It wasn’t long before researchers were
glad it had endured. Where once foresters
had worked to study how to most efficiently
remove wood from a landscape, a new gen-
eration of scientists began to study the effi-
ciency with which a forest, by creating wood,
could remove carbon from the air. They real-
ized that, after so many years of focus on
their young, experimental plots, they did not
yet fully understand the intricate workings
of a mature Northwestern forest.
Wind River’s old-growth area now hosts
the National Ecological Observatory Net-
work (NEON), which gathers data at 81 field
sites across the United States and makes it
available to anyone interested in tracking
how global change is affecting specific eco-
systems. On a bright but bitter November
morning, I hike with Bible and some NEON
employees to the tower that overlooks the
forest. (The tower was once part of a con-
struction crane used to hoist gondolas full of
scientists up to study the Wind River canopy,
but the crane’s boom was decommissioned
in 2011.) Researchers now use the tower
to measure, in exquisite detail, the carbon
cycle within Wind River’s old growth. Along
its length, the tower is outfitted with eight
levels of sensors and cameras, a cavity ring-
down spectrometer, and something called a
sun photometer, part of a gadget accurately
described to me as looking like a robotic arm
that’s going to “shoot down UFOs,” which
uses detailed measurements of radiation to
determine the nature and quantity of aero-
sols in the atmosphere. Inside a hut at the
bottom of the tower sits a stack of servers to
back up the reams of ecological data that are
constantly zipping off by satellite to NEON
headquarters in Colorado. From there, it’s
now possible to watch the way carbon diox-
ide flows differently at the forest floor and
the canopy, or to see it temporarily build up
in windless groves after trees have stopped
photosynthesizing for the night.
We like to imagine that climate change
will eventually be solved via grand mobi-
lizations of futuristic technology, and this
is surely an impressive one. But as Matt
Schroeder, NEON’s assistant director of
field science, tries to help me understand
the maze of wires and machinery, he con-
fesses himself to be more impressed by the
engineering wizardry that surrounds the
tower. There are scientists racing to invent
new technologies that pull carbon from the
air, but here, all around him, are billions of
needles and leaves that already do it, day
in and day out. Through the profound, irre-
placeable, utterly ordinary bit of magic that
is photosynthesis, trees build themselves
from almost nothing, transforming sun-
light, carbon dioxide, and water into mil-
lions of tons of biomass—approximately
half of which is pure carbon, locked safely
away from the atmosphere. And old trees,
by virtue of their age and size, can hold far
more carbon than anybody else.
“Our technology has to be protected in
this box,” says Schroeder, gesturing at the
hut where the tower’s cables and servers
and gas cylinders are kept. “Whereas thistechnology”—he stares up at the towering,
once-denigrated old trees and all the hun-
dreds of tons of carbon locked away in their
massive trunks—“just works, year-round.
It runs on solar power. It creates all of this
from thin air.”
Schroeder shakes his head, looking
freshly wonderstruck and not like he’d been
studying the trees for years. “We have no
technology that could do this. The DNA on
this landscape has done this.”↙
THE CLIMATE SCIENTIST KATE MARVEL
called the 2010s “the decade we knew
we were right”—the decade when long-
predicted calamities associated with a
changing climate began to manifest clearly
in our own real world, coming true “with a
terrifying rapidity that is no more reassur-
ing because it is easily understood.” From
the melting of the Arctic or the bleach-
ing of the Great Barrier Reef to fires and
floods and hurricanes and droughts and
buckling permafrost, this decade has been
both heartbreaking and ominous. We are
beginning to experience, faster than any
of us hoped we might, how much we have
depended on a stable climate, how much we
stand to lose now that we are destroying it.
Yet for all the terrifying speed with which
the consequences of climate change are now
making themselves known, it’s important to
remember that things could be much worse.
Last year, humans dumped roughly 40 bil-
lion tons of carbon dioxide equivalents into
the atmosphere, despite knowing that those
emissions will create even more warming
and planetary havoc. It was a fresh test of
our commitment to our survival and well-
being, and once again we failed, quite abys-
mally. Luckily for us, though, this is a test that,
simply because of where we live, is always
graded on a curve. Only something like half
of those 2019 emissions will stay in the atmo-
sphere and continue to make our predica-
ment worse. The rest are obligingly absorbed
by forests, like the one at Wind River, as wellChartgeistBYJon J. Eilenberg_Excess brush and timber in forests can be removed to prevent wildfires and then slow-baked in a low-
oxygen environment to create charcoal-like biochar. When buried, biochar can nourish parched agricultural
soil, promote food production, increase water efficiency, and hold carbon in the ground for centuries.HFCs from
refrigeration
Methane from
cowsHot air from
politiciansCO2 from
fossil fuels