Commentary: Forestland is a vital organ of the living Earth — and needs protection.
Ed.: The essays, analyses and opinions presented as Community Voices express the perspectives of their authors on topics of interest and importance to the community, and are not intended to reflect perspectives on behalf of the Salish Current.
Two hundred fifty years ago, healthy forests covered one billion acres of the future United States. The population of the thirteen colonies — colonists, enslaved Africans, and Native Americans — totaled about 2.5 million. Four hundred acres of forest stood for each of them.
Today, a combination of forest loss and population growth has brought that number down to just over two acres: A patch of trees small enough to fit inside Seattle’s Husky Stadium for each American.
Our view of forests has changed less than one might imagine since the days of the Minutemen. To do right by our remaining acres of forest requires a fundamental shift — better still, a revolution — in how we look at forests in the first place. As distinguished environmental journalist Lynda Mapes writes in her recent book The Trees Are Speaking, “nothing less than a paradigm shift will save them.”
Not long ago, one of us served on a committee of experts exploring “Forests as Climate Solutions” in Massachusetts, a state even more heavily forested than Washington state. The experts divided quickly into camps. One camp held that forests are a resource to be harvested (and regenerated) sustainably to maximize profits. The other viewed forests as an obstacle to the necessary expansion of towns, farms, industry, and even renewable energy projects.
But this binary frame was a thought-trap held over from the 19th century. Twenty-first century science tells us that forests are a vital organ of the living Earth.
Every schoolchild learns that trees produce oxygen and help clean our air and water. Less well appreciated? Forests, along with oceans, still control Earth’s climate to a significant degree. Forests remove nearly one-third of the carbon we emit by burning fossil fuels and clearing land.
This stabilizing capacity has been impaired by two recent years of extreme wildfire. Yet no human technology proposed to date can conceivably scale to the low-cost effectiveness of forests to absorb and store atmospheric carbon.
Forests shelter beloved wild species, and are part and parcel of networks of fungi, insects, and microbes that we have barely begun to understand. And, yes, forests are beautiful, peaceful, magnificent. Give that beauty the credit it deserves.
Still, we debate whether to harvest trees for toilet paper or to cut them down to build data centers. To date, we’ve cleared more than one-third of Earth’s natural forests off the planet. To use a tech analogy, if you let someone strip the rare-earth minerals from your laptop computer, would you expect it to function at all?
When forests flourished and human populations were scattered and small, before we began pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, chopping down trees was a splendid and sustainable way to obtain wood, fuel, and living space.
In a similar way, donating blood to the Red Cross every few months is a splendid and sustainable way to help others in need.
Imagine donating blood every day, from multiple veins. That blood drain would jeopardize the donor’s life. And yet that’s exactly what we’re doing to the world’s forests: draining the life force of a battered planet-wide system critical to our survival. No amount of tree planting can make up for that kind of destruction.
Climate scientists agree. Three years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) affirmed that “protection of existing natural forest ecosystems is the highest priority for reducing (heat-trapping) emissions.”
Trees literally hold our planet together. And no trees do more of that work than the ones in existing mature and old growth forests, structurally complex ecosystems like the Upper Rutsatz parcels on state land in northwest Washington’s Nooksack watershed. Such “legacy forests” — never logged during the 20th century — absorb and store orders of magnitude more carbon than young saplings can.
If you have an opportunity, by all means plant a tree — one that may someday shelter your children’s children. And as you do so, plant an idea: that the world’s remaining forests are vital organs of our living planet, Earth’s bulwark against climate catastrophe.
Fellow Americans, two acres of forest still stand for each of us. Let’s honor those hard-working acres by taking action to protect them to help cool our fevered planet.
— By William R. Moomaw, Sara St. Antoine, and Edward Wolf
• • •
We welcome letters to the editor responding to or amplifying subjects addressed in Community Voices. If you wish to contribute to Community Voices, please send an email with a subject proposal to Executive Editor Mike Sato and he will respond with guidelines.
Help keep the local news flowing — support nonpartisan, fact-based, no-paywall local journalism
with a donation to the Salish Current — news for people, not for profit.