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I think the following post by Doug Heiken of Oregon Wild in another forum is relevant to this discussion. Thanks. Gary Braasch

This is from: http://forestpolicy.typepad.com/blog/2007/11/the-forest-serv.html

"There seem to be a lot of people out there who are critical of forest sequestration.

I think part of their motivation is to point out that forest sequestration is not going to allow us to continue fossil emissions as usual, and of course they are absolutely right about that. We have to aggressively limit fossil fuel emissions AND conserve forests.

Another common critique is that forests may someday switch from a net sink to a net source (implying "so why bother saving forests"). However, many people fail to realize that this fact alone should not change our strategy.

There are good reasons to conserve forests to mitigate climate change, whether or not they are net carbon sources or net carbon sinks, BECAUSE even if forests do switch to become a source, forest conservation is nonetheless essential in order to prevent a bad situation from getting worse. "Mitigation" includes not only absolute reductions of atmospheric carbon but any "avoided emissions," such as protecting forests so that as much carbon as posible stays in the forests instead of the atmosphere.

Even dead trees are a large and valuable carbon store. More than two-thirds of all the carbon in North American forests is NOT in living vegetation! This seems to imply that the useful life of "trees" extends to at least twice the lifespan of the old trees. Wood products rarely last this long in our throw away culture.

On another note: The USFS is remarkably silent on the carbon consequences of logging, especially old-growth forest logging. All the FS's carbon-climate attention is on young forests (that would grow anyway) and fire control (which we have very little control of).

Science tells us that we need to stop logging mature and old-growth forests, and when logging outside of old forests we need to extend harvest rotations and retain more live and dead trees when logging.

Check out Oregon Wild report on forests-carbon-climate here:
http://www.oregonwild.org/oregon_forests/global-warming-and-forests

Doug Heiken | Nov 23, 2007 11:37:13 PM"

posted 4 years, 9 months ago
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As usual in these kind of discussions -- about what happened to the natural wealth of the Northwest, poor us! -- we dance around the source of the problem: We overused, overfished, overlogged, overbuilt, overplowed, overdammed the entire region. Salmon habitat was continuous from ocean to the smallest springs in the natural forests far up into the mountains and on into Idaho and British Columbia. Most of those forests have been logged, and agricultural uses wiped out the rest. Don't forget also we dammed the entire upper Columbia with Grand Coulee in the 1930s --- basically murdering the largest salmon run! Even blaming everything on the ocean is now blaming ourselves, since our own OSU oceanographers have been showing fish and seabird problems are often tied to rising atmospheric temperatures from human causes. We did this, and now we have to live with it. If we really care, with more knowledge available today, we can try to back off some of these destructive ways of living and working. I recommend this book: Salmon Without Rivers - Jim Lichatowich

posted 4 years, 9 months ago
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