Forests posts from the Daily Score blog - Sightline Daily

The Wolves of Olympic National Park

Eric de Place — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 13:03:59

Update 10/20: Crosscut has a version of this post.

What happened to the Olympic Peninsula after its wolves were hunted to extinction in the 1920s? There's a fascinating new study (pdf) out on this question -- the first of its kind as far as I know. As it turns out, eliminating this one keystone species sent shockwaves through the whole ecosystem. Some of the effects were felt almost immediately after wolves were extirpated and some are only just now becoming clear.

It's a shame that reading articles like means hacking through verbiage that can feel as dense as an Olympic rainforest -- it's all "flow-induced shear stresses," "fluvial erosion," and "ungulate exclusion" -- because the study's content is incredibly important for lay people to understand. (Good ordinary language articles are here and here.) The upshot is that researchers have determined that the Olympic wolves were river-keepers, in an indirect but very real sense.

Here's how it worked. Once upon a time, healthy wolf populations kept the native elk herds lean. But when the wolves were killed off, the elk populations spiked (with a colossal and much-noticed-at-the-time boom in the 1930s). The booming elk herds spent much of their time in the lush river bottoms, cropping the living heck out of new tree growth and hammering the seedlings of cottonwood, bigleaf maple, and even some conifers. Those young trees had stabilized the banks along the region's fast-flowing rivers. And without new saplings and their fortifying root-systems, the rivers began to erode their banks, eventually channelizing and "braiding" as they spread out along the newly-unstable valley floors.

By comparing places where Olympic rivers are relatively free of elk (owing to hunting or other causes), the researchers were able to document substantial differences in the shapes and dynamics of the rivers. In fact, the researchers even hypothesize that the native salmon populations in Olympic National Park have been harmed by a river system that is less supportive of certain invertebrates.

If you've hiked along the wilderness Olympic rivers, particularly on the rainforest side, you've no doubt marveled at the clean meadow-like glades where old alders and bigleaf maples reach for sky amid grassy meadows. There are few young or intermediate-age trees. They're lovely places but also symptoms, perhaps, of something missing from the wilderness. Maybe you've even seen the big Roosevelt elk there, cropping away at the green growth. You've certainly never seen wolves there as travelers in the Olympics once did.

Luckily, there's a solution at hand. We should restore wolves to the Olympic Peninsula just as we have successfully done in the Rocky Mountains. If wolves were returned to their home in the Olympic forests, we might expect that the next several decades would mean a gradual restoration. Young maples and cottonwoods might thrive again in river bottoms, knitting stronger river banks, and improving the health of the salmon nurseries. I'll bet a dozen (or a hundred) other things would happen too -- wolf-connected effects that we're not even aware of now.

The good news is that wolves are already returning to the state. But while gray wolves have begun a natural reintroduction of eastern Washington and eastern Oregon, it is unlikely that they will bridge the relatively developed areas west of the Cascade Mountains to reach the Peninsula. In any case, the Olympic wolves were probably slightly different from their interior cousins: they were likely a coastal subspecies of gray wolf, very similar or identical to the wolves that still range in British Columbia's coastal regions. These northern coastal wolves, by the way, would make an ideal transplant population.

This study (pdf) of Olympic National Park comes from Oregon State University -- the same folks who brought to light the fascinating ripple-effect of ecosystem restoration that occurred when wolves were reintroduced in Yellowstone National Park.

I Can See Clearcuts Now

Eric de Place — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 15:05:45

Oh, Google, what would we ever do without you? Check out this Google Maps-generated image of the region near Cannon Beach, Oregon:

The strange patchwork of brown? Those are clearcuts in the Coast Range. And many of them appear to be recent.

What's really great is that you can zoom in so close that you can clearly see the bulldozed logging roads, a line of "leave trees," and a striated green that I'm guessing is first season re-growth of vegetation. See::

I'll bet some tech-savvy map-genius type could collate enough Googe Map images together to do a systematic analysis of clearcutting. I could imagine starting in just one region -- perhaps a single Oregon county -- or expanding the analysis to include a large swath of the Pacific Northwest or even North America.

Why am I so fascinated by this?

Because back in the day we used satellite images to monitor clearcutting around Cascadia. We made pretty nifty maps -- some of them animated -- showing 30 years of cutting. Here's one that we made for a section of the southern Oregon coast.

All that red shows clearcutting since the early 1970s. And, yes, it's a lot of clearcutting.

These maps made a bit of a splash, and we were intending to update them every year or two. But then the imagery from the satellite became defective; and rather than fix the satellite, the US government opted to redeploy the money to the Mars space program (at least that was the word at the time).

We were bummed out.

But with the wealth of imagery available from Google Maps (not to mention Google Earth), it seems almost possible to use Google's free public images to construct a new and ongoing analysis that would track clearcutting as often as the images are updated. By calculating acreages it should be possible to develop an ongoing forestry score -- with supplementary pictures! -- to show how logging practices are actually happening. No doubt there would be some technical issues to sort out, but I don't think it's anything that some tech-savvy map-genius type couldn't handle.

Anyway, it's intriguing stuff.

Credit for this post really belongs with Clark; he came up with the idea.

Burning Slash for Electricity

Clark Williams-Derry — Tue, 27 May 2008 13:55:53

This news from the Spokane Spokesman-Review caught my eye:

Tons of slash from a 250-acre logging site north of Loon Lake, Wash., could have gone up in smoke.

Instead, the woody debris will be chipped and hauled to Avista Corp’s biomass facility in Kettle Falls, where it will produce enough electricity to meet 37,500 homes’ needs for about eight hours.

I'm the very first to admit that I know very little about forest management. No, strike that -- I effectively know nothing. So I have no idea if carting away all of that debris could deprive the soil of necessary nutrients over the long haul -- or if burning slash is even a reasonable forest management technique. (Can anyone out there in blog-land help me out?)

Still, from a novice's point of view, this doesn't seem crazy: if the "waste" wood is going to be burned anyway, why not try to use the heat to generate some electricity?

Well, that's fine as far as it goes. But what caught my eye was the numbers: 250 acres, for 8 hours of power, for 37,500 homes. Could that possibly scale up? Could wood waste offset a significant amount of fossil fuels in the generation mix?

Short answer: probably not.

Just running the numbers a bit -- and remember, these are order-of magnitude estimates, so use them at your own risk...

First off, let's assume that the slash in those 250 acres is fairly representative of yield across the state. That's a huge assumption, obviously, and it's probably wrong. But we're just playing around, right?
To power 37,500 homes for a full year, rather than just 8 hours, would require the slash from 3 x 365 x 250 acres = 273,750 acres of land. (In comparison, Mt. Rainier National Park is about 236,000 acres.)
Excluding wilderness, parks, and other protected areas, there are about 18 million acres of forest land in the state of Washington. (See here for more precise estimates.)
Assuming 50 year rotations, that makes about 360,000 acres of logged forest per year. (Remember, I'm a forestry newbie, so I have no idea if 50 years is a reasonable estimate for the average rotation length of the average forest in the state.)
If we used all of the slash from those 360,000 acres to generate electricity, it would power about 50,000 homes for a year, give or take.
The census says that there are about 2.6 million housing units in Washington State -- meaning that if the forest slash from all logged land in the state were burned for electricity, it could provide about 2 percent of the state's residential power needs. Note that this doesn't include the use of electricity in office buildings, factories, and smelters -- all of which are substantial.

So it looks like forest slash is small beans. That's not an argument that burning slash for power is a bad idea; I have no opinion on the matter, really. But it does suggest that it's a bit unrealistic to hope that slash will play more than a bit part in our energy future. Still, it's a worthwhile experiment; as long as forest soils don't suffer, every little bit of non-fossil energy can help.

Photo by Flickr user Joseph Robinson, distributed under a Creative Commons license.

Wild Sky Wins

Eric de Place — Thu, 08 May 2008 11:16:21

At long last, it's official: Washington gets a new wilderness area, the Wild Sky. It's 100,000 acres of streams, forests, lakes, and mountains on the west side of the Cascades.

Big congratulations are in order to the hundreds of people who worked to win this designation. The Wild Sky political process was an epic. First proposed in 2002, the nascent wilderness area was an exercise in tenacity. Last week, when the bill finally passed out of Congress, Seattle P-I columnist Joel Connelly had a nice article on the context and history. (Also good coverage last week from Seattle Times reporter Warren Cornwall, here.)

New wilderness designation in the Northwest has been tough to come by lately. But 2008 looks to be a promising year. As High Country News reports, the Wild Sky may be the first of several in the West: these include more than 500,000 acres in the Owyhee country of southwestern Idaho (the first wilderness in 30 years in that state); plus 264,000 acres in Utah (some of which is already in Zion National Park); and if we're lucky, a small but important new wilderness on the Oregon Coast that would protect nearly 14,000 acres in an area dubbed the Copper Salmon.

Guilt-free Hiking

Eric de Place — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 23:00:43

It's almost trail season again. For semi-compulsive folks like me that means it's time to start nailing down plans for summits and other backcountry fun. And it's also time to start feeling just a smidge guilty about what is surely my personal largest source of carbon emissions: driving to trailheads.

So on Saturday when I finally laced up the hiking boots again after an unusually slothful winter, I chose to slog my way up West Tiger Mountain 1 and 2, partly because those destinations can be reached by driving fewer than two dozen miles from home. (Tangent: wow, there's a lot of snow out there.) But then today, as I was starting to feel pretty good about myself, I got an email from Andrew Engleson, the editor of Washington Trails Magazine, who one-upped me by biking from Seattle to the trailhead at Cougar Mountain, and then biking back home. Read about it here.

Andrew's adventure reminded me of a site I've been meaning to blog about: Hike Metro. It's a very cool smattering of hiking ideas, complete with instructions, about how to get to trailheads on bus fare. By necessity, of course, most of the listed hikes are relatively near cities, but there are a few far flung locales too.

It also reminded me that I've long wanted to ask folks about how they get to trailheads without that little lingering guilt. I carpool whenever possible, of course, and I drive a fairly fuel efficient car, even on roads that it's probably not designed for. But to be completely honest, I'm not going to cut back my hiking, skiing, or climbing. So what should I do?

And what about folks in British Columbia and Oregon? Are there ways to hike by bus -- or even by bike -- in those parts of the Northwest too?

Update 4/15: Adding that, somewhat counterintuitively, busing it may not always be the most carbon-efficient way to reach the trailhead (because when the seats are full, cars are pretty darn efficient per passenger-mile). It is, however, a good choice for those who choose to live carless, which is itself highly carbon efficient.

BC, Natives Work Together to Plan Taku's Future

Kristin Kolb — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 12:58:30

The Taku River valley is one of BC’s crown jewels. It’s 4.5 million acres of forest tucked up in the northwest corner of the province. It’s also the home of the Taku Tlingit nation, who have a vision of how to manage the land for future generations. Now they’re sitting down with the province to hammer out a plan. The Prince Rupert Daily News has the story.

Like Clayoquot Sound and the Great Bear Rainforest, the Taku project is the result of different people sitting down and working together on a solution. BC is a global leader in conservation success stories. And the key is collaboration among native people, government officials, conservationists, and businessmen. That ain’t easy.

Check out the Taku Tlingit’s land-use vision here (PDF). And a fantastic map of the conservation plan here (PDF). The Taku Tlingit worked with Round River Conservation Studies to create the report. (Round River also drafted the conservation plan for the Great Bear Rainforest several years ago.)

Beetle Mania

Adam Brown — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 17:41:35

We've been watching the Mountain Pine Beetle for a while as it's feasted upon the pine forests of British Columbia, infecting nearly 710 million cubic meters of the "1.35 billion cubic meters of saleable pine in the province (CBC News)." It is difficult to imagine that a beetle, no bigger than a grain of rice, can cause so much damage. Then again, when that beetle has over a trillion friends, it is not so difficult to fathom. But new reports from the provincial Ministry of Forests and the Council of Forest Industries indicate that the infestation may have reached its peak, thanks in part to recent cold weather and a declining food supply.

It's simply impossible to overstate how rapid -- and devastating -- the beetle's spread has been. But it's wrong to think of it as a "natural" phenomenon. Rather, it's a regrettable -- if not entirely unforeseeable -- consequence of two entirely of human forces: timber management practices that have left unusually high concentrations of the precise sorts of trees that beetles like to feast on; and a climate-warming trend that's been simply ideal for beetle reproduction. In other words, the pine beetle has enjoyed an all-you-can-eat buffet.

The result: ecological devastation on a truly massive scale.

A shocking visual: Clark cobbled together the following animation from this Canadian government report (pdf link) on the mountain pine beetle's infestation of British Columbia's interior forests. The beetle epidemic started with scattered, isolated outbreaks in 1999, and within 6 short years spread to cover an area about three times as large as Vancouver island. The red spots represent places affected by beetle outbreak. If your internet browser lets you view animated graphics, you should see the infestation spread like cancer.

Good news about declining populations can't begin to compensate for the damage done to date. But good news is good news.

The ministry's annual survey on the pine beetle's spread in 2007 seems to indicate that it is slowing, said Doug Routledge, COFI's vice-president.

The survey shows that the pine beetle had infected 710 million cubic metres of lodgepole pine forests at the end of 2007, up from 582 million cubic metres at the end of 2006.

Routledge said that is an increase by a factor of 1.3, which is below the growth rate of 1.4 to 1.6 over the past five years leading officials to believe the beetle's spread is past its peak "The primary reason is that it has pretty much eaten itself out of house and home," Routledge added. 'It's running out of food.' (Times Colonist)."

Maybe we're just hungry for some sunny news amid the gloomy picture, but the peaking of the beetle infestation does represent a sliver of hope -- not only for the industries and communities that rely upon timber, but for fragile salmon habitats as well.

Since the infestation began, forest cover along the salmon runs has decreased. Forest cover regulates the temperature and levels of streams and rivers home to the salmon runs. Boughs of the dead, beetle infected pine trees do not "intercept snow and rain, or shade the forest floor to slow the spring snow-melt (Times Colonist)." As a result, the snow packs are greater and melt faster, causing flash floods and higher river flows that erode the stream beds of the salmon runs. The lack of shade over these habitats also causes the water's temperature to rise, decreasing the salmon's food supply and creating a difficult environment for the salmon to thrive in. However, with the beetle's declining population, efforts to protect and rebuild salmon habitats get a boost.

The beetles' smorgasbord has run out - they've taken "all you can eat" to a new extreme and they've left the place in shambles. But it looks like the end of the Mountain Pine Beetle epidemic may be near - at least this phase of it.

Good news for British Columbia...bad news for coleopterologists (or do they get excited about anything beetles do? - beetle mania?).

Imagery credit: Allan L. Carroll, Ph.D.Research Scientist Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Forest Service, Pacific Forestry Centre, Victoria, BC.

The Problem With Tar Sands

Eric de Place — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 15:06:02

Last week, when I expressed my concern about biofuels, it generated a lively discussion. But I'd hate for folks to think I'm picking on biofuels. Petroleum can really chap my hide. To wit, check out this new report from Environmental Defence Canada. The title says it all: Canada's Toxic Tar Sands: The Most Destructive Project On Earth (pdf).

I found the title a bit overheated at first, but take a look before you decide. The claim may be debatable, but it's also not mere hyperbole: the tar sands oil extraction very well could be the most destructive project on earth. In fact, it's already yielding catastrophic results for human health, not to mention for a vast swath of North America's ecology. (In any case, I've had the privilege of working on climate policy a bit with one of the authors, Matt Price, and I can attest that he's a smart guy.)

I won't summarize the study here, but just point out that among the many problems with tar sands oil, is that it can only be extracted and processed with very large energy inputs (which means very large carbon emissions):

The main reason is that extracting the oil from the sand is so energy intensive, from the large machines to the natural gas used to melt the bitumen out of the sand. It is estimated that by 2012 the Tar Sands will use as much gas as is needed to heat all the homes in Canada... Using huge amounts of relatively clean burning natural gas in order to produce dirty and carbon heavy oil is what commentators have dubbed “reverse alchemy” – the equivalent of turning gold into lead.

For a long time, it wasn't economical to extract tar sands oil. But now, with high and rising oil prices -- and plenty of demand from Canada's neighbor -- it's starting to pencil out. It's just a shame the accounting doesn't factor in pollution, the cancer risk, the wildlife, the water quality, the air quality, the atmospheric carbon...

You get the idea.

The Problem With Biofuels

Eric de Place — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 17:41:07

Earlier this month, two independent studies in the journal Science dropped a bomb into the already controversial world of biofuels. To cop the New York Times' lede, the studies found that:

Almost all biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels if the full emissions costs of producing these “green” fuels are taken into account...

Yesterday afternoon, when I finally got around to reading the articles, my chin hit the floor. The NYT was far too gentle: they don't just show that biofuels have worse GHG emissions than gasoline, but drastically worse emissions -- and for virtually every type of biofuel, including cellulosic ethanol (except in some highly specific conditions).

For really the first time, the studies are factoring in the carbon lost from land conversion. The authors argue (persuasively, in my opinion), that it's crooked accounting to simply do a GHG analysis of crops versus petroleum. After all, the crops used for biofuels don't grow in a vacuum. What really happens is that new land -- Indonesian rainforest, Brazilian woodlands, American grassland -- is cleared and ploughed to make way for biofuel feedstock crops. Existing agricultural land, of course, is already in production for food and fiber.

The clearing is a death sentence for wildlife in some of the most biodiverse places on earth. It also releases huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere -- called the "carbon debt." In fact, the carbon debt run up by land conversion is, in most cases, far more than is saved by subsituting biofuels for petroleum products. (Details on the studies' are below the jump; abstracts are here and here.) It would take decades at best, centuries at worst, to repay the carbon debt. And this when we need steep emissions reductions now.

Look, I'm sure there will be further debate, and maybe even counter-studies. (The biofuels industry appears to be fighting back already.) But in a way, uncertainty could be the real problem for biofuels, as well as for the latest fad in climate policy, low-carbon fuel standards. Either biofuels are a climate catastrophe, as these studies indicate; or we have no idea what biofuels do to the climate because experts don't agree. And that second option is the best case scenario, at least in the near term.

The worst case scenario, of course, is what the studies show. Corn ethanol is plain awful, needing many decades to repay its carbon debt even when planted in abandoned cropland. But corn ethanol is benign compared to biodiesel. The best biodiesel scenario from the study (soybeans planted on Brazilian grassland) would take nearly four decades to repay its carbon debt. Other biodiesel scenarios are even worse: palm oil planted on former southeast Asian tropical rainforest takes 86 years to repay its carbon debt; biodiesel from soybeans on tropical rainforest would take at least 300 years; biodiesel from palm oil on peatland rainforest would take more than 400.

To be fair, the authors point out that future generations of very specific kinds of cellulosic ethanol -- municipal waste or desert algae, for example -- could have positive GHG benefits. (And, presumably, the boutique biodiesel from french fry oil, which can never scale to meaningful production levels, is not quite so awful.) But the hope for a benign biofuel future is predicated on our demand for fuel not inducing futher land conversions. And that's a very big "if."

In any case, those future climate-friendly fuel sources are mostly hypotheticals. Real-world stuff isn't so promising. I quote:

...if American corns fields of average yield were converted to switchgrass for [cellulosic] ethanol, replacing that corn would still trigger emissions from land use change that would take 52 years to pay back and increase emissions over 30 years by 50%.

Ouch.

I'm bearish on biofuels. And if you want my opinion, biofuels are really just the latest in a long line of Hail Mary's that try to avoid ending Americans' car addiction. There's always a technological miracle around the corner -- just wait a few more years -- then we'll have plug-in hybrids running off clean or surplus energy; then we'll HyperCars or FreedomCars that can cross the continent on a tank; then we'll have Segways that will revolutionize personal travel. I could go on. In the meantime, we avoid the bread and butter fixes we've known about for decades, and we keep sending ever greater amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

This is really happening. Right now, maybe the single biggest threat to good cap-and-trade programs like the Western Climate Initiative is that policymakers will avoid capping transportation fuels, which are easily our largest source of emissions. The latest attempt to punt involves adopting a low-carbon fuel standard (LCFS), which is supposed to be a big boon for biofuels. (Depending on its construction, an LCFS can work like a cap on absolute emissions or a cap on the intensity of emissions.) The LCFS would quantify the lifecycle carbon emissions of every fuel stream entering the economy. To begin with, that's an analysis of mind-bending complexity. But now, in light of the new studies in Science, it appears that an honest LCFS would either favor conventional oil or simply be technically infeasible because the accounting is so incredibly complex.

Or -- and this is the biggest danger -- the LCFS would use an accounting like we've seen in the past: one that favors biofuels, but that downplays land conversion or other factors. In that case, the carbon reductions could be a chimera.

There is a very real chance that LCFS, or something like it, will trump a general cap on transportation emissions. If that happens I am going to start calling it cap-and-pray. Pray that some new miracle solution can keep us all in our cars with no climate consequences.

For the record, I don't pretend to be an expert in biofuels or in life-cycle analysis. But remember, these are peer-reviewed papers by respected researchers in a top science journal. (And in case you're wondering, the authors' affiliations don't indicate a prediliction to anti-ag positions; they hail from places like Iowa State University, the University of Minnesota, and the USDA.)

Finally, I've hunted around a little -- not a lot -- for counters to these studies. I couldn't find much, but please do share if you know of any! In the meantime, my take is that the findings are damning, even if they're not the last word on the subject.

***

Postscript: A commenter points me to a letter from two government researchers that objects to one of the two studies (the Searchinger et al. study). To drastically summarize here, the letter makes the following principal claims: 1) US ethanol production won't rearch the levels used in the study because of current legislation; 2) Average corn yields in the US and other countries will increase, meaning that less land will be converted; 3) Brazil and China will not convert much additional land because of current legislation and practice in those countries; 4) Ethanol refining processes can become more efficient in the future; and 5) There's a lot of biomass already available from forest growth, crop residues, and other sources.

Without spending too much more time on the keyboard for this post, I think that most of letter's claims are debatable, at best. (But go read it for yourself, and tell me why I'm wrong!) In any case, the letter concludes by acknowledging what I take to be the central problem -- uncertainty:

...indirect land use changes are much more difficult to model than direct land use changes... While scientific assessment of land use change issues is urgently needed in order to design policies that prevent unintended consequences from biofuel production, conclusions regarding the GHG emissions effects of biofuels based on speculative, limited land use change modeling may misguide biofuel policy development.

Exactly. But "limited land use change modeling" is what we've seen in the past. That's what got us into biofuels. Uncertainty of this nature is a double-edged sword, one that should cut against biofuels until we're confident they're not a danger.

How Trees Cause Pollution

Eric de Place — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:48:46

Backyard trees may not accomplish much, but forests soak up vast amounts of carbon. In fact, some people argue that trees and native plant communities may be one of our best remedies for climate emissions. Unfortunately, forests not only store a lot of carbon, they can also emit a lot carbon.

Take California's redwood country, for example. Data from the North Coast Air Basin shows astonishing carbon emissions from a typical year of forest fires in just three counties. Enough, in fact, to equal 367,000 average American cars on the road. And this in a region with just 167,000 souls.

Here's the down-low. Experts estimate that forest fires in Del Norte, Humboldt, and Trinity Counties were responsible for more than 1.8 million tons of carbon-dioxide over the decade from 1994 to 2003. Not only that, but fires kicked out more than 56,000 tons of methane, which is roughly 23 times as climate-potent as carbon-dioxide. All that adds up to nearly 2 million tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent climate pollution. (Major hat tip to Lynn Jungwirth, who emailed me the data.)

Of course, the emisions from fires is really only half the story of forests. It's debits, but not the credits. Northern California's forests stored carbon during that period too ("sequestered" it, as they say in the biz). Just how much? Well, it's hard to be certain. And that's part of the problem.

As North America gets serious about climate change, there's growing interest in understanding the role of forests (and land use change more generally). That's as it should be. But we should also acknowledge the big uncertainties that are inherent in dynamic ecosystems.

One big risk is counting forest carbon storage as a plus -- an "offset" to our emissions -- but then not counting their emissions when they burn. We shouldn't treat trees as permant carbon storage if, in fact, they're not.

And in truth, at least as I understand the state of play, it's very hard to know the extent to which forests are permanent carbon storage vehicles. In fact, some research suggests that climbing temperatures may turn big carbon sinks, like Pacific Northwest forests, into carbon sources.

Depending on how climate change plays out, hotter (and drier and longer) summers could lead to more wildfires, and therefore more emissions. Spreading forest pests, probably linked to warmer winters, can kill vast tracts of forest, simultaneously reducing carbon uptake and increasing susceptibility to fires and logging.

So before we start banking on forests to do our climate work for us, we need to get serious about answering some quesions. Do forests permanently store carbon? And, if so, how can we verifiy the amount (and changes to the amount over time)?

Surely afforestation adds to the world's carbon storage, but what about a mature forest? Is it a carbon sink, a source, or a steady state?

Now, I'm not saying that the right solution to ignore forests. Not at all. The questions I'm posing all have answers. We just need to figure out what they are.

Timely update, 2/13: In yesterday's throne speech, BC premier Gordon Campbell announced that the province will use forest offsets to help address climate emissions. The Vancouver Sun article is pretty short on details, but it sounds like the offsets would come mostly from afforestation projects.

Putting a Price on the Priceless

Eric de Place — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 15:01:35

I find this both wildly perverse and perversely intriguing:

Ecological economist Robert Costanza... and his team of researchers have already released one study claiming to have commoditized the world’s biosphere. The total value: $33 trillion...

There's a big part of me -- the mountain-climbing, Edward Abbey-reading part -- that finds this simply appalling. The natural world is so astonishing and beautiful that I can't stomach the thought of putting a monetary value on it. Then there's the other part of me -- the pragmatic, Sightline-researcher part -- that tells me that we already put a monetary value on nature. We just don't do it systematically; and we often to do it in order to exploit rather than conserve.

Even though $33 trillion is more than the combined world GDP, and even though the researchers believe the estimate to be conservative, there's still something dissonant about putting a price on what feels priceless. Or, is it really the best way we have to quantify, and therefore protect, natural systems? After all, prices have a way of clarifying in a way that few things can.

Costanza will be speaking in Seattle next Wednesday. I doubt I'll be able to make it, but I'd love to hear what people think.

What Doesn't Keep Me Up At Night

Eric de Place — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 18:04:06

Update 1/18: This was probably one of the dumber posts I've written. I've been regretting it ever since I hit "publish," but I'm going to leave it up anyway in order to take one more crack at explaining what I was trying to do. Here goes:

Climate change has dire consequences. It affects humans, ecosystems and economies in alarming ways. But there are some ways of describing the problem that simply don't sound scary. One example of that is "trees are blooming earlier" -- it sounds nice. I was trying to suggest that if you have a choice between talking about wearing sandals more often or about unhealthful heatwaves, maybe you should go with the heatwaves. I didn't do a very good job of getting that across.

In any case, to go beyond my post, a huge amount of opinion research shows that talking about the consequences of climate change is ineffective. It paralyzes and overwhelms people. Instead, it's better to talk about solutions.

***

Says a leading presidential candidate:*

As a result of climate change, glaciers are melting faster; the polar ice caps are shrinking; trees are blooming earlier; more people are dying in heat waves; species are migrating, and eventually many will become extinct. [my emphasis]

The trees are blooming earlier? Panic!

I mean, I spend most of my waking hours thinking about climate policy, but "the trees are blooming earlier" sounds about as alarming as Christmas being held twice a year, or bunnies getting fuzzier.

Whatever we do, we must stop the trees from blooming earlier!

And look, before you jump all over me, I get the point: like many ecological systems, pollinators are being thrown off by climate change. The consequences are hugely important. But it also struck me as sort of unintentionally hilarious -- and maybe not the canniest framing I've ever seen.

Am I wrong? Is this just further evidence that I should stick to research and keep my nose out of communications?

* I'm not saying who it is -- you can figure it out easily enough -- because I like much of this person's policy substance. Anyway, I still have no idea who I'm voting for and we never endorse candidates.

Shorter Winters Weaken Forest Carbon Sinks

Anna Fahey — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 22:25:47

As we've written here before, forests have gained a lot of attention in the climate change conversation because of their ability to suck carbon out of the atmosphere. Individuals can buy "reforestation" offsets on the Internet. There's talk of including credits for carbon stored in trees and wood products as part of many proposed cap-and-trade systems. Cities and businesses are even planting trees as part of their efforts to slow climate change.

There's no doubt that forests, and their tremendous ability to store carbon, can play a role in protecting the climate. But we have to be cautious about that role. Forest ecosystems are, by their nature, unpredictable-there's simply no way to know how much carbon a forest will store over the long haul, Worse, climate change itself magnifies those uncertainties. If a warmer climate makes forest fires more frequent - as some people believe is possible - then a lot of "offsets" will simply go up in smoke. Or consider BC's devastating pine beetle infestation - an example of how ecosystem disruption can fell more trees than any chainsaw.

And there's troubling news today that makes us more cautious than ever: A new global study by researchers at the University of Helsinki shows that trees are absorbing less CO2 than predicted, as the world warms and vegetation patterns shift.

It turns out that changing growing seasons may shorten the seasonal window when vegetation is a "sink" -- that is, taking in carbon -- rather than extending that season. That means plants are spending less time as net carbon sinks, and more time as net carbon sources. Not good.

The Guardian reported the study's main points today:

The ability of forests to soak up man-made carbon dioxide is weakening, according to an analysis of two decades of data from more than 30 sites in the frozen north.
The finding means that more of the CO2 we release will end up affecting the climate in the atmosphere rather than being safely locked away in trees or soil.
The results may partly explain recent studies suggesting that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing faster than expected.
If higher temperatures mean less carbon is soaked up by plants and microbes, global warming will accelerate.

Climate scientist John Miller of the University of Colorado put it this way in his commentary on the study for the journal Nature: "We are currently getting a 50 percent discount on the climatic impact of our fossil fuel emissions" (That is, half of what we pump out is sucked up by the oceans and ecosystems on land.) "Unfortunately, we have no guarantee that the 50 percent discount will continue."

Wilderness Lite

Eric de Place — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 12:24:30

Lately it feels like Northwest wilderness protection can't catch a break. Not only has it proved damnably difficult to pass even popular new wilderness designations, but much-loved trails and access roads are getting pummeled by winter storms. Routinely it seems.

But maybe -- just maybe -- there's a golden opportunity amidst the storm wreckage. Maybe we've been given a cheap and easy way to expand our wilderness areas. After all, a washed-out or heavily-damaged road means more than just frustrated hikers: it also means a lot more wild country.

That's because some of the worst storm-related fury is actually the aftermath. Chronic underfunding, mismanagement, and heightened concern for the environment often makes rebuilding access roads to trails prohibitively expensive or extremely controversial. In fact, Washington is a good example. The mangled Dosewallips and the Stehekin River Roads have probably been the most contentious locations. But also the Cascade, Suiattle, and White Chuck River Roads, plus the Mountain Loop Highway near Barlow Pass. Oh, and the Queets, which has been out of commission for who knows how long. And I hear the the South Shore Quinault is out again. That's just some of the major stuff: it doesn't include the welter of smaller forest roads that provide valuable access to lesser known trails and peaks.

Trailheads are part of a large share of my weekends, so I certainly appreciate the ready access that we Cascadians are blessed with. But I'm conflicted too. Despite Washington's comparative wealth of official wilderness areas -- a greater share of our land than any state other than Alaska and California -- I've long wish we had even more. But too much of our wilderness is barren rock and ice terrain; it's lovely to look at, but it's not habitat-rich like low elevation areas are. And that's where the road-destroying storms may have a silver lining.

Exhibit A is the ever-controversial Dosewallips River Road.

Nowadays, the Dose Road ends 5 miles short at a gigantic washout. Once you're out of the car, you skirt the washout in a quarter mile or so of short switchbacks and then descend back to the road. From there it's a lovely well-graded 5 mile walk (pictured above) to the campground at road's end, which for the last couple of years has been a luxurious "backcountry" destination. It's got picnic tables and fire rings nestled under big leaf maples beside the river. The trail proper then strikes out into the heart of Olympic National Park.

So, there's an optimistic take on the Dose washout: we didn't lose 5 miles of road so much as we gained 5 miles of trail. And the former road bed is a "trail" that mountain bikes can use too, which are rightly verboten on actual trails in national parks.

Maybe I'm being Pollyana. Some people complain -- legitimately -- that because of the Dose washout Lake Constance is no longer a dayhike for most folks. Similarly, Dose Meadows and Honeymoon Meadows are now multi-night excursions for all but the uber-fit. And climbing Mount Constance is now even more grueling. (On the other hand, some of these places were being loved to death. And like Glacier Basin above the now semi-closed road to Monte Cristo, these spots will gradually recover their health when spared from armies of tenderfeet.)

So here's my modest proposal: since we don't have the money to fix all the roads that keep getting washed out, let's stop trying. But let's also create a designation for these newly-roadless areas, a sort of Wilderness Lite.

Mountain bikes and horses would be welcome in Wilderness Lite. And campfire policy could be more liberal than it is in the backcountry. By providing a place for these heavier-impact uses, it might reduce the encroachment of them in true designated wilderness areas.

Wilderness Lite would have ecological benefits too. Roads spread invasive species and their erosion damages rivers. By allowing nature to selectively phase out certain roads, we could be helping to restore ecosystems. Even better, almost all of the frequently washed-out roads are in low-elevation river valleys, the kind of places with old growth forests and salmon streams -- the very places that are under-represented inside current wilderness boundaries.

In truth, we may not have much of a choice. Many of the best climate models predict that the Northwest is going to see more floods of the kind that wreck havoc on forest roads. If the recent winter floods weren't instances of climate disruption, then they were at least good previews of what we're likely to see. It's probably going to get even harder to keep up -- and we're already behind.

Deciding on a forest road triage approach -- sweetened by a new Wilderness Lite designation -- might free up resources to protect our highest priority roads and trails. In a way, Wilderness Lite honors the legacy of conservationists like Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who argued that a growing population would require more wild places. If we're smart, future generations of Northwesterners may inherit a world with more deep wilderness -- plus more Wilderness Lite -- than we enjoy today.

I borrowed the title of this post, and some of the thinking, from an article in Crosscut by Bill Schneider, a writer for New West.

Junk Mail Box: Stopping Paper Waste

Alan Durning — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 09:48:04

On my email accounts, I have filters that keep out most spam. But my regular mail boxes at home and the office? No such luck! Advertising arrives in the post daily, by the sheaf and by the ream.

It annoys me. Here I am, scrupulously recycling and contemplating the climate impacts of my consumption, while L.L. Bean and its ilk are dropping slabs of paper in my mail box: paper that took carbon-storing trees to create, climate-polluting factories to mill, and carbon-belching trucks to haul. All told, it’s 41 pounds of junk mail a year per American.

Admittedly, junk mail isn’t high on Cascadia’s lists of menaces. According to estimates developed for the US Postal Service, it accounts for just over one tenth of one percent of all energy use (at least, if Cascadia matches the US average), plus one-fiftieth of municipal solid waste.

Still, it’s worth a little attention, especially when you consider that virtually no direct mail actually works. Postal advertising is an industry where a mass mailing is considered successful if 2 percent of envelopes or catalogs generate a sale. That means 98 percent of the paper and ink was pointless waste. If we could wave a magic wand and make it disappear, both the mailer and the recipient would be better off.

Look at the situation from an entrepreneur’s perspective. Any industry where 98 percent of the marketing misses its audience is a gargantuan business opportunity for whoever can figure out how to boost the “hit rate.” Eliminating unwanted ads in our mailboxes should increase profits for mailers by slashing costs without diminishing revenue. After all, US merchants pay upwards of $30 billion a year to produce and distribute junk mailings, and less than half of it even gets opened. Better targeting of direct mail aligns the interests of the economy with those of forests, the climate, solid waste agencies, and postal customers. What a deal!

The environmental implications of junk mail—most of which are caused by paper production and disposal—are worth spelling out. This report by a group of national environmental organizations says that, among US manufacturing industries, papermaking is the first-ranked consumer of water (per ton of product), third-ranked consumer of energy, third-ranked emitter of toxic pollutants into the air, fourth-ranked emitter of greenhouse gases, and fourth-ranked emitter of toxic pollutants into water.

Paper’s climate impacts are particularly troubling: From our forests—which absorb and store carbon dioxide, slowing climate change—to the landfill, the paper trail disrupts the climate. Two of every five trees felled around the world by loggers (as opposed to land-clearing farmers) are destined for pulp and paper mills. (The United States, the world’s junk mail capital, uses more paper per person than any other nation ever.) Paper accounts for one fourth of municipal landfill waste, and municipal landfills account for one third of human-caused methane emissions. Methane is 23-times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. All told, according to this calculator by Environmental Defense, paper generates three times its weight in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions.

Those 41 pounds of junk mail have the same carbon footprint as burning six gallons of gasoline. (And remember, that’s 41 pounds per member of your household.)

But how to seize this waste-reduction opportunity?

Two solutions:

Federal or state “Do Not Mail” registries, like the “Do Not Call” registry for telemarketing. The Center for a New American Dream has been campaigning for such services. Fourteen states, including Cascadian states of Washington and Montana, have considered legislation to create state “Do Not Mail” registries—plus fines for those direct mailers who ignore them. (To support the bills, write your representatives here.) In Canada, by policy of Canada Post, citizens can simply inscribe on their letter boxes “No advertising mail, please” and be spared much of the deluge. Unfortunately, this policy just results in letter carriers throwing out junk mail rather than householders doing so. Canada, too, needs Do Not Mail lists. (British direct marketers themselves have agreed to boost the precision of their targeting in order to trim waste.)

In the meantime, we can all take ourselves off of various mailing lists. Here are three good guides for ways to stop advertising mail. Or you can pay a small fee to a junk-snail-mail filter service like 41pounds.org or greendimes.org to have them do the leg work.

My own favorite is the new, free service CatalogChoice. It’s signed up more than 300,000 members in its first three months of operation. For me, it’s fun to throw the unwanted catalogs on a pile and, whenever I feel like it, log in to my account at Catalog Choice and zap my name off the relevant lists.

Or, at least, ask for my name to be removed. As BusinessWeek reports, not all catalog mailers are honoring Catalog Choice yet. I predict they’ll come around soon enough. As Catalog Choice’s membership grows, it’ll have substantial power to cajole, embarrass, or pressure mail-order businesses into compliance. And with or without merchants’ cooperation, Catalog Choice builds the political case for official Do Not Mail registries.

P.S. One counterargument that I’ve heard for junk mail is that direct mail allows postal services such as Canada Post and USPS to achieve bigger economies of scale: they can maintain inexpensive nationwide service for all. Were it not for the plethora of catalogs and credit card offers, goes the argument, it might cost a dollar to mail a baby photo to your faraway uncle. It’s a plausible argument, but it appears to be false. US law governing the postal service stipulates, for example, that “each class of mail or type of mail service bear the direct and indirect costs attributable to that class or service.” In other words, your baby picture is already supposed to pay its own way.

Still, for the sake of argument, let’s assume it’s true that junk mail helps pay for real mail. That still wouldn’t justify the practice! Ponying up a little more to mail a letter would be a small price to pay to unspam our mail boxes.

(Alyse Nelson did most of the research for this post. Thanks, Alyse!)