Dozens of wilderness-related bills are wending their way through Congress this session.
They range in size from the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act, H.R. 980, colloquially known as Carole King’s perennial wilderness bill aiming to protect 24 million acres throughout Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming, to Pete DeFazio’s bill, H.R. 2889, which would add 4,070 acres on to Oregon Caves National Monument’s present 480 acres.
All of those bills have passionate grassroots proponents and equally passionate and well-heeled opponents. Virtually all of them are missing a newly critical point: creation of wilderness is a deposit into a carbon bank.
People need wilderness; writers from Henry David Thoreau to Aldo Leopold to Edward Abbey have explained why the human soul needs wilderness far better than I can. Now, a new reason for preserving wilderness has appeared on the radar. Lush forests aren’t just paradise for deer and hikers. They’re also America’s best carbon banks.
Climate activists know that REDD means “reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation.” Usually, REDD is associated with tropical forests such as those of Indonesia and Brazil. In the national and international politics of climate, REDD involves large sums of money being transferred from rich countries to Third World countries such as Indonesia and Brazil, complete with gamesmanship.
However, studies show that old-growth boreal forests are even better at absorbing carbon than subtropical forests. A new Wilderness Society study finds that the thick, wet forests of the Pacific Northwest store 1 1/2 times as much carbon as the entire amount of carbon dioxide burned in fossil fuels throughout the country each year. Old, wet cool temperature forests, from the Tongass in Alaska (shown) to the Rogue and Siskiyou in southern Oregon, top even the tropical forests of Indonesia and Brazil for storing carbon.
While wilderness activists are in some ways a savvy group, they’re focused on the trees, not the forests. At the Western Wilderness Conference this weekend, wilderness activists recognized the existence of climate change without, perhaps, seeing the political implications for wilderness protection.
They discussed providing resilient habitat in a warming world by simply protecting more land further north. They dream of a wildway (both private and public lands where wildlife can freely roam) along the Rocky Mountains, from northern New Mexico to the Yukon. They believe that animals can migrate northward as the southern reaches of their habitat warm. They favor landscape scale conservation.
Separately, climate activists underestimate the potential backlash among American voters at the idea of “paying Indonesia and Brazil not to cut down trees.” Voters begrudge miniscule amounts of foreign aid already in the budget. Climate finance hasn’t been discussed in any detail in the mainstream media. Expect a tsunami of negatives.
Wilderness activists, meet climate activists.
Wilderness activists need to know that, for example, H.R. 2889 isn’t just a wilderness bill. It also creates 4,070 acres of carbon sequestration, right here in the United States, handily centered around a job-generating national monument.
Climate activists need to support wilderness bills as relatively inexpensive domestic REDD projects. They also need to scrutinize applications to log in national forests as carefully as they would permits for new coal plants. They can start with the Forest Service’s planning rule.
Historically, national forests were managed as any other crop, valued only for timber harvests. President Obama’s administration seeks to change that myopia (note the sea change here from measuring forests solely by board feet — change I can believe in!).
The new rule will address current and future needs of the national forest system, including restoring forests, protecting watersheds, addressing climate change, sustaining local economies, improving collaboration, and working across landscapes.
The planet needs the carbon bank of wilderness just as the human soul needs the untrammelled realm of wilderness.
BOOTSTRAP: WHAT YOU CAN DO TODAY
A series of meetings throughout the Rocky Mountain West and in Washington is taking place now through mid-May. Perhaps a Democratic administration, willing to consider climate change in the context of managing national forests, will set aside some of those forests as wilderness. See the Forest Service public hearing calendar in the Apture embed above.
