Category: Conservation & Environment

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Gains and losses

It is colder than I thought it would be, but I expect spring will come while I am still in Virginia.    

I counted the rings.As well as I can count, the tree was about chest high in 1900. It probably took a few years to get there, so it was an acorn maybe in 1890. Oak trees require some cover but a lot of sun.There are other big oaks nearby.My guess is that these oaks were on a property line, where there were other trees but cleared fields in both directions.Fairfax County has good soil for pasture and was an area of mixed dairy farms before it became urbanized.There is a good chance that was this, but I really don’t know.The big tree was actually two trees that grew together.It looks like there might have been a third tree in the middle. 

How different this place was when this tree started to grow. 

I felt bad when I saw the tree was gone, but I don’t want to make this a narrative of loss.  It is easy to fall into a narrative of loss when you really have loss, but we don’t think of the gains. The forest around is growing. Light that now gets to the formerly shaded ground will let other things grow faster and better. There really is no loss.  Back in 1890, a big tree may have fallen down to allow this big tree to grow.  The rings clearly show differences in the decades of growth. The likely cause is other trees crowding in and then being cleared. 

You can see the stump up to, rings next and some other trees growing together, maybe forming future big trees.  On the stump picture, you can see a dime, which gives some perspective.  

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Paper or plastic

We have been using the same shopping bags for around fifteen years.  We bought a bunch at Giant.  I think they are made out of recycled plastic for Coca-Cola bottles, so it is appropriate.  I use them because I don’t want to waste plastic bags, but mostly because they are much more convenient.  I can stuff in five or six 2 liter bottles of coke in each one w/o worrying that they will break and send everything crashing to the ground.

I am not sure how much pollution my shopping bags avoid. Plastic bags are bad for the environment, although banning them for shopping may not have much of a positive effect.  Lots of people use the bags for garbage. If they don’t have the plastic shopping bags, they buy plastic garbage bags.  Paper shopping bags cause no net harm to the environment, at least in America, since they are produced with a renewable resource and are biodegradable.  As I wrote in other places, paper is produced from thinning.  If forest owners cannot earn money from this, they cannot afford to thin and forest health is adversely affected.

Lately I read of another permutation.  The reusable bags get dirty and may carry pathogens. I don’t know about that.  I am not sure that I can wash my recycled plastic bags. I will try one. 

Banning plastic bags may cause more plastic to be used, as I explained above. Not using paper may harm forest health and reusing the same bags can make you sick. Nothing about the environment is simple.

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Science wins for now

Scientists at FDA say that genetically engineered salmon would not have a significant impact (FONSI) on the U.S. environment and safe as food from conventional Atlantic salmon . This should clear the way for the fish to be farmed, adding a less expensive and healthier option to world diets. It will also take some pressure off badly stressed wild fisheries and generally make our environment better than it would have been. It is great that this report finally came out. 

There is lots of similar good news that is not well reported. For example, I think it is remarkable that U.S. CO2 emissions have dropped to twenty year lows and that we have become the world leader in reducing emissions. Few people seem to know these things and I find little in the media. There used to be a lot more when we were not doing as well. Of course, one of the best things in the environment in my lifetimes is the natural gas revolution.

More on fracking.

We are accustomed to bad environmental news and it is easy to provide. Much of it is just plain BS with scary images – like the tap water starting on fire in the pseudo-documentary “Gas Land.” A lot of it is based on fear of change. Most of it is true, however, but it is truth out of context. A natural environment is constantly changing, with some things coming and others going.

As trees in a forest grow bigger, the wildlife it supports changes. I remember the controversy on Isle Royale in Lake Superior. It is one of the most studied places in the U.S. because of the interaction of wolves and moose. The different animal populations and the forests are always changing. The wolves wiped out the coyotes and impacted the beaver population. If you wanted to document loss, here it is. On the other hand, the wolves at first prospered, by killing moose. Again, look at the moose herd and you can document loss. The decline of the moose numbers allowed forests to regrow, but you could document the loss of moose forage. You get the point. Change is constant. Change brings losses and gains. If you look at only one side of the equation, you can easily paint the picture you want.

For the U.S. in my lifetime, we have had mostly good ecological news. Lakes are cleaner today than when I was growing up. Forests are healthier. Wildlife is so robust some are even becoming nuisances. Of course, there have been losses. Our task is to judge the balance.

This balance goes for every choice we make. Choices should be informed by information, but there is rarely a choice with only a plus side. This salmon is a good thing, on balance. I like salmon, but it is a little expensive. I look forward to the being able to eat this new salmon.

NB – I posted this on a different site and included some comments that I think make the post better.

More on Biotech here & here, plus a little on bioenergy.

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Forward to a better environmental future

We talk about how things peak and decline.  These are often illusions.  There really is no such thing as “peak oil” in any practical sense, for example, but we can see peaks in human activities. The U.S. probably reached peak gasoline in 2007, i.e. we will never again burn as much gasoline again. We probably reached peak U.S. CO2 emissions about the same time. Our emissions are generally falling. Today scientists believe we have reached peak farmland, i.e. our footprint on the land will be reduced in the future.

This thanks to improved agricultural productivity. In the not too distant past, farmland under the plow increased in relation to the amount of crops grown. From 1870-1940, for example, the corn harvest closely tracked acres planted. Today we produce five times as much corn each year, but on LESS land. We will ever again plant as much land in corn as we during the 1940s.

The total amount of land planted in crops worldwide continued to rise in recent years because population was growing and the world’s people were improving their diet, i.e. eating more in general and eating more meat. But these trends are slowing too.

Population growth is much slower than it was a generation ago and is expected to slow and maybe even reverse within the lifetime of people already alive today. As for eating more, people’s appetite for more and better food goes up, but then also stabilizes. Although we all know some people who are pushing the limits, eventually there is only so much a person can eat.

We can expect agricultural yields to continue to improve, especially if we can get beyond the troglodyte fear of GMOs. Even w/o this source of improvement, there are lots of things that can be done. I read recently about a lettuce bot that can efficiently weed, thin and pick lettuce. This will improve cultivation techniques, while dispensing with the need for backbreaking labor current applied in the fields.

We can already see the results of more efficient agriculture, although it is so much around us and happened so slowly that we might not notice. In the last century, forests in the Eastern U.S. and Western Europe have returned as cropland no longer needed was recolonized by forests. There is more forest canopy in the Eastern U.S. then there was in 1812. With that has come wildlife. Deer, turkeys and even squirrels were almost extinct in some states a century ago. Today they are common enough to be pests in lots of places. ears are back on our tree farms. Before about ten years ago, they had been absent for a hundred years. I am not sure I am completely happy about their return, BTW. (I prefer not to share my land with dangerous animals. I don’t really think that they would be more afraid of me than I would be of them.) But return they have.

Anyway, the smaller footprint on the land will give us the luxury of small scale organic farming for the upscale markets as well as the capacity to conserve natural areas and better protect soil and water resources. We really need to update our conception. For my entire life we have talked about fragile nature.

It has been a narrative of sad loss. According to this paradigm, each year there was less: less clean water, fewer animals and trees etc. I recall “ecological clocks” ticking inexorably toward a bleak dystopia like those portrayed in movies like “Soylent Green” or “Blade Runner.” But we have turned a corner w/o perceiving it. And we did it by going forward, not backward. Today we have more and better options than we did in 1970, when I first started to worry about these things. It has turned about much better than I thought it would.

In the new paradigm, we need to restore humans in nature. IMO, in the old paradigm there is too much separation. We want to protect nature FROM humans. This follows naturally if you believe in the idea that we are merely trying to slow the inevitable loss. In the renewable and renewed world we live in today, I think it is important for people to understand their integration. I like the idea of community farms, not because I think locovores are more ecologically beneficial (I don’t) but rather because it helps people understand where food comes from.

I also think we need to encourage a new generation of hunters. Hunting is dying out, as the older generation of hunters literally dies out. It would be a good thing if at least some of our calories came from wild game now expanding numbers into our neighborhoods. No matter what, the mind-sets and adaptions of the past fifty years will be increasingly out of date in the next.

Another addition – return of wolves to the Eastern forests.

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Saving papers harms forest health

Saving paper doesn’t save trees.  This is what I have on the bottom of my emails, “If you feel it necessary to print this message, recall that wood is 100% renewable resource & we grow most of the pulp wood for paper sustainably on American tree farms.” Some people like it; some are offended; most probably don’t notice.  I put it on there against those silly ones that tell you to be careful not to print in order to save trees.

Saving paper does not save trees because most paper is made from pulp trees grown sustainably on tree farms. 

The trees cut for pulp are usually cut as part of thinning operations.  They CANNOT be saved.  If you do not thin your forests, growth slows; health declines and beetles start to attack all the trees.  You could thin the trees and then just leave them on the ground, but that leads to fire danger and insect infestations.  Thinning trees is good for the health of the forest.  It is also good for wildlife, since the thinning allows sunlight into the woods, encouraging the diverse food supplies wildlife needs.  Forest landowners don’t make much money from thinning operations.  Most of the money they make goes into forest improvement, BUT if there is no profitable market (i.e. paper) for thinned wood most forest landowners cannot afford to do it at all.

The bottom line is that the paper industry contributes to healthy forests.  Forests would be LESS robust w/o paper industry demand for pulpwood.  People should put what I have on the bottom of their emails.  If they want to measure environmental costs, they need to measure energy. Below are some of my sixteen year old loblolly.  They were thinned two year ago. We removed about half the trees. You can see that they have easily grown together.

The environmental impact of paper on forest health is a net benefit. The place where paper could be a negative is energy cost.  It takes energy to cut trees, process paper and move it to your office.  This means that NOT using paper may be a good thing in some cases, if energy costs outweigh effects on forest health.

What rarely makes sense is recycling small amounts of paper.  Make the distinction. Recycling bulk paper makes sense.  Recycling small batches does not.  Think of the energy costs.  You have to collect paper using trucks and then put it through a similar process as making paper from wood.  The equation involves the energy needed to harvest timber versus the energy required to “harvest” recycling.  Collecting small amounts of paper, especially paper that is soiled, makes no sense.  Recycling that Starbucks cup almost certainly is worse for the environment than would be making paper with newly harvested trees.  The paper plants are probably closer to the forest than they are to the places where you are tossing those cups.  It will cost a lot to clean these things and paper is heavy. It takes a lot of energy to move. The big problem if you don’t recycle paper is the space it takes in landfills.  This is also not a clear choice.  Wood sequesters carbon until it is burned or decays.  If the paper made from wood sits in landfills, it holds onto that carbon for a long time.  Somebody should do the math on this.

So the common denominator of all this is energy.  Does it take more energy to recycle or make new paper?  Add in the variable that the demand for paper is beneficial to forest health.  Paper making may use trees but it saves forests by increasing forest health.  Speaking of energy, the widespread replacement of paper with electronic files is not ecologically free. 

Data is stored and processed at large computer service farms. Computers in server farms run 24/7, and consume prodigious amounts of electricity, both for the computers and the air conditioning needed to keep them cool.  But this is another story.

The bottom line is that saving paper does not save trees and may actually have negative impacts on forest health.  It MAY save energy and certainly saves money for you or your firm.  We need to balance the needs to have printed materials with ecological and cost concerns.  Just do the right thing for the right reasons. This brings me to what made me think about this.  In the Atlanta airport I saw the machine pictured above.  This is plain stupid.  It purports to be environmentally benign but it making at least three big mistakes.  It saves paper, which is not needed.  To do that it USES energy. Beyond that, it puts in each bathroom a piece of complicated electronics that inevitably requires maintenance.  Whoever bought this made a mistake from the environmental point of view, although probably not from the PR perspective.   Many people see something like this and feel much better about wiping their hands.  Many of these people will probably put some “save the trees” message on their emails.

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Knowing you’re doing the right thing in your forest

We are talking about third party certification.  This means that all aspects of the forestry operation are evaluated by an objective third party, i.e. not forest owners or those interested in buying the timber.  It works like an audit of a business’ accounts and activities. It is done by a trustworthy independent firm or individual who is trained to know what he/she is looking for. The certifiers make judgments based on specific criteria.  In the case of a business they are assessing financial health.  Are the practices of management honest and effective?  Will the business have a reasonable chance of surviving and thriving?   Passing the audit doesn’t automatically prove that everything is great, but it gives everyone a reasonable basis on which to judge and make decisions.  An audit does indeed help to catch people who are cheating, but its better purpose is to give owners and managers the information and tools they need to improve performance.  Forest certification has many of the same purposes.


Responsible forest owners want to make a profit but only in ways that sustain and improve the health of their land and the environment around it.  That is why they embrace better methods and search for sustainable solutions.  But in this ever changing world, how can know you are doing things right?   How do you know you are doing the right things in the bigger picture?  And if you are, how will others know? Certification helps with all these things.

The American Tree Farm System (ATFS) was the world’s first third party certification scheme and it has been helping forest landowners practice and perfect good forestry for more than seventy years. Tree Farm is now sponsored by the American Forest Foundation. A lot changed in all that time. ATFS’s commitment to sustainability endured but more people became interested in forest sustainability.Other certification schemes came on the scene in the 1990s. Major certifiers active in the U.S. today are Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI).In addition, a worldwide organization that essentially certifies the certifiers is Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes (PEFC). PEFC endorsed SFI in 2005.

All certification schemes have the similar goal of sustainable forestry and protecting ecosystems.  There are some differences in the ways they go about making that happen.  Among the certification schemes, ATFS is best suited to individual forest owners because it is inexpensive to get and stay certified (Tree Farm inspections are free to the landowner and usually can be completed in a day) and because it promotes goals without dictating specific actions to achieve those goals.  In other words, Tree Farm provides the flexibility that smaller, non-professional owners need.           

Ensuring wood and wood product come from sources that we know to be practicing sustainable forestry, while protecting wildlife, soil and water resources is becoming increasingly important to consumers of wood product.   It has always been important to responsible landowners.  It is probably a good thing to have a diversity of certification plans to provide choices for a variety of needs.  For me, and I think for most small operators like me, ATFS is the best way to go.  Others with different needs might make other choices.  All of us share the same goal of good forestry.  There are many good paths to this destination. 

 My picture show my first forest from SR 623. I have taken the picture from the same spot many time before. The lower picture shows me with my trees.  A few years ago, I was taller than all of them. Notice the two trees right behind me. The one on my right is older. It was a volunteer and bigger. The one on my left is planted and genetically superior.  It is now bigger and better form. 

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Food plots

Wildlife needs edge communities, places where different biomes meet, where resources are varied.  There are several natural places to put food plots. One is under any transmission wires that cross your property. You cannot use this land for much of anything anyway, so it provides a good, long narrow wildlife area. Other natural areas for food plots are landing zones.

Landing zones are where loggers set up equipment to stack and process harvested timber.  There is not much sense in planting them in trees, since subsequent harvests will squash them.  But you don’t want to just neglect them. Because of the soil compression of the heavy machines, plants will not easily regenerate on them naturally. You need to break up the hard surfaces and plant in some wildlife plots.

The additional advantage is that the landing zones are spread out in the forest. They provide little islands of food and variety within the forest. 

Food plots play out over time. You have to replant them every 3-5 years. I am lucky in that the guys at the hunt club do that on my land. They study this.  I get the magazine that has different studies and possibilities. But each site is special.  It is an art and not a science.  The hunt clubs and I have common interests. They like to make the food plots to improve wildlife. I agree. They also seem just like the joy of doing it and I am happy to have them “play” with my land.  One of the guys helped his granddaughter plan a food plot on our CP land. She won some kind of 4H project.

My pictures show the food plots ready to be planted or in growth. The top shows the plot on our new property. I have not yet though up a name for this place, so I am just calling it new forest. The trees are twenty-eight years old. Below that is the plot under the wires on the Freeman place. That food plot was planted last spring. The trees in the background are sixteen years old. The bottom is CP, our “original” land. Those trees are nine years old. All the stands look pretty good.

Our forests in Virginia, mine included, are not very intensive. Notice all the stuff growing under and among the trees, weeds. But the weeds are what the animals eat. They are better for the environment. I have seen much “better” managed forests, where the trees are planted closer and there is much more production per acre.  I am happy to leave some space on my land for the diversity of nature. The only thing I worry about is that our business model will not be competitive. People more clever than us will figure out ways to make things more efficient.  It would take away much of the joy of forestry for me. I like the easy management, less control.

That is one reason I think we have to maintain other values. One of the most important is hunting. W/o the hunt clubs, I could not mange the way I do. The hunters are really the stewards of the rural environment. I am glad they are there and that I got to know them. 

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Webs

There seem to be lots of spiders around here.  Maybe it’s just spider season. I don’t know. They throw their webs across the trails at about face height. You usually don’t see them, but you walk into them and get the threads in your mouth. It is not pleasant, although I suppose ruining all that work impacts the spider more than the walker.

We are down here to look at the farms and especially to look at the new one. Everything is looking good. The trees look healthy and have put on good growth this year. Usually it is not so long between visits, so I am seeing a little more growth than usual.

There is an interesting change in the streams on the CP place. As the trees get bigger, they suck up more of the water that falls on the land, so it doesn’t run off so quickly. Some of my formerly full stream beds are now just wet, even with the extensive rain we had here in the last couple of months. There is still water pooled up in some places, so it is not a general dryness.  I like one particular place where I sit under some really big beech trees. This place now has a spring, where it used to have a surface stream.  The water evidently follows the stream bed underground and then if forced to the surface by some really big rock formations.  It flows down the rocks.  Very nice.

The new farm is 137 acres just north of Hwy 58.  It is good land with around 100 acres of twenty-eight year old loblolly, another maybe twenty acres in five year old and the rest in mixed hardwood SMZ. There is relatively little SMZ, so a more generally useable land.   We could harvest the pines at any time, but we would ideally do this in about five years. I want to be around to watch the harvest and the replanting, so maybe after I retire would be a good time. That is not that long away now.

I probably have to modify my planning to account for retirement and mortality.  My forestry planning goes out to times when I will probably be dead.  The thing that is fun about forestry is the long term perspective, but you cannot manage events past your lifetime.  The other problem is just getting around. Yesterday I was climbing around over rocks and streams. I was getting tired. I take good physical condition for granted.  How much longer can I do this?

I talked to Larry Walker who runs the hunt club and works in local forestry.  He told me that the market for pulp and timber has improved a lot recently, especially over the last month.  I don’t know if this is a leading economic indicator, but it is local good news. 

Another piece of good news is that Dominion Power will begin using wood chip biomass to replace coal in its power stations in Altavista, Hopewell, and Southampton coal-fired power stations. Wood chips are a completely renewable resource & carbon neutral, i.e. they soak up as much CO2 as they produce when burned. This move will also provide a market for slash and other forestry byproducts and steady the market prices for pulp wood.  It makes sense to burn biomass in a place that produces so much of it.  This is the fundamental principle of energy. You should use what works best in the local conditions.   There is no single solution.

The two top pictures show our new land.  I am standing near the trees to give perspective. Below that is my usual corner on the CP property. The bottom picture are my sycamores along the road. I have been thinning them into a kind of colonnade.  I am vaguely allergic to sycamore. If I do a lot of work cutting branches etc, I cough and sneeze.  So I can do it only a little while before I need to take a breathing break.  Sycamores have a distinctive smell, which I suppose it the same thing that causes me trouble.

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We Did it Again (Take that you pessimists)

Wood is an excellent building material. It is easy to manipulate, a good insulator and wood is completely renewable as well as biodegradable. It is more environmentally benign than competing materials like concrete or steel in its full lifecycle and wood is always at least carbon neutral & actually removes CO2 from the air. But wood has suffered from a big weakness; it was not strong enough to build tall structures. Until now.   

Cross-laminated timber (CLT) can transform the way in which wood is used. CLT can be used to replace pre-fabricated concrete panels or even steel in building. The Australians are currently building a ten story wood apartment building in Melbourne using CLT and experts believe that building as high as fifteen stories should be possible in the near future. This makes wood a suitable building material in all but the tallest buildings and goes a long way toward a sustainable future. But there is more.

A really exciting new development is nanocrystalline cellulose (NCC). You may not have heard of this before because technologies needed to understand it, like electron scanning microscopes, were unavailable until recently. Experts quoted in the link above think that NCC will replace metal and plastic in many applications and could make nonorganic plastics obsolete in the not-too-distant future and the U.S. National Science Foundation predicts will become a $600 billion industry by 2020.

NCC has mechanical properties comparable to stainless steel or Kevlar and has a strength to weight ratio eight times better than steel. “It is the natural, renewable version of a carbon nanotube at a fraction of the price,” according to Jeff Youngblood of Purdue University’s NanoForestry Institute in West Lafayette, Indiana.

So the future for wood is bright, which has wonderful consequences for the environment and for America. The U.S. can produce all the wood fiber it needs in completely sustainable and often environmentally positive ways.

The world develops in unexpected ways. We often fear the future because it is unknown. We project our current problems forward and they seem unsolvable. They usually ARE unsolvable given the current state of technolgoy and development. The variables we too often leave out of the equation are human innovation, imagination and intelligence. Our resources are not fixed. They grow larger based on our abilities to use them. I wrote not long ago about the boom in shale oil that has vaulted the U.S. into world leadership in reduction of CO2.

This was predicted by nobody even five or ten years ago. In fact, had you mentioned such a possibility back in 2002 you would have been called all sorts of names, none of them synonyms for honest or intelligence. We are looking at a better than expected future. A related development is the shift of the energy center of gravity from those unstable regions of the Middle East to the Americas and maybe the Atlantic parts of Africa.

Those pessimists who project our problems forward and fear we will never solve them are right. Generally speaking, history shows that we almost never SOLVE problems; we transcend them.

As we replace non-renewable or environmentally unfriendly materials with those sourced in something as abundant and renewable as wood, we are fulfilling the impossible dreams of a previous generation of environmentalists and we are doing while increasing our country’s wealth and prosperity. I am fond of the future since I plan to live there for the rest of my life. It looks like it will be much better than the places I used to live.

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Better Cows = More Meat with Less Environmental Impact

As it turns out, much deforestation is unnecessary and not even profitable in the long run. Just letting your cows wander around with the inferior forage is not the best strategy. Years ago in Acre, there was only one head of cattle for every three hectares of pasture and it took three years to raise a cow for slaughter.  Today there are about two cows for every hectare and cows become steaks and hamburgers after only around eighteen months. If you do the math, you figure out that today ranchers could raise around 12 times the number of cows on the same acreage because of better techniques and better genetic stock. Beyond that, the better genetics of today’s cows means that they are bigger and better than their predecessors.   

The favorite type of cattle in Acre is the  The Nelore or Zebu. This is an off white animal with a hump and a big waddle, with most of its genetic stock originally from India. They generally do not eat them in India; in Brazil they do.  his provided incentives to the Brazilian breeders that don’t exist in India. In fact the Nelore in Brazil is almost a different variety of cow from its Indian forebears. It grows faster and produces better meat faster.  This is a good thing if your goal is to produce meat for sale and it is also easier on the environment, because there is less need for land and other inputs per pound of beef. The Nelore are well adapted to the tropics. They do well in converting poor quality food into good quality beef and require little care. Currently, of the roughly 160 million cows in Brazil, 100 million are Nelore.  Their major vulnerability is that they are almost completely unadapted to cold temperatures. When it gets down around freezing, they literally drop dead where they are standing. I recall seeing that on television in Mato Grosso do Sul when they had a rare cold snap.

When I was in Brazil a quarter century ago the Nelore cattle (which were almost always call Zebu) were just becoming widespread.  People I knew in Rio Grande do Sul said that they were not very good and didn’t produce good meat. (BTW – they still cannot raise them in RGS because of the cold.) Maybe they weren’t and didn’t back then, but they do today. Churrascaria now regularly feature a fatty but tasty cut of meat that comes from that hump. I have to assume that if they are selling the hump at least some of the picante and contra-fillet they are serving also is from the Nelore animals and it at least what I have been eating is good.