_Last year, the UN Environment Assembly adopted its first ever resolution to conserve
and restore peatlands, the largest natural terrestrial carbon store on Earth.as by the world’s grasslands, wetlands, soils,
and oceans. These natural sinks, as they’re
known, remove carbon from the atmosphere
and lock it away, protecting us, if only in part,
when we fail to protect ourselves.
More than a decade ago, while working as
an intern for the National Park Service at a
small park in Hawaii, I got an eye-opening
lesson in just how generous nature’s curve
can be. Given the assignment to calculate
the park’s contribution to climate change, I
spent weeks dutifully pulling records about
electricity use in park buildings and gaso-
line burned in park trucks, about how much
methane we’d generated with our trash and
how many hydrofluorocarbons with our
refrigeration; I tried to calculate the fuel
burned to allow employees to fly to confer-
ences and the barge that delivered our sup-
plies from Honolulu to make its annual trip
to our remote location. But when I entered all
that information into a program that would
calculate our total carbon footprint, I was
shocked: It estimated that, poof!, the carbon
sequestration provided by the park’s forest
cover—the scrubby forest where the wild pigs
hid, the rich tropical greenery that covered
the floors and walls of our deep valleys—can-
celed out everything else we did. And by a
wide margin. Was our forest really so much
more important than our emissions?
No and yes. The fundamental predic-
ament of climate change is one of timing
and placement. Carbon in our atmosphere
has, because of its location, an outsize influ-
ence on the temperature of the planet and
the ecological chaos we’re experiencing as
a result. But it’s actually a tiny percentage of
the carbon that’s stored elsewhere on the
planet—infinitesimal compared with what’s
locked in the Earth’s crust and mantle and
deep ocean, yes, but also just a fraction of the
amount of carbon already stored in nature,
from forests and algae to peat bogs.
Carbon is said to move in two cycles:
There’s the slow one—the barely there, eon-
scale flux in the carbon stored in the depths
of the Earth and ocean—and the fast one, the
one that flows at a timescale measurable in
the lives of living things. (The two speeds are a
bit like the tortoise and the hare, if the hare is
running and the tortoise is a long-extinct and
forgotten species whose constituent atoms
are slowly leaving the world of the living for
that of geology.) When we burn fossil fuels,
we’re polluting our fast world with pieces of
the slower one and knocking it out of balance.
In the blink of a geological eye, we’re returning
to the atmosphere huge amounts of carbon
that it took nature unfathomable stretches of
time to pack safely away.
We know this behavior can’t continue.
Look at any model of the ways that we
might keep Earth from warming more than
2 degrees Celsius (the already dangerous
threshold that the Paris agreement was
crafted to keep us from crossing), and you
will see that there is no path to a stable cli-
mate that doesn’t include a dramatic reduc-
tion in our emissions. We can’t keep adding
slow carbon to our fast-moving crisis in the
living world. There is no confusion about
that fact among experts, and it’s the reason
we talk so much about emissions and the
imperative to reduce them.
But there are also important opportuni-
ties for change beyond just cutting our use
of fossil fuels. All these living things that take
in carbon dioxide and turn it into biomass
are protecting us through their very exis-
tence. When we destroy nature’s carbon
storage (should we clear-cut all that bio-
mass at Wind River, for instance), we can
turn it from a carbon sink into a source,
from an ally into yet more fuel for the fires
of our era. But what if we were able to help
deepen the sinks—to work with nature, to
lean into the curve, to help it help us out
of a mess of our own making? Nature, too,
is an amazing, complex, and remarkably
effective technology—our biggest and most
overlooked ally in the climate fight.↙
ONCE A YEAR, JIM LUTZ, A PROFESSOR OF
forest ecology at Utah State University, and
his students come to Wind River. Within anintricately mapped section of the old for-
est about the size of 50 football fields, they
visit every individual tree and snag and vine
over a centimeter in diameter—which is to
say, more than 37,000 of them—and record
what has died and what has grown, and by
how much. This kind of attention to detail is
hardly unique among studies at Wind River.
In 2010 it took Lutz and a team roughly
10,000 hours of measuring, tagging, and
detailed mapping of trees to set up the plot;
the annual forest census takes another 1,500
hours or so. When I ask Lutz what inspired so
much effort, he explains that he was pursu-
ing not just a discrete inquiry but “an abid-
ing objective” that would last as long as his
career did: a drive to understand the details
of how an old-growth forest actually works.
When and why do trees die? (“You’d think
people would have worked that out by now,”
he adds.) When and why do they gain or lose
carbon? How does their most basic biology
react as the world around them gets hotter
or drier? “You have questions that can’t be
answered except with a large number of trees
over a large number of years,” Lutz says.
Lutz also needed such a vast area to study
because he was interested in a relatively
rare resident of the forest; to get enough
examples of it for his studies to be mean-
ingful, he’d have to cover a lot of land. Lutz’s
elusive quarry? Thick, old trees like the big
Douglas fir that Bible so admired. These
days, old-growth forest is itself a rare find,
but even within it, the attrition of centuries
means that most trees aren’t actually that
old. As Lutz puts it, “to grow a big tree, you
need an old tree, which means a tree has
to survive”—not just logging but fires and
insects and diseases, and anything else that
could have come along during its long life
and killed it. Old-growth forest is naturally
a complicated mix of ages and sizes and
structures. But though truly big trees aren’t
the most common of the forest’s residents,
Lutz has learned that their role in its ability
to store carbon is as oversized as they are.
In a 2018 paper looking at 48 different
forest plots, including the one in Wind River,