The global climate crisis is forcing us to restructure our thinking about almost everything we do. In the last two centuries, rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the single most influential greenhouse gas, have risen from 280 parts per million to 419 ppm, and are now threatening to literally cook us off the planet. At the seemingly modest temperature rise of 1.2°C, we are already starting to experience the disastrous effects on climate, species, ocean levels, weather patterns, food production, human health, and our general sense of physical and psychological wellbeing. Meanwhile, as carbon dioxide emissions continue to go up rather than down, the circumstances invite a paradigm shift in our thinking.
Science’s most elegant and simple solution to the climate problem is to plant a trillion trees. They are nature’s most efficient biological machinery at reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide and storing it in wood as carbon. At the same time, forests hold soils in place, provide critical habit for innumerable species, regulate humidity and hydrological cycles while moderating weather. So we need to think of trees differently. Instead of a source of raw material measured as cubic metres of annual allowable cut, we need to consider the vital role played by trees in keeping our planet habitable.
In addition to their many biological, ecological and aesthetic functions, trees are stored carbon. But, unlike the dead hydrocarbons that were stored many millions of years ago as coal, oil and gas, trees are actively sequestering carbon today. Not only do they store carbon, but they will continue to store more carbon for as long as they live, a function that is becoming crucially important in a time of climate crisis.
In British Columbia, which is 60% covered by forests that store about 6-7 billion tonnes of carbon in above-ground bio-mass, this crisis has now become apparent. A century of rapacious logging has been followed by vast forests being killed by the mountain pine beetle, and other huge areas being burned by record fires encouraged by rising temperatures and droughts. The beetle has killed literally half of the province’s lodgepole pine forests, while weakening the rest. The combined damage from insects, drought, heat and fires has reversed the carbon sequestration function of the province’s forests from plus 89 million tonnes per year in the decade of the 1990s, to negative 39 million tonnes per year during the 2010s. As of 2015, B.C.’s forests have been emitting more carbon dioxide than they have been storing. To illustrate the enormity of this problem, the amount of their emitted carbon dioxide represents 25 tonnes per B.C. citizen, compared to 11 tonnes per person for all fossil fuels burned in the province. And this does not count the 46 million tonnes per year of carbon dioxide emitted by logging, presently the largest of any other single industry.
When the “atmospheric river” arrived in 2021, the parched and denuded forest soils facilitated floods that cost the province about $5 billion in damage to roads and property. Additionally, the entire forest industry is in rapid decline as timber supplies collapse, vital forests are depleted, and climate uncertainty confounds both the planning and the viability of new forests. Coastal old-growth forests, treasures of ecological wealth, have been reduced to a remnant 4% of their original coverage, with a few surviving individual trees being appropriately called “veterans” for having survived the equivalent of war.
Even corporations, with their compulsive vigilance to maintain profits over losses, are beginning to recognize the fact that trees have more value left standing than being cut. Mosaic, for example, which manages TFL 47 on Quadra Island, has pledged to exchange 40,000 hectares of trees on TimberWest’s privately owned land elsewhere for cash as carbon credits—Mosaic’s trees stay standing as carbon sinks for 20 years so the other corporations can continue emitting an equivalent amount of carbon. Although this practice preserves the relevant forests, the net result is no global reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide. The carbon emitters continue to release carbon, and Mosaic, by its own calculation, can make higher profits by selling the sequestered carbon than by logging its trees, a manoeuvre that does not alleviate the climate crisis but boosts Mosaic’s environmental image and keeps its shareholders happy.
To further enhance its environmental image, Mosaic is aspiring to be “carbon neutral” as a corporation by 2035, which apparently means transitioning to “hybrid vehicles”, to “electric log trucks”, and by using the “best available science” to “produce climate resilient seedlings” that resist the effects of excessive carbon emissions—a claim that should elicit a smile in anyone who recognizes the logic of using science to design seedlings to resist the heating caused by the logging that emits the carbon dioxide that necessitates the special seedlings. But this is the logic of addiction that got us into the local and global dilemmas we are presently confronting.
The solution to these dilemmas is not in making a corporation “carbon neutral”, but in accomplishing the same objective for our entire economic system, an option that is rapidly closing as levels of greenhouse gasses continue to rise and as we continue to wreck the forest ecologies that keep our planet liveable by storing carbon.
Mosaic is responsible for logging TFL 47 on Quadra. Eleven woodlots are also active on the island. Together they contribute to the climate crisis simply by cutting trees. Trees that are 60 or 80 or 100 years old are in the prime of their lives as carbon storage organisms. Once felled, not only are they denied the option of collecting and storing carbon for hundreds of years, but most of the carbon they have already stored is released into the atmosphere within a year. Measured by this gauge, all logging is in conflict with the efforts being made to control climate change by reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
More on this subject, in detail, in Part 2 of Logging’s Carbon.
Ray Grigg for Sierra Quadra
Top photo credit: Saplings planted in the middle of a Quadra Island tree plantation – Photo by the late Rod Burns
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