Conor here: In case you need some good news after a long, hot 250th birthday weekend.
An interview with host Steve Curwood from “Living on Earth” magazine, a public environmental radio station, by Bill Moomaw, distinguished visiting scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. Cross posted to Inside Climate News.
If we look at the history of the United States, after the European colonists arrived, some of the most significant changes they made were the landscape, especially our forests. Logging was rampant, but now, on the 250th birthday of the United States, many of our forests are back, especially in the Northeast.
As they act as carbon sinks, maintaining our forests is an important tool we have to mitigate the effects of climate change. During the Kyoto Protocol negotiations, the United States even tried to argue that our forests should be considered the solution to our carbon emissions history.
Bill Moomaw is Tufts professor emeritus and distinguished visiting scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. He was the lead author of several reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; the organization shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former US Vice President Al Gore. Moomaw has spent decades studying how the process of rebuilding America’s forests could shape the country’s climate future.
STEVE CURWOOD: Can you look back in history to when the United States was just starting out?
MOOMAW: After arriving on the Mayflower, John Winthrop is quoted as saying: “We were sent into a wilderness full of wild animals and wild beasts.” Apparently, they were not impressed by the large forest they saw or the people here, and they had this idea that the forests were in the way.
To look like England, they had to have agriculture, they had to cut down the forests to use their towns, and it didn’t stop there. The number of tall white pine trees in the main forests here was so great that the king of England wanted them all to be preserved for His Majesty’s ships to have very tall masts, taller than the Spaniards, for example. The forest was already seen as a resource and a hindrance, so it had to be removed. That is part of New England and part of Virginia, which were the first settled areas.
CURWOOD: How much forest was lost in the Northeast when the Europeans arrived?
MOOMAW: Well, it took a while, but by 1850 New England was about 80 percent cut down, and in some places it was 90 percent. It just ended completely.
It wasn’t until after 1900, when [first head of the U.S. Forest Service] Gifford Pinchot returned from Europe, learning how Europeans managed their forests to be a resource for hundreds if not thousands of years, that we changed our habits from deliberate destruction. I mean, we were cutting down the hemlock forests in the Northeast, in New England, just to get the bark, to get the tannin into the leather. The rest was simply thrown away and burned. These fires burning in New Hampshire—they were burning wood they had just cut.
CURWOOD: What needed to happen for the forest to return to the Northeast?
MOOMAW: Well, it’s an amazing story. For example, Massachusetts—the third most populous state in the United States—is 60 percent forested today. Now, it was about 90 percent forested when the Europeans came, but it went through a period where 80 to 90 percent of the forests were cleared, and that spread between 1850 and 1900 with the railroad.
The railroad tracks had to be lit, fueled by burning wood to burn. Railroads had to have ties, so trees were cut down to make railroad ties. What we credit as industrialization in America in the latter half of the 19th century was a disaster for the forests.
But about 1850, the lands of Ohio were opening up, and the New England farmers who cut down the forests and plowed the rocks found that all there was to do in Ohio was cut the woods, and there were no rocks.
So they left their farm, and the regrowth of the forest in the Northeast US, especially New England, is the largest forest in the history of the world, and it all happened because of what I call beautiful neglect. It wasn’t a plan, it was just the abandonment of farmland that was largely regressing spontaneously.
Now, in some parts of the country, the forests that were cut down have been turned into plantations of large trees of one species. We didn’t really plant our way back to forests, we planted our way back to tree farms, because if you’re a forester and you have a piece of land, you wanted to improve it—that is, replace the trees you’re going to cut down with the trees you want to cut down in the future—so the species are changed to suit that. So we didn’t get our natural forest back in other parts of the country, but in New England we got it pretty good. It is amazing what has happened in the last hundred years.
CURWOOD: So in Mpumalanga, we can actually celebrate that they are back a lot?
MOOMAW: However, we can. I think it’s worth celebrating, too. The war is not over yet, in the sense that many states have a Ministry of the Environment, which means that the forest is considered a resource—something to be exploited for economic reasons.
It was this big fight going back to the late 19th century that somehow some people think, we should save some of our forests. John Muir is a very famous person who advocated that, so when Gifford Pinchot said we need to use it as a resource and use it wisely, Muir says it was somehow sacred and should be protected, and that was the argument.
Now there is a third view, which is that forests and other ecosystems are important parts of the earth’s functioning system. That’s why we talk about them, in terms of weather, for example. In that role, we can’t have a planet with the climate that makes our entire civilization possible if we don’t have forests and oceans and other living organisms.
CURWOOD: Looking forward another 250 years here in America, how do you think our forest management will change? How should it change?
MOOMAW: I think it needs to change in a way that will protect a large enough percentage that it will be able to take care of both the global climate and our regional climates.
For example, the Northeast temperature and global warming is very low because we have a lot of forests. Those forests both provide shade, but also, in order to grow, they draw water up their trunks, and the water contains the minerals and nutrients they need, and then evaporates the water from the leaves and cools the environment. So Boston, for example, is probably three or four degrees cooler than it has any right to be.
In other words, global warming may cause that much warming, but our forests cool us for that amount, so there is a lot of value in that theory. And that has economic consequences, by the way. A few years ago, when Worcester, Massachusetts had to cut down, I think, 30,000 trees that were infected, the use of air conditioning went up a lot, and we can’t all stay inside. People who build houses cannot be exposed to wind while building houses, they have to work outside. Farmers have to work outside. I think it is very important that we all have the right climate.
