taken from, for example, dead and dying trees removed to control severe insect infestations or root diseases or, whatever.  Carefully done, forest management on an on-going basis allows for a full range of values to be realized from the forest.  But it does have the downside of denying total control to those who constantly inform us they know best because they are the true “environmentalists.”

Lose An Industry; Lose A Forest

An interesting juxtaposition of events has the potential to teach a lesson both political decision-makers and the pop-environmental industry need to pay attention to. 

On the one hand, massive forest fires in the western United States are demonstrating what can happen when a forest products industry has been hounded nearly out of existence in states like Colorado, Utah, and others with the subsequent lack of attention to forest health attending the loss. 

These trees were dead before they burned.  They should have been used for lumber.

Even as the environmental devastation caused by those fires continues, the pop-enviros in my community are taking steps likely to help assure the end of a significant forest products sector in the community. 

Over the past month in the U.S. State of Colorado more pollution has been pumped into the atmosphere as the result of forest fires than is likely to be produced by all human activity in that state for years to come.  Incredible tonnages of a variety of greenhouse gases, particulate matter and metals actually smelted from the earth as fires burn (much of the mercury in the atmosphere, for example, is there as a result of forest fires) are circling the earth today because of those fires.

The intensity of the fires could have been significantly reduced had the massive numbers of dead trees the fires fed on been harvested, milled into useful products and sold to build homes, businesses and other structures rather than being left in the woods to serve as torches.

Lumber or Torch?  The pop-environmental community has consistently fought harves in areas like this.

A big reason those trees weren’t used, aside from resistance to harvest by a strong pop-environmental movement, has been the lack of a harvesting and processing infrastructure capable of making use of the trees.  All of Colorado, based on Forest Service analysis released in 2009 contains only 3 softwood sawmills, none of them large.  Many other states are equally underserved, especially considering the billions of board feet of potential lumber that could be milled from dead and dying trees. 

A business building being constructed out of lumber and logs milled from dead trees.  The bluish tint is typical of lumber cut from trees killed by the pine beetle.

Cut to my neck of the woods, Whatcom County, Washington.

Whatcom County’s first industry in the mid-1850s was a softwood sawmill.  The first non-native, permanent resident built a mill on a waterfall at the edge of Bellingham Bay and got to work.  At the turn of the 20^th Century dozens of sawmills, large and small, served the county’s forest products industry, mills fed by the 1.3 million acres of forestland contained in the County.

Times change; by the end of the 20^th Century well over a million acres of land in the County had been converted to national parks, national forests and other uses.  Today, about 100,000 acres, mostly owned by the State of Washington, remain formally set aside to provide the timber necessary to maintain an industry in the county while an additional 120,000 acres is privately owned forest, subject to conversion but, at present, mostly available to serve the forest products industry.

The former forest products industry was, of course, devastated by the constriction in supply.  Sawmill closures, reductions in the number of firms engaged in harvest and other losses reduced the industry to a shadow of its former self.  Today, only one softwood sawmill of any size operates in Whatcom County with a few additional mills available in neighboring counties.  The forest products industry has become a regional industry with most harvesting firms working in at least three counties and some in more due to lack of a sufficient supply of harvestable wood. 

Now, Whatcom County’s “environmental” community is preparing to administer what could be a fatal blow to the area’s forest products industry.  A desire to grow, over time, an “old growth forest” and a presumed need to avoid damage to a water supply even the State’s famously liberal Department of Ecology sees as unlikely, has led the pop-environmental community into promoting the conversion of about 8,700 acres of designated commercial forests into a “forest preserve” destined, for the most part, to never again see a harvest. 

The area to be set aside surrounds a local lake and was almost entirely incinerated in forest fires burning through the area a hundred years and more ago. 

The light tan represents areas of forest incinerated in the 1800s.  The X marks are the locations of the present day forest designated for commercial use but now under pressure for conversion.

So, now the question an environmentalist would always ask, a question that has received almost no discussion at all in the rush to judgment regarding the matter;   “Given recent events in Colorado, and elsewhere, should a community of 200,000 people, with almost immediate access to several hundred thousand acres of existing park land and millions of acres of park lands already available within an hour's drive, risk the health of its forests for the sake of yet one more park?”

I suspect the recently chastened people of Colorado would at least think about the answer to that question. 

Too many in Whatcom County answer simply, “Park good.  Cut trees bad.  It probably won’t burn anyway.”

Forest Fires And Greenhouse Gas Emissions - We Fail The Forest When We Oppose All Harvest

One of the ways the pop-environmental movement is most successful at assuring plenty of greenhouse gasses are emitted to the atmosphere is to hinder attempts to treat forests for forest health.  The successes go beyond increased greenhouse gas emissions.  In the United States and Canada, at least, decades of neglect in terms of treating for fire reduction have created a situation where forest wild fires burn so hot they vaporize streams, and everything living in them and, actually smelt things like mercury from the ground, sending it into the airstreams to settle in lakes, streams, bogs and lungs.

Modern forest fires tend to be more intense than most were in historic times

Forest fires are, of course, nothing new in North America.  American Indians routinely burned forests, plains and anything else that could be burned to increase berry yields, attract tasty critters like deer, and other game animals, burn out enemies, create clearings and for a variety of other reasons.  When Isaac Stevens arrived in Washington Territory in 1853 fresh off a triple threat trip on which he surveyed routes for a potential transcontinental railroad, signed treaties with Indian tribes and, on arrival took office as first Governor of the territory one of his first observations was to the effect that the whole region seemed to be on fire.

But wildfires, into the early years of the 20^th Century, were generally different from wildfires today because the forest was different.  Today’s forests, especially in the American and Canadian intermountain west, are far more densely populated with trees, than they were when the pioneers first arrived on the scene.  Even more important, the fuel loads at forest floor level and up are immensely greater than they were 100 years ago so fires are much more prone to climb the fuel ladder from forest floor to the crowns of the trees and erupt into conflagrations that leap from tree to trees and are very difficult to suppress.

Isaac Stevens meets with the "Nez Perces" in 1852 or '53.  Note the state of the forest in terms of fuel loads.  The Stevens expedition included an artist charged with accurately rendering a visual record of the trip.

The modern forest is overloaded with fuel stock and too many trees making the forest a prime candidate for catestrophic fire

We know 100 + years of fire suppression is the big reason we have larger and more destructive wildfires.  That is not a reason to ignore the forest in the hopes things will go back to normal if we just bury our heads in the sand, or ashes, long enough.  We have the technology to restore the forests to more historic conditions but, thanks to the pop-environmental movement, we all too often lack the will to accomplish the task; the movement would rather see a fire unnecessarily burn an old growth tree than see a well managed thinning regimen reduce the intensity of a fire to the level where larger trees can withstand the fire event. 

The problem with large wildfires is they not only put the forest at risk, they emit massive amounts of pollutants into the air.  A single wildfire can emit many times the greenhouse gasses, particulates and other pollutants many entire industry sectors emit in entire years.

Dr. Thomas Bonnicksen is one of the world’s leading experts on forests and forest health.  In recent years he has developed a model for assessing the consequences of forest fires called, simply enough, the Forest Carbon and Emissions Model.

In 2009 Bonnicksen published the third in a series of examinations of emissions resulting from forest fires in California titled Impacts of California Wildfires On Climate And Forests:  A Study of Seven Years of Wildfires (2001 – 2007).

On summarizing the findings of his work Bonnicksen said, “The wildfire crisis is becoming more serious each year. Fires are getting bigger, more destructive, and more expensive. In 2001, California wildfires burned one-half million acres. In 2007, 1.1 million acres burned, and an estimated 1.4 million acres burned in 2008 destroying 1,000 homes. This was the most destructive fire season in the state’s history and 2009 could be worse.”

Discussing the emissions resulting from the fires Bonnicksen commented, “From 2001 to 2007, fires burned more than 4 million acres and released an estimated 277 million tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere from combustion and the post-fire decay of dead trees. That is an average of 68 tons per acre. These wildfires also kill wildlife, pollute the air and water, and strip soil from hillsides. The greenhouse gases they emit are wiping out much of what is being achieved to reduce emissions from fossil fuels to battle global warming.”

Putting the impacts of fires in context, Bonnicksen pointed out, “The emissions from only the seven years of wildfires documented in this study are equivalent to adding an estimated 50 million more cars onto California’s highways for one year, each spewing tons of greenhouse gases. Stated another way, this means all 14 million cars in California would have to be locked in a garage for three and one-half years to make up for the global warming impact of these wildfires.”

Much of the damage done by unnecessarily intense forest fires in California and, across the rest of the United States and Canada can be reduced by a rational and well managed treatment program aimed at enhancing the health of the North American forests.

Well meaning, but misguided, demands that forests be left to their own devices only result in more destruction of the forest resource, huge amounts of unnecessary pollution and the waste of vast amounts of time and money better spent on ends with more likelihood of success.