Tag Archives: old growth forests

Mongabay: New study identifies mature forests on U.S. federal lands ripe for protection

Redwood trees in California. Iconic species including redwoods and giant sequoias are fairly well protected. But the new study calls for a wide range of mature and old-growth forests on federal lands to become fully protected. Image by Rhett A. Butler / Mongabay.

Forest ecologist Dominick DellaSala of Wild-Heritage in Oregon has been eager to produce high-quality, verifiable maps of remaining intact, mature and old-growth forests across the continental United States. He and I have been discussing the potential for such mapping to help create what he and colleague Bev Law of Oregon State call a Strategic Carbon Reserve, akin the the Strategic Petroleum Reserve that presidents call upon when gas prices spike or OPEC suppliers manipulate global oil supplies.

The carbon reserve would act as a protected carbon sink in the US that would remain intact, biodiverse and capable of continuing — and even expanding over time — its capacity to sequester greenhouse gases to help slow the rate of global warming. This story here describes the outcome of a new study (October 2022) in which DellaSala teamed with a group of forest ecologists to produce the first ever coast-to-coast mapping of such valuable, vulnerable forests.

President Biden in April 2022 requested similar mapping from his departments of Interior and Agriculture for the purpose to protecting more forests on federal land to help him meet his Paris Agreement GHG-reduction goals by 2030. DellaSala’s study will serve as a baseline comparison in April 2023 when the federal maps are due to make sure timber interests and forestry corporations don’t pressure the U.S. agencies to produce maps more favorable to logging than conservation.

An expanse of legally clearcut forest in northwest Washington state. While national park forests are fully protected, just 24% of U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management forests are fully protected, with the rest at various levels of risk. I took this photo just outside fully protected Olympic National Park in July 2022.

Mongabay: British Columbia delays promised protections as old growth keeps falling

*Torrance Coste counts the rings on a fallen old-growth cedar in the Upper Caycuse Valley. He estimated the age of the harvested tree at 500 years or more. Image by Justin Catanoso.*

In summer of 2021, during a trip to the Pacific Northwest, I had hoped to continue my coverage of British Columbia’s at-risk old growth forests. But Covid-19 restrictions kept me from entering Canada. In July 2022, with the border re-opened, I was able to report this story from the field in Vancouver Island’s wooded and extensively harvested remote outback.

What I observed was both staggering and disheartening — large blocks of old-growth forests that should have been protected from logging, given a policy promise in 2020 by BC’s majority party, were being clearcut throughout southern Vancouver Island. Logging rushed to take down ancient giants while they still could. Torrance Coste, a BC forest campaigner, was my tour guide that day, taking me to settings of environmental degradation and decimation that few BC residents, let alone legislators, ever seen. They should. Torrance is also seen in a short video embedded in the story in which he explains the difference between native forests designed by nature and monoculture tree farms planted by logging companies.

The story is thorough and nuanced with politics, environmental science and the treatment of Indigenous peoples overlapping; I appreciate my editor Glenn Scherer giving me the space I needed to tell the full story. As a key source told me in the BC capital of Victoria:

“Certain politicians say, ‘Canada is just 1% of global emissions; it doesn’t matter what we do. But if we protect our at-risk old growth, we can be 10% of the global solution. Why don’t we want to be the beacon of what’s possible? Wouldn’t that be nice?”

*Clearcut logging in the Anzac Valley, part of the boreal rainforest near Prince George, British Columbia. Image by Taylor Roades courtesy of Stand.earth.*

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?”

Northwest Coastal Map: Coastal temperate rainforests, among the rarest ecosystems on Earth as well as being the most carbon dense, stretch along the Pacific Coast from northern California to the Alaska panhandle. Map (left) by Dominick DellaSala and Island Press / photo (right) by John Schoen.

Mongabay: British Columbia poised to lose ‘white rhino of old growth forests’

British Columbia’s remaining old growth forests aren’t only valuable for the carbon storage they provide; they should also be cherished for their uniqueness, the biodiversity they harbor, and the awe they inspire. Image by Jakob Dulisse.

This story of mine for Mongabay put me on a learning curve to understanding a new and important ecosystem: inland temperate rain forests of British Columbia, Canada, and how they are vanishing to over-timbering and now wood pellet production. The story turns on two spring 2020 reports that spell out clearly what’s at stake. Both reports were produced for a progressive government in Victoria that for the first time in memory is at least interested forest conservation — especially old-growth forests of the province’s tallest trees along its coast and inland in these unique rain forests.

The story also carries my first video for Mongabay, in which I worked closely with our India-based video producer Manon Verchot. Her skill at these 5-minute YouTube videos is readily apparent. Here’s the video link.

There is much at stake in this story: ancient, irreplaceable trees; wildlife on the brink of extinction; carbon storage of prodigious volume; climate mitigation that is critical both to Canada and the planet; government faced with critical decisions regarding the environment and the economy.

*Clearcut logging in the Anzac Valley, part of the boreal rainforest near Prince George, British Columbia. Image by Taylor Roades courtesy of Stand.earth.*

Mongabay: As investment giant BlackRock pulls back from coal, NGOs urge the same for biomass energy

The four eastern cooling towers at the Drax coal-fired power station in North Yorkshire, United Kingdom. Image: Jono Brennan, CC BY-SA 2.0

This story came to me directly as a result of my coverage of the biomass-for-energy story over the past two years. Biofuelwatch, an environmental group, had organized a global group of NGOs to appeal to the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, to pull its 5 percent stake in the world’s largest energy-generating plant using wood pellets. Millions of tons of pellets are produced annually largely Southeastern US forests.

The underlying goal? If the world is going to dramatically reduce its use of fossil fuels, large investment companies like BlackRock need to divest hundreds of billions of dollars in oil, gas, coal and biomass, and ramp up investment in genuine zero-carbon wind and solar energy.

The company in question is one of I’ve about often; Drax, the United Kingdom’s largest energy provider. I interviewed its CEO at COP25 in Madrid, Spain, in mid-December in a fairly contentious encounter following a presentation in which no questions from the audience were allowed.

Thanks to Mongabay editor Morgan Erikson-Davis for her careful attention to detail. And thanks to my Mongabay colleague Erik Hoffner for arranging for the story to be republished here with the environmental news site Eco-Business.