NACD's Woody Biomass Desk Guide and Toolkit

It seems like every bioenergy and conservation conference I go to drives toward the same conclusion... "What we need is education, education, education." Of course, determining which messages should be communicated is key - which is why the credibility of the authors is paramount. Who is writing the content and what is their motivation?

Whenever I come across material that I think is credible and approachable from a lay audience's perspective, I upload links to them through this Bioenergy BlogRing. Some of the guides I have written about in the past include:
• 25x'25 - Agriculture and Forestry in a Reduced Carbon Economy
• USDA Forest Service - Woody Biomass Utilization Desk Guide
• Southern Forest Research Partnership, Inc. - Sustainable Forestry for Bioenergy and Bio-based Products Training Curriculum Notebook
• California Forest Foundation - Protecting Communities and Saving Forests

Fred Deneke of 25x'25 just sent me a treasure trove of information about Woody Biomass amassed by the National Association of Conservation Districts (NACD).

Conservation Districts were born out of necessity in the 1930s Dust Bowl when America's topsoil rapidly eroded. They are local units of government established under state law to carry out natural resource management programs at the local level.

NACD is the nonprofit organization that represents America’s 3,000 conservation districts and the 17,000 men and women who serve on their governing boards. It was founded in 1946 on the philosophy that conservation decisions should be made at the local level with technical and funding assistance from federal, state and local governments and the private sector.

The association's programs and activities aim to advance the resource conservation cause of local districts and the millions of cooperating landowners and land managers they serve.

The desk guide is intended to be used for public outreach in support of biomass industry planning and development. It includes educational content, handouts, introductory Powerpoint presentations, case studies, FAQs, and a glossary of terms.

Here is how the authors describe the guide...

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Woody Biomass Desk Guide and Toolkit

Communities today are challenged to develop effective strategies that support forest ecosystem health, mitigate the effects of climate change, satisfy growing energy needs, and provide local economic opportunities. For some communities, woody biomass may be a viable option for meeting these needs and deserves serious consideration. Forests in the United States represent an important potential energy and biobased product resource.

NACD, in collaboration with federal, state, and local partners is working to raise awareness about the potential for woody biomass as a primary feedstock for such products.

This Woody Biomass Desk Guide and Toolkit provides an overview of woody biomass production and utilization in the U.S., tips of how to provide effective outreach for your clientele, and educational handouts to share with your audiences. The purpose of this guide is to equip natural resource professionals and outreach specialists with the information and tools needed to increase awareness of the use of woody biomass for energy in the U.S.

Desk Guide and Toolkit Chapter Topics

Introduction and Table of Contents (1MB PDF)
Chapter 1 - Setting the Stage (836KB PDF)
Chapter 2 - What is Biomass? (2.5MB PDF)
Chapter 3 - Products and Possibilities (1.7MB PDF)
Chapter 4 - Implications of Producing and Using Woody Biomass (1.5MB PDF)
Chapter 5 - Incentives to Produce and Use Woody Biomass (1.3MB PDF)
Chapter 6 - Do-It-Yourself Supply Curve: Tools to Help You Get Involved in an Entrepreneurial Biomass Project (13.8MB PDF)
Chapter 7 - Outreach and Education (492KB PDF)
Chapter 8 - Case Studies (2.15MB PDF)

Handouts
In addition to the reference sections, most of the chapters also contain handouts. These outline important points, strategies, and information that may be useful for landowners, the public, local leaders, or other audiences.

Handout 1 - Electricity Production: Comparing Wood and Fossil Fuel Feedstocks (2MB PDF)
Handout 2 - Woody Biomass Basics (2.25MB PDF)
Handout 3 - Agricultural Biomass (1.5MB PDF)
Handout 4 - Implications of Using Woody Biomass for Energy and Other Products (1.15MB PDF)
Handout 5 - State and Local Policies and Incentives to Produce and Use Woody Biomass (1.5MB PDF)
Handout 6 - Financing a Bioenergy Project (1.15MB PDF)
Handout 7 - Common Concerns (1.15MB PDF)

NACD has two more Desk Guides in the works that will be out shortly. One will be on Community Wildfire Planning (Pre, During, & Post) and the third on Woody Disaster Debris Disposal.

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technorati biomass, agriculture, forestry, education

Evergreen no more?

"We must always consider the environment and people together, as though they are one, because the human need to use natural resources is fundamental to our continued presence on Earth."
- Jim Petersen, Editor, Evergreen Magazine 1989

So opens the Evergreen website, an online resource for archives of the the Evergreen magazine. Started in 1986, articles about forestry, biological diversity, forest health, and wildfires have graced the pages of this singular, often plaintive voice in the forest wilderness. An example...

"To see what will happen next in eastern Oregon, look at what is already happening in northern Arizona and New Mexico. Federal forests in both states have been devastated by catastrophic wildfire in recent years. But because there is no wood processing infrastructure left in the Southwest, neither state possesses the structural nor financial means to mediate their forest health problems. And until the Congress decides to stop paying environmental groups to sue the socks off the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, there is zero chance that new infrastructure investments will be made in the region, despite quite valiant Forest Service efforts to recruit wood processing businesses.

"Many environmentalists know this, and are worrying aloud on their own websites about the loss of credibility they are suffering as urban support for thinning in at risk forests tops 80% nationally. While we applaud their more conciliatory voices, environmentalists have no way of controlling their own radical fringes."

The magazine preceded the establishment Evergreen Foundation whose mission is to help advance public understanding and support for science-based forest policies and practices. I became aware of this publication and its editor, Jim Petersen, when I received a copy of a speech Jim gave to the Montana Loggers Association last week (available for download here). He introduced his speech with the same combination of chagrin and optimism that motivates me.

"So much is at stake and so few seem to get it – the “it” here being the fact that Montana’s timber industry is teetering on the brink of collapse at the precise same moment when it ought to be laying the cornerstone for its own bright future.

"I want to talk about the elephants in the room that no one else ever seems to want to talk about. This being the case, I decided on the following title: “When you are up to your armpits in elephants, it is difficult to remember that your original job was to drain the swamp."

"And no mistake, we are all mired in a swamp. And we are up to our armpits in elephants. But I think I finally see a way out of the muck and mire that has been sucking us into the abyss for so many years. And the way out – the route to a better future – is biomass. So I am going to talk about biomass too.

Jim lists 22 different elephants. Here are a few of the most interesting:

"Elephant No. 1 is the one that perennially irritates me the most: Congress. It’s bad enough that Congress continues to twiddle its thumbs while the West burns to the ground. Worse though is the current debate over whether to include federal biomass in renewable energy legislation that is slowly making its way through Congress. If you wonder where this insanity begins, I’ll tell you. It begins with an unholy alliance between Elephant No. 2, several large pulp and paper producers, and Elephant No.3, the Natural Resources Defense Council. Elephant No.3 doesn’t want federal biomass to be included in the energy standard because it fears resurgence in the timber industry that it loves to hate. Elephant No. 2, the pulp and paper producers, are in league with Elephant No. 3 because they fear that including federal biomass in the legislation will drive up the price of fiber.

"I’ve got news for Elephant No. 2. Your problem is far more serious than whatever competitive headwinds you may face if federal biomass is included in federal renewable energy legislation. Your problem is that you aren’t competitive on the global pulp and paper stage. You are being eaten alive by Scandinavian companies that are investing billions of dollars in South America, where land, labor and regulatory costs are a fraction of what they are in the U.S.; where pulp mills actually sit in the middle of plantations, not 40 or 50 miles away from them, and where trees reach pulp-size maturity in 5-7 years.

"Imagine my horror on learning that some of the biggest publicly traded forest products companies in the country were working furiously behind the scenes to sabotage the Bush Administration’s Healthy Forests Restoration Act. Why? Because they saw the thinnings that forest restoration would yield as competition for their own wood – and their fiduciary responsibility is to their shareholders, not the nation’s dead and dying federal forests. It’s the same in pulp and paper. These companies – all of them publicly traded – have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, not to you, not to me and not to the economic or social well being of our country. Those fiduciary responsibilities, those trust obligations, reside in our elected officials."

"Some people believe this new elephant – he is Elephant No. 6 – is a good for nothing slacker and doesn’t care if he ever brings us any wood. But I think they are wrong. I think Elephant No. 6 – we’ll call him Woody for lack of a better name – I think this new elephant whose last name is Biomass would like to show us what he can do, if only the Congress will let him.

"It is long past time for the Congress to give Woody Biomass, No. 6 in our string of elephants, the legitimate chance he needs to show us what he can do in our dead and dying federal forests. Let’s stop fiddling around on 10 or 20 or 100-acre show-and-tell plots; let’s put Woody to work on tracts of federal forestland that are large enough to make a difference both ecologically and economically.

"Some of you have heard me say that I think it is time for our nation to return its national forests to Indian tribes from whom we stole them more in the 1800s. I still believe this, but I don’t think it will happen in the near term, if ever. Nor do I believe that the Forest Service is to blame for our current state of affairs. The Forest Service is a public agency – albeit one that has wandered far from its original mission. Today, it serves at the behest of political parties and special interest groups that have vastly different visions for the future of our nation’s publicly-owned forests.

"My cynicism aside, the climate change debate gives us an unprecedented opportunity to argue the case for managing our federal forests in ways that increase their carbon storage capacity, no matter its source, no matter the guilty party, no matter the amount.

"I want to have this debate with every environmentalist in the country, because if we are really serious about replacing air polluting fossil fuels with lesser polluting renewable fuels, including solar, wind and woody biomass, and if we are serious about reducing CO2 levels in our atmosphere, we simply cannot ignore this next elephant that is standing quietly in our midst, waiting to be recognized. He is Elephant No. 13, and he possesses the miraculous ability to transform carbon dioxide into wood fiber through a process called photosynthesis – a process that powers itself with the free, non-polluting energy of the sun. He can thus increase the carbon storage capacity of our federal forests.

"Yet despite his miraculous powers, our Photosynthesis Elephant will need our help, and he will need the help of No. 6, our new Forest Service elephant. Working as a team, which is what elephants do best, they can design perpetual thinning and stand tending programs capable of increasing the carbon storage capacity of our federal forests while, at the same time, decreasing the billions of tons of pollutants that wildfires spew into our earth’s atmosphere every year.

"I emphasize the word “perpetual” because we cannot thin our forests once and expect that they will magically hold themselves in perfect balance until the end of time. They won’t – because there is no steady state in nature. Chaos is constant, and everywhere. But we can limit nature’s wild swings by dedicating ourselves to the constant task of forest stewardship – the thinning and stand tending work that we must do if our forests are to provide the long list of things that we Americans want and need."

I highly recommend reading the Spring 2006 issue of Evergreen with the feature article written by Dave Skinner titled "Ring of FIre." It is difficult to read about the demise of forest product mills at the same time that the forests are so unhealthy. Even worse is the realization that this article was written a full two years before the current economic collapse - which imperils the future of all the mills that remain.

What will become of the forests? What impact there be on the communities that have been stewards of our forests? What will be the climate change consequences of this demise?

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technorati biomass, forestry

25x'25: Agriculture and Forestry in a Reduced Carbon Economy

The 25x'25 Alliance held their National Summit March 31-April 2 in Arlington, VA. The theme this year was "Agriculture and Forestry in a Reduced Carbon Economy" which is significant because of the relatively equal footing given to forestry in an organization that has, up to this point, reflect a more agricultural emphasis. Last year the organization's National Steering Committee chartered a special Carbon Work Group to analyze this issue, file a report, and make its recommendations.

To date, a carbon “primer” has been developed by the 25x'25 Carbon Work Group and circulated in draft form among its agricultural and forestry partners and renewable energy stakeholders. That input was incorporated into a carbon discussion guide, an evolving collection of recommendations regarding climate change policy, its implementation, and what must happen for the agriculture and forestry sectors to deliver maximum greenhouse gas emissions reductions.

Here is a link to the draft version of Agriculture and Forestry in a Reduced Carbon Economy: Solutions from the Land There is a shorter Executive Summary that facilitates accessing the longer document which was completed just in time for the Summit to encourage distribution and comments of the draft.

The Work Group facilitators ask that you please send your comments to Jeffrey Frost and Ernie Shea.

The Work Group has also developed a Question and Answer guide to support information education outreach work with interested stakeholders and has also consolidated a list of key documents and resources.
Click here to see a new video about Agriculture and Forestry in a Reduced Carbon Economy.

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technorati biomass, agriculture, forestry

A New Social Contract for Forestry

Here is an article that I didn't write but it offers an approach to solving the communications problem that currently stymies the deployment of forest management programs. I have written several articles about the sad state of affairs of the environmental litigation process in this blog. If you wish to participate in a dialog on this subject or contact the author, David Atkins, then visit this Timber Buy/Sell article.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are those of an individual and do not necessarily reflect the policies or opinions of his employer.

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A New Social Contract for Forestry –
Climate Change, Energy Independence a Path to a Sustainable World

Forestry has been in the cross hairs of environmentalists for 40+ years in the United States. This “Forty Year Civil War” has revolved primarily around federal forest lands. In spite of this, I think forestry has a very bright future, provided we complete a new social contract.

This “civil war” originated in the 1960s when the controversies around clearcutting and terracing on the Monongahela and Bitterroot National Forests exploded onto the national political scene. The old social contract that came out of the Progressive Era of Teddy Roosevelt has been rejected. At that time, the “experts” were given the authority to implement land management decisions on behalf of society. This model of top down decision-making crossed a broad spectrum of society, from health care to education.

The environmental protection laws passed in the early to mid-1970s, such as the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Forest Management Act, attempted to define a more responsive decision-making process by inviting the public to give input before the experts made their decisions. However, the laws still held the experts solely responsible for making Solomon-like judgments on behalf of society at large.

Unfortunately, what we now have is a system for fighting decisions, through appeals and litigation, but not for resolving the disputes by finding common ground resulting in an acceptable decision to implement. The system is a ‘winner takes all’ approach wherein courts are asked to decide who is “right” and who is “wrong.”

The reality is a whole array of approaches to managing forests exist, not just a binary choice of right vs. wrong. For any particular living, dynamic forest ecosystem, there are an ever-evolving set of choices to be made between a multitude of resource considerations and societal values.

It is clear from the current litigation-stalled processes that citizens are not content to simply share their opinions. Rather, they want to BE the decision-making body, in consultation with the experts. This requires a new social contract for both the decision-making and disputes-resolution processes regarding public land management decisions in the U.S.

Over the past fifteen years a new boot-strapped social contract of “collaborative decisions” has grown in various parts of the country at the grass roots, community level. The inability to implement actions on the ground motivated people in a few places to re-examine the old battle lines. They achieved agreements by focusing on common ground. This new system is based on sustainable management; the requirement to blend environmental, economic and social needs and desires, now and in the long-term.

This new approach is hampered by the existing decision-making and litigious disputes-resolution process. Small minorities can over-ride the work of the community collaborative effort; the process can be dragged out for years and then end up in court for additional years. This is a powerful disincentive for open collaborative behavior.

I am bullish on Forestry’s future for two reasons: 1) the repeated examples of successful collaboration demonstrate this process can work; 2) there to two national/international issues, Energy Independence and Climate Change, that will greatly benefit from proactive, collaborative forestry practices. In a carbon constrained world and as a country that is a net importer of oil and gas, environmentalists and forest managers have a huge opportunity for discovering common ground. Forests as natural solar collectors with wooden batteries and their ability to capture and store carbon are an important contributor to a new sustainable world. Wood can conserve energy by substituting it for energy intensive materials like steel, concrete and aluminum. Wood can provide thermal energy, electricity and liquid fuels that can be carbon neutral. The solid wood can sequester C for decades to centuries. The need for collective, collaborative, adaptive management timely decision-making and disputes resolving processes has never been more critical or urgent.

This new social contract needs to be based on the following principles:
• power between the parties needs to be fair and equitable involving appointed and elected representatives of all interested parties;
• dispute-resolution needs to be timely and relatively low cost involving mediation rather than litigation;
• it needs to re-enforce collaborative behaviors and discourage confrontational behaviors by disincentivizing litigation;
• Sustainability - balancing social, environmental and economic desires, needs to be foundational

Such a contract assures all the participants that their perspective is legitimate; it eliminates the binary choice of right vs. wrong, it is timely and protects people’s right to challenge decisions.

I suggest we need legislation that captures the tremendous lessons learned from the boot-strapped grassroots processes that have grown out of many locations around the country, codify them in a system that provides access equity, timeliness, and representation in the decisions, and apply this system throughout the nation. We need to move past the old divisions and rancor, and recognize that the need to address climate change and energy independence requires a new social contract that provides structure for a new time.

For an expanded discussion, click here.

David C. Atkins
Forester and Forest Ecologist
Missoula, Montana
February 22, 2009

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technorati <biomass, agriculture, forestry

Analysis of Woody Biomass Case Studies

After every thinning operation of forest management (see the before/after picture above) there is an accumulation of woody biomass (see below).
Woody biomass is the lowest-value material removed from the forest, usually logging slash, small-diameter trees, tops, limbs, or trees that can not be sold as timber. However, in the emerging renewable energy paradigm shift, this biomass has suddenly acquired added value as a potential feedstock for conversion to biofuels and biopower. So there is a pull of demand for this feedstock that did not exist before. Couple that with the push to reduce the impacts of global warming, accumulations of woody biomass in the forests are seen as a two-prong threat. First, they dry out to become combustible fuelwood to spark wildfires and second, as they rot they emit greenhouse gases.

So the collection, impacts, and the logistics involved in removal of these piles is a new subject of research and debate. Numerous case studies have been collected that examine the impacts of woody biomass on forest fires (both left standing in the forest and left piled after forest management).

I reported on the case studies accumulated and referenced online by the Joint Fire Science Program. A new report has been issued by the Forest Guild titled
Synthesis of Knowledge from Woody Biomass Removal Case Studies that provides an analysis of the case studies focusing on seven main themes that emerged from collecting and comparing them: objectives, collaboration, ecology, fire, economics, implementation, and regional differences.

Its final conclusions are that all aspects of biomass removals from forests are evolving - expanding markets, harvest technology, restoration of fire-adapted eco-systems, collaborative partnerships, contractor experience, and guidelines for best management practices. Funding challenges for science and implementation of new forest management remain. However -

"Rising oil prices, carbon concerns, wildfire hazard reduction requirements, and interest in renewable fuels may help expand markets and thereby expand the number of forests where biomass removals are profitable."

Profits are important, in the absence of other sources of funding, to make evolution of woody biomass management environmentally as well as economically sustainable.

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technorati biomass, forestry

Woody Biomass Removal Case Studies

Here are a series of publicly accessible case studies that point to the conscientious work being performed and meticulously documented by forest managers and academia "so that managers, land- owners, business entrepreneurs, communities, and industry partners can easily access information to help them remove and utilize woody biomass from forests in an efficient and ecologically responsible manner."

Who is the Forest Guild?

We are a professional organization of forest stewards and affiliates who are passionate about sustaining and restoring the integrity of our forests while meeting the needs of the communities that rely on them. Our members’ work provides tangible examples of “excellent forestry”—forestry that is ecologically, economically, and socially responsible.

Anyone can access the fruits of this study by simply inserting a search keyword (a species of animal, for instance) or by choosing from multiple options for each of several fields of information (see screen shot below).

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Woody Biomass Removal Case Studies
Lessons Learned and Strategies for Success

Forest managers remove woody biomass from forests for many reasons, including: reducing hazardous fuels, increasing fire safety in the wildland-urban interface, restoring ecosystems, improving wildlife habitat, conducting forest stand improvement, and providing products from poles to pellets. Managers across the country on public, tribal, conservation, and private lands have utilized a wide variety of strategies for removing biomass. To help share these strategies, the Joint Fire Sciences Program initiated two coordinated analyses of themes, strategies, and lessons learned from an examination of over 40 biomass removal case studies.

Two research teams, one led by the Forest Guild and another by the University of Minnesota, have collected and analyzed the case studies presented here so that managers, land- owners, business entrepreneurs, communities, and industry partners can easily access information to help them remove and utilize woody biomass from forests in an efficient and ecologically responsible manner.

• Search the case studies
• Case studies index
• Project summary – University of Minnesota
• Project summary – Forest Guild
• Links to woody biomass resources and information

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technorati biomass, forestry

The Forest Service and Climate Change

The Forest Service has put together a 12 minute video titled The Forest Service and Climate Change that encapsulates some of the mounting concern for the impact of global warming on the health of our forests, the ability of forests to counteract its progress, and how the Forest Service plans to deal with it.
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technorati biomass, forestry

Authority returned to the Forest Service

I am convinced that one of the hardest jobs in the government is to work in the USDA Forest Service. It is not that it is dangerous work... it's that it must be so frustrating.

Here is an organization entrusted with a gargantuan challenge, with what should be a more than adequate budget, and more responsibility than should be expected of any governmental agency - safeguarding the health of one of our biggest assets, our federal forests. The job should be the most fulfilling in government - "gardeners" of our rich forest legacy and its wildlife. The people I've met are dedicated and top-notch - steeped in decades of education and experience studying the fine machinations of our forest ecology.

So why is it so frustrating? It is because the management lacks any real authority. They cannot control their own much less our forests' destiny.

What is ironic is that the people that challenge them the most - the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that frequently take them to court - insist on turning more private lands into their care. Do they receive commensurate budgetary increases to manage the additional lands? No. Are the forests going to be taken care of better by a federal bureaucracy than by private timberland owners - no. Why? Well, the private owners had authority to tend to their assets. The Forest Service has very little control over these same lands. It must be great sport taking the FS to court but it certainly isn't resulting in healthier forests based on better science.

Which is why it is heartening to see the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals come out and unanimously overrule a decision that judges should not be making scientific decisions in lieu of Forest Service expertise. The August 2008 issue of the Society of American Forestry (SAF) reports on this encouraging turnaround.

Incredibly, many court challenges barring forest management projects are based on the specious argument that the Forest Service violates the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) because it doesn't "adequately address all of the uncertainties in its proposed treatments." The lower courts often take the view that "the public interest in preserving nature and avoiding irreparable environmental injury outweighs economic concerns." In short, neither money nor time matters if there is any possibility that their actions might be detrimental to some special concern or another. The appeals court's ruling counters that this policy gives the lower court too much authority over scientific matters outside its jurisdiction.

In its July 2 ruling on Lands Council v. McNair (or Lands Council I) the panel wrote that, “In essence, Lands Council asks this court to act as a panel of scientists that instructs the Forest Service how to validate its hypotheses regarding wildlife viability, chooses among scientific studies in determining whether the Forest Service has complied with the underlying Forest Plan, and orders the agency to explain every possible scientific uncertainty. As we will explain, this is not a proper role for a federal appellate court.”"

Such a ruling couldn't come too soon. As explained elsewhere in this blog, our forests suffer from too little forest management stalled interminably by litigation - particularly in view of the unnatural conditions of smoke and greenhouse gas emissions from wildfires which continue to distort the historic profile of our forests.

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Ninth Circuit: Improper for Judges to Act as Scientists
11-Judge Panel Says Courts Must Defer to Agency Expertise

In a landmark case, an 11-judge panel of the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit unanimously ruled last month that courts must defer to US Forest Service expertise when it cannot be shown that the agency acted in scientific uncertainty in complying with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and that the agency could choose the scientific methods it uses in meeting the requirements of the National Forest Management Act (NFMA).

Undersecretary of Agriculture Mark Rey praised the decision.

“We think this is a fairly significant decision—maybe the most significant Forest Service environmental case of the past two decades,” he said. “The panel was reacting to the Ninth Circuit getting deeper and deeper into a posture of second-guessing agency expertise or its use of expert scientific information. In several instances, the panel reversed what they believed was a drift in Ninth Circuit jurisprudence away from the standards of review used by other circuits.”

Rey added that the panel said that it was not necessary for the Forest Service to prove its methods to a level of scientific certainty.

“The panel said that wildlife viability is not the only consideration that the agency has to take into account and that we are not required to use on-the-ground analysis in all cases,” Rey said. “They said that it is not the court’s role to conduct an assessment of the methodology the Forest Service uses, that the Forest Service has discretion to determine what scientific studies are important, and that we’re not required to address every possible uncertainty in our decisionmaking.”

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technorati biomass, agriculture, forestry

California's Target for Forest Carbon Reduction

The California Air Resources Board is responsible for implementing the state's AB32 Global Warming Solutions Act. It's first step is to provide a Climate Change Draft Scoping Plan that outlines the reduction goals for achieving a reduction in statewide greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

One of the goals is the reduction of 5 million tons/year of CO2 from forests using sustainable management practices. It is no secret that California can profit from better management of both its private and public forest lands. But as documented in studies from the California Forest Foundation, wildfires in America are at an all-time high and trending higher. Unless aggressive changes take place, like implementing forest management programs funded by the federal 2003 Healthy Forest Restoration Act, greenhouse gases may well outpace the reductions stipulated in the plan.

Here is the specific text in the Scoping Plan that stipulate the Sustainable Forest portion.

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Sustainable Forests

Preserve forest sequestration and encourage the use of forest biomass for sustainable energy generation.

The 2020 target for California’s forest lands is to achieve a 5 MMTCO2E reduction through sustainable management practices, including reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfire, and the avoidance or mitigation of land-use changes that reduce carbon storage. California’s Board of Forestry and Fire Protection has the regulatory authority to implement the Forest Practice Act to provide for sustainable management practices and, at a minimum, to maintain current carbon sequestration levels. The federal government must do the same for lands under its jurisdiction in California. California forests are now a net carbon sink. The 2020 target would provide a mechanism to help ensure that this carbon stock is not diminished over time. The 5 MMTCO2E emission reduction target is set equal to the current estimate of the net emission reduction from California forests. As technical data improve, the target can be recalibrated to reflect new information.

California’s forests will play an even greater role in reducing carbon emissions for the 2050 greenhouse gas reduction goals. Forests are unique in that planting trees today will maximize their sequestration capacity in 20 to 50 years. As a result, near-term investments in activities such as planting trees will help us reach our 2020 target, but will play a greater role in reaching our 2050 goals.

Monitoring carbon sequestered on forest lands will be necessary to implement the target. The Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, working with the Resources Agency, the Air Resources Board, and the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection would be tasked with developing a monitoring program, improving greenhouse gas inventories, and determining what actions are needed to meet the 2020 target for the Forest sector. Future climate impacts will exacerbate existing wildfire and pest problems in the Forest sector. These problems will create new uncertainties in reducing emissions and maintaining sequestration levels over the long-term requiring more creative strategies for adapting to these changes. In the short term, focusing on sustainable management practices and land-use issues is a practical approach for moving forward.

Future land use decisions will play a role in reaching our greenhouse gas emission reduction goals for all sectors. Loss of forest land to development increases greenhouse gas emissions because less carbon is sequestered. Avoiding or mitigating such conversions will support efforts to meet the 2020 goal. When significant changes occur, the California Environmental Quality Act is a mechanism providing for assessment and mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions.

Biomass fuels will also play a role in the expansion of renewable energy sources but will be accounted for in the Energy sector. Similarly, no reductions are yet attributed to future fuels management strategies, but that accounting will be done following implementation. Public investments to purchase and preserve forests and woodlands would also provide reductions that will be accounted for as projects are funded. Urban forest projects can provide the dual benefit of carbon sequestration and shading to reduce air conditioning load. The Forest sector is already a source of voluntary reductions that would not otherwise occur. ARB has already adopted a methodology to quantify reductions from forest projects, and will be considering additional quantification methodologies later this year. Table 11 summarizes the emission reductions from the forest measure.




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technorati BIOblog, BIOstock, biomass, agriculture, forestry

Sustainable Forestry for Bioenergy and Bio-based Products

To many preservationists the term "Sustainable Forestry" is an oxymoron. To them all management of forests is unnatural, and therefore unsustainable. I have two questions for them:

1 - If your garden was infested with bugs, suffering from lack of soil nutrients, invaded by weeds, recently burned, or eroding from water damage, would you intervene by managing it? If yes, then why should forests be treated differently?
2 - Hasn't civilization already changed the character of our natural forests to a point from which they will never return to a "natural" state?

Even the experts of the USDA Forest Service would agree with the second question. Some of the problems that are plaguing our public forest lands are the result of aggressive fire suppression of the mid-1900's that were initiated in response to massive fires of the period. If we want to restore our forests, we need to return them to a profile more closely resembling the 1800's with care to make sure that the restored profile is more sustainable. But it will take management to get there, and management to sustain it in the face of growing population, climate change, and global competition for energy feedstocks.

Forest management is necessary. The expanded interface between wildlands and civilization (called "Wildland Urban Interface") is inevitable and the current high density (number of trees per acre) of undermanaged forests is changing their character. The consequence could be a spiral of forest wildfire and decay causing unprecedented greenhouse gas emissions, leading to more global warming, leading to more greenhouse gas emissions. The magnitude of the problem potential dwarfs emissions from other sources.

The forest industry is ready to lead the way to more sustainable forest management practices. The Southern Forest Research Partnership (SFRP) is a leader in research examining how the use of woody biomass can be expanded to aid the health of our forests while insuring that health is sustainable. SFRP research is available online with digital manuals and powerpoint presentations that can be used to train the public about environmentally sustainable bioenergy production systems.

I met up with Dr. Larry Biles, Interim Director of SFRP, at the 2008 Smallwood conference in Madison, WI who had barely enough time during his presentation to outline the wealth of SFRP information available online. Their 300-page training manual is located the Forest Bioenergy website (under Training Tools). They also have a forest encyclopedia (actually a series of several encyclopedias that focus on specific topics) and he highly recommended both the Forest and Range and Interface South websites that provide useful information for practitioners of forest management.

He gave me a CD of the training materials and I found them to be extremely well written and up-to-date (having been published in September, 2007). They really do "span the gap between knowledge and application."

Of particular interest to me was Module 7: Environmentally Sustainable Bioenergy Production Systems:

This module provides an overview of adaptive forest management along with international agreements and various certification systems. It covers issues related to forest soils, water quality, and biodiversity conservation. Specific issues include soil compaction, streamside management zones, and the management of dead wood.

The final part of this module deals with designing low impact operations. Using tools and information presented previously, the readers learn how to plan a low-impact operation. A summary of the concept of best management practices and links are provided to each state’s specific BMP program. You will learn about the proper application of these practices to conserve and protect the environmental sustainability of the forest while maintaining biomass and timber productivity.

The SFRP and supporting organizations have provided a tremendous service collecting this information and providing straightforward media for its distribution and presentation. The slides are a gold mine for presenters who wish to engage stakeholders in decisions affecting the management of forests.

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technorati BIOstock, biomass, forestry

Engaging Forest Stakeholders through Stewardship Contracting

We have seen too many examples of mainstream media spinning and twisting the discourse between science research, environmental concern, and public opinion. I recently attended a workshop that showed a constructive approach that is taking root in the forests of the Pacific Northwest.

Back in early March I organized two side events at the Washington International Renewable Energy Conference (WIREC) on "Bioenergy and Communications." The humble objective of these panels was to address the challenge of communicating bioenergy information to the public and engaging stakeholders the colossal energy and environmental paradigm shifts that are predicted to occur over the next few decades. The panelists were terrific but the central question remained largely unanswered:

What new ways might exist to engage stakeholders in the constructive development of economically sustainable solutions to environmentally sustainable challenges?

The federal Stewardship Contracting program is a good example of one innovative approach. It is providing a constructive means for bringing diverse stakeholders together to plan and finance forest restoration programs while rebuilding the economic infrastructure of local communities.

Last week the first of four traveling workshops titled Biomass Utilization and Stewardship Contracting was held in Auburn, California. It was hosted by the Sierra Business Council and sponsored by Resource Innovations of the University of Oregon, UC / Berkeley Cooperative Extension, USDA Forest Service (Region 5), the Sierra Nevada Conservancy, and Placer County (site of the recent Angora Fire in Lake Tahoe).

During these two days of presentations attendees witnessed the testimonies of Forest Service managers, community leaders, environmentalists, academicians, consultants, and fire fighters. These experts spoke knowledgeably about the challenges of forest restoration from their unique perspectives. Then examples were given of existing projects that were changing the environmental and economic landscapes of the forests they were designed to restore.

Four stewardship examples from the Pacific Northwest are amply documented in Redefining Stewardship: Public Lands and Rural Communities in the Pacific Northwest - a publication prepared by Ecotrust and Resource Innovations.

Besides meeting some terrific local leaders, what I learned was that patient community discourse is necessary in the formulation of sustainable projects. It is preferable to engage stakeholders up front rather than suffer the delays of reactive litigation to plans that have not been fully vetted by those most vested in the results of forest restoration - the local community.

Similar workshops will be held in Sonora (May 22-23), Bishop (May 28), and Chester (May 30).

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technorati BIOstock, biomass, forestry

Senator Wyden: Thinning Forests to Save Them

Well, at least someone in the Senate has it right. Thinning forests is not only "not all bad" but absolutely necessary if we hope to return forest to their historic condition - their condition prior to the relocation of native americans, the rampant logging, the counter-productive suppression of forest fires, obstructive environmentalist litigation, and real estate overdevelopment of wildlands. Without thinning, there will be insufficient funding of this important work which will help reduce forest fires, their greenhouse gas emissions, and their rapacious impact on wildlife habitats.

Below is a press release reporting on Senator Ron Wyden's (D-Oregon) explanation of the need for thinning legislation. On January 9, 2008, a story by Jeff Barnard appeared in on the AP news wire about Wyden's plans to introduce legislation in support of measures to expedite the deployment of national forest logging projects.

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Wyden Says Pacific Northwest Forests in Trouble, Thinning Will Help Increase Forest Health, Reduce Fires, Increase Jobs
Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Medford, Or -- Thinning the Pacific Northwest’s troubled federal forests will increase forest health, decrease the chances of catastrophic forest fires and create more timber industry jobs for Oregonians, Senator Ron Wyden said today.

“Thinning creates a healthier forest, a healthier economy and a healthier environment,” Wyden said during opening remarks at a roundtable discussion on how to improve federal forests in the Pacific Northwest. “Trees going up in smoke do nothing for the quality of our communities, our air or our families. As chair of the Public Lands and Forest Subcommittee, I am committed to finding a solution that protects our treasures while meeting our needs for healthy forests and providing timber for our mills.”

The roundtable discussion included representatives of federal forestry agencies, timber, recreation organizations, conservation groups and others. The roundtable in Medford and another earlier this week in Bend were are a follow up to a Public Lands and Forest Subcommittee hearing in Washington, D.C. last month.

“It’s outrageous, even by federal government standards, that over half of the Forest Service budget is spent on fighting fires while tens of millions of acres of choked, second growth forests go un-managed, waiting to burn,” said Wyden. “Government inaction, endless appeals, and poorly allocated resources have put communities, jobs and forests at risk like never before. If we are willing to work together toward bipartisan, sensible solutions, we can restore our forests, reduce the risk of catastrophic fire, protect old growth and ensure good, family-wage jobs for decades to come.”

Wyden noted that The Healthy Forests Restoration Act (HFRA) authorized up to $760 million in new money to complete hazardous fuel reduction work on 20 million acres of federal forest land, but that only 77,000 acres had been treated.

“At that rate, it would take the Bush Administration more than 250 years to complete the Act’s mandate,” Wyden said. “I, for one, am not willing to wait that long.

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technorati BIOblog, BIOstock, biomass, forestry

Logging trees to save forests from development

One of my favorite forest industry resource sites is the Smallwood Utilization Network operated by Craig Rawlings and Nora McDougall of Missoula, Montana. I find a timely piece of information whenever I read one of their monthly newsletters (you can subscribe for free here).

This month's nugget is an editorial published in the Seattle Times about the retrenchment of various conservancy groups who are suddenly realizing that the forest products industry is good for forests and is a bulwark against the plagues of bugs, fires, and real estate developers that are ruining these precious resources.

The author of the article is Brian J. Boyle was Washington's commissioner of public lands from 1981 to 1993 and is the leader of the Northwest Environmental Forum. The University of Washington's College of Forest Resources has brought together a broad spectrum of stakeholders to apply scientific and policy information to address critical environmental and natural resource management issues. Potential users will include resource and environmental agencies; energy, forest, agriculture, and real estate interests; and land conservancies, environmental groups, tribes, and NGOs.

Here is the text of his article in its entirety...

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Save Northwest forests for conifers, not condos
By Brian J. Boyle

The Nature Conservancy announced this past summer that it plans to log trees on 161,000 acres in the Adirondack forest in New York to preserve the forest. The conservancy says that the logging will help pay off the debt incurred buying the land from a private owner, pay taxes, supply logs to a local sawmill and protect "a unique jewel of nature from fragmentation and development."

In Washington, the Cascade Land Conservancy has acquired 140,000 acres of "working forests" with a similar goal — to prevent development. The land conservancy also has plans to log sustainably, in keeping with the idea that the forest "works" when it provides logs and jobs — and income for the conservancy to manage the forest.

One might ask, how did the conservationists become tree-cutters?

Twenty years ago, environmental activists chained themselves to trees to save them from cutting, and the forest industry was often branded a threat to the environment. Yet, today, sustainable logging may be the salvation, because in the words of one conservationist, it's a choice between conifers and condos.

When you fly over Western Washington and some areas east of the Cascades in the daylight, you see unbroken swaths of trees. A forest? you ask. But try flying over at night — in Eastern King, Snohomish, Okanagan or Lewis counties — and what you will see are lights, thousands of them, from houses on rural subdivisions split into one- to five-acre parcels. This isn't a forest, it's "rural residential." This forest doesn't have spotted owls or murrelets, and the dominant bird species may be the crow. Once-timbered slopes now have serpentine driveways leading up to rural mansions.

Working forests, on the other hand, include areas actively managed for timber and for environmental services, such as fresh water, wildlife habitat and climate protection. Washington's working forests include 8 million acres of private and tribal forests and more than 2 million acres of state forestland.

Protecting the forests from development has turned conservation leaders into working-forest proponents. They've teamed up with old enemies and other strange bedfellows to keep sustainable timber operations in business, and they're stopping forests from being converted to subdivisions the old-fashioned way, by buying the land.

The forest industry isn't the same one your grandparents knew. The so-called industrial forest is disappearing. Weyerhaeuser is the last big corporate owner in the Northwest and its future is uncertain. Other former industrial forests are now owned by pension funds and investors and valued as financial investments, not for their tree values, and are swapped from landowner to landowner to rebalance portfolios.

Family forest owners eke out a living while fending off pressures from neighbors who live in subdivisions that used to be forests. Any forest landowner may find it expedient to sell as Washington's urban areas grow and subdivisions are permitted. The money from a developer fattens a retirement portfolio faster than the money from trees that can't be harvested for 30 years. But, a forest thick with houses ceases being a working forest, a shelter for wildlife and a protector of streams.

Conservation groups, local land trusts, and timber industry, government and tribal representatives, at a series of dialogues convened as the Northwest Environmental Forum, agreed that to sustain the forest environment, they need to help keep the timber industry in business through incentives for landowners. Here is what this diverse group thinks the Legislature should do:

• Create conservation markets, by putting a price on fish-and-wildlife habitat and carbon capture, so landowners can realize profits from more than just timber;

• Help nonprofits and others acquire and trade easements and development rights to protect critical forest watersheds;

• Remove wood from overstocked and overstressed forests to reduce wildfire risks, protect wildlife habitat and save state forest-fire-suppression funds;

• Help investors produce bioenergy from wood cellulose;

• Provide tax incentives so developers permanently protect forestland in exchange for higher-density development elsewhere.

Many say the Puget Sound-area population will double by 2050. That's a lot of potential condos, unless we can find ways for the forests to be saved and to support this new image of the industry.

Copyright © 2008 The Seattle Times Company
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technorati BIOblog, BIOstock, biomass, agriculture, forestry

Forest Service and Sierra Club mark trees together

Maybe it's because of the wildfires, maybe the fear of global warming - whatever the reason, here is one example of a reconciliation taking place between two parties that are too often seen "at loggerheads" with each other.

The USDA/Forest Service at Black Butte Ranch in Oregon decided it was time to try a new tack in its attempt to create understanding between stakeholders in the environmental sustainability of forests. By inviting members of the local and environmental community (including the Sierra Club) the Forest Service succeeded in engaging stakeholders in the process of choosing which trees to save and which to harvest to enhance survival and the generation of new old growth forests.

Along similar lines, the American Forest and Paper Association (AF&PA) has just released a document titled Factors that Influence Successful Collaborations Between the Forest Products Industry and Environmental Organizations. It details a dozen geographically diverse projects from the U.S. and Canada. It offers eleven factors that appear to be crucial for the broadbase acceptance of any forest management projects.

There simply isn't time to waste on litigation anymore. Here are some excerpts on a story we need to see more examples of if we expect any headway in preserving the past for the future. Thanks to The Smallwood Utilization Network Forum for citing this and other relevant stories.

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Field trip helps forge trust among diverse interests
By Kate Ramsayer / The Bulletin
Published: November 16. 2007 5:00AM PST

The 20 or so people — from the U.S. Forest Service, timber industry, conservation groups and some who just live nearby — stood in the ponderosa pine forest next to Black Butte Ranch.

Armed with 11 different colors and patterns of marking tape, they set out with a goal — to flag which trees they would save, with the other ones left to be cut, if they were making the decisions.

One objective point of the Glaze restoration project is to thin trees and do other management treatments to generate new old-growth forests, possibly creating an example for other areas to follow in the process, said Maret Pajutee, district ecologist for the Sisters Ranger District.

But the goal for the day was to have people see how decisions are made about which trees to cut, learn from each other and share ideas, and perhaps build trust between the different groups and the Forest Service, she said.

And putting in time on the ground with different groups at the beginning of the process, she said, could help avoid time-consuming appeals and lawsuits at the end.

The Glaze restoration project was actually first pitched to the Sisters Ranger District by Cal Mukumoto, manager of Warm Springs Biomass, on the timber industry side, and Tim Lillebo, with the conservation group Oregon Wild. While the district originally had other priorities, once Mukumoto and Lillebo built some community support for the project and raised money, the agency got on board. Now, a draft environmental assessment of the project is expected early next year.

“That has never really happened to us before,” said Pajutee. “It’s really an exciting and unique thing that’s happened here.”

With some work that the Forest Service does, the agency has trust from the public, said Bill Anthony, Sisters District ranger. In other areas, however, like salvaging fire-killed trees, there’s a very low level of trust.

But the hope for projects like this, he said, is to move that trust and understanding along.

“What’s unique about this project is the partnership … with the restoration not only being the outcome, but working together, building trust, working through (issues) constructively instead of with litigation,” said Bill Anthony, Sisters District ranger.

The district wants to avoid situations like with the Metolius Basin forest management plan, where some groups collaborated with the agency, but an appeal was still filed against the project.

“By being open, upfront, by being out on the ground with the different interests, that’s how I think this is going to be a success,” Lillebo said. But there will still be concerns, he said, and times when people don’t agree about whether a tree should be cut.

“The goal was to have an example as a potential model,” he said. “Hopefully, we’ll have people say, ‘I can live with that.’”

But the overall goal, he said, is to generate old growth. Lillebo said he used to be totally against all cutting, a response to earlier Forest Service policies of cutting large areas of forests and growing them back just to cut them again as a sort of tree farm.

“People don’t trust what’s happened in the past, when the whole last 40, 50 years has mostly been cutting the big trees down,” he said.

But now, he said, the science is indicating that some forests are so different from their natural state that they need to be managed by people.

“Uh-oh, maybe we were wrong,” he said. “In a lot of cases, you can’t just leave it alone. Let’s protect the big trees, and come up with a system where you grow back this old growth.”

On Thursday, forestry consultant Darin Stringer explained the strategy that the Forest Service is considering to treat the Glaze project area, parts of which edge right up to houses at Black Butte Ranch.

The idea is to create a mosaic across the landscape, of clumps of trees that are of a specific age or size. While that may require taking out a lot of small trees in areas that already have old growth, it will also mean taking some of the medium-sized, commercial-value trees out of stands to let the remaining trees grow bigger.

To show people how this might be done on the ground, the project organizers hosted the tree-tagging experiment. The results won’t actually be used, but it was a way to let people see what goes into the process, Pajutee said.

“You have to look for a lot of things — health, lack of defects,” he said. “If you take this one down, it’ll give this one a better chance.”

Tim Clasen, who lives a few miles south of the area, had come to learn about the Glaze restoration project. He was using his yellow-and-black-striped tape to mark groups of trees, and looking for a good spot to put a clearing that would allow one tree to grow unhindered.

“I really like the idea that they’re trying to coordinate different groups,” he said.

John Morgan, resource manager with Ochoco Lumber Co., said he was tagging the trees with the healthiest, sharpest pointed crowns — the ones that have a better chance of growing big, which adds to the health of the forest but also provides good timber down the road.

If this project is done correctly, it could be a model for future projects, said Miller, who added that she has high hopes that it will be done correctly. She said she had lots of reservations when Lillebo first told her of it, and still has some concerns about things like riparian areas and cutting too much in certain areas.

But if it works, the Glaze restoration project would be something that she could hold up as an example of acceptable ways to do forest management, she said.

“I think it’s kind of exciting,” Miller said, “because you wouldn’t see this five years ago, the Sierra Club and the Forest Service in the forest marking trees.”

Kate Ramsayer can be reached at 617-7811 or kramsayer@bendbulletin.com.

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technorati BIOstock, biomass, forestry

Hurricane Katrina's greenhouse gas legacy

Hurricane Katrina's legacy is not just the flooding of New Orleans and the destruction of coastal Mississippi. It is also responsible for damaging five million acres of forests - an area the size of the state of Massachusetts. For comparison, the destructive power the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens wiped out 150,000 acres of forests (less than 4% of the forest destruction reach of Katrina).

In a front page article of the Los Angeles Times, Thomas Maugh II and Karen Kaplan reported on new research results by Tulane's Dr. Jeffrey Q. Chambers that has appeared in Science magazine. By using spectral analysis comparisons of before (2003) and after (2006) imagery of the region made by NASA's Landsat V satellite (click to enlarge image above), Chambers and his research team has made a number of alarming findings about the carbon footprint of this very destructive hurricane.

What is the greenhouse gas consequence of all that wasted biomass rotting and decaying?

Left in place without removal, the carbon of the trees will continue to decay for decades. Roughly 50% of the content of trees is carbon. The emissions from decay will contain methane and carbon dioxide. According to Dr. Chambers' analysis, 367 million tons of carbon dioxide will be emitted - which is about the same amount as is absorbed by all U.S. forests in a year. It is also a total that exceeds the combined emissions of national forest fires for an entire year.

What is the time frame for removal?

As it decays, the woody biomass becomes harder to access and harder to remove. Even with modern equipment, it is easier to assess, plan, and harvest standing trees than those lying on the ground at some progression of decay. Besides the remaining obstruction of hurricane-damaged logging roads in the area, foliage regrowth has already begun which makes logging access more difficult.

Should the drought conditions of the South persist, the dead biomass represents a significant fire threat which would add significant amounts of new greenhouse gas and particulate matter emissions to the atmosphere and further complicate restoration.

What will the new forests look like if left to natural regeneration?

According to the Times article, "Chambers and his colleagues said the deforested land, once covered with native species such as longleaf pine, oak and cypress, is being taken over by invasive species that are change the ecology of the area. One of the most prolific, the Chinese tallow, oozes a milky, toxic sap that creates an inhospitable environment for insects, birds and small animals."

How can we pay for forest restoration?

According to Dr. Thomas Bonnicksen of The Forest Foundation, the a privately financed restoration of the forests is straightforward. "Sell the logs to sawmills to be turned into wood products, and use the revenue generated to pay for removing the slash left behind and replanting the forest. Replant native trees in a patchy mosaic so the forest develops naturally. This includes leaving enough snags and logs for wildlife habitat, and returning a few years after planting to remove competing brush so trees grow quickly and are protected against future wildfires."

Who would administer the forest restoration program?

There is a federal committee called the Woody Biomass Utilization Group that includes forestry, energy, and wildlife experts from several departments of government - the Departments of Energy, Agriculture/Forest Service, and Interior. They also have a subgroup studying Disaster Debris that works with FEMA and Homeland Security in an effort to establish and coordinate federal remedial response to environmental disasters like Katrina, floods, tornadoes, and megafires throughout the country.

When asked what the biggest hurdle was to the implementation of harvesting and reforestation programs, Ron Vineyard of the Forest Service responded "infrastructure." By that he meant that there needs to be more sawmills, power plants, forest products companies, and biorefineries who can take possession of the woody biomass harvested from the disaster zones. The carbon would be sequestered in forest products like lumber, paper, and biochar while carbon-neutral bioproducts like ethanol, alcohols, chemicals, and bioplastics could be cleanly produced to reduce the use of carbon-positive petroleum byproducts.

Unfortunately, many of companies of the pre-existing infrastructure have been damaged from the hurricane, too, and the timberland owners of the region are likely to sell their lands to developers rather than pay to reforest their lost inventories. That will not make environmentalist groups happy who recognize the need to keep our forests large and healthy as carbon sinks to mitigate global warming.

Government action is needed now

There is no possible way that the federal agencies - who are already coping with fire-fighting, humanitarian rescue efforts, and capital restitution from each year's mounting ecological catastrophes - can pay for the scope of immediate remedial action needed. Political leadership and coordination with utilities and private industry is required - and the nation will be stronger for it.

Now is the time for federal, state, and local governments to pass policies that reduce regulatory hurdles and create incentives to utilities and private industry to establish new infrastructure. Passage of bioenergy friendly amendments to the stagnating Energy and Farm Bills would be a very timely response demonstrating Congress' recognition of the long-term consequences of the problem while supporting green business and career opportunities for their constituencies.

Emerging technology companies can convert the woody biomass much more cleanly than their predecessors. This will create the economic means to address the gargantuan and urgent task of harvesting and replanting Katrina's catastrophic biomass legacy.

technorati BIOstock, biomass, agriculture, forestry

Watch 60 Minutes - Warming Climate Fuels Mega-fires

I recommend that my readers watch a story on CBS 60 Minutes this Sunday, October 21st. You can read it first at Expert: Warming Climate Fuels Mega-Fires - including my online comment. Like so many investigative stories on television, they create a significant amount of viewer outrage without offering solutions.

I am glad they are pointing out that "Seven of the 10 busiest fire seasons have been since 1999." What they don't point out is that 50% of the Forest Service budget has been allocated to fighting forest fires and obstructive litigation rather than deploying proven prevention measures.

Forests are now 4-10 times denser than their historic norm (when they were open enough for a horse to gallop through). Now dense underbrush and small diameter trees hamper walking and fire-fighting. That, coupled with warmer, dryer conditions, is what is causing these fires.

I witnessed a persuasive presentation at a workshop sponsored by UC/Berkeley and the USDA/Forest Service last month that thinning forests works. Through a series of photographs Ron Vineyard of the Eagle Lake Ranger District of the Lassen National Forest showed how the 2002 Cone Fire in Northern California extinguished itself within about 20 yards of its entry into the mechanically thinned zone. Their studies place the cost of suppressing a fire in an unthinned forest at $1,726/acre. The cost of mechanically thinning a forest with an underburn is approximately $204 per acre. An ounce of prevention is, indeed, worth a pound of cure.

With the benefits of thinning so obvious I asked him what the biggest hurdle was for the Forest Service. He said "Infrastructure." He explained that there wasn't sufficient private industry demand for the fuelwood to make publicly financed thinning operations economically sustainable.

Currently the forest products industry is not robust enough to fill the breach. But there is significant promise that new tech biorefineries will be able to cleanly convert woody biomass (fuelwood and underbrush) into cellulosic ethanol.

For now, I would like to see environmental groups restrain themselves from attacking Forest Service fire prevention programs they plan to deploy. If they care about global warming they should recognize that mega-fires now spew more greenhouse gas emissions per year than all the auto emissions of the U.S. combined.

I will be attending the Society of American Foresters National Convention in Portland, Oregon October 23-24 and presenting my speech Woody Biomass: Fuel for Wildfires or Feedstock for Bioenergy? October 25th at the Residual Wood Conference in Vancouver, BC.

technorati wildfires, BIOstock, biomass, forestry