he found that the largest 1 percent of trees
contain fully half of all the above-ground
live biomass, which also means half of all
the carbon, since the two are directly cor-
related. Young trees sequester carbon faster,
packing it on in the vigorous growth of their
early years, but they can’t begin to com-
pete with what large trees have been able to
build into their trunks and branches through
years and years of maturation. “You can’t
sequester a lot of carbon without big trees,”
Lutz says. “You just can’t do it.”
This makes old trees—and even Mung-
er’s much-hated dead trees and logs, which
can take centuries to rot in the Northwest—
not useless but precious. While a single-age
stand would lose 1 percent of its carbon
storage if it lost 1 percent of its trees, big
trees are so important that a 1 percent loss
of individuals in an old forest could reduce
its carbon by half. And while old forests
eventually begin to reach an equilibrium,
at which they’re not adding a lot more car-
bon than they’re losing through death and
decomposition, researchers have found that
the old growth in Wind River is still seques-
tering new carbon each year, adding to the
huge amount it already stores. “Even just
putting a thin annual growth layer on such
a big cylinder is a huge deal,” explains Ben
Vierra, who manages NEON’s research in
the Pacific Northwest. Bible, deep in the
grove, says: “This forest is still putting on
forest. Quite a bit actually—it could give a
young forest a run for its money.”
There has recently been much discussion
of tackling climate change by planting lots
and lots of trees, something that Lutz is all
for—it’s still carbon, after all. But he’s cau-
tious about how much can really be stored
by a lot of willy-nilly new planting, especially
if those trees are planted in conditions that
will not allow them to thrive and grow old.
Methods for optimizing nature’s ability
to store carbon are known as natural cli-
mate solutions. The word natural, it turns
out, is as key as the word solutions—these
are strategies that have a lot of potential,
but that also work in complex ways that
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