_Research in Australia and China suggests that certain types of fungi can
be added to soil to enhance carbon sequestration by up to 17 percent.Mark Harmon, a forest ecologist at
Oregon State University who has been
researching carbon storage in forests
since the 1970s, tells me that he’s lately
been hearing more people use carbon
sequestration as a justification for doing
the opposite: cutting more trees, faster,
so you can plant a new generation more
quickly. The theory is that carbon is quickly
sequestered in plantations and then stored
in wood products, rather than wastefully
lost to decomposition in older, slow-grow-
ing forests. (Sound familiar?)
Harmon sees this as a fundamental—and
frustrating—misunderstanding of how car-
bon works in forests. Young trees take up car-
bon quickly, sure, but they’re starting from a
huge carbon deficit if a bunch of older trees
had to make way for them. The old-growth
section at Wind River holds up to 400,000
kilograms of carbon per hectare and is still
adding more. Cut the forest “and it becomes
a huge source for a long time,” Bible says.
It’s the total storage that matters, explains
Harmon: “That’s what the atmosphere per-
ceives.” It’s also an outcome for which we
can choose to manage our timberlands.
In the future, we’re likely to manage tree
plantations for carbon sequestration as well
as for wood products, Bible believes, and
that’s more likely to happen if we finally put
a price on carbon. To do otherwise would be
to turn our backs on an offer of help when
we need it most.
There’s still a lot we don’t know about
how the natural systems that sequester so
much of our carbon operate, or how they
will respond as the world changes around
them. Some of these changes may be sig-
nificant. More carbon dioxide in the atmo-
sphere, for example, means that some trees
may sequester carbon faster, but warming
also leads to problems like drought stress
and increased wildfire, which mean more
carbon escapes. When a strong El Niño hit
the Pacific Ocean in 2015, nature stored only
about 44 percent of that year’s human emis-
sions, compared with 66 percent during a
colder La Niña in 2011.
But we’re learning more all the time—
at Wind River and elsewhere—about how
nature absorbs carbon, how to allow it to
absorb more, and how meaningful that help
could be. One recent study suggested a suite
of land management changes—restoration
of degraded forests, wetlands, and grass-
lands; carbon-sensitive agriculture; better
management of timberlands—that if enacted
in the US could quickly offset a fifth of our
current emissions. Another found that, glob-
ally, natural climate solutions could provide
as much as 37 percent of the cost-effective
carbon mitigation necessary between now
and 2030 to keep warming from exceeding
2 degrees Celsius.
“We have to acknowledge,” says Harmon,
“that natural systems have the capacity to
repair things and to help us. We have to take
more advantage of them, not less.”↙
BEFORE WE LEAVE WIND RIVER, BIBLE
wants to show me another part of the exper-
imental forest. We turn our backs on the
giants and follow a slight path around a
small wetland and through a grove of alder
trees, arriving in a section of forest that has
been managed quite differently.
It feels as if I hadn’t quite seen the old
growth until we walk away from it. It isn’t
just that this other, much younger section
of forest has smaller trees; it also has much
less moss, much more light, a totally differ-
ent understory. Though only a few hundred
yards away, it feels unfamiliar, like a differ-
ent forest type altogether. It’s a cliché to say
that an old-growth grove feels like a cathe-
dral, but after leaving it, the younger for-
est makes me think of pictures I’ve seen of
bombed-out churches—sacred spaces sud-
denly opened to the world, unaccustomed
sunlight streaming vulgarly in. “When the
wind and dry come through here,” says
Bible, “it just cuts through like a comb.”
This young stand is home to many more
trees, per hectare, than the older one we’ve
just left, yet researchers have found that itholds less than a quarter of the carbon. “If we
were standing here 100 years ago”—before
the forest was removed—“it was exactly like
where we just were,” says Bible. “It’s going
to take a really long time to get back to that
stage.” But he hopes that the foresters of the
future will be able to help speed the process.
Munger and his contemporaries would
likely be surprised to learn that today’s for-
esters are preoccupied with finding ways to
promote the very features that they derided
in old growth—dead wood, trees of a vari-
ety of sizes and ages, decomposition, large
quantities of biomass just standing or lying
around—and seeking to re-create them even
in the young tree plantations that their pre-
decessors prized for not having those things.
New versions of the old spacing research are
showing that with targeted thinning and
management, you can create old-growth
features even in homogenous commercial
forests, allowing space for trees to grow to
huge sizes in the future. Outside of the old-
growth reserve, Bible says, much of the future
of experiments at Wind River lies in studying
ways to help forests maximize not profit but
carbon storage. Munger’s “decadent” forests
and murderous snags “were systematically
removed in the 20th century,” write Herring
and Greene. “Now they are being systemat-
ically returned in the 21st century.”
It has occurred to Lutz that his decision to
study old-growth forests may seem a bit odd:
Why bother to become an expert in a world
that is all but gone? But he likes to remind
people that the condition of our forests is a
choice, a decision that’s now more social than
natural. In the future we will have only the
natural places that we choose to have, only
the ones that we value enough to protect and
restore and nurture. One day, he says, if peo-
ple decide they want more of these big, old,
complicated forests in the world, “then I can
help.” And that forest, in turn, can help us.BROOKE JARVIS (@brookejarvis) lives
in Seattle. She’s working on a book about
insects. Her last story for WIRED, about
online harassment, was in issue 25.12