Category: Conservation & Environment

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Lobbying day for forests

Our day of lobbying went well. We visited staffers from Senators Tim Kaine & Mark Warner, as well as from Representatives Gerald Connolly, Morgan Griffith, Abigail Spanberger, Rob Wittman & Ben Cline. I met a few of the staffers before and they remembered me. I understand that they have notes and do prep, but it is also because of my unique business card. All of those who remembered me mentioned the card. In any case, I am impressed that they took the time to welcome me back. Good constituent relations. My representative is Gerry Connolly. He used to be our Fairfax County supervisor. He is a good guy.

Proud to be American
All the staffers were friendly and listened to our entreaties with interest and attention. It would be unfair to characterize their responses in greater detail, except to note that Ben Cline’s district included our Virginia Tree Farmers of the Year in Highland County, and his staffer was especially interested in maybe meeting them. I can and will, however, list what I told them.

The facts tell; the story sells
I studied the night before the list of the bills we want our Virginia delegation to support and positions we hope they will take, but I decided that I would touch on those things, but that I could give them the leave behind material for details. Instead, I decided to tell my own story, what I think is important about the way we do forestry. The things I really understand and really care about.

Trees are more than wood and forests are more than trees. I started with this mantra, and elided into the triple bottom line, i.e. every endeavor must be good economically, environmentally and for the community. We need the balance and if we fail on any one of them, we fail in general. The challenge for private forest owners, however, is that if we do the ecological and community parts well, we sometimes have problem with the economic part. To address this, I am grateful for government programs.

I gave the example of our own NRCS grants to restore longleaf, protect soils, plant pollinator habitat and manage with patch burns. All these things, I explained, are things I want to do, but could not afford absent the cost shares. For example, pollinator habitat seeds can cost around $300 an acre. I could not justify spending that much money on too many acres. The cost share is exactly that. It costs me time & money to carry out these activities, but it costs less with the help I get. I also greatly value the help I get in the form of advice and planning. The partnership is more powerful than either side could do.

My land is part of a big system
This fed into one of our “asks.” We want support for landscape scale projects for family forests. My land is part of a larger ecosystem. My land affects the health of the big ecosystem and my land’s health is affected by the larger system, so I care about that. Examples of landscape scale projects include longleaf restoration (one I am working on), wildfire mitigation and the white oak initiative.

I went into the white oak initiative in a little more detail both because I am fond of white oak and because it is easy to illustrate. There is today no shortage of white oak. The problem is with it age structure. We have old growth and middle-aged white oak, but there is not enough of the new generation. This is because white oak requires disturbances to allow the right amount of light. Doing this is not rocket science, but it needs to be done. It takes 50-80 years for a white pine to mature, so what we do now matters a couple generations hence.

The hook with white oak is bourbon. ALL bourbon must be aged in new white oak barrels. Other sorts of wood leak. All the color and most of the taste of bourbon comes from the white oak barrels. When you take a drink of bourbon, you are tasting the decades of oak. Even people who do not drink bourbon can appreciate this. In case they do not, wine, most cider and some beer are also oak wood aged.

Landowners cannot by themselves defend their land against invasive insects and plants. The government role here is to limit spread, anticipate invasions and research ways to adapt or overcome the threats. This is often done with grants to universities or to state and local governments. I think this is one of the most important things that government does. The challenge is that it is so important but often not urgent. If not done this year, you might not notice.

It is like nutrition and exercise. Skip a workout and eat nothing but donuts for a day or two and neglecting your health doesn’t much hurt. Neglect it for a long time and it is deadly.

Thanks for past success
We thanked Congress for the Farm Bill, which included lots of forestry friendly factors. One of the parts important to Virginia is the Sustainable Forestry & African American Land Retention program. This is aimed to help African American forest owners whose families owned and often still own forest land. The problem is that many are absentee owners and titles are unclear, with many descendants of the original landowners owning a small piece. This makes it difficult to manage the land and nearly impossible to take advantage of the many government programs alluded elsewhere, state and Federal.

We also thanked the Congress for the wood innovation grants, that have helped develop important innovations like Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) and for passing the wildfire fix, and I talked a little about the need for cross-boundary hazardous fuels projects, that will help private forest owners manage fire risk, and for the Community Wood Energy Program (CWEP).

If I sum up our talks, I think we were talking about the big picture, how our lands fit with programs and how the program fit with our lands. We got to know more about each other and understand better.

As Aldo Leopold said, “we can only be ethical in relation to something we can see, understand, feel, love, or otherwise have faith in.”

More information on the American Forest Foundation at this link.

Pictures show Capitol on the morning of the visit. Next is a beautiful big beech tree on the grounds and a garden path.

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Preparing for lobbying

Spent the day preparing for our visits to congress tomorrow. Our job is to talk about forestry and conservation issue with Congressional staff. I have done this three times before.

I know it is unfashionable to say so, but most members of Congress want to do the right thing. We may disagree with their policies, but most of them are good people.
We did our preparation at Key Bridge Marriott and then had a reception at “Tony and Joe’s” in Georgetown. My first two pictures are from that area of Georgetown harbor. Next is Georgetown University from across the river. Last is just part of our presentation. I figured I should have something from that, even if it was not a very exciting photo.

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Susan & Ronald Moyers – Tree Farmers of the Year 2019

My note on Virginia’s Tree Farmer of the Year
Meeting Ronald and Susan Moyers and touring their Highland County Tree Farm, along with their daughter Missy was a true joy. Their enthusiasm for tree farming is palpable and infectious. The Moyers truly represent Tree Farm ideals, with a strong land ethic and deep love of complexity of their land’s ecology. The Virginia Tree Farm Foundation is proud to name Susan and Ronald Moyers Virginia Tree Farmers of the Year for 2019.

Moyers’ 570-acre tree farm is incredibly diverse, as you would expect in a mountainous region that supports many micro-ecologies. South and north facing slope support different natural communities. Ronald is sublimely aware of the variation and plans his works with natural principles. For example, he is restoring red spruce by planting groves in the most appropriate microclimates, where they thrive and propagate “naturally,” with a little help from Moyers.

Laurel Fork is a wild cold stream with headwaters on the Moyers farm. It supports a population of native trout and the area around is a great example of boreal ecosystems. Moyers are careful to protect springs and banks of the stream. Clean water is a forest product and you need protect more than the banks. The Moyers understand that their responsibly for water means maintaining healthy forests. They harvest timber in ways that profitably produce wood while sustaining and regenerating the biotic communities.
Besides wood, the Moyers are producing Allegheny herbs, elderberries, ginseng and maple syrup. Maple syrup is an important source of revenue. Ronald applies intelligence and natural principles to this endeavor, as he does all others. He thinned part of his sugar bush but left other trees “natural”. Then he measured the results.

The thinned stand produces better quality sap and more of it, despite there being fewer trees. You can get more with less if you add intelligence, but it goes beyond that. More light reaching the forest floor means that those herbs, elderberries and ginseng grow better, and wildlife habitat is enhanced.

Highland County is Virginia’s biggest producer of maple syrup, helped by highest average altitude of any county east of the Mississippi and the cool mountain climate that makes good sugar maple country. The Moyers share their experience with neighbors and hosting maple festivals, master naturalists and student groups. Forestry students from Dabney S. Lancaster Community College are working with harvest and post-harvest management under Moyers’ tutelage. Much of activity is centered around a meeting center, under construction but already functioning. Moyers are building this with heavy and solid timber harvested from the tree farm. The Moyers farm is a big asset to the community.

Tree farmers know that trees are more than wood and forests are more than trees. They understand their forests as communities that exist in both space and in time. This ideal the Moyers exemplify, with a strong appreciation of their land’s past, commitment to it future and their part in the greater ecology. It is with great pride that the Virginia Tree Farm Foundation congratulates the Moyers. We are grateful to Westrock Forester Keith Simmons who nominated them, and we know that Virginia will be the better for all their efforts.

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Water & mud on Diamond Grove

I went to look over the Diamond Grove place. Flooding has knocked down bridges. My road was closed off, thankfully the block was just past the gate to our farms.

It rained a lot and moved a lot of mud. It looks like there is a foot of new mud and sand on my first creek. Not sure where it came from. I cannot find any big areas of erosion on my land, but I suppose each square foot contributes its little part and it ends up big. We have set up rocks and brush to slow the water and encourage it to drop the sediment and that seems to have worked. When we got the place in 2005, there was a lot of steep and eroded banks. That is mostly fixed now.

The storm snapped off the top of a very big tree in one of the other SMZs. It will be interesting to watch developments. We had a big tree uprooted by wind and rain in 2006. It made a big opening and changed the course of one of the streams. It was interesting to watch the fill in. Nature is resilient.

I am very fond of my big beech trees. I expect that sooner or later one or more of them will blow down. One of my favorites is mostly hollow and on a stream bank. There are plenty of little trees waiting to take the place, but I like the old ones.

My first picture shows the snapped tree. It is much bigger than the picture shows. The new green leaves this time of the year filters the light and makes everything seem green, even things that are not really green. Next is the “new” land near my bald cypress. I expect it will gradually move. It must have been one really big storm. I have never seen so much moved dirt, and the bridges have never been undermined like that.

Next is my beech wood. It is a kind of old world look. There are more leaves on the ground now than at other times of the year. Beech trees hold onto many of their leaves all winter. They are pushed off by the new leave in spring, i.e. now. The penultimate picture shows my closed road and last is the path through the 15-year old loblolly. I think we will thin after this growing season.

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Prickly pear and the rattlesnake master

When you think cactus, you rarely think Virginia, but the prickly pear is native to southeastern piney forests and part of the longleaf ecology. Trees are more than wood and forests are more than trees is well illustrated by a longleaf forest, since much of its diversity rests on the plants on the ground.

I long wanted a prickly pear addition to my longleaf, but they are harder to find than you would guess. The ones you find usually are desert varieties, meant as house plants here, that do not do well in Virginia’s climate.

Chrissy found one for me, along with another interesting native plant, the rattlesnake master. It almost sound like a couple of comic book heroes, “Prickly Pear and the Rattlesnake Master.”

Anyway, I planted them today. This is more like gardening than forestry, but I hope they spread.

When Mike Raney, Scott Powell and others in the hunt club notice, don’t be surprised at the cactus in Virginia.

My first picture is prickly pear and the rattlesnake master. Next is one of the bald cypress I planted a couple months ago. I planted 200. The criteria was that if my feet were dry, I planted longleaf, but if my feet were wet, I went with bald cypress.

Speaking of wet, the next picture is a “vernal pond,” AKA a persistent mud puddle. Vernal ponds are very important for amphibian reproduction. The water must persist long enough for the amphibian life cycle but not long enough that it becomes permanent enough to have fish that eat the amphibian eggs or tadpoles.

Penultimate picture is part of the stream management zone. I took my folding chair down there and had a beer today, between hard work, of course.

Last is a downed longleaf. I have had a problem with them just falling down. Not all, or even a big number, but enough that I notice. The loblolly do not do that on the same piece of ground. Anybody have explanations?

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Nature Conservancy

Warm day today. We walked over to Open Road for supper and a couple beers. Alex came along.

But boozing is normal for us. The less usual part of our day was our breakfast at Virginia Nature Conservancy (TNC), shown in the last picture.

The Nature Conservancy is the best of the environmental organizations because they effectively work with partners, private, government and NGOs. TNC is not confrontational, nor do they need to take credit. For them the mission of making a better environment trumps all else.

We have been contributing to TNC for more than 30 years, which is likely why they invite Chrissy and me to these sort of events.

The Nature Conservancy
President of Virginia TNC, Locke Ogens, talked about the Conservancy’s efforts in Virginia form the mountains to the sea.

Climate smart forestry
In the mountains, TNC is stitching together lands important to migratory birds. Complementing this is “climate smart forestry”. TNC leadership understands that most conservation much be done on private lands and that it must return some profit. They are showing the conservation can produce profit. Logging and conservation are more than possible; they are both important goals.

On piedmont and tidewater, TNC is working to restore longleaf pine. This is where I have most contact with them because of my interest here. I have written a lot about this elsewhere, so I will not repeat.

Blue Carbon
Something newer to me was “blue carbon”. TNC is working to enhance living infrastructure of clam reefs and sea grass. These are working laboratories. Studies indicate that they slow down storms and help protect coastal ecology and cities. TNC is working with the City of Virginia Beach to improve green infrastructure to also include planting of trees to wick up flood waters and mitigate water damage through transpiration. My friend Tim Receveur might be interested in this.

Sea grass can sequester a lot of carbon. We currently do not know how much. TMC scientists are currently studying this.

Adapting to climate change
An overall theme of TNC is adaptation to climate change. Ecosystems are migrating north as the climate warms. We need to facilitate that movement. We can help by planting southern trees near the north of their range, as we are doing with longleaf. We also want to facilitate movement of animals. To that extent, we need to protect corridors.

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Forest visit March 24, 2019 (again)

This was one of the rainiest years ever in Virginia. Our stream management zones were carrying more water than usual. You see in the first picture how high the water was by looking at the sand and mud that the high water deposited. Interesting thing happens with that mud and sand deposits. They form natural levies. When they flood over the levies, as happens in very rainy times, the water is trapped on the far side and encourages a wet forest.

Other two are SMZs that did not flood so much. Last picture is bare ground that was used as logging deck. I planted some wildflowers in the foreground and crimson clover farther in. I expect it will be verdant and beautiful in a couple months.

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Forest visit March 24, 2019

I attended a talk about the need for white oak for bourbon barrels and decided to do my part for the 2050 class of bourbon drinkers by planting one of my patches with white oak. So I ordered some from Virginia Department of Forestry. My trees came a little early, but I wanted to plant them quick as possible, so I went down to the farms.

It was just right time to plant the trees but a little early to see springtime. However, some things are starting to grow. Some of the longleaf have begun to “candle”, i.e. send up new growth. Some of the seedlings the kids planted are also showing the little buttons of new growth. It seems a miracle each spring, but it happens every year.

First picture shows a 2 years old longleaf candling. Next is a seedling starting out. Picture #3 is the open woods we burned last May. #4 is an odd “laying” longleaf. Look closely and you see that the tree has fallen to the ground and started to grow up from there. Last picture is the loblolly planted in 2016. You can see the trees well with the brown grass. Soon, the grass will be green and the trees will blend in.

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Still developing a land ethic

Land empty of people is sad and incomplete – A land full of people who overreach and destroy nature is a horror. A land empty of people is sad and incomplete. Walking gently on the earth is essential, but that implies humans are indeed walking there. Harmony, not exclusion, is the valuable and achievable goal. Humans living in harmony with nature is joyful and helps us find meaning in life.

The picture on left shows camas, a native plant with edible roots once very common in moist meadows of the Pacific Northwest. It was an important part of Native American diets and still has great cultural significance.  Natives Americans maintained these plant by regularly burning under the ponderosa pine. When fire was excluded, the brush filled forests almost eradicated camas.  When prescribed fire brought regular light fires back, the camas came back too.

I was in Kalispell, Montana as part of my part-time (WAE) work for State Department. While I did nothing secret, it would be bad form to post on most of the discussions.

But I did have a talk with Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT) foresters who met with me not as a State Department official but as a guy just interested in their land ethic and how they managed their forest land. I have been reading and listening to land ethic practitioners for years now, trying to develop a land ethic I can use and share. Of course, it is always a work in progress. Land ethics are written on the land we steward and that is in a perpetual state of becoming.

I wrote some notes and I think they are worth sharing.

Tribal forestry
My plane was leaving a little later in the day, and a couple of tribal foresters were kind enough to explain some of their forest land ethic to me. Well … they admitted that – like most people who work in the woods – they were delighted to talk trees anytime anybody was willing to listen, regretting only that we did not have time to go into the woods together.

They became even more eager when I told them that I had been in the reservation forests a year earlier to study tribal fire practices and admired their superb work with ponderosa pine regeneration. White bark pine has become a challenge because of beetle kill and warmer winters. Besides pine, tribal foresters work with fir, spruce, hemlock and tamarack, as well as understory and herb layers of the forest. Forests are more than just the trees. Unfortunately, timber cutting and fire exclusion in the last century had harmed the health of their forests, making them more susceptible to beetle infestations and disastrous fires. More holistic based forest management will help restore forest health, but this will take years, and, in most ways, it is a never-ending endeavor, as change is constant, which means what we do must adapt.

Land ethic for seven generations
They told me that their land ethic involved managing the forests to the benefit of seven generations of their people and in it general form it resembles the Aldo Leopold inspired land ethic I learned as a young man. Today we might call it adaptive management. It recognizes the complexity of the ecosystem and that we can never know enough to make final decisions. Rather we observe, act, reflect and act again based on the new information and we do this forever. There are not problems to be solved but conditions to be adapted. We agreed that land ethics cannot really be written down, but rather must be lived on the land.

Land empty of people is sad and incomplete
An important factor is their land ethic involved the people integrated into the system. This is much in line with conservationist thinking but is out of step with some preservationist ideals that seek to separate nature from almost all, or in more radical formulations all, human activity. A land where people overreach and destroy natures is obviously bad. But a land empty of people is also sad and undesirable. It is essential to walk gently on the earth, but that implies that humans are indeed walking there. Harmony, not exclusion, is a valuable and achievable goal, and humans living in harmony with nature is joyful.

Thin and burn
This beautiful ponderosa pine forest in the photo is not natural. It is maintained by regular use of fire. Tribal foresters are using a variety of tools, such as thinning and prescribed fire, to restore and maintain the health of their heritage forests. Their plan is to restore the mosaic patterns of open land and forests of various ages. They want to have five age classes of trees, ranging from the new forests to one with very old trees. They understand the different fire and cutting regimes. A ponderosa forest requires regular light fire. A lodgepole pine forest might need stand altering fire or harvest, while spruce and fir burn or are cleared much more rarely.

We spoke most about the ponderosa, since that is most common and requiring fire and thinning. They talked about work they had done with their own forests and trees on the adjoining National Forests. It is part of a good neighbor policy of the Forest Service. They thinned and burned all but a few acres, when a wildfire went through. It passed under the managed forests without causing significant loss, but when the fire got to the overstocked unmanaged forests, it got into the crowns and burned that forest to the ground. The fire got so hot that it sterilized the soils, setting regeneration back decades.

THIS is an unnatural fire.

A land ethic for the generations
The foresters talked a little about tribal history. The Salish and Kootenai are mountain people and their diets consisted of game that could be hunted in the mountains and plants gathered there. This contrasts with some tribes that lived along the rivers and subsisted on salmon. Some of these people were related and trade was brisk, so it was not a straight boundary. The people also hunted bison. They were mobile and left the higher mountains in the fall, to return in the spring. On leaving their mountain camps, they set fire to the woods. These fires burned naturally, most going out soon after, but some persisting until quenched by winter snows. This is what helped produce the open woods and the mosaic pattern. (People unfamiliar with fire in the woods have the impression that a fire goes through evenly, burning everything in the path. This is not how it works. Vagaries in vegetation type, soil moisture, wind direction and just plan random chance mean the fire creates essentially an archipelago of different and diverse patches.)

The practice of setting winter fires mostly stopped when reservation life made seasonal migrations more difficult or impossible and when, during the early and mid-20th Century the expert opinion was that fire was an enemy to be fought and defeated. Prescribed fires today are less extensive but designed to recreate the diverse and varied archipelago environments.

This is not the first time I have been in these forests. Attached in my note from a fire conference last year.

I have included some pictures from the trips. The first two are just scenes.
Picture #3 is from the Seli’š Ksanka Qlispe-Dam, formerly known as Kerr Dam, owned by CSKT tribes since 2015 and managed by Energy Keepers, a tribal firm. It is the first example of a Native American nation in the United States owning a hydroelectric dam. CSKT also operates the local electricity provider, Mission Valley Power.

It is a concrete gravity-arch dam, built in 1938. The dam was designed to generate hydroelectricity but also serves recreational and irrigation uses. We were able to visit the dam powerhouse on the second day of the visit, but snow made it impossible to see the panoramic views of the dam and the lake.

Picture # 4 is a war memorial outside the CSKT tribal headquarters, produced by a local artist. Members of the CSKT have served in honorably and in significant numbers in our nation’s armed forces.

Picture # 5 is from the public town hall meeting in Kalispell.

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You need not eat the whole egg to know it is rotten

You need not eat the whole egg to know it is rotten.
Like many Virginia landowners, I get unsolicited offers from firms wanting to exploit my land for solar farms. I throw them in the garbage. I don’t care what they offer. I don’t want it. It’s not my place to tell other forest landowners what to do but let me explain why I feel strongly that we should not do it.

Let me be clear. I support solar on rooftops, powering remote installations & shading sunny parking lots. Our urban areas are full of sunbaked roofs & parking lots. Just don’t take down forests or cover fields with solar panels. This is not clean energy.

Trees are more than wood and forests are more than trees
Responsible private landowners protect the health of the biotic communities – the living soil, water, air and wildlife – that depend on our land. We still use and profit from the land, but we do it wisely and we also must look beyond our own land to the greater ecosystem and the greater society. We should think in terms of the triple bottom line – a decision reasonable for ecology, economy and society?

Considering the big picture, we might argue that devoting our forest land to solar meets the triple bottom line criteria. Here is why it does not. If we harvest a tract, it does not stop being a forest. It becomes a forest in transition, as the next generation begins. It stops being a forest if we convert to other uses, pave it over or cover it in solar panels. But isn’t the energy produced by these panels worth the cost of the local forests? Well … no.

Today’s solution is tomorrow’s problem
No matter what they tell you, these panels will not last decades. How long do ordinary shingles last on your roof? They will be ruined by weather, made obsolete by advancing technology or just neglected. During their short lifetime, it is likely that they will never make up for the ecological value of the trees they replaced, nor the biotic communities that would have grown.

We can tell they are a bad deal because they are not self-supporting.  Solar farms are essentially farming tax breaks and subsidies.  They get this up front, while you rely on the uncertain long-term payback.

Before you let these guys have your land, ask a few practical questions. How long and how much? How often will they be on your land? What happens when they remove the panels? Is the firm reliable AND are they likely to stay in business for the life of the contract? Who is liable if something goes wrong?

Ask if this fits your land ethic
I could think of more, but maybe save time by asking an enabling question. Does this use of land fit my land ethic? My answer is “no,” so I stop right there. You need not eat the whole egg to know it’s rotten.

And take a look at this article.