Forest Health: A State of Emergency
… And a Course of Action
by Alan Page, Ph.D. and Karen Ribeiro
What will you do how, where and when will you do it?
This paper will address the following:
Are global forests in a state of emergency
Why/how fossil energy use must change to Carbon Negative systems … now
How to stabilize carbon-rich stocks (assets)
How to restore forest ecosystem health
Biochar: A common term used for charcoal suitable for horticultural use that may or may not have been modified by addition of microbes and nutrients not found in raw new charcoal. The term has much ambiguity associated with its lack of specifity – be careful and ask questions before making decisions.
Carbon Positive: Any situation or system that releases more carbon, in the form of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2), than can be recovered by an associated process (if at all).
Carbon Neutral: Any system wherein the emissions of CO2 are in balance over a reasonable period of time. The time span selected may depend on the urgency of the situation and the area of concern. In a low urgency situation with stable storm patterns a forest area may be carbon neutral over a period of 300 years with periodic periods of negativity and positive carbon releases.
Carbon Negative: Only a few natural systems have the potential to be carbon negative wherein they sequester or withhold more carbon from returning to the atmosphere than has been released. These systems include carbonate rocks “weathered” from “reduced” sources of material, deep ocean deposits of carbonate in the form of calcified body parts, and charcoal formed from biological “feedstocks” such as trees and other plants.
Charcoal: A solid carbon product made from the heating of organic matter in the absence of air or the stopping of combustion before the carbon is oxidized.
Emergency: An emergency requires immediate action in order to mitigate substantial loss.
Are global forests in a state of emergency?
YES, We have a global forest emergency! Our political leadership has chosen to deny this reality.
According to Climate Code Redi:
“How fast and how profoundly we act to stop climate change caused by human actions, and work to return to a safe climate, is perhaps the greatest challenge our species has ever faced, but are we facing up to what really needs to be done?
We have to come to terms with two key facts: practically speaking, there is no longer a 'carbon
budget' for burning fossil fuels while still achieving a two-degree Celsius future; and the
2°C cap is now known to be dangerously too high.
For the last two decades, climate policy-making has focused on 2°C of global warming impacts as being manageable, and a target achievable by binding international treaties and incremental,
non-disruptive, adjustments to economic incentives and regulations.
But former UK government advisor Professor Sir Robert Watson says the idea of a 2°C target 'is largely out of the window', International Energy Agency chief economist Fatih Birol calls it 'a nice Utopia', and international negotiations chief Christiana Figueres says we need 'a miracle'. This is because, in their opinions, emissions will not be reduced sufficiently to keep to the necessary 'carbon budget'.”
If in fact there is no additional CO2 holding capacity in our planet's atmospheric buffer, then we have an emergency and we must:
Do everything possible to stabilize existing carbon rich stocks,
Cause the existing carbon uptake mechanisms (like forests) to function at peak efficiency,
Get off non-renewable carbonaceous energy1 immediately,
Continue to stabilize the old carbon sources and carbon taken up each year.
This emergency requires immediate action in order to mitigate substantial loss. This climatic emergency in our forests involves pending (short term) loss of harvestable trees, the inability to regenerate and regrow a similar forest, the demise of the ecosystems they support, and erosion or destruction of related physical infrastructures such as roads, bridges, and powerlines. Additionally, such an emergency requires every entity and able bodied person to cooperate in the mitigation effort.
In order to sound the emergency alarm and elicit a response from the community, people need to understand the nature of the emergency. The risks from doing nothing must clearly outweigh the effort involved with taking effective action. Consider how long it took those aboard the Titanic to respond to the reality of their sinking ship.
The August 12, 2014 issue of Time Magazine featured a “LightBox” photo series of raging fires within Yosemite National Park. By September 18, 2014 these fires were still only 10% contained2. This may become the new normal – forests emitting carbon rather than sequestering and storing it; even as human interventions in forests re prohibited. If any significant proportion of the world's forests do become carbon positive, the earth will have entered a series of positive feedback loops that will be impossible to reverse and “life as we know it” will have ceased to exist. The craters found in the permafrost of the Yamal Peninsula now (9/2014) appear to be formed by the rapid release of large pockets of trapped methane gas3. While this is new to terrestrial topography it has been happening for decades in the seas around the Arctic circle4.
Forests and farms are the ubiquitous natural carbon uptake areas. Here is a brief example of carbon uptake by trees:
It takes 6 moleculesof CO2 to produce 1 molecule of glucose (containing 6 C atoms) through the process of photosynthesis which releases 6 molecules of oxygen as a by-product. There is a net atmospheric gain of 1 molecule of Oxygen for every Carbon molecule “ingested” by a tree.
The natural condition, particularly in a forest, is one of intense competition. Forests start after a heavy cutting and frequently are re-established whenever there is a new seed crop and available growing space with resources that seedlings can colonize. A starting forest may have 500,000 or more seedlings per acre but when harvested years later there may be fewer than 300 trees per acre. Most species that can form a high forest re able to live for several hundred years given a stable climate and no damaging wind or ice loads. Normally more than 499,800 trees have died and rotted per acre over a 150 year period, releasing CO2 and other greenhouse gases which were sequestered back to the atmosphere. It is not likely that this 150 year plus longevity will be possible given the present rate of climate change.
Effects of Management:
Active thinning done at the right time can improve the growth rate of the trees that are left to grow. Careful study and analysis are needed to maintain the efficiency of carbon uptake. Thinnings not used for durable or other essential products must be used in a local carbon negative energy extraction system and the char must be used locally.
Significant research into the action of biochar in soils has been done within the last ten years by J. Lehmann at Cornell University. His group and others have shown that the increased cation and anion exchange sites in soils having biochar incorporation come from charged areas on the carbon of the biochar. Dr. Ogawa of the Kansai Power Environmental group has studied the incorporation of biochar into soil by micro-organisms for much longer because the use of char in soils has been a significant part of Japanese agricultural practice for generations.
There is little question that the incorporation of micro-organisms in biochar offers protected sites for beneficial bacteria to form commensual communities that are free from predator destruction and a site for deposition of additional carbon based materials (glomulin) that act as a glue to hold soil particles to the biochar granules. The biochar is also colonized by hyphae of soil mychorrizal fungi which move moisture and nutrients between these sites and plant roots.
The effects of enhanced microbial populations in agricultural soils have been known in detail for soils without biochar and are described in publications by the USDA and Soil Science Society of America. The addition of biochar to soils acts to enhance the ability of the soil micro-biota to do their job and is likely to have many of these predictable outcomes:
1. Improvement of soil porosity for air and water: biochar has a large surface to volume ratio that comes from the cellular structure of the plant material that was charred,
2. Extended Carbon Residence Time: Soil carbon having a much longer residence time in the form of biochar carbon than is possible for more reactive soil carbon from humus,
3. Greater soil structural strength: this strength develops from the stable micro-biotic connections made between soil particles and biochar through the glues that are secreted by beneficial soil bacteria and fungi that reside in the biochar,
4. Maintenance of a productive relationship between plant roots and beneficial microbes : damaging soil organisms can overwhelm plant roots when the actions of these pathogenic organisms can not be effectively countered by weak responses from unaided or damaged plant roots – beneficial soil micro-organisms can quickly replace or substitute for an extensive plant root system thereby allowing the plant to concentrate energy that would have been used in plant root growth in other areas of the plant,
5. Increased ability of plant roots to gather water and nutrients during periods of stress: the same principle is at work here as in 4 above,
6. Effects of Reduction of Bulk Density: the volume of available soil water is increased because of the increased void space from the biochar added as well as from enhanced soil structure and the strong affinity that biochar has for the soil solution in general.
7. Strong retention of soil anions and cations: as mentioned above studies of biochar additions and enhanced microbial populations in agricultural soils have shown that both cation and anion exchange can be improved, there is no reason to expect that the same situations do not occur in forest soils.
8. Detoxification of organic molecules: the charged sites within and around biochar attract and hold organic molecules for extended periods; the proximity to protected populations of bacteria and fungi within and around the biochar and the long residence time for compounds held on charged sites on the biochar enable many different kinds of molecules to be broken into less toxic components.
These factors explain the rapid recovery of pine trees in Japan shown by Dr. Ogawa. The effective application of pre-inoculated biochar around the base of a tree will greatly improve the availability and
rate of uptake of water and nutrients.
Tall trees are very risky storage entities and dense forests generally grow very slowly. The following issues need to be taken into consideration:
It takes a much longer for a crop to mature in a dense forest stand, exposing the trees to more internal and external damage from strong winds, flooding, drought, fire, ice and pests or disease, than if the stand had been thinned appropriately;
Waiting to thin a forest stand until the thinning can generate a profit may cause the area to sequester less carbon than if the thinning had not taken place. There are several components to this problem – stress effects on the remaining trees that may cause premature death, growth rate decrease or lack of positive response, stem breakage, degrade of upper stem sections, among other factors. The occurrence of any or all of these problems may be difficult to predict.;
Early thinning done appropriately and at the right time can concentrate most of the productive capacity of the site on a fewer number of trees thereby shortening the growth period;
Unharvested biological material that dies and rots is a positive reinforcing climate change factor since the collected carbon will have been released.
So in this new emergency situation it is important to be able to collect as much of the stored carbon and either prolong its stability (sequestration) as charcoal, as a long term building material or as an energy source to replace fossil energy (this energy release could be part of the char production process) before it rots and to do it at the right time in the life of the forest so that the trees that are left can grow rapidly.
It has been pointed out above that humanity has created value from all possible sources with as little regard for consequences as possible. We call the process “mining” in extreme cases, but in fact there are many things that can be done better and still create “value” with a different approach that focuses on “maintenance”. Unfortunately our currency and credit system do not have any means to allow normal people to function in a forest time frame. So forests are mined for value and abandoned between harvests out of economic necessity.The forests we have in much of the northeastern United States are where they are because the land which had been farmed / used as sheep pasture) was abandoned around the 1850s. The trees of these new forests have been cut and sold whenever there was money to be recovered.
Many foresters try to follow a Forest Management Plan (FMP). In Massachusetts this plan may contain a State supplied section titled “Stewardship Issues” which makes it seem as if a forest owner has the duty to seek appropriate environmental choices when making management decisions. In reality, the authors of the original Stewardship Issues guidance did not suggest that owners actively seek out possibilities in a broad energy perspective. This guidance does not address the economic costs and implications of many of the other mandates for managing a forest, including:
rare species (endangered, threatened, and special concern)
riparian and wetlands areas
soil and water quality
forest health factors (weather, insects, diseases, air quality, human activity)
wildlife management (managing for diversity, protecting/enhancing existing habitat)
recreation and aesthetic considerations
There remains few reliable economic incentives or support for landowners to adequately address or even understand these stewardship issues beyond the income from timber sales that normally involve long distance transport of products.
Why/how fossil energy use must change to Carbon Negative systems … now
The fact that there is no future capacity for the earth's atmosphere to accept more CO2 from fossil sources – or unnecessary release from natural sources – should be a wake-up call for each forester to do due diligence regarding what is feasible and necessary from their perspective.
Ideally this due diligence will include:
Educating themselves on sustainable thinning and ecosystems management,
Collaborating in a variety of complementary energy markets,
Looking for carbon free energy sources,
Developing renewable fuels for heating,
Generating or purchasing electricity from carbon neutral or negative sources,
Finding or developing sources of local liquid fuels from existing carbon sources that are likely to be released soon.
Moving away from carbonaceous energy:
While wind and solar power are not carbon negative and environmental/energy costs for turbine and photovoltaic panel production can be high, the innovations in both over the last decade makes both excellent renewable sources of energy even on the community level. Solar options with dedicated financing and a commitment for power distributors to pay a reasonable price for output are worth exploring in most regionsii.
An emerging discussion involves the generation of energy by systems that are described as “Over-Unity” (OU)5, meaning that they produce more energy out than is invested. Our current energy systems convert a small fraction of the energy value of the fuel into usable work. It is claimed that Over Unity technologies have been know for at least a century. Mr. Nicola Tesla had many patents that are now being re-researched for use in this area. It is claimed that Tesla and many other inventors have been systematically discredited and their technologies suppressed6. Recently many of these OU systems are coming to light in ways that challenge everything about how energy is currently produced, delivered and used.
All of these technologies require significant energy releases for R&D, production of the systems, maintenance of the facilities and distribution, and dismantling and disposal at the end of life. So of themselves they are not carbon negative. One group claims to be able to solidify CO2 at room temperatures7.
If any of the above techniques are viable (economically rewarding) they will eventually either be again suppressed or they will go viral and be unstoppable. The issue that this paper addresses is that until some form of carbon negative or carbon neutral energy becomes so pervasive that any and every part of our polluting lifestyle has been mitigated we will need to take steps locally and individually to do everything we can to be responsible for our own energy pollution. This mandate should stay in place until the climate control system has become able to manage the annual green house gas fluxes without human carbon negative activity.
Spend time researching technologies that appear promising. Exhaust all the skills available to either find the reality behind the claims or to try to make the technology work in your community.
Techniques and Systems to be Researched and Developed:
There are three different kinds of systems described above:
low carbon sources that could eventually provide pollution-free energy, and
carbon-negative systems that both produce energy and remove carbon from atmospheric circulation
Over Unity alternatives
Regardless of what energy source the bulk of society chooses to adopt, carbon negative processes will be needed to stabilize the climate control system. There are many different techniques to provide carbon-negativity and a usable energy output. It will remain to be seen which becomes more valuable, the energy or the carbon-negativity. The energy can be recovered from local bio-fuels in several forms:
heat (either as a by-product of some other use or as a function of direct burning)
burnable gas or liquid
concentrated liquid for later use or transport to a centralized refinery
electricity and heat – either for direct use or transport over existing infrastructure
Sustainable carbon negative energy production may involve electricity production but limitations on the transport distance of feed stocks may require the production and capture of some concentrated energy form, gas, liquid or stored electricity. Examples of these possibilities are very limited. Few off-the-shelf devices are carbon-negative. Most wood using systems burn a fuel to ash and CO2 plus water. One has to look hard to find ways to recover charcoal before all of the energy is removed. Several sources of potentially carbon-negative technologies can be found. Their mention here does not carry any recommendation or evaluation beyond the possibility of some future capability. Entities offering such systems include: Cool Planet8, Clear Stak/Agfuels NE9, All Power Labs10, Sandri Oil11, Stak Properties12, Coop Power13 and others that use wood or bio-based fuel sources, but most have not developed this carbon negative aspect of their products. If carbon negativity is an important part of your energy choice you will have to be very persistent. The possibility of carbon negativity and sustainability will require that you look particularly for systems that can use local fuels with limited additional refining and the capability to recover carbon in a long term stable form.
Since most people arrive at normal activities in liquid fossil fueled vehicles, a source of renewable liquid fuel is essential to avoid disruptions in the short term. The combination of a mix of renewable and or free (over unity) energy products could facilitate continuous operation of very local facilities. Such capabilities are not considered economic in the “normal” business calculations of today. Cool Planet has such technology available but does not appear to be interested in local / sustainable implementation (their website makes such claims but there has been no indication of the capability to follow through).
Stabilizing existing carbon rich stocks for long term sequestration:
Carbon richsources exist all around us. They include soils, farm residues, and forests as well as wooden structures, furniture, human organic wastes, abandoned coal mines, old oil and gas wells, other existing stocks of carbonaceous wastes of all kinds, and polar and coastal deposits of methane. Farms, forests, and other local lands have great potential for benign carbon storage, The values of the various kinds of carbon storage potential have not clearly evaluated, defined or measured for use in our market economy.
Much of what is defined as “market value” should be called extractive or “mined” asset capture or recovery. We lack a system for valuing or appreciating the contributions of ecosystems of all kinds, human labor and community support, and moral imperatives that preserve and sustain living ecosystems and the wider aspects that give land “value” to us all, particularly carbon stability.
This may seem to be beyond the capacity of local or individual efforts, but in fact there is one proven technology that is very old and very easy to practice. Stabilizing carbon requires that the carbon stock or biological feedstocks (fallen, dying trees, corn stalks, and much more) be prevented from decaying and releasing CO2 by transforming it into a non-reactive form at normal temperatures. Charcoal is such a non-reactive compound.
Charcoal is easily formed, but the systems for doing so without emissions are not “off the shelf”. Fortunately many of these systems are low tech and many producers of these technologies are keenly focused on the energy sovereignty and agricultural benefits of their technologies and often make their systems available through open source channels. Advocating for the development and use of “carbon- negative” systems that are available to all is a clear solution for carbon stabilization.
So in this era of climatic instability it is important to be able to stabilize as much of the carbon collected by trees before it rots and to do it at the right time in the life of the forest so that the trees that are left can grow rapidly. As we harvest carbon stocks, it is also important to have the intention of minimizing damage to the remaining trees and the forest soils. There are many parts of this process that need to be addressed proactively. In particular, the maintenance and thinning of forest stands should be done by people who live close to the forest and do not add to the pollution or cost of the activity either by their travel or by the equipment they use.
How to restore forest ecosystem health - Continuing to stabilize old carbon sources and annual carbon uptake:
Summary: The emergency forests face will not go away without careful consistent attention to the impacts of both humans and geologic processes that destabilize the climate maintenance system. While humans are no the only sources of climatic instability the things humans value can not long withstand wide climatic swings. Forests are part of the biological stabilization system that humans can easily interact with and help to perform the functions that they have always done. Long term effectiveness of this essential cooperative linkage can only come about with the development of systems that provide the incentive structures that enable those who live and work in forests to perform their tasks appropriately. There are many things that have to change in order for this to come about.
The first phases of the proposed conversion of our energy use may take on the qualities of a Manhattan Project, but the restoration of global ecosystem health will require the institutionalization of climate maintenance system sensitivity and the ability to adapt local processes to the needs of the global system for without climatic stability everything else will be unstable.
Local efforts will be the key to limiting the impacts of resource choices. are likely to focus on local carbon sources or storage points. These high carbon areas include farm fields and residues, homes and buildings, home utensils and furnishings, family and local waste, and local forest growth and mortality.
Carbon stabilization can be done at the local level in two general ways:
keep what is alive or stable in a situation where the condition does not change, or
turn the material which will rot into a fuel and retain as much of that fuel as charcoal that can be used for constructive purposes in the community (wastewater filtration, soil remediation) and then be returned to the soil either for land/ecosystem restoration or for increasing agricultural productivity, fully realizing the benefits of the stable, recalcitrant carbon.
There are few alternatives available for this process to be realized without careful intervention by interested local people all the way through the process. There is much work to do to help community regions become the careful responsible areas they can be.
This is a simplified discussion of a very complex topic. It is written without detailed discussion of sources for brevity. Where there appear to be untested possibilities, the questions are raised along with the reasons for us all to dig deeper into the facts to clarify what is true from the hype. For instance, it may be difficult to understand the reality of the very long term greenhouse gas emissions, particularly of methane, given the “Think About It” campaign hyping up the use of natural gas as a “bridge” fuel. Is it is possible that it is a bridge to nowhere?
We don't know when a true global catastrophe will appear, but we do know that the 40 years required for emissions to fully affect climate puts the onset of this emergency around the time of the 1970s oil crisis. This onesided debate is a few decades overdue. (Though, we might note the contrast in political will in addressing defined threats from radical Islam).
There is general agreement from the Arctic Methane Emergency Group that we are hitting Arctic methane release tipping points as Arctic Sea ice is lost14. It now appears that the Arctic Sea Ice will be gone during summer months by 2016. It is expected that if the release of these significant amounts of methane occurs, major changes in weather patterns will prevent the livable climate stability.
There are several groups advocating major efforts which only governments can undertake effectively, but there are indeed important energy changes possible at the community and neighborhood levels. These possibilities of a local nature are not likely to be facilitated by traditional financing and governments now in place15.
The problem we face is not that geo-engineering tactics might lull us all into complacency, shirking our carbon emission cutting responsibilities. The problem is that too few of us fully understand the imbalance in the natural world and the root issues of the extractive economics responsible for the imbalance. An international carbon fee or “tax” is imperative as reparation to the environment and to the vast social injustices that have been perpetrated by “too big to fail” operations and soul-less enterprises for many decades.
There is an interesting community organizing concept being developed and deployed by the “Fix the World Project”16. The concept came from their frustration with the lack of cooperation that they got from the groups that called themselves investors. They call the concept: Cottage Industry Community Units (CICU). A CICU is designed to provide a way for local groups to come together and pool resources and expertise to tackle any community need. The whole idea is explained in a free online book available in their site see the link below17.
1 Energy Position Paper. 2008. Alan C. Page, Ph.D Green Diamond Systems Belchertown, MA https://sites.google.com/site/commongoodforestry/home/energy-position-paper-2007/energy-position-paper-2008
3Add video links
The link to solidification of CO2 is out of date so no information is available at this time.
10Link: All Powerr Labs – http://www.gekgasifier.com
12Link: Stak Properties - http://www.stakproperties.com/index.php?p=1_15_Gasification-Solutions
14 Press Release: Urgent Message to Governmentsfrom the Arctic Methane Emergency Group, AMEG
AMEG’s Declaration: Governments must get a grip on a situation which IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has ignored. A strategy of mitigation and adaptation is doomed to fail. It will be impossible to adapt to the worst consequences of global warming, as IPCC suggests. The Arctic must be cooled, ASAP, to prevent the sea ice disappearing with disastrous global consequences. Rapid warming in the Arctic, as sea ice retreats, has already disrupted the jet stream. The resulting escalation in weather extremes is causing a food crisis which must be addressed before the existing conflicts in Asia and Africa spread more widely.
15 CED – Adaptive Program for Agriculture: Embattled Farmers: 1776 and 2003 by Jody Aliesan Published on Friday, December 19, 2003 by CommonDreams.org