Welcome to The Landscape, your show about America's Parks and Public Lands. I'm Erin Weiss with the Center For Western Priorities in Denver. And I'm Kate Gretzinger in Salt Lake City. Today on the podcast, we're talking about trees, old trees to be exact. We called up one of our favorite forest scientists, doctor Dominic Della Sala, to talk about a recent op ed he wrote for the
Seattle Times. In the piece, he raises the alarm about some mature and old growth forests that are currently on the chopping block and calls on president Biden to protect them before leaving office. We'll get to that in a minute, but first, the news. In a historic move last week, president Biden offered a formal apology for the atrocities committed at Indian boarding schools from the early 1800 all the way through the 19 seventies.
Tens of thousands of native children were removed from their homes and sent to these federally run boarding schools under the American policy of forced assimilation. A federal investigation released in July found that at least 900 children died at those schools. The president's speech took place at the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona. Interior secretary Deb Haaland, who spearheaded that government investigation into the history of boarding schools, joined president Biden there.
She said, quote, I acknowledge that this trauma was perpetrated by the agency that I now lead, which is a reminder of the historic nature of her appointment as the first indigenous interior secretary. So far, president Biden has designated 2 national monuments at the request of Native American tribes in the west using the president's authority under the antiquities act. Those are Avikumay in Nevada and Bajanowavjo Ittaqoqveni, ancestral footprints of the Grand Canyon in Arizona.
The Bears Ears National Monument draft management plan, which was released earlier this year, is also the first management plan to be cowritten by tribes. Indigenous communities across the west are calling on president Biden to protect additional areas of spiritual and cultural importance as national monuments. That includes the proposed Chuckwalla National Monument in California, Satitla Medicine Lake Highlands in California, and Quetzan National Monument also in California.
President Biden has the opportunity to make conservation history while further addressing and acknowledging historical injustices by designating these monuments. Quick note here. Doctor Della Sala mentions the National Old Growth Amendment a few times in this episode. That's a plan the Forest Service is working on right now that will determine how the agency manages old growth forests in response to climate change. The draft plan or environmental impact statement came
out in June. A 90 day comment period for the draft EIS closed in September, and a final decision is expected in December. Our guest today is doctor Dominic Della Sala, chief scientist at Wild Heritage, which is a project of the Earth Island Institute. We had doctor Della Sala on the podcast twice last year to talk about the Biden administration's plans to protect mature and old growth forests.
So we were surprised to read a recent op ed by him in the Seattle Times in which he says the forest service is still planning to allow logging in some old growth forests. Doctor Gellasala, thanks for joining us today. We're excited to learn more about why these forests are still at risk. Thanks for having me on again. It's a pleasure. So let's back up and start with a basic question for those who haven't listened to
our other episodes with you. What are old growth and mature forests, and why are they so important to protect? Yeah. Great question. I've spent, 4 decades of my life in these forests all around the globe, and so I have a pretty good handle on what qualifies as an older forest. And I think a lot of listeners know what that is too. You could just take a hike in the coast redwoods, and you know you're in these majestic cathedral forest or in the Olympics, on the Olympic rainforest or up on the
Tongass rainforest. I mean, there's hands down no argument that those are old growth forests. We know what they look like. We know what they feel and smell like. And as scientists, we've been quantifying their ecological values now for, as I mentioned, at least 4 decades.
And now we know some surprised findings within the last decade or so that they play a really strategically important role as natural climate solutions in drawing down our carbon pollution and storing it long term in the biggest trees and in the soils and the surrounding vegetation. And they cleanse the air we breathe, and they give us clean drinking water, and they are the best places to find wildlife.
So all of those values are some of their ecosystem parts that are unique to those forests compared to, for example, a plantation or a clear cut that has lost most of those values. Awesome. And I have another question here related to how we define these trees. Is the Biden administration's definition of mature and old growth the same as yours, or is there an, disconnect there? I think that yes and no. And that I don't think that there's any argument about what an old growth forest is. We
know what that is. We look at them as not only these cathedral forests, but scientists can quantify their structural differences in those forests compared to a clear cut. And so the height of trees, the age of trees, the diameter at breast height, the diversity of layering in the tree canopy where you have a penthouse, mid story, a basement, so to speak, of different structural layers, and you've got death
and life linked together in those forests. You see the dead trees play a critically important role in the ecology of those forests, whether they're standing as snags or down on the ground as logs, and then you have a diversity of plants and wildlife. So we know what those are.
The argument is around mature. And the reason why mature is important and why at least Biden got this right in his executive order, he said mature and old growth and not just old growth, is because we've wiped out most of the old growth in the lower 48 states. And the mature forest are only a few decades away from acquiring those characteristics that we would consider
old growth. So we've got to look at this as a protection and restoration approach if we're gonna maintain those ecosystem values, especially in a rapidly shifting climate. I think we have a lot of agreement on old growth in terms of how our 2 teams assessed how much of it is out there. I think we, probably apart more so on the mature and what qualifies as mature.
And, unfortunately, the federal government, the forest service, and the BLM are leaving mature out there for additional logging because quite frankly, I think they freaked out when they realized 46% of their inventory was mature and 17% was old growth. So that, to them, must mean up to 2 thirds of their land base, they couldn't log in anymore.
And I think that's why we don't have any protections for mature, and we only have, you know, marginal protections for old growth in the old growth, national amendment. So I wanna just quickly jump in and clarify for folks that the Biden administration did its own inventory of mature and old growth. And then, doctor Della Sala, you and your team did the 1st independent, catalog of old growth and mature force in the US. Is that correct? Yeah. It is. And there were some similarities
in our methodologies, but some differences too. So I can go over those if you'd like. Yeah. Let's come back to that. Aaron? Yeah. I mean, I I I think you're you hit on our my next question here, which is getting into a wording choice that you put in this op ed in the Seattle Times where you called on president Biden to do more to protect quote older trees as opposed to just old before leaving office.
So walk us through what the Biden administration has done so far in terms of those kinds of protections and what more you think needs to be done in order to get at least some or however many, percent of those older trees into old growth status? Well, yeah, there's the science part of it, and then there's the policy part of it. And as I mentioned in my Seattle Times op ed, unfortunately, can I have some fries with that nothing
burger? Yeah. Oh, dear. Because that's what we got was a big fat nothing burger, which was incredibly disappointing because we worked for 4 years with the administration on getting the president to recognize the importance of mature and old growth forest, which he did at Earth Day back in I think it was 2021 or 2022, whenever that was. And he directed the federal agencies to inventory the nation's mature and old growth forest for,
quote, conservation purposes, end quote. The problem is they did the inventory, but they're doing no conservation. So it essentially is a long term plan for continuing to log in these forests, albeit at a lower rate than what was historic. And it completely keeps mature forest on the chopping block, and the the excuse that they give in their old growth amendment is these forests are gonna burn up, be eaten by insects, destroyed by climate change, and the only solution is chainsaws.
And we in the scientific community know that that's not reality, and it's unfortunate that they're hiding the the ball behind natural processes that are changing because of climate change, but logging those forests is not the solution. Protecting them from logging as natural climate solutions will give them the best resistant properties and resilient properties to get through this climate change bottleneck that we currently are in.
So, I wanna come back to that sort of carbon sequestration, question because there were some headlines recently that said carbon sinks are failing, and I wanna have you sort of, ground truth that for us. But before we move on to that, you mentioned in the op ed that there are currently plans to log in National Forest that contain these mature and old growth trees. Which forests are are, you referring to there?
Yeah. There's over a dozen or so that are, that have been identified by conservation groups that are still on the chopping block. Those sales have already gone forward, and we continue to oppose them, and they're across the whole country. So I would refer folks to go to the climate dash forest.org website and look for the threatened forest because they exist from Oregon to Vermont, and there's widely scattered. There are places in Montana, for example.
One place that I've spent quite a bit of time is the Black Ram project area in Northwest Montana. And, there was a really great article that was done on that area in terms of its its properties as a climate refuge. And that there are thousands of acres of old growth forest in that, proposed climate refuge that would be subject to clear cut logging. The forest service has already got that on the chopping block. It's been blocked in the courts, but it could come up again.
And the agency has examples of this all over the country. In my neck of the woods in Southern Oregon, the Bureau of Land Management is constantly plucking old trees out of its so called fuels management operations, which in fact not only destroy the climate properties of those forests, but they raise the fire hazards by taking out the fire resistant tree and leaving the logging slash behind. You can't treat it all even though
they burn it in piles. You can't get to all of it, and those areas have a tendency to burn in high intensity fires. So we're seeing this all over the country, and there are many examples of where, you know, Old Forest is still on the chopping block and will remain on the chopping block because the old growth national amendment is a nothing burger. So what would a meaningful protection look like? Would it be promulgated as a rule, from the USDA? Is there a faster way to do this?
Like, what is the ideal way to sort of extend protections for these areas right now with, you know, the clock ticking down on the Biden administration? Yeah. I think the the best way to do it is for the White House to intervene and say, look. We want you to fix the problems that are in your environmental impact statement because we're gonna still get a final impact statement, and we're gonna get a record of decision.
So that's where you can fix this, and they can fix it by adopting a strong conservation alternative that takes off the table once and for all all of those mature and old growth forest because they are our best natural climate solution. So if we are going to go through some really horrific conditions, if we continue on this path of unmitigated fossil use, we're already seeing this with supercharged hurricanes, big wildfire events.
We've gotta get off of fossil fuels, and we've gotta protect our natural climate solutions if we're going to slow down runaway climate chaos. That needs to be this administration's parting gift legacy to the planet so that they can comply with what the president did, which was he's, signatory on the Glasgow Forest pledge that has pledged to end forest losses by 2030. So how could you sign on to a pledge and then be one of the leading nations that's degrading its forests?
So the White House can fix this, but time is indeed running out. I wanna talk about the Tongass a little bit. The the Biden administration did restore some protections for the Tongass that had been taken away by the Trump administration. Those are are final now, but now you have senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska with a bill that would privatize over a 115,000 acres of the Tongass, including 80,000 acres of prime old growth. That bill has already passed out of committee
in the senate. So the threats here are obviously not or and the protections potentially not just at the administrative level when you have congress running around also trying to privatize these forests. What's the political landscape here in terms of protecting old growth and, and or trying to get congress to do the right thing here? I'm so glad you brought up the Tongass.
That forest is near and dear to my heart, and I cut my intellectual ecological teeth on the Tongass, in the early 19 nineties doing some of the first old growth, studies up in that neck of the woods. And the Tongass is remarkable. It is, the nation's tops on old growth forest. There's over 5,000,000 acres. It's tops on the nation's roadless areas over 9,000,000 acres, and its tops on the nation's natural climate solutions with storing 20% of the entire carbon across the national forest system.
It's the best possibility for a natural climate solution in Southeast Alaska. And yet Lisa Murkowski has been trying to privatize the Tongass repeatedly. It keeps coming up. And, unfortunately, this one, as you mentioned, passed out of committee. It could get, ramrod through the lame duck. It could get attached to the farm bill. There are many
different vehicles that this could move on. And the opposition has been coming from some in the indigenous community like, the indigenous elder Wanda Cope, who wrote an op ed in the Juneau Empire opposing it. And I sent a letter including a 125 scientists to the White House saying, when this comes up, please do everything you can to block it.
And, actually, I have an op ed on my screen right now that I plan to send to the Juno Empire, which is the state publication, right in the capital that says this needs to be stopped in its tracks. It's opposed by members of the indigenous community. It's opposed by conservation scientists. It would give away all the town Tonga's values across those acres to developers and logging interest at a time when we need those in protection as natural climate solutions.
I wanna ask about what the timber industry would look like without access to these mature or old growth forests. Obviously I mean, fundamentally, that's the the pressure point here is timber industry says we need these trees because we are producing timber products, whether it's paper products or lumber for for housing or furniture or anything else. So take all the mature, all the old growth off the table.
Is there enough capacity then to meet America's lumber needs just in private, younger, faster growing forests, or is there a risk that if you protect all of the mature forests in the US, you then unintentionally create an incentive for old growth logging in other countries with fewer protections? Yeah. There's a lot in that question. Thanks for asking it. So I'm gonna start with kind of this Uber overview with the national forests are a drop in the wood basket.
There's only about 4% of the nation's total wood supply that comes from the national forest. Of that 4%, only a fraction would be coming from mature and old growth forest. There's plenty of places for wood supply that we don't need to be logging what are giving us the absolute critical values that we need to get through the climate crisis. And I'll give you two examples where the transition is occurring, and those transitions need to be aided by
federal dollars. So instead of investing in below cost timber sales, which give away those trees to the timber industry, invest in retooling mills to accept small logs, invest in value added manufacturing, invest in helping to diversify those local economies like what was done with the Northwest Forest Plan in the early 19 nineties. And so the two places where this is happening that are exemplary is the Siuslaw National Forest in Oregon, which was one of the
early adopters of the Northwest Forest Plan. They got out of the business of old growth and had been logging, in secondary for us with relatively little opposition and keeping their supply moving. The other place is the Tongass. Now I took this on my team and I took this on in 2009. We asked secretary Vilsack to transition
the Tongass out of old growth logging. And at the time, they said we need 30 years of old growth trees to get the industry, their product and second growth forest ready for, you know, another level of logging. And I questioned where that number came from, and we hired a bunch
of field crews on the ground. They went out there, did a bunch of inventory, and lo and behold, there was a more than enough trees in the 55 to 60 year old categories along existing roads on a much smaller logging footprint that would meet the timber volume needs. All that needs to happen there is to change the infrastructure of the mills to accept more logs, stay on the existing footprint.
That transition is underway on the Tongass, but it gets derailed every time we get an administration that comes in that wants to do logging or whether every time we get, you know, an a push from the industry to go after more old growth. We have to push back and say no. Retool or go the way of the dinosaur because sooner or later, you're gonna overcut. And those old trees, the jobs and the
products will all be gone. So the Tongass is unique in being able to make that shift when you still have about 90% of your old growth left, and you've got an administration that wants to move the industry in that direction. So it so it's fundamentally big trees versus small trees, and do you wanna spend the money now or later to be able to process small trees because you know you're gonna have to eventually it's just how much worse do we make climate change in the process?
I think that's it. And I think every country that has, like, primary forest, these are forests that are old growth that haven't been logged, Eventually, hits an inflection point where you run out of accessibility and it becomes, like, economically infeasible to go into those primary forest. And this happens. We see it all over the world and then the ecosystem crashes. So we can avoid that with the Tongass.
It could be a global model of here's how you transition to smaller trees, and you keep all your ecological values in place before you crash the ecosystem. Now I wanna move on from mature and old growth and ask you about a few other developments, in headlines we've been seeing re related to forests. The first is that the agriculture secretary, the USDA secretary, Tom Vilsack, recently announced guidance to the forest service that requires them to prioritize forest connectivity,
mainly for the benefit of wildlife. And I'm wondering if that is as big a deal as it sounds like. Does it have any teeth? What's your read on that? Yeah. So for your listeners, the issue of connectivity is fundamental in conservation biology approaches. So we look for a bunch of different ways to get nature through the onset onslaught of climate change and land development. So we've gotta have sufficient, amounts of protection across the landscape.
There are efforts to protect 30%, 50%, a 100% of different, habitat types globally and in the US. And then we've gotta make sure that the landscapes that we protected are sufficiently connected so that wildlife can move around, especially looking for suitable climate niches in a rapidly changing world. And by having connected landscapes, we have functional ecosystems. And so USDA introduced this policy. On the surface, it looks like it could be meaningful.
However, the focus is a lot on the so called working forests. And I have a problem with that term in general because if you look at work as a measure of ecosystem benefits that we get from forest, by far, the, the natural systems are the working forest and not the ones that they're plucking trees from. So I think the concept of connectivity has to be across all lands and not just focused on working lands, but working ecosystems. And that means protecting your roadless areas.
That means obliterating some roads that might increase the size of roadless areas so you have even more functional connectivity in places. And that means making sure that you've got sufficient areas that are protected, represented across a large region that are well connected so that animals and plants can move around. So I think it's promising, but I think the focus on working lands is, one dimensional.
Or or at least misses all of the work that goes in when people are not actually there doing anything. So given all of those pressures, what advice would you give the next agriculture secretary? How do you prioritize, balance the pressures of habitat connectivity, climate change, the forestry industry wanting and saying we need this to be economically viable even if, that that's not necessarily a fully honest take.
How how would you like to see the next agriculture secretary approach America's National Forests? Yeah. So I I hope the next agriculture secretary is not a chicken farmer because these are not crops. These are forest living ecosystems, and to treat them as crops and then call it fire management or reducing insect outbreaks is just misleading. It's based on misinformation. Let's really truly evaluate the public asset that we have on the national forest because we can't find this any other place
in the country. We're not gonna find it on private lands. We're not gonna find it on state lands. It's really the federal lands that hold the keys to our climate future, And we need a total, revamping of the forest service to take into consideration the value of carbon, of clean water, of wildlife habitat, of recreation, of clean air that communities are going to need to weather the climate storm. Most of our clean drinking water has its headwaters in the national forest system.
Most of our natural climate solutions in our old forest are on the natural for a national forest system. Those areas need to be valued and upheld by protecting them from logging. That means fixing the old growth national amendment through supplementation, and, revision process that will take those forests off the logging chopping block once and for all and move it from guidelines into official policy that the agency is going to follow. Alright.
I mentioned this earlier, and I wanna sort of maybe wrap on this question, but I recently saw a really concerning news story that said trees and land failed to absorb almost any carbon last year. And the essentially, the the headline was that Earth's carbon sinks are failing. Is this true, or is there some nuance that is missing from this headline? Yeah. It's it's partially true. I mean, the headline is absurd. The trees are not gonna stop absorbing carbon.
That's just ridiculous. The headline was just off base. The article was good, but the headline was misreading. It was misleading. So I think, right now, what we have is a massive carbon sink, and it's our forest. And they are doing the job of taking carbon out of the atmosphere and absorbing holding on to it, storing it through the miracle of photosynthesis. And they do do it better than any terrestrial ecosystem on the planet. Now is that gonna remain the case in perpetuity?
Depends on where you are in the region of the globe. If you're in the, coastal temperate rainforest, you have a better chance, which is why we think Southeast Alaska, the Tongass, is gonna function more as a climate sanctuary and more interior portions of Alaska are heating up at a a have the highest climate velocity on the planet. So it's going to really shift around the globe. And in places, we're not gonna have forest anymore in the next 50 to a 100 years.
Some other vegetation will come in and also provide carbon, carbon sink potential. But the massive loss of carbon to the atmosphere and ecosystem values of that transition are going to really have reverberating effects on society. We don't want that to happen. So the only way to stop that is to get off of fossil fuels, protect the natural climate solutions, and reduce the chance of that happening. And we're running out of time
for that. Every single country around the globe has not followed the Paris climate agreement. So one follow-up question for you. My understanding of the story is that something about the way the climate is already changing is making these carbon sinks less effective. Is that right? And can you say just a little bit more about that and what what sort of is happening right now that's maybe hurting these climate sinks other than just chopping them down, which, of course, is bad?
Yeah. I think what's going on is so for example, in the Amazon, the Amazon has shifted from a carbon sink to a source of carbon 3 times in the last 2 decades, I believe. And that is because the slash and burn agriculture is changing the climate. The rate of logging is so severe in Amazonia that the, the recycling between the hydrosphere and the biosphere is being disrupted in terms of water going back into the atmosphere and it's falling as rainfall.
So we're getting more droughts in Amazonia, and it's shifting it into, more of a source of emissions than a sink. And that's the planet's lungs that we're, polluting from slash and burn agriculture and fossil fuel pollution. And this could happen, widespread across the globe where you've got higher temperatures overheating, heat domes, which happen a lot in the Pacific Northwest now and many other places in the interior west. We get these heat domes. We get increasing droughts.
All of that stresses out trees. And as they die, they lose that carbon sink value, especially if the dying is widespread. So I think there's a lot of concern about that, and I spend a lot of my time looking at climate change models in the next 5 to 10 decades are showing that the potential for that is going to increase if we don't get off of this pathway that we are of treating the atmosphere as a dumping ground for our carbon emissions. Alright. Well, on that cheery note, we will
leave this episode. Our guest today is doctor Dominic Della Sala, chief scientist at Wild Heritage, a project of the Earth Island Institute. Thank you so much for being with us. Yeah. And happy Halloween, everybody. I didn't mean to scare you. We started off today's episode with some good news, so we're gonna end with something a little different. Have you heard about the free landholders?
They're an extremist group claiming ownership of about 1400 acres in the San Juan National Forest in Southwest Colorado. They built a barbed wire fence around the land, which angry locals have begun to dismantle with wire cutters. Some members of the group have ties to the fundamentalist church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints. That's FLDS, a polygamous sect that was once led by Warren Jeffs.
Patrick Leroy Pipkin, a member of the group, told the press that they have a claim to the land under the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the 18 14 Treaty of Ghent, and the 1783 Treaty of Paris, and the articles of Confederation. This is some pretty crazy stuff with a lot of parallels to the sovereign citizen movement, and if you squint hard enough to Utah's land grab lawsuit effort. So we'll be keeping an eye on it to see where it goes.
Well, that is all for today, folks. I'm just gonna hope that we don't have to do a full episode on these free landholder folks at some point, but obviously, if it becomes more of a thing, we'll be there. As always, leave us a review if you can wherever you are listening to us right now. Send us your questions and your comments, podcast at westernpriorities.org.
We will have a post election episode of this podcast, regardless of course of who wins, so look for that sometime in the days after November 5th And do, of course, get out there and vote. If you are spiraling about this upcoming election, get outside. Nature, one of the best mental health resources we have, of course, including our national public lands. Thanks again to doctor Delasala for his time, and thank you for listening to the landscape.