Here’s a bad idea: Gas from trees

Already, Weyerhaeuser and Chevron have joined forces to develop “treecell technology” to manufacture cellulosic ethanol. As you read this, ethanol factories are popping up across the United States like gaping mouths hungry for a constant supply of forest. And, conveniently, just when industry develops the technology to exploit even the smallest tree for profit, the Forest Service announces that “more than half of Oregon’s 29.7 million acres of forest lands” are overgrown and in need of “thinning” to keep down fire risk. What a coincidence!

While science suggests that densely planted tree farms and some fire suppressed forests in the Southwest are likely to burn hotter than natural forests, the fire suppression argument is of little relevance to Oregon’s healthy native stands. Historically, much of Oregon’s forests have gone centuries between rejuvenating wildfires. Industrial fire suppression has been around for only about 50 years — leaving these forests well within their natural fire cycle and in no need of “fixing.”
Of course this hasn’t stopped Desmond’s Biomass Study Group from eyeing our rainforests as feed stocks.

The truth is, thinning can’t even reduce the risk of severe fire, as demonstrated by ecologist George Wuerthner’s observations of 2002’s Biscuit fire: “Many of the low-density, widely spaced Jeffrey pine growing on serpentine burned up even though their natural stand density is much lower than what you are left with under even aggressive thinning.” When drought, high temperatures, low humidity and wind combine — which we’re seeing more of with climate change — a fire’s going to burn, no matter how many stumps are in its way.

What’s more is that science, such as Pacific River Council’s “Watershed Impacts of Forest Treatments to Control Wildfire,” demonstrates that thinning (or any form of logging, really) can worsen the risk of fire by increasing sunlight, which dries fuels, and by allowing more wind to enter a stand, which hastens the spread of fire.

And the ecological impacts of thinning? What Desmond flippantly calls “excess biomass” belongs in the forest as a source of future soil nutrients. And despite the benign-sounding name, thinning still creates much the same carnage as clear-cutting: landscape-wide tree removal; erosion and siltation of waterways from road construction and use; and soil compaction from heavy machinery.

Even if the overwhelming evidence — and common sense — doesn’t convince Desmond that thinning in native forests is a bad idea, does he honestly think that cellulosic ethanol’s microscopic contribution could somehow extend our consumptive driving habits any more than a few years? Instead of wasting time, energy and resources trying to concoct a “green gasoline” (no such thing!), let’s increase corporate average fuel economy standards to 50 miles per gallon or lower the speed limit to 55 and save more gas than we could ever squeeze from the Northwest’s forests.

Register Guard