Carbon ‘sinks’ a meager silver lining to forest plan

Published: August 09. 2011

The Bulletin, Bend

Nature can be allowed to decide the fate of Oregon forests — come wildfire, come disease, come what may. But most people don’t want that. So the debate is over how public forests should be managed.

The Northwest Forest Plan, adopted in 1994, was one major attempt at management. Now scientists from Oregon State University and elsewhere say they have found an unintended benefit of the plan: it’s helped with carbon. Not harvesting public forests means the forests have become a carbon “sink” — a place that absorbs more carbon than it releases. It’s called carbon sequestration.

Governments and scientists have been looking at how forests might be used to offset or reduce carbon emissions. If the carbon storage of a forest can be accurately modeled and a price put on that, it could become part of the debate over whether public forest land is harvested.

But this consequence must be weighed against what else the Northwest Forest Plan has done. The goal of the plan was to save species, especially the Northern spotted owl, and to “produce a predictable and sustainable level of timber sales.” It didn’t work out as planned.

Owl habitat was saved. But instead of a spotted owl paradise, the barred owl thrives in the same habitat and threatens to drive the spotted owl out. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife service has considered killing thousands of barred owls in another attempt to save the spotted owl.

Then there’s the timber harvest. Whether or not you believe too many trees were cut down on federal forest land before the plan, the harvests have only been about half the level the plan itself saw as sustainable. It’s made it more difficult to do the thinning necessary to reduce the danger of wildfire. And it wiped out jobs in Oregon’s timber industry. Counties depending on proceeds from timber revenue are still struggling with how to make up for it.

“From 1990 to 2000, private-sector forestry and logging declined from 15,774 jobs statewide to 12,887, a loss of 2,887 jobs, or 18 percent,” the state Employment Department says. Timber harvests dropped from 6.2 billion board feet to 3.9 billion board feet over the same period. By 2009, it was down to 9,391 jobs and 2.7 million board feet.

The Northwest Forest Plan didn’t do all of that, but nobody believes it hasn’t played a major part.

The new study will be used by some to further the argument that there is more reason to not harvest trees on public land. But the Northwest Forest Plan has sequestered more than just carbon. It’s sequestered jobs. It’s sequestered necessary thinning. It’s meant that the trees to build homes are cut far away where there is little regulation and oversight. Managing our forests should not mean the only trees that can be cut are from somewhere else.