Tag Archives: Logging

Mongabay: Forest and climate scientists fear Biden delay on mature forest protection

An old-growth Western cedar in Olympic National Park, summer 2022. Photo by Justin Catanoso

What follows below is a summary of this story of mine, which details a letter to President Biden from the top climate scientists in the country. They are calling for an immediate moratorium on logging in old-growth and mature forests in all national forests. The U.S. Forestry Service manages these lands, and more often than not, much of the 112 million acres is managed not for conservation but for harvesting forests — our surest font-line defense during this climate crisis — for lumber and wood products.

More than 200 forest ecologists and top climate scientists, including Jim Hansen and Michael Mann, have written the Biden administration urging it to quickly move forward on the president’s commitment to protect old-growth and mature forests on federal lands.
The scientists made an urgent plea for an immediate moratorium on logging federal forests with trees 100 years old or older, many of which remain vulnerable to logging and dozens of timber sales nationally. They also asked for the establishment of substantive federal management standards to protect those forests.
Federally owned old-growth and mature forests play an outsized role in storing carbon, offering a vital hedge against escalating climate change.
At stake are 112.8 million acres (45.6 million hectares) of old-growth and mature forest on federal lands, according to a 2023 U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management inventory — an area larger than California. Less than a quarter of those forests are currently protected against logging.

Mongabay: Timber harvests to meet global wood demand will bring soaring emissions: Study

Extensive logging of remote mountains on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada, feeds the timber industry. Many of the trees taken here are old growth, more than 200 years in age. Timber companies typically replace the natural forest with monoculture tree farms that lack biodiversity and sequester far less carbon than the original natural forests. Image by Justin Catanoso.

ECOLOGISTS and climate activists spend a lot of time, justifiably, decrying the always-growing rate of international deforestation. What they rarely look at, evaluate or consider, is the impact of global logging for the timber and biofuel industries. This story describes a major study published in July 2023 in the prestigious journal Nature about the impact that logging has on contributing far more to global carbon emissions than ever imagined.

The study, by a several researchers backed by World Resources Institutes presents staggering figures involving current and future demand for wood products and the impact is/will have on global tree cover, and thus, carbon sequestration from intact forests. It is, like too many of my stories, startling and dispiriting, especially when you consider the many “treaties” nations have signed, as recently as COP26 in Glasgow, to halt deforestation. Of course, those treaties always involve loopholes the logging industry has demanded and received.

The summer of 2023 has brought every single day a reminder of the climate catastrophes people are the world are enduring — massive wildfires in Canada, record temperatures in Mexico and the US Southwest, vicious storms and flooding in the Northeast, deadly heatwaves across southern Europe and India. Every forest felled for short-term profit makes the earth less able to slow the rate of warming, and the rate of calamity. This study in Nature makes clear that policy changes in logging are a near-term requirement, and even points to solutions that are close to plausible while actually preserving most of the forests policymakers have pledged to protect.

Note: this is a major study by top scientists with a leading NGO published in the most prestigious scientific journal. The Times and Post and others have been busy reporting every day on the horrible weather events this summer. None bothered to cover a significant root cause and potential solutions. That’s not how we get out of this climate crisis.

This 52-acre native forest in Edenton, North Carolina, U.S., was clear cut in late 2022 for both timber and for whole trees chipped to make wood pellets for bioenergy. The site was cleared for industrial development. Only trees for landscaping were to be replanted. Clear cuts like this around the world diminish global carbon storage. Image by Justin Catanoso.

Mongabay: The U.S. has cataloged its forests. Now comes the hard part: Protecting them

*I took this photo in an old-growth forest in Olympic National Park, Washington State, in July 2021, while reporting for Mongabay. That’s forest ecologist and source Dominick DellaSala on the trail.*

This Mongabay story of mine includes these details.

In April 2022, President Biden instructed the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to do a thorough inventory of forested public lands as a part of his climate mitigation strategies to reduce U.S. carbon emissions by 50% by 2030.
The new study, released April 20, identifies a total of 112 million acres of mature and old-growth forests on federal lands across all 50 states, an area larger than the state of California.
Forest advocates largely heralded the new inventory, so long as it serves as a road map for putting those millions of acres off-limits to logging so the forests and their biodiversity can remain intact to fight climate change.

A 60-day public comment period, starting late April 2023, will determine whether federal rules will actually help fulfill President Biden’s ambitious climate goals or continue to allow logging of irreplaceable ecosystems in forests lands that are already shrinking and critical to overall climate mitigation.

My colleague Jeremy Hance edited the story and agreed to include the 8-minute video from my 2021 story that features Oregon forest ecologist Dominick DellaSala.

*An old-growth Western red cedar in Olympic National Park. Photo by Justin Catanoso*

Mongabay: Old-growth forests of Pacific Northwest could be key to climate action — story and video

*Hall of Mosses Trail, Hoh Rainforest, Olympic National Park, Washington state, U.S. Image by Tjflex2 via* Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

This story linked here is one I originally imagined reporting from Vancouver Island in British Columbia. The Canadian province seems intent allowing the last of its majestic, irreplaceable old-growth forests be taken by the timber and pellet industries — aside from perhaps the Great Bear Rainforest on the central coast. But Covid restrictions locked the border between the US and Canada in late July (2021), so I shifted my focus to Washington state and Olympic National Park for my first field reporting since summer 2019.

My idea was simple — tour a coastal, old-growth rainforest with a forest ecologist and discuss why such rare ecosystems are important to harboring vast biodiversity, cleansing air and watersheds, and storing more carbon per hectare than the rainforests of the tropics. A good source and expert, Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist at Wild Heritage: Earth Island Institute, agreed to fly up from Oregon to meet me on the Upper Peninsula of Washington state, just a few miles across the sound from British Columbia.

I also wanted a video, linked here, to complement my story. My my editor Glenn Scherer approved a budget for me to hire Seattle-based Ted Grudowski, a friend of my Greensboro neighbor and documentarian Michael Frierson (lucky connections all around). Ted is an award-winning environmental videographer and knows the Olympic National Park inside out. He was as much as a fixer in helping me map a plan for where to report from as he was an expert videographer in capturing my hike with DellaSala, and later, a key interview with John Talberth, an expert Pacific Northwest forest conversation. The multimedia package came together exactly as I hoped it would, with a special assist from Mongabay video producers Manon Verchot in India, Lucia Torres in Spain and Lisa Golden in Great Britain.

Here’s an excerpt:

“As humans endure one of the worst summers ever punctuated by climate catastrophes around the world, and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change releases its most dire report yet, I’ve invited DellaSala, past president of the Society of Conservation Biology, to join me on this hike to discuss the value of old-growth forests.

“What’s at stake in protecting much of what’s left? How can government policy on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border do more to preserve old-growth, perhaps the most effective means we have of slowing the alarming rate of global warming — letting tall, old trees grow taller and older in large, fully intact ecosystems?”