Not Seeing the Forest for the Trees
Does a tree falling in the forest make a sound if no one is there to hear it?
The old philosopher’s question has been on my mind quite a bit lately, because I have been hearing big trees fall quite a lot for several seasons running. Toppling tulip poplars and white pines thud against the forest floor — or what had been forest floor, and the sound and significance of each tree down has reached both my ears and my thinking.
As more than three hundred nearby acres have been deforested over that past six or more months, I have been listening, and that has left me wondering and worrying about the future of our forests.
Now we’re no stranger here to logging operations within earshot of our front porch. None of this forest loss is pretty, but after a typical operation when the noise and dust are done, it is some comfort to see that standing trees are left, and wood waste remains that will shade the ground, provide cover for salamanders and small vertebrates, and rotting, will return at least some of the minerals and nutrients to the soil as a mixed woods very slowly returns.
But when last year’s autumn leaves disappeared from our high property line, I was astonished to see that the much higher ridge behind it (the southern flank of Lick Ridge) was completely devoid of trees. Down to the ground. The horizon was as smooth as a baby’s bottom against the northern sky. It had been clearcut.
I am sure I uttered an expletive at the shock of what looked like a mountainside after a nuclear blast. Its utterly treeless state brought a new significance to the sound of trees that had been falling where there used to be forest. I had seen it before.
Clearcutting as a forest-planning scheme is well known to me from my Alabama years. It has its own set of biological issues, notwithstanding its appeal to profit-eager “land companies” and forest-harvesting individuals. Replanting the blast zone in fast-growing high-dollar evergreens maximizes for higher wood dollars (though it will take a generation to realize that profit). But there is an invisible but very important high cost from timber extraction done carelessly, and it impacts the commons we share. Unfortunately, those costs are too often not made visible in the balance sheet.
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We all benefit from forest products. In the recently reforested east (as agriculture moved west a few generations ago) forests are home to many of us. It would not be Earth without wood and without water. It is an amazing and essential resource to humankind. The cellular carbon processes that make wood fibers are powered by the sun and watered by vast intercommunicating networks of roots and fungal threads. We take wood quite for granted, and so we place too low a value on the benefits of undisturbed forest, or wisely managed forest, and may not see the forest for looking only at the trees.
Over the days and weeks and the relentless rumble of tandem-trailer-loads of horizontal former trees, I made myself think about the total cost of each log as it passed by. Where someone else might just see a log, I saw hundreds of gallons of root-pulled water in each poplar bole (amounting to about 50% of its green weight). I considered the cost in soil chemistry and the minerals carried away the log’s fibers and fluids. I considered the oxygen that the tree would no longer breathe out as it had done over its half-century growing in place. I thought about the lost shade, the absent leaf litter, the lost cooling and lost habitat to a host of arboreal and ground-dwelling animals. The profit goes to a few, the product is useful to many of us, but the cost is paid by all of us. But wait: there’s more.
Soon after the day we were first mooned by the bare rump of Lick Ridge looming above us, I had the unsettling thought: What if all the small trees and damaged trees and shrubs that had disappeared from our view on the high ridge were being sent to chip mills? And what if this use of our forests is in wide practice in Southwest Virginia as it already is in the sunbelt south? I really did not know the answer to that question.
What I did know is that this use for forest “crops” encourages the taking of pretty much everything, the leaving of precious little. The clearcut forest is a meal devoured without crumbs. Where did all those branches and tops and misshapen wood go when it disappeared from the land?
In my naivete I had assumed such ‘waste wood’ went to make pellets for burning in wood stoves in the states. I assumed only sawdust and wood leavings were being pelletized. (That is not the case now since whole trees appear in the feed stock of some major pellet-making plants.)
The wood pellet industry is large and growing rapidly because that’s where the money is. Here’s a current list of “forest biofuels” companies that produce pellets, and their capacity in tons. The southern states in 2016 produced almost 11 million tons (that’s 22 billion pounds) of wood pellets.
And here is the principal point of my concern and interest in this industry: Eighty percent of those US forest-derived pellets are put on cargo ships to western Europe. Could Lick Ridge former trees be on their way to Belgium or to the Drax plant in Great Britain this very minute?
While there may be a legitimate place for full use of a tree once it has been cut (using everything but the oink you might say), does this mean that any possible market for wood pellets from this source is a wise use of our water, soil, and lost biodiversity for profit?
And projecting worst fears, if the market moves so that the highest dollar is paid for pellets versus fiber for paper or lumber for framing, will whole-tree (round wood) stock become pellet fodder, further accelerating the deforestation of our US acres for Europe’s “clean” energy?
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And at this point we reach a fork in the road of science and corporate interests. One path will sustain and increase this export of wood pills from US forests to oversees end points. The other should cut the feet out from under the purported reasons the process started in the first place. Follow the money or follow the science. We’ll call these two points of view the Shippers and the Stoppers.
The Shippers hit upon the notion some years back, and especially as feller-buncher and pelletizer technology became more efficient at gathering trees for pellets, burning hardwood pellets instead of coal would replace a CO2 producing fuel with one that was “carbon neutral” producing, over the long run, no net increase in CO2. That sounds pretty good. And there is a hungry market in place that wants to believe this storyline.
European fossil fuel power plants are under mandate to cut their CO2 footprint. Import ginormous quantities of wood pellets from any forest that can be cut for this purpose. Any forest anywhere. Problem solved. But only if forestry biomass is indeed carbon neutral. If it is NOT, after all, then there is no market for 80% of current southern forest pellet stock on its way across the Atlantic.
But certainly the risk of making stockholders unhappy would not bias the reading of the facts by the pellet exporter folks, would it? Meanwhile, trees are cut, pellets are burned, CO2 is released. But wait long enough and the CO2 goes back into the new forest that takes its place. Swish, gargle, rinse, repeat. That wonderful symmetry sounds nice and surely the “green” end justifies the means: pellets are good for the planet. Or maybe not.
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The Stoppers have a different point of view. (Note that many of them support the notion of burning waste/biomass wood residues to supplement domestic energy production but oppose the claim that forestry biomass is carbon neutral. They also oppose the use of whole trees for pellets, domestic or exported. Sadly, turning whole trees into pellets for export overseas is already well underway.
One such group of some 60 Stoppers from Woods Hole Research Center produced a “Letter to the Senate on carbon neutrality of forest biomass.” I suggest you read that letter (see Resources.) Just one of the facts it offers is that “The US Energy Information Agency estimates that for each 1% added to current US electricity production from forest biomass an additional 18% increase in US forest harvest is required.”
That’s one heck of a lot of tree stumps for an amount of electricity better saved by a national effort to conserve electricity in cities, homes and business. Question: Why do we never hear much about that common-sense measure? If demand for electricity went down because we intentionally used less, wouldn’t that reduce the motivation to take the tops off mountains for coal and strip-mine our forests for pellets?
So is forestry biofuel carbon neutral? Consider the following facts:
►Biomass burning power plants emit 150% the CO2 of coal, and 300–400% the CO2 of natural gas, per unit energy produced.
►Land use can change over a generation. Forest logged for pellets today might be paved or sold for shopping centers or housing or ravaged by the forest insect pest du jour. In that case, the trade-off of expected CO2 back in the ground a generation later does not compute. That point, and the urgent fact that we need CO2 reduction today, not after 40 more years of runaway greenhouse heating of the poles and the oceans.
►Wood on the stump is about 50% water. Energy to boil off water has to be factored into the net energy estimate. Also consider that…”fossil fuel emissions associated with producing bioenergy (harvesting, chipping, drying, pelletizing and transporting) are equivalent to 20–25% of direct emissions, and under this legislation these emissions are unaccounted for.” [Woods Hole ref]
Sorry: That’s cooking the books for the benefit of the Shippers, and the Stoppers say (on behalf of future forest potentially and needlessly lost) that this is a bad plan for trees and a worse plan for forests. (The legislation is currently pending as S.2012–114th Congress. President Obama voted against it. Now it’s a whole new ballgame, and what doors might the current foxes open into the henhouse?)
You’d think cooler heads would prevail, but the gold rush is on. Timber is big business; forests are living ecosystems. We should know the difference and speak up for our woodlands before it’s too late.
When trees fall, will you be there to hear them?
POSTSCRIPT: “Were the clearcut acres above us sprayed with herbicide to suppress hardwood growth?” I asked the regional forester, knowing this practice is common where evergreens take precedent for their faster growth and higher profit than hardwoods. “Yes, from a helicopter last summer.” I’m sure I gulped audibly. Here is the cocktail that was broadcast over land that in all likelihood contributes to our drinking water, the health impacts hopefully negligible, but one can’t know for sure:
24 oz. Polaris AC Complete + 2 oz. MSM + 12.8 oz. DLZ mixed with 9.7 gallons of water per acre. That’s more than 1000 gallons per 100 acres sprayed from a helicopter that would not be able to effectively broadcast over deforested land and not over any adjacent wetlands or streams. It’s effective. It’s efficient. And few people ask the right questions at the right time.
POSTSCRIPT #2: I have learned that some but not all wood-product processors who might receive forest products from Floyd County send wood residuals to pellet plants, but some do. So if you’re considering cutting timber on your land in Southwest Virginia and any of this matters to you, be sure and ask about the process, stump to smokestack, before you sign the contract.
RESOURCES
Letter to the Senate on carbon neutrality of forest biomass | Woods Hole Research Center
Our Forests Aren’t Fuel | Dogwood Alliance
Bumpass VA wood pellet producer ships via cargo ships to Europe. Trae Fuels | Wood Pellets: Clean Energy
Biomass Magazine — The Latest News on Biomass Power, Fuels and Chemical
