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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, executive director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center. And joining me is Paul Koberstein, the co-editor of the Cascadia Times, a regional journal published in Portland, Oregon, and the co-author of Canopy of Titans: the Life and Times of the Great North American Temperate Rainforest, which was published in August 2023 by OR Books. Welcome, Paul, to the Econews Report. Thank you for joining us.

PAUL KOBERSTEIN:

Thank you, Tom. It's great to be here with you.

WHEELER:

Well, it's great to have you. And we get to talk about my favorite part of the world, which is the wet forest of the Pacific Northwest. So I know that this area has a lot of different names. It has had a lot of names proposed for it. What do you call the wet forest environment of the Pacific Northwest?

KOBERSTEIN:

Yeah, well, thank you for that question, but can I just first give a shout out to my co-author, Jessica Applegate, who sadly couldn't be here today, but did a tremendous job in contributing to the writing and the research and editing of this book? Yeah, the book is about the temperate rainforest from Northern California to Alaska. Very few people really see this as one single ecosystem, but our book does, and there's a number of scientists who do as well, connecting the Redwoods, the Douglas Fir region in Oregon, and Washington in British Columbia, and the Sitka Spruce region in Southeast Alaska from the Tongass to the far side of the Gulf. It's one big ecosystem.

WHEELER:

And we here are at the southern end of the range of the Sitka Spruce so you know you can you can see the gradient at work there between Alaska all the way down here to California. So California's redwoods are not particularly rainy but you have them characterized as part of this great temperate rainforest. Why is that?

KOBERSTEIN:

Can I touch on something you just mentioned first? I'll get into the rain and the redwoods. So, there is a mixture of trees throughout this rainforest. The Douglas fir extends from British Columbia to Northern California, and the Sitka spruce goes all the way at the top of the Tongass, all the way down to the redwoods. There's one spot in, I think, Prairie Creek National State Park, where a 300-foot redwood, and a 300-foot Douglas fir, and a 300-foot Sitka spruce are growing side by side by side. The only place in the world where you have 300-foot trees of different species growing next to each other. So, that's kind of a fun fact that we point out in our book.

As far as, why are the redwoods part of this rainforest when it doesn't really seem to be all that rainy? And the answer to that is fog. There's a tremendous amount, as anyone who knows, in this region, knows, this is a tremendously wet rainforest because of the fog. And basically, the criteria for a rainforest is a lot of rain close to the ocean in a temperate zone for a temperate rainforest. So, the rain comes in the redwoods as fog. They get more than 40 inches of rain per year from fog. So, that is why.

WHEELER:

And you cover a lot of areas that get a lot more rain. One of my favorite places in the world, the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. Whenever I think of a temperate rainforest, I think of the whole forest area on the west side of the Olympic Peninsula. And I think if there's one place on the planet that I would have to save, it would be the whole rainforest. I think that that is my my favorite spot on on planet Earth. So you've you've devoted yourself to this region for a number of years. As I said at the outset, you co-founded the Cascadia Times, which is a regional environmental journal. What is it about the Pacific Northwest, about Cascadia that has drawn your love and affection?

KOBERSTEIN:

Well, we see the Cascadia bioregion is very similar to the temperate rainforest, so it does extend further east to Montana and Idaho. But personally, I started writing about the forest in the early, in the 1980s when I worked for the Oregonian and into the 90s. And one of the earlier articles I wrote was about Louisiana Pacific. It's planted there in, I think it's Arcata, or what's it in Humboldt County, on the Bay. And the pollution they were emitting into the water was fairly egregious. And one of the more fun stories I wrote, I worked on, is just being in the redwoods makes my heart sing. It's such a beautiful place. You like the Olympics, of course, and I do too, but the redwoods is really a special place on planet Earth. And so each redwood is a carbon sink, and each one of them deserves a protection. Because of that, every time you cut down a redwood, you lose a tremendous amount of lost carbon sequestration.

WHEELER:

So redwood forests are capable of putting on more carbon than any other forest on this planet, basically, as I understand it. Is that right?

KOBERSTEIN:

That's right, there's a professor at Humboldt State University, Steven Sillett, who did the initial work on measuring carbon content in redwoods, who's also an explorer who climbed a vast number of 300-foot trees and developed a lot of the science around carbon and forests. So the redwoods have the maximum amount of carbon of any forest in the world per acre, and that would be in the old-growth parts of Jedediah Smith State Park in the northern part of the state, as well as the other redwood preserves, Prairie Creek, Redwood National Park, Montgomery Flats, and so on. But each one of these areas is incredibly carbon-dense, six or seven times more carbon-dense than the Amazon, which tells you all you need to know about why this is important.

WHEELER:

And I mean, these spectacular sites, Jedidiah Smith, Prairie Creek, they are fantastic examples of what once was all over. We have 4% of historic redwoods left, but we once had kind of an unbroken chain of old-growth redwoods for hundreds of miles that had sequestered carbon for millennia. And we saw a significant amount of that be disturbed in a very short period of time and be turned into lumber, which now is in houses in San Francisco and Oakland and Eureka. My house is built of old-growth redwood. The folks in the timber industry would say that the best thing that we can do to a tree with regards to carbon is to cut it down and turn it into two-by-fours, that this is the form of stable carbon sequestration is some sort of a high-intensity forest rotation where we get lots of young trees cut down at kind of the peak of their growth cycle and then turned into long-lived forest products. What's wrong with this math or what's the argument against this talking point?

KOBERSTEIN:

The argument is simply that it's better to keep carbon in lumber and plywood than in a forest. And that does not recognize the fact that a piece of plywood is not going to be sequestering any more carbon ever again. Whereas the tree is going to keep sequestering carbon for hundreds and thousands of years in the redwoods, 3,000 years. So you have cut off that potential of carbon sequestration as well as when you log the tree, there's going to be emissions from the sawmill, from the chainsaw, from the logging trucks, as well as when the piece of redwood is built into a home, that will slowly decompose and emit carbon throughout its lifetime. There's one study that showed that about 80% of a forest's carbon is lost to the environment, to the air within the first century after logging.

WHEELER:

Yeah, just just think about a logging site, right? So trees get cut down, but not all parts of the tree are useful. So branches, tops are left in the forest. These are often put into slash piles and then immediately burned. And so then you take the the round wood to a timber mill. That round wood is then cut into dimensional lumber. But there's a lot of bark and pithy sapwood and off cuts and sawdust that are produced in the process. That also probably is going to get collected and then immediately burnt. And then you have some long lived forest products, maybe about half of the total carbon in a tree is put into a long lived forest product.

But how long those forest products are going to exist is is somewhat debatable, right? I know that when I bought my house, we redid the kitchen. We did a lot of things to the house that were previous improvements made by the last homeowner in the early 2000s. So that improvement from the last homeowner lasted about 15 to 20 years before I came in and ripped out whatever they did and put in something that I liked. And that's kind of the nature of wood product. Not all of them last as the two by fours that are the studs of our walls that hang around for over 100 years. A lot of them get put into things that have a more ephemeral life that then decompose, get sent to landfills, turn into methane, which escapes into the atmosphere. So the idea that we are safely sequestering carbon in forest products, I believe, is overblown.

But this is a way by which the timber industry is attempting to greenwash their practices by saying, you know, the best thing for climate change is is clear cut forest. So there is a whole camp of scientists who provide an alternative view of forest and are pushing back on the industry backed narrative. Folks like Bill Moomaw and Bev Law. Would you like to talk about about Bill and Bev and the cadre of other folks and what their prescription is for a forest instead?

KOBERSTEIN:

This is a great question. The whole science of understanding the relationship between forest and carbon is fairly new, and we've paid a lot of attention to fossil fuels and the climate and carbon. But forest and carbon is a developing area of science, and many ecologists are focusing their attention on it. The first scientist that I have found to deal with the subject was an OSU professor, Oregon State University professor named Beverly Law, who in 2018 came out with a study that showed that if you protect older forests and extend the time period between timber rotations, you can increase the amount of carbon on the landscape by more than half, which was really controversial because it meant that the timber industry was contributing to the problem. To that point, they had been claiming to be part of the solution, and now they're being exposed as a polluter.

A year later, Bill Moomaw, who is a professor at Tufts University in Boston, came out with a study that showed if you take Beverly Law's ideas and extend them globally, you can solve the climate crisis. A little background now here on that. So, we have, as a society, we have been pumping carbon pollution into the air for three centuries since the Industrial Revolution. All that carbon is still up there, or most of it is. It's what's causing the temperatures to go up, the sea levels to rise, and glaciers to melt, and so on. And we have to stop burning fossil fuels to prevent it from increasing the amount of carbon in the air. But if that's all we do, we will never address this legacy carbon. And the fact of the matter is what Moomaw and Law found is that only forests are able to deal with that at an affordable cost and at the necessary scale.

Moomaw coined a term for protecting forests as a climate solution. He called it "proforestation." And it's starting to have some resonance. A couple years ago, the IPCC recognized that protecting forests is an essential part of the climate solution, in addition to stopping fossil fuels. So, there is some headway being made by these scientists, but it's slow.

WHEELER:

You are listening to the Econews Report. Joining me is Paul Koberstein, the co-editor of the Cascadia Times, a regional journal published in Portland, Oregon, and the co-author of Canopy of Titans, the Life and Times of the Great North American Temperate Rainforest.

So proforestation is going to be different, though, than this idea that has gained traction in a number of years, reforestation, of planting a trillion trees, as some people have proposed. Can you explain the difference between proforestation and reforestation?

KOBERSTEIN:

So, reforestation means when you cut down a tree, replacing it with a new sapling, you spray the landscape with pesticides to prevent other tree species from growing there, and then you plant a new tree, and in a clear cut, that's reforestation. Proforestation means protecting trees that already exist. You know, the ancient Chinese had a saying that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the best thing you can do today is plant a tree. If you could time travel, you would find that the best time to plant a tree is a thousand years ago, let it sequester all that carbon, and the next best thing you can do today is to save a tree, to save a forest.

WHEELER:

Till I stand for that thousand years.

KOBERSTEIN:

And the other part of this that you mentioned, the branches and the logs and the roots and stuff that sit on the forest floor from dead trees decaying and dead trees, that carbon stays in the forest as long as those branches and logs are there. A Douglas fir log, for example, will take a thousand years to decompose. So more than half of the carbon in a forest is on the ground, not above in the canopy.

WHEELER:

And I think any visitor to a redwood forest would be familiar with this, right? These are our nursery logs that proliferate across a old growth redwood forest, the large dead trees that have fallen, that have been there ever since you were a kid, and you come back 50 years later and that log is still sitting there, maybe a little bit smaller in size, but substantially still the same. So we still see a lot of carbon sequestration in a forest. This compares to the carbon that is lost, though, when, you know, we have slash piles and biomass facilities at timber mills that are burning that carbon. That is an immediate source of carbon emissions into the air, as opposed to the long, slow decomposition in a forest. So, so on, on one hand, our forests of the Pacific Northwest are a solution to climate change, and they are also going to be impacted by climate change at the same time. Do you want to speak to how climate change is already impacting the forests of the Pacific Northwest and what we can anticipate to see in the future?

KOBERSTEIN:

I think the most obvious impact is drought and wildfire. The number of wildfires are increasing in number and frequency and severity as the climate gets warmer and the moisture declines in the forest. And this is causing all the wildfire problems you're seeing with regard to the destruction and loss of life. But forest fires are not necessarily in and of themselves bad. Many forests, including redwoods and sequoia, need fire to regenerate. And unfortunately, we're putting out every fire we can, and this is causing another set of problems within the forest.

WHEELER:

Yeah, go on. What is the issue with our addiction to putting out these forest fires and what is the impact here?

KOBERSTEIN:

One of the problems with forest is the solution that the Forest Service has come up with, which is to thin the forest in the hope that that'll reduce the fuel to make us all safe from the catastrophic wildfires we've been experiencing. The problem is that thinning doesn't really do anything to stop or slow down the most destructive wildfires, which are all driven by wind. One of the scientists with the John Muir Society in Southern California, Chad Hansen, wrote a book that says you can't stop the wind with a chainsaw.

So thinning is going on all across California at a very aggressive rate. You'll see slash piles popping up everywhere, and those have to be burned. There's a tremendous number of them. On the Stanislaus forest alone, there are 60,000, like 15 per every acre, and those are going to go up in flames over the winter as the crews get to them, causing huge pollution problems, health problems for people. They're being advised to close their windows and stay indoors, and all because the Forest Service has thinned these forests with the misguided logic that this is going to prevent catastrophic forest fires and save lives. It will not. The only thing that'll save lives from a forest fire is, of course, harming your homes, preventing the fire from burning down the roof or the fence or the pile of wood you have in your side yard.

WHEELER:

And given your books about the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest, it's also important to distinguish those forests from other fire-prone forests in the West. The Klamath-Siskiyou Mountains and the mixed conifer forests out there can be significantly different than the thick, wet Dougfir forests on the west side of the Cascades in Oregon and Washington. Those forests experience fire at far less regular clip, and when they burn, they tend to burn in low-severity, mixed, mosaic type of fire.

So you know, I think it's also important here that we distinguish between these things. And this is going to matter as we come to issues like the Northwest Forest Plan and other kind of large efforts, large planning efforts by the Forest Service to manage our forests. If the Forest Service says that we need to log to stop fire in the moist, wet forests of the Pacific Northwest, that is probably not as true as it is in other forest environments that are drier and more fire-prone. In this temperate rainforest region, the Tongass is one of the crown jewels. In Alaska, if folks have not had the opportunity to visit the Tongass, can you describe it and the role that the Tongass plays as this large, intact forest in both protecting our climate and in protecting biodiversity?

KOBERSTEIN:

Jessica and I took two lengthy trips up to the Tongass while researching this book. First trip we went up to Juneau and talked to a number of scientists and forest advocates about the plan at that time was from the Trump administration to open up roadless areas to logging. This is around 2018. We noticed in their analysis and the advocacy around that was that very few people were paying attention to the carbon impact, the climate impact, of all this logging they were planning to do. And that's basically why we started writing this book because we thought that this was a really important message that was not really getting out.

And so we went up there to look at these forests. We were really impressed with some of the things that were happening. There's a huge die-off of yellow cedar, which is related to climate change. The climate in Alaska is getting warmer as it is everywhere. These yellow cedars grew up, evolved in an ecosystem that had a lot of snow during the winter. But because the temperature is rising and there's less snow, there is less of a blanket of snow on the ground and the yellow cedar would die off because of the increased temperature in the ground during winter.

So that was one of the first things we noticed from Alaska. We took another trip up to a place called Prince of Wales Island, which is on the far extreme southeast corner of southeast Alaska, to look at the rainforest up there. And it was pretty incredible to see how much of that rainforest has been logged. There's giant patches of clear-cuts as far as you can see. And we discovered that many of these logs are being exported to China from southeast Alaska. And one day we actually flew over a cargo ship that was being loaded with logs that were bound for a port on the China Sea. And at the same time, the local mill owner was in federal court complaining about the lack of logs. And the problem was, of course, these logs were being shipped, exported the log and the carbon to China.

WHEELER:

And we see, again, the Trump administration targeting the Tongass as one of the potential ways to meet the Trump-imposed objective of delivering more timber from American forests, from our public lands. The Forest Service anticipates that it's going to be able to log 25% more than it previously had by kind of cute interpretation of its own rules and regulations. So we are going to see more pressure on the Tongass. And I would love folks to support all the conservation groups up there who are doing the good work to protect that vital region. Paul, with a little time we have left, looking into your crystal ball, thinking about the forests of Pacific Northwest, the temperate rainforest of the Pacific Northwest, what are the greatest risks to them in this immediate period in the Trump years and maybe slightly beyond? And what are the kind of long-term issues that you foresee for this region?

KOBERSTEIN:

Well, let me answer that question by going back in time a little bit. When white settlers came to this region in the 1800s, this region was fully stocked with old-growth forests. Eighty percent of the forests that were there at that time are now gone. They're down to 20 percent. And in the Redwood region, we've lost 95 percent of the original forest. So, we've already lost a lot already. And the question I ask is, well, the timber industry has converted 80 percent of this forest to tree farms. Isn't that enough? I mean, can we set aside the remaining 20 percent as a carbon sink, given how incredibly valuable it is to the climate, as a carbon sink or a carbon reserve? So, ideally, that would happen. My crystal ball is not quite as optimistic as I'd like it to be.

I think Trump is going to make an effort to liquidate as much of the forest as he can. Whether he's successful is a good question. I do have some optimism. I don't want to leave people with doom and gloom. Last June, there was a decision in Alturas, California, to cancel a bioenergy project that would have taken wood pellets from forests in California and make wood pellets out of them to export to China and Europe. The decision to kill that project was basically the result of activism. People were empowered to oppose that and rose up and stopped it. And the lesson from that is that people can make a difference. People can be empowered to save their forests because it's happening. I think if we can replicate that victory in other venues, and we can, I think there's going to be lots of forests left for our children and grandchildren in the future.

WHEELER:

All right. Unfortunately, we're running out of time, but Christmas is just around the corner. I would suggest if you're looking for a gift, picking up a copy of Canopy of Titans, which is a love story to our North American temperate rainforest. We have one of the authors here, Paul Koberstein. Thank you so much, Paul, for joining the Econews Report today.

KOBERSTEIN:

Thank you, Tom. It's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you.

WHEELER:

All right, join us again on this time and channel next week for more environmental news from the North Coast of California.