Clearcutting the Climate
    By Josh Schlossberg
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective

    Tuesday 18 March 2008

    It may have taken decades, but could it be that the environmental movement has finally gotten the mainstream media, politicians and the American public to understand that protecting the environment doesn't just mean saving a favorite hiking trail or even some fuzzy critters, but is actually about the future of life as we know it on planet Earth?

    Or maybe it has more to do with the unanimous climate change science from the likes of James Hansen, James Lovelock and others. Or unprecedented natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and southern California's wildfires. Or possibly even - as much as I hate to admit it - Gore's simplistic movie.

    Whatever the reason for the consciousness shift, one thing is for certain: the time to act is now!

    Now that the very real possibility of planetary destruction from the climate crisis has finally registered in the psyche of anyone who matters (global warming skeptics are like the Ku Klux Klan: still around, but no one takes them seriously), the concern is no longer whether or not politicians, media or industry will keep ignoring the issue. As much as they all might like to, those pesky killer storms, ravaging droughts, raging wildfires and rising sea levels have a way of keeping the topic in the public eye.

    No, today's challenge is not that climate change will be left out of the dialogue - in fact, everyone from the Bush Gang to Fortune 500 CEO's are proposing all sorts of minor tweaks that they claim will address climate change, while coincidentally allowing them to continue business as usual. So there's plenty of talk.... The problem is that few genuine, comprehensive plans of action are in the works to honestly try to veer us off our collision course with biospheric collapse. The dragon the environmental movement must now slay has a name and it is: "greenwash."

    For example:

• We have Wal-Mart finally responding to public pressure by agreeing to waste a fraction less energy when peddling their worthless garbage - but no plans to encourage the local production and sale of goods by banning the construction of new box stores.
  
  
• We have Congressional bills that would mandate a slight increase in vehicle fuel efficiency - but no plans to rearrange cities and offer incentives for walking, biking and light rail, while making cities greener and more livable.
  
  
• We have programs to plant tree seedlings to absorb carbon from the atmosphere - but no plans to stop (or even to scale back) logging the planet's fraction of remaining native forests ... hence the creation of a "Clearcutting the Climate" conference.

    With the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization attributing 25-30 percent of human-caused carbon emissions to logging the world's forests (the second-largest source of emissions after fossil fuels, according to NASA), clearly one of the simplest, quickest and most effective steps we can take in the US to cut back carbon emissions is to stop logging our nation's five percent of remaining native forests, found primarily on public lands.

    Seizing the opportunity to make the connection between intact forests and a livable climate, Native Forest Council, ZeroCut Coalition member group Cascadia's Ecosystem Advocates (CEA) and GreenwashEugene.com organized "Clearcutting the Climate: a conference of science and action," this past January at the University of Oregon in Eugene.

    The concept of the conference was to provide the latest science on the topic of forests, logging and climate change, expose fraudulent "solutions" to the climate crisis, as well as to facilitate collaboration between citizens and activist groups working on climate and forest protection.

    Two hundred concerned citizens from Oregon, Washington and California (with a few attendees from as far away as Maine and Washington, DC) attended the daylong conference to glean wisdom from the information-packed presentations of nearly a dozen scientists, educators, activists and environmental leaders from across the Pacific Northwest (the conference also served as a "green" model of utilizing regional talent to avoid unnecessary travel and combustion of fossil fuels).

    Dr. Mark E. Harmon, Professor and Richardson Chair of Forest Science at Oregon State University, laid the groundwork for the conference by outlining the role carbon dioxide emissions play in causing climate change. Harmon presented the compelling evidence that CO2 emissions are, beyond a shadow of a doubt, increasing at a phenomenal rate compared to historic levels.

    Building on Harmon's carbon science, Dr. Olga Krankina, Professor of Forest Management and Forest Ecology at Oregon State, discussed the "newest objective for forest management:" carbon storage. Krankina reminded conference-goers that the forests of the Pacific Northwest contain some of the greatest stores of carbon on the planet and that the most significant impact the region could have in reducing its carbon footprint would be to keep its forests alive and standing.

    According to Krankina, forest carbon is not just in the trees, but in the roots, soil and dead plant material, while national forests - which encompass most of the remaining native forests in the US - contain three times the carbon stores of cut-over private land (much of which should, of course, also be protected and allowed to recover).

    Doug Heiken, conservation and restoration coordinator for Oregon Wild, kicked off the afternoon segment by presenting his eye-opening "Myths and Facts About Forests and Global Warming," which mercilessly exposed several myths perpetuated by Big Timber (some of these myths were originally presented at timber industry front-group Oregon Forest Resources Institute's (OFRI) greenwash conference "Forests, Carbon and Climate Change" at Oregon State University in spring 2007).

    One myth Heiken made short work of was the nonsense that clear-cutting a forest to replant tree seedlings somehow sequesters more carbon than leaving the forest unlogged in the first place. Heiken instead revealed that native old growth forests store vast amounts of carbon (a tree also continues to absorb carbon over its lifetime), most of which is released to the atmosphere when logged, no matter how many seedlings are planted afterward.

    Another myth Heiken smashed was the lumberjack fantasy that all of a cut tree's carbon can be safely stored in two-by-fours. Heiken dropped the bomb that after logging, milling, processing and transportation, only 15 percent of a cut tree's carbon is stored in short-lived wood products.

    Heiken also deftly tackled the wildfire myth that all of a forest's carbon is released to the atmosphere after a fire. Heiken demonstrated, to the contrary, that most carbon remains onsite after wildfire (old dead trees can last centuries), that wildfires emit far less carbon than logging and that post-fire "salvage" logging creates a "carbon desert."

    While not physically present at the conference, Lance Olsen, former president of the Great Bear Foundation in Montana, discussed - in video form - what he calls "climate-driven habitat fragmentation and deforestation" and also how deforestation can alter rainfall patterns, leading to regional desertification and drought.

    World Temperate Rainforest Network's Pat Rasmussen of Washington took time away from her work of organizing forest and climate campaigns throughout North and South America to address forest die-off and to give conference-goers pertinent suggestions for citizen action, as well as to outline some specific strategies to employ for forest protection.

    Dr. Alder Fuller of Eugene's Euglena Academy began his talk with a warning that if the other speakers were there to explain how to "save our house from burning," his role was to point out that "the house is already on fire."

    Fuller minced no words in explaining how the planet might already be past the tipping point for catastrophic climate change. The future, as he sees it, holds planetary changes which he predicts will be "rapid, violent and chaotic," ones that may "end civilization as we know it," such as: heating oceans, large scale ecosystem destruction, and - oh yes - eradication of all but a billion humans from the face of the Earth.

    After administering this bitter pill, Fuller assured attendees that all is not lost: even if we can't stop "global heating," we can slow it down by cutting back carbon emissions and by preserving as many wild ecosystems as possible. Fuller also offered the reality check that perhaps just as important as taking action to slow climate change is learning how to adapt to its inevitability.

    During the late afternoon, conference-goers split up to attend two separate workshops, the first entitled: "Real and False Solutions to the Climate/Forest Crises." Mark Robinowitz, creator of GreenwashEugene.com, debunked some of industry's attempts to continue business as usual under a slathering of greenwash, such as the carbon offsets hoax, while tying in peak oil. Cascadia's Ecosystem Advocates co-director, Shannon Wilson, gave a slideshow on the follies and dangers of converting forests to biomass or cellulosic ethanol, while Aprovecho eco-forester Matthew Hall gave a presentation on how to cut trees on one's own private woodlot in the least ecologically damaging way possible.

    The other workshop was entitled: "How the Climate and Forest Protection Movements Can Work Together," where participating citizen activists and grassroots organizations laid the groundwork and devised strategies for future campaigns and collaboration.

    Tim Hermach, founder and executive director of Native Forest Council, finished off the conference with a rousing speech reminding attendees of the power of the individual to create change in the world. Hermach also stressed the need to demand accountability from our corporate masters, who are committing "crimes against nature and humanity," and how we must all find the courage to forge a new path into an uncertain future.

    The organizers hope that "Clearcutting the Climate" is a step in the right direction on this new path.

    DVDs of the conference are available for a $20 donation by sending an email to info@forestcouncil.org, calling 541-688-2600, going to www.forestcouncil.org/join or mailing a check to: Native Forest Council, ATTN: CONFERENCE, PO Box 2190, Eugene, OR 97402.