A More Nimble Forest Products Industry Could be the Key to the Future
By Jack Petree
Much of what is written today, especially in the
popular and/or activist-driven press, about post-fire and other salvage
harvests, is based on antiquated thinking about American forests. Most
arguments against salvage harvests were posited in the days before
climate change, other (often imported) threats to the forest, and
equipment better suited to selective treatments of threatened forests
was widely acknowledged, intensively studied, and available.
Anti-harvest activists haven’t updated their ideas in a generation — a
generation of massive change when it comes to the challenges our 21st
century forests face.
In North America today tens of millions of acres of
formerly vigorous, resilient forests contain hundreds of millions of
dead trees that threaten our forests’ ability to provide the
carbon-gobbling and sequestration capacity photosynthesis provides in a
healthy forest. Every day those tens of millions of trees are giving up
to the atmosphere, in the form of greenhouse gas emissions, the carbon
they’ve stored away over a lifetime. The precise number varies with
species but, in general, a board foot of lumber sequesters (traps)
somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 – 5 pounds carbon equivalent in its
cells. If a million dead trees, each averaging only 500 board feet of
lumber were to be milled rather than allowed to deteriorate and release
their carbon, two billion pounds of carbon equivalency in emissions
would be avoided.
Today’s Challenges
In general, conditions challenging today’s American
forests are much different than those faced by forests even two decades
ago. An important article, “Temperate forest health in an era of
emerging megadisturbance,” (Science Magazine - 2015), by two of
America’s foremost forest ecologists points out: “Although disturbances
such as fire and native insects can contribute to natural dynamics of
forest health, exceptional droughts, directly and in combination with
other disturbance factors, are pushing some temperate forests beyond
thresholds of sustainability. Interactions from increasing temperatures,
drought, native insects, and pathogens, and uncharacteristically severe
wildfire are resulting in forest mortality beyond the levels of
20th-century experience. Additional anthropogenic stressors, such as
atmospheric pollution and invasive species, further weaken trees in some
regions. Although continuing climate change will likely drive many
areas of temperate forest toward large-scale transformations, management
actions can help ease transitions and minimize losses of socially
valued ecosystem services.”
Another study, Evidence for declining forest resilience
to wildfires under climate change (Ecology Letters 9(2018) 21:
243–252), documents the loss and/or transition some forests experience
after a major disturbance. Among other conclusions, the authors report
that compared to the last century, “Results highlight significant
decreases in tree regeneration in the 21st century,” and “Major
climate-induced reduction in forest density and extent has important
consequences for a myriad of ecosystem services now and in the future.”
Future Carbon Source
Some, many, or even most, of the forests some imagine
as having “eternal” or “timeless” natures are unlikely to survive into
the future with a form recognizable to what they exhibit today. Likely
forms after a megadisturbance run the gamut from transitional forests
with reduced ability to provide the ecological services we expect from a
forest today to wholesale conversion to shrub or grass land; the carbon
sink taken for granted today may, without help, become the atmospheric
carbon source of the future.
The tens of millions of dead, dying, and overcrowded
trees in our public and private forests represent an opportunity not to
be wasted. Of course, abundant habitat for flora and fauna dependent on
traditional post-fire landscapes needs to be preserved, but nothing has
prepared our forests for overwhelming amounts of salvageable timber;
timber that, harvested, not only provides the lumber and other products
we need but, sawmilled, offsets the need to harvest healthy trees in
forests not yet threatened by megadisturbance.
Future Forest
Today’s forest products industry is already serving the
future forest. Thinning to both reduce the odds of catastrophic fire
and to provide more water for healthy trees represents a sort of
pre-salvage harvest, providing lumber and saving healthy trees from
harvest. Lidar allows us to identify trees threatening forest health and
remove them specifically, while modern, portable, thin-kerf sawmills
allow salvage to take place at a targeted level, with harvest and
milling mostly accomplished by local small business owners. Biochar made
from slash sequesters carbon, provides nutrients for farms and forest,
and on, and on . . .
Much remains to be learned about how climate change
will ultimately change our forests, but change they will, as will the
forest products industry. Exciting times? We’re living them now!
Jack Petree is a public policy consultant and owner of Tradeworld Communications.
