Welcome to The Landscape, your show about America's
Parks and Public Lands. I'm Erin Weiss with
the Center For Western Priorities in Denver. And
I'm Kate Gretzinger in Salt Lake City. Today
on the podcast, we're talking about trees, old
trees to be exact.
We called up one of our favorite forest
scientists, doctor Dominic Della Sala, to talk about
a recent op ed he wrote for the
Seattle Times. In the piece, he raises the
alarm about some mature and old growth forests
that are currently on the chopping block and
calls on president Biden to protect them before
leaving office. We'll get to that in a
minute, but first, the news.
In a historic move last week, president Biden
offered a formal apology for the atrocities committed
at Indian boarding schools from the early 1800
all the way through the 19 seventies.
Tens of thousands of native children were removed
from their homes and sent to these federally
run boarding schools
under the American policy of forced assimilation.
A federal investigation released in July found that
at least 900 children died at those schools.
The president's speech took place at the Gila
River Indian Community in Arizona.
Interior secretary Deb Haaland, who spearheaded
that government investigation into the history of boarding
schools, joined president Biden there.
She said, quote,
I acknowledge that this trauma was perpetrated
by the agency that I now lead, which
is a reminder of the historic nature of
her appointment as the first indigenous interior secretary.
So far, president Biden has designated 2 national
monuments at the request of Native American tribes
in the west using the president's authority under
the antiquities act. Those are Avikumay in Nevada
and Bajanowavjo
Ittaqoqveni,
ancestral footprints of the Grand Canyon in Arizona.
The Bears Ears National Monument draft management plan,
which was released earlier this year, is also
the first management plan to be cowritten by
tribes.
Indigenous communities across the west are calling on
president Biden to protect additional areas of spiritual
and cultural importance as national monuments.
That includes the proposed Chuckwalla National Monument in
California,
Satitla Medicine Lake Highlands in California,
and Quetzan National Monument also in California.
President Biden has the opportunity to make conservation
history while further addressing and acknowledging historical injustices
by designating these monuments.
Quick note here. Doctor Della Sala mentions the
National Old Growth Amendment a few times in
this episode. That's a plan the Forest Service
is working on right now that will determine
how the agency manages old growth forests in
response to climate change.
The draft plan or environmental impact statement came
out in June. A 90 day comment period
for the draft EIS closed in September, and
a final decision is expected in December.
Our guest today is doctor Dominic Della Sala,
chief scientist at Wild Heritage,
which is a project of the Earth Island
Institute.
We had doctor Della Sala on the podcast
twice last year to talk about the Biden
administration's
plans to protect mature and old growth forests.
So we were surprised to read a recent
op ed by him in the Seattle Times
in which he says the forest service is
still planning to allow logging in some old
growth forests.
Doctor Gellasala, thanks for joining us today. We're
excited to learn more about why these forests
are still at risk.
Thanks for having me on again. It's a
pleasure.
So let's back up and start with a
basic question for those who haven't listened to
our other episodes with you. What are old
growth and mature forests, and why are they
so important to protect?
Yeah. Great question. I've spent,
4 decades of my life in these forests
all around the globe,
and so I have a pretty good handle
on
what
qualifies
as an older forest.
And
I think a lot of listeners know what
that is too. You could just take a
hike in the coast redwoods,
and you know you're in these majestic
cathedral forest or in the Olympics,
on the Olympic rainforest or up on the
Tongass rainforest. I mean, there's
hands down no argument that those are old
growth forests. We know what they look like.
We know what they feel and smell like.
And as scientists, we've been quantifying their ecological
values now for, as I mentioned, at least
4 decades.
And now we know some surprised findings within
the last decade or so that they play
a really strategically
important role as natural climate solutions
in drawing down our carbon pollution
and storing it long term
in the biggest trees
and in the soils and the surrounding vegetation.
And they cleanse the air we breathe,
and they give us clean drinking water, and
they are the best places to find wildlife.
So all of those values are some of
their ecosystem
parts
that are unique to those forests compared to,
for example, a plantation or a clear cut
that has lost most of those values.
Awesome. And I have another question here related
to how we define these trees.
Is the Biden administration's
definition of mature and old growth the same
as yours, or is there an,
disconnect there?
I think that yes and no. And
that I don't think that there's any argument
about what an old growth forest is. We
know what that is. We look at them
as
not only these cathedral forests, but scientists can
quantify
their structural
differences in those forests compared to a clear
cut. And so the height of trees,
the age of trees, the diameter at breast
height,
the diversity of layering in the tree canopy
where you have a penthouse,
mid story,
a basement, so to speak,
of different structural layers, and you've got death
and life linked together in those forests. You
see the dead trees play a critically important
role in the ecology of those forests, whether
they're standing as snags or down on the
ground as logs, and then you have a
diversity of plants and wildlife. So we know
what those are.
The argument is around mature. And the reason
why mature is important
and why at least Biden
got this right in his executive order, he
said mature and old growth and not just
old growth, is because we've wiped out most
of the old growth in the lower 48
states.
And the mature forest are only a few
decades away
from acquiring those characteristics that we would consider
old growth. So we've got to look at
this as a protection
and restoration
approach if we're gonna maintain
those ecosystem values, especially in a rapidly shifting
climate. I think we have a lot of
agreement on old growth in terms of how
our 2 teams
assessed how much of it is out there.
I think we, probably
apart
more so on the mature and what qualifies
as mature.
And, unfortunately,
the federal government,
the forest service, and the BLM
are leaving mature out there for additional logging
because quite frankly, I think they freaked out
when they realized 46%
of their inventory
was mature
and 17%
was old growth. So that,
to them, must mean up to 2 thirds
of their land base, they couldn't log in
anymore.
And I think that's why we don't have
any protections for mature, and we only have,
you know, marginal protections
for old growth in the old growth, national
amendment.
So I wanna just quickly jump in and
clarify for folks that the Biden administration did
its own inventory of mature and old growth.
And then, doctor Della Sala, you and your
team did the 1st independent,
catalog of old growth and mature force in
the US. Is that correct?
Yeah. It is. And there were some similarities
in our methodologies, but some differences too. So
I can go over those
if you'd like. Yeah. Let's come back to
that. Aaron?
Yeah. I mean, I I I think you're
you hit on our my next question here,
which is getting into a wording choice that
you put in this op ed in the
Seattle Times
where you called on president Biden to do
more to protect
quote older
trees as opposed to just old before leaving
office.
So walk us through what the Biden administration
has done so far in terms of those
kinds of protections
and what more you think needs to be
done in order to get at least some
or however many,
percent of those
older trees
into
old growth status?
Well, yeah, there's the science part of it,
and then there's the policy part of it.
And as I mentioned in my Seattle Times
op ed, unfortunately,
can I have some fries with that nothing
burger? Yeah. Oh, dear. Because that's what we
got was a big fat nothing burger, which
was incredibly disappointing because we worked for 4
years with the administration
on getting the president to recognize the importance
of mature and old growth forest, which he
did at Earth Day back in I think
it was 2021
or 2022, whenever that was.
And he directed the federal agencies to inventory
the nation's mature and old growth forest for,
quote, conservation purposes, end quote. The problem is
they did the inventory, but they're doing no
conservation. So it essentially is a long term
plan for continuing to log in these forests,
albeit at a lower rate than what was
historic.
And it completely keeps mature forest on the
chopping block,
and the the excuse that they give in
their old growth amendment is these forests are
gonna burn up, be eaten by insects,
destroyed by climate change, and the only solution
is chainsaws.
And we in the scientific community know that
that's not reality,
and it's unfortunate that they're hiding the the
ball behind
natural processes that are changing
because of climate change, but logging those forests
is not the solution. Protecting them from logging
as natural climate solutions will give them the
best resistant properties
and resilient properties to get through this climate
change bottleneck
that we currently are in.
So,
I wanna come back to that sort of
carbon sequestration,
question because there were some headlines recently that
said carbon sinks are failing, and I wanna
have you sort of,
ground truth that for us. But before we
move on to that, you mentioned in the
op ed that there are currently plans to
log in National Forest that contain these mature
and old growth trees.
Which forests are
are,
you referring to there?
Yeah. There's over a dozen or so that
are, that have been identified by conservation groups
that are still on the chopping block. Those
sales have already gone forward,
and we continue to oppose them, and they're
across the whole country. So I would refer
folks to go to the climate dash forest.org
website
and look for the threatened forest because they
exist from Oregon to Vermont,
and there's widely scattered. There are places in
Montana, for example.
One place that I've spent quite a bit
of time is the Black Ram project area
in Northwest
Montana.
And, there was a really great article that
was done
on that area in terms of its its
properties as a climate refuge.
And that there are thousands of acres of
old growth forest in that, proposed climate refuge
that would be subject to clear cut logging.
The forest service has already got that on
the chopping block. It's been blocked
in the courts, but it could come up
again.
And the agency has examples of this all
over the country. In my neck of the
woods in Southern Oregon, the Bureau of Land
Management is constantly plucking
old trees out of its so called fuels
management operations, which in fact not only destroy
the climate properties of those forests, but they
raise the fire hazards by taking out the
fire resistant tree and leaving the logging slash
behind. You can't treat it all even though
they burn it in piles. You can't get
to all of it, and those areas have
a tendency to burn in high intensity fires.
So we're seeing this all over the country,
and there are many examples of where, you
know, Old Forest is still on the chopping
block and will remain on the chopping block
because the old growth national amendment is a
nothing burger.
So what would a meaningful
protection look like? Would it be promulgated as
a rule,
from the USDA?
Is there a faster way to do this?
Like, what is the ideal
way to sort of extend protections for these
areas right now with,
you know, the clock ticking down on the
Biden administration?
Yeah. I think the the best way to
do it is for the White House to
intervene and say, look. We want you to
fix the problems that are in your environmental
impact statement because we're gonna still get a
final impact statement,
and we're gonna get a record of decision.
So that's where you can fix this, and
they can fix it by adopting a strong
conservation alternative
that takes off the table once and for
all all of those mature and old growth
forest because they are our best natural climate
solution. So if we are going to go
through
some really horrific conditions, if we continue on
this path of unmitigated fossil use, we're already
seeing this with supercharged hurricanes,
big wildfire events.
We've gotta get off of fossil fuels, and
we've gotta protect
our natural climate solutions if we're going to
slow down runaway climate chaos. That needs to
be this administration's
parting
gift legacy
to the planet so that they can comply
with what the president did, which was he's,
signatory
on the Glasgow Forest pledge
that has pledged to end forest losses by
2030.
So how could you sign on to a
pledge and then be one of the leading
nations that's degrading its forests?
So the White House can fix this, but
time is indeed running out.
I wanna talk about the Tongass a little
bit. The the Biden administration
did restore some protections for the Tongass that
had been taken away by the Trump administration.
Those
are are final now, but now you have
senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska
with a bill that would privatize over a
115,000
acres of the Tongass, including
80,000
acres of prime old growth. That bill has
already passed out of committee
in the senate. So
the threats here are obviously not or and
the protections potentially
not just at the administrative level when you
have
congress running around also trying to privatize
these forests.
What's the political
landscape here
in terms of
protecting
old growth and,
and or trying to
get congress to do the right thing here?
I'm so glad you brought up the Tongass.
That forest is near and dear to my
heart, and I cut my intellectual
ecological
teeth on the Tongass,
in the early 19 nineties doing some of
the first old growth, studies up in that
neck of the woods. And the Tongass is
remarkable.
It is, the nation's tops on old growth
forest. There's over 5,000,000 acres. It's tops on
the nation's roadless areas over 9,000,000 acres, and
its tops on the nation's natural climate solutions
with storing
20% of
the entire carbon across the national forest system.
It's the best possibility
for a natural climate solution in Southeast Alaska.
And yet Lisa Murkowski has been trying to
privatize the Tongass repeatedly.
It keeps coming up.
And,
unfortunately,
this one, as you mentioned, passed out of
committee.
It could get,
ramrod through the lame duck. It could get
attached to the farm bill. There are many
different vehicles that this could move on. And
the opposition
has been coming from some in the indigenous
community like,
the indigenous elder Wanda Cope,
who wrote an op ed in the Juneau
Empire opposing it.
And I sent a letter including a 125
scientists
to the White House saying, when this comes
up,
please do everything you can to block it.
And,
actually,
I have an op ed on my screen
right now that I plan to send to
the Juno Empire,
which is the state publication,
right in the capital that says this needs
to be stopped in its tracks.
It's opposed by members of the indigenous community.
It's opposed by conservation scientists. It would give
away
all the town Tonga's values across those acres
to developers
and logging interest at a time when we
need those in protection
as natural climate solutions.
I wanna ask about what the timber industry
would look like without access
to these mature or old growth forests.
Obviously I mean, fundamentally, that's the
the pressure point here is
timber industry says we need these trees because
we are producing timber products, whether it's
paper products or lumber for for housing or
furniture or anything else. So
take all the mature, all the old growth
off the table.
Is there
enough capacity then to meet America's lumber needs
just in
private,
younger, faster growing forests,
or is there a risk that if you
protect all of the mature forests in the
US,
you then unintentionally
create an incentive for old growth logging
in other countries with fewer protections?
Yeah. There's a lot in that question. Thanks
for asking it. So I'm gonna start with
kind of this Uber overview with the national
forests are a drop in the wood basket.
There's only about 4%
of the nation's total wood supply that comes
from the national forest.
Of that 4%,
only a fraction
would be coming from mature and old growth
forest. There's plenty of places
for wood supply that we don't need to
be logging
what are giving us the
absolute
critical
values that we need to get through the
climate crisis.
And I'll give you two examples where the
transition is occurring,
and those transitions need to be aided by
federal dollars. So instead of investing in below
cost timber sales,
which give away those trees to the timber
industry,
invest in retooling mills to accept small logs,
invest in value added manufacturing,
invest in helping to diversify
those local economies like what was done with
the Northwest Forest Plan in the early 19
nineties.
And so the two places where this is
happening that are exemplary is the Siuslaw National
Forest in Oregon, which was one of the
early adopters of the Northwest Forest Plan. They
got out of the business of old growth
and had been logging,
in secondary for us with relatively little opposition
and keeping their supply moving. The other place
is the Tongass.
Now I took this on my team and
I took this on in 2009.
We asked secretary Vilsack
to transition
the Tongass out of old growth logging. And
at the time, they said we need 30
years of old growth trees to get the
industry,
their product
and second growth forest
ready for, you know, another
level of logging. And I questioned where that
number came from, and we hired a bunch
of field crews on the ground. They went
out there, did a bunch of inventory, and
lo and behold,
there was a more than enough trees in
the 55 to 60 year old categories
along existing roads
on a much smaller logging footprint that would
meet the timber volume needs. All that needs
to happen there is to change the infrastructure
of the mills
to accept more logs,
stay on the existing footprint.
That transition is underway on the Tongass, but
it gets derailed every time we get an
administration
that comes in that wants to do logging
or whether every time we get, you know,
an a push from the industry to go
after more old growth. We have to push
back and say no.
Retool or go the way of the dinosaur
because sooner or later, you're gonna overcut.
And those old trees, the jobs and the
products will all be gone. So the Tongass
is unique in being able to make that
shift when you still have about 90% of
your old growth left, and you've got an
administration that wants to move the industry in
that direction.
So it so it's fundamentally
big trees versus small trees, and do you
wanna spend the money
now or later to be able to process
small trees because you know you're gonna have
to eventually it's just how much worse do
we make climate change in the process?
I think that's it. And I think every
country that has, like, primary forest, these are
forests that are old growth that haven't been
logged,
Eventually, hits an inflection point where you run
out of accessibility
and it becomes, like, economically infeasible
to go into those primary forest. And this
happens. We see it all over the world
and then the ecosystem crashes.
So we can avoid that with the Tongass.
It could be a global model of here's
how you transition to smaller trees, and you
keep all your ecological
values in place before you crash the ecosystem.
Now I wanna move on from mature and
old growth and ask you about a few
other developments,
in headlines we've been seeing re related to
forests.
The first is that the agriculture
secretary, the USDA secretary, Tom Vilsack,
recently announced guidance to the forest service that
requires them to prioritize
forest connectivity,
mainly for the benefit of wildlife. And I'm
wondering
if that is as big a deal as
it sounds like. Does it have any teeth?
What's your read on that?
Yeah. So for your listeners,
the issue of connectivity
is fundamental
in conservation biology approaches. So we look for
a bunch of different ways to get nature
through the onset
onslaught of
climate change and land development. So we've gotta
have sufficient,
amounts of protection across the landscape.
There are efforts to protect 30%,
50%,
a 100%
of different,
habitat types
globally and in the US. And then we've
gotta make sure that the landscapes that we
protected
are sufficiently connected so that wildlife can move
around,
especially looking for suitable
climate niches in a rapidly changing world.
And by having connected landscapes, we have functional
ecosystems.
And so USDA introduced this policy. On the
surface, it looks like it could be meaningful.
However, the focus is a lot on the
so called working forests.
And I have a problem with that term
in general
because if you look at work as a
measure of ecosystem
benefits that we get from forest, by far,
the,
the natural systems are the working forest and
not the ones that they're plucking trees from.
So I think the concept of connectivity
has to be across all lands
and not just focused on working lands, but
working
ecosystems.
And that means protecting your roadless areas.
That means
obliterating
some roads that might increase
the size of roadless areas so you have
even more functional
connectivity
in places.
And that means making sure that you've got
sufficient areas that are protected,
represented across a large region
that are well connected so that animals and
plants can move around. So I think it's
promising, but I think the focus on working
lands is,
one dimensional.
Or or at least misses all of the
work that goes in
when people are not actually there doing anything.
So given all of those pressures,
what advice would you give
the next agriculture secretary?
How do you
prioritize,
balance
the pressures of
habitat connectivity,
climate change,
the forestry industry wanting and saying we need
this to be
economically viable even if,
that that's not necessarily
a fully honest
take.
How how would you like to see the
next agriculture secretary approach
America's National Forests?
Yeah. So I I hope the next agriculture
secretary is not a chicken farmer
because these are not crops.
These are forest living
ecosystems,
and to treat them as crops and then
call it
fire management or reducing insect outbreaks is just
misleading. It's based on misinformation.
Let's really truly evaluate
the public asset that we have on the
national forest
because we can't find this any other place
in the country. We're not gonna find it
on private lands. We're not gonna find it
on state lands.
It's really the federal lands that hold the
keys to our climate future,
And we need a total,
revamping of the forest service
to take into consideration
the value of carbon,
of clean water, of wildlife habitat, of recreation,
of clean air
that communities are going to need to weather
the climate storm.
Most of our clean drinking water
has its headwaters in the national forest system.
Most of our natural climate solutions
in our old forest are on the natural
for a national forest system.
Those areas need to be valued and upheld
by protecting them from logging. That means fixing
the old growth
national amendment through supplementation,
and,
revision process that will take those forests off
the logging chopping block once and for all
and move it from
guidelines
into official policy that the agency is going
to follow.
Alright.
I mentioned this earlier, and I wanna sort
of maybe wrap on this question, but
I recently saw a really concerning news story
that said trees and land
failed to absorb almost any carbon last year.
And the essentially, the the headline was that
Earth's carbon sinks are failing.
Is this true,
or is there some nuance that
is missing from this headline?
Yeah. It's it's partially true. I mean, the
headline is absurd.
The trees are not gonna stop absorbing carbon.
That's just ridiculous. The headline was just off
base. The article was good, but the headline
was misreading. It was misleading.
So I think,
right now,
what we have is a massive carbon sink,
and it's our forest.
And they are doing the job of
taking carbon out of the atmosphere and absorbing
holding on to it, storing it through the
miracle of photosynthesis.
And they do do it better than any
terrestrial ecosystem on the planet.
Now is that gonna remain the case in
perpetuity?
Depends on where you are in the region
of the globe. If you're in the, coastal
temperate rainforest,
you have a better chance, which is why
we think Southeast Alaska, the Tongass,
is gonna function more as a climate sanctuary
and more interior portions of Alaska
are heating up at a a have the
highest climate velocity on the planet.
So it's going to really shift around the
globe.
And in places, we're not gonna have forest
anymore in the next 50 to a 100
years.
Some other vegetation will come in
and also provide carbon,
carbon sink potential.
But the massive loss of carbon to the
atmosphere
and ecosystem values of that transition
are going to really have reverberating
effects on society.
We don't want that to happen.
So the only way to stop that is
to get off of fossil fuels,
protect the natural climate solutions,
and reduce the chance of that happening. And
we're running out of time
for that. Every single country around the globe
has not followed the Paris climate agreement.
So one follow-up question for you. My understanding
of the story is that
something about the way the climate is already
changing is
making these carbon sinks less effective.
Is that right? And can you say just
a little bit more about that and what
what sort of is happening right now that's
maybe hurting these climate sinks other than just
chopping them down, which, of course,
is bad?
Yeah. I think what's going on is so
for example, in the Amazon, the Amazon has
shifted from a carbon sink to a source
of carbon
3 times in the last 2 decades, I
believe.
And that is because the slash and burn
agriculture
is changing the climate.
The rate of logging is so severe in
Amazonia
that
the,
the recycling
between
the hydrosphere and the biosphere is being disrupted
in terms of water going back into the
atmosphere and it's falling as rainfall.
So we're getting more droughts
in Amazonia,
and it's shifting it into,
more of a source of emissions
than a sink. And that's the planet's lungs
that we're, polluting
from slash and burn agriculture and fossil fuel
pollution.
And this could happen,
widespread
across the globe where you've got higher temperatures
overheating,
heat domes,
which happen a lot in the Pacific Northwest
now and many other places
in the interior west. We get these heat
domes.
We get increasing droughts.
All of that stresses out trees.
And as they die,
they lose that carbon sink value, especially if
the dying is widespread.
So I think there's a lot of concern
about that, and I spend a lot of
my time
looking at
climate change models in the next 5 to
10 decades
are showing that the potential for that is
going to increase
if we don't get off of this
pathway that we are of treating the atmosphere
as a dumping ground for our carbon emissions.
Alright. Well, on that cheery note, we will
leave this episode. Our guest today is doctor
Dominic Della Sala, chief scientist at Wild Heritage,
a project of the Earth Island Institute. Thank
you so much for being with us. Yeah.
And happy Halloween, everybody. I didn't mean to
scare you.
We started off today's episode with some good
news, so we're gonna end with something a
little different.
Have you heard about the free landholders?
They're an extremist group claiming ownership of about
1400 acres in the San Juan National Forest
in Southwest Colorado.
They built a barbed wire fence around the
land, which angry locals have begun to dismantle
with wire cutters.
Some members of the group have ties to
the fundamentalist church of Jesus Christ of Latter
day Saints. That's FLDS,
a polygamous sect that was once led by
Warren Jeffs.
Patrick Leroy Pipkin, a member of the group,
told the press that they have a claim
to the land under the 1848
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,
the 18 14 Treaty of Ghent, and the
1783
Treaty of Paris,
and the articles of Confederation.
This is some pretty crazy stuff with a
lot of parallels to the sovereign citizen movement,
and if you squint hard enough to Utah's
land grab lawsuit effort. So we'll be keeping
an eye on it to see where it
goes.
Well, that is all for today, folks. I'm
just gonna hope that we don't have to
do a full episode on these free landholder
folks at some point, but obviously,
if it becomes more of a thing, we'll
be there.
As always, leave us a review if you
can wherever you are listening to us right
now. Send us your questions and your comments,
podcast at westernpriorities.org.
We will have a post election episode of
this podcast, regardless of course of who wins,
so look for that sometime in the days
after November 5th And do, of course, get
out there and vote.
If you are spiraling about this upcoming election,
get outside.
Nature, one of the best mental health resources
we have, of course, including our national public
lands.
Thanks again to doctor Delasala for his time,
and thank you for listening to the landscape.