One of the most refreshing voices speaking out on environmental issues today is Dr. Patrick Moore, a respected ecologist and environmental activist. He was one of the original founders of Greenpeace and has been a popular speaker at forest product industry meetings over the last few years.
Dr. Moore left Greenpeace in 1986 after he felt the organization had become too radical and was hijacked by political extremists. In recent years, Dr. Moore has been focused on the promotion of sustainability and consensus building among competing concerns. Dr. Moore has written a book about the importance of trees and the forest products industry to the health of the global environment. Called Green Spirit — Trees are the Answer, Dr. Moore’s book demonstrates that rather than reducing wood consumption, people should be planting more trees and using more renewable wood in order to reduce our reliance on non-renewable fuels and materials.
Chaille Brindley, Pallet Enterprise assistant publisher, recently discussed many global environmental issues with Dr. Moore. They especially focused on issues relating to forests and the overall forest products industry. Below is part one of two, of a synopsis of that interview.
Pallet Enterprise: Recently, scientists at The Ohio State University produced research that showed that logging of native forests had reduced the ability of forests to absorb carbon dioxide and store carbon. What does this mean about the long-term effects of logging?
Moore: They’re just looking at storage. They are not looking at sequestration rates, and they’re not looking at substitution of non-renewables with wood. What they do is take a narrow look at it, and they just look at how much carbon is stored on the ground.
The proper way to look at the relationship between forestry and carbon cycle is to look at the whole process. Just like in finance, you have both a cash flow and a balance sheet. The cash flow is about sequestration or absorption rate, the rate at which carbon is being fixed by trees. Young growing forests are fixing carbon very quickly, and old forests have pretty much reached a steady state but have a high storage of carbon. An old forest is like a mature company that has a lot of assets on its balance sheet. But it has a very small or break-even on the cash flow. Carbon is going out as fast as it is coming in.
Pallet Enterprise: So they’re only studying one variable and not getting the whole picture?
Moore: The other picture is the cash flow or the sequestration, or the rate of change. The balance sheet is a snapshot in time. Cash flow is a statement of rate of change. A young growing forest is absorbing carbon very quickly pulling it out of the atmosphere. The real question is what do you do with the wood?
If you take the wood from managed forests and use it in a sustainable way, in other words, grow forests back after you harvest them, this replaces the carbon that you removed. At the same time, it uses wood as a substitute for non-renewable materials like steel, concrete, plastic, and non-renewable fuels, like fossil fuels. You prevent the CO2 from going up in the atmosphere in the first place. You close the carbon cycle, as I like to call it. By growing more trees and using more wood, you reduce emissions, especially where you use the wood instead of using other things. For example, if we were not making paper from trees, what would we make it from? Maybe we’d make it from oil. Maybe we’d have to have some kind of plastic paper.
Pallet Enterprise: What about hemp?
Moore: Well, with hemp, you’d have to remove the forests in order to grow the hemp.
They don’t take that into account. They just say, “Oh, we’ll just grow hemp and leave the forests alone.” Where are you going to grow the hemp, guys? You have to cut the forests down to grow hemp, just like you have to cut the forests down to grow corn. It’s no different than any other agricultural crop.
In the final analysis deforestation by agriculture and urbanization is what causes forest loss. Forestry causes forest renewal. What’s happened in the Great Lakes area is that most of the cut over forest has actually been renewed. It is a big sink for carbon at the present time because it’s a fast growing forest. It is true when the forest was originally cut down back in the early 20th century, there was a puff of CO2 that went up into the atmosphere as a result. When the forest started growing back, it started pulling that carbon back out of the atmosphere again.
More importantly, with forest management and use of wood as a renewable resource, you get a double hit. First, you pull carbon out of the air by growing trees. Then you prevent carbon from being put back into the air by using the wood instead of using non-renewable resources that require high inputs of fossil fuels to manufacture or use. That’s my big picture of the situation.
Pallet Enterprise: Congressman Richard Pombo is trying to push through legislation that would drastically change the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Are you familiar with that?
Moore: I believe it’s focused primarily on the requirement for full compensation to be given when land is taken out of production. If the federal government comes and says you can’t farm or log this land because there are endangered species there, then the government has to compensate the landowner for the loss of value of the land.
Pallet Enterprise: What is your take on compensating landowners for value loss related to the ESA?
Moore: I agree with it 100%. As a matter of fact, maybe it will spur the Feds to realize that a punitive lawyer-based approach is not the right approach to the endangered species issue. Punishing country people for having endangered species on their property is counter productive and leads to “shoot, shovel and shut up.”
It leads to destruction of native habitat. Because if you don’t want an endangered species on your property, one of the best ways is to make sure there is not suitable habitat for them. What we need is an incentive-based ESA which rewards people for having endangered species on their property. It’s fine for the city people, why? They don’t have any endangered species, because they killed every last one of them. That’s why there’s no endangered species in the city. But there are endangered species in the country. At least the country people haven’t killed them all. If we want the country people to care about the species, we have to reward them for caring about them.
If the U.S. government comes on your land and you can demonstrate that you now have six mating pairs of spotted owls or red cockaded woodpeckers on your property and you only had three last year, then you get double the tax credit for doing that. That would encourage people to maintain endangered species habitat on their property. If there was a reward system for having endangered species, instead of the current punishment system, people would participate more. That is the fundamental problem with the ESA.
Pallet Enterprise: Some folks claim that this would cost too much money and that people should just follow the law in the first place. Environmental groups suggest that the government should not pay people to obey the law; instead it should punish those who actively destroy habitat. Shouldn’t people just follow the law or else suffer the consequences?
Moore: No, because it’s a stupid law in the first place. You wouldn’t have to pay people for taking their property away if you didn’t have to take their property away. And you wouldn’t have to take their property away if there was an ESA that encouraged them to have endangered species on their land instead of punishing them for it. All the criticisms are there because the law is stupid in the first place.
Pallet Enterprise: One of the things that ESA supporters point to is that the law has had a number of
success stories, such as the Bald Eagle. Do you believe it has been a major factor in some of the species that “have been recovered” or is that mainly clerical error? What is your opinion some of these species might have come back?
Moore: ESA advocates can’t name off all that many species, as far as I can tell. For example, the reason the Bald Eagle came back was because people stopped shooting them due to general awareness and public concern. The ESA may have played a minor role. But I believe the ESA has been counter-productive because, again, it punishes people for having species on their land. If you were trying to pass effective endangered species laws and most of the endangered species are in rural areas, why would you pass laws that make country people hate endangered species? And there’s no doubt that is how the ESA is written now. It makes country people afraid of endangered species instead of embracing them.
Pallet Enterprise: Are there any countries that you know of that have written effective endangered species laws? Are there any models that the U.S. government can follow?
Moore: No, except for possibly Canada. We fought back two species-at-risk pieces of legislation which were modeled after the U.S. law. We managed to get a coalition of all the country people across Canada and successfully fought both of those efforts. Now, Canada has species-at-risk legislation which is much more acceptable. The Green movement doesn’t like the Canadian laws because they don’t punish anyone.
Pallet Enterprise: What is your opinion of President Bush’s Healthy Forest Restoration Act?
Moore: The Healthy Forest Restoration Act is the best thing to happen in forest policy in the United States in a long time. Finally, the people in the U.S. Forest Service are having their hands untied a little bit to do the things they know need to be done.
The whole idea that by going in and thinning the forest you’re going to cause this irreparable harm is complete nonsense. They say, “Oh we must not let any disturbance occur because we want to save this forest.” Meanwhile, their policy decision is what sets up the land for total destruction by catastrophic wildfires. Thus, we can blame the catastrophic wildfires on the do-gooders who think that they are saving the forests by not allowing the Forest Service to do any management. That’s the real problem here.
The Healthy Forest Initiative is finally freeing the local land managers to do what they know needs to be done which is to fire harden these forests. Sure, we could let nature go back the way it was 250 years ago when the forests just burned all the time. In fact, the native people burned it first. They were major forest fire starters. They burned it in order to keep the forest floor clean, to make more forage for wild game, to make it easier for them to walk, etc. They burned the forest regularly in North America just like they did in South America. And they did this in Australia, too.
Today, we don’t need to do it that way because we’ve got machines that are capable of removing unwanted trees and brush mechanically without necessarily burning it. I’m in favor of controlled burning, but you can’t do that in all situations. Especially when fires get out of hand and go through a town, people get pretty angry about that. I’ve seen what they’re doing at Northern Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada; it’s a great model to follow. The forest looks beautiful especially in a couple of years when the greenery comes back on the ground again. They get good timber out; they fire harden the forest, and they produce a very healthy forest in the process.
Pallet Enterprise: With some of the large scale fires that are on TV today, are you starting to see a change in the general public opinion on active management versus just letting nature take its course? Does the leave it alone approach advocated by many groups have as much public support as it once did?
Moore: No, it doesn’t. I think you have especially seen a change in most of the western governors. You see a change in most of the communities in the west with mayors too. I think the general public is getting better information on the pro-management side. All you have to do is show that the private forests don’t go up in the catastrophic fires. And they’re beautiful healthy forests.
Pallet Enterprise: What about looking down the horizon? The Bush administration got some reforms passed with the Healthy Forest Restoration Act and is working on other environmental and land management changes. Could this all be undone if the Democrats rise to power again?
Moore: Actually, I see progress and believe it is here to stay. Let’s say Hilary Clinton is the next president. I don’t think she’s going to kowtow to the extremists. She’s trying to carve herself out a position in the center. She may well listen to a group like the western governors. If the Democrats take both houses in Congress, now that may be a different story.
I think the Healthy Forest Initiative is here to stay because it had such widespread support from both parties. There are these supporters of the Kyoto Protocol who were saying Bush is the enemy. They think they have to get rid of Bush in order to get the U.S. to join the treaty. That’s a pile of hooey. It has been known all along that a majority of Democratic members of Congress are opposed to the Kyoto Treaty.
