Letters to the Editors: Spring 2009
Forests and Climate Change
To the Editors:
The Winter 2008 issue is truly great. Steve Long, Virginia Barlow, and everyone on the staff deserve enormous credit for what they have accomplished over the past 15 years.
What I find so outstanding about this issue is the combination of environmental science, forestry, human interest stories, and practical advice. Virginia’s calendar is loaded with inspiring details, as usual, and the article on woody debris is timely and interesting.
But David Dobbs’ article on climate change is what really struck me. It takes a magazine like this to be able to publish something that has such immediate local significance but also enormous importance around the “globe.”
Dobbs focuses on the implications of climate change for the forest in the Northeast, but he also makes us think of the opposite: what can our forest do for the “globe”? Expanding the map on page 29 to show forests around the world would show that we live in the midst of a truly remarkable environmental region. Carbon sequestration is just one obvious potential for our forest in mitigating climate change. But there are others, like the role of our forest in evapotranspiration, cloud formation, and the snow cover/albedo which is enhanced in a deciduous northern forest. Perhaps future issues could expand on this connection between environmental science and its practical implications in the Northeast.
What’s truly unique about Northern Woodlands is the potential to connect issues covered in ecology and environmental science journals with practical reality. We can read about a topic like climate change in the midst of articles on logging, forest products, wildlife habitat, invasives, and infestations, which this magazine covers routinely. They are all included in one magazine! Truly remarkable.
Lynn Peterson, Woodstock, Vermont
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Forests and Climate Change
To the Editors:
In David Dobbs’ piece: “Climate Change, Tree by Tree,” he attributes forest inertia, in part, to tree longevity (“Maples…typically live 80 to 200 [years]”) and the fact that “trees can’t walk.”
Tree longevity is often adversely affected by instability. Being unable to walk and subjected to drought, flooding, or high temperatures, trees can die quickly, opening a niche for different species.
In parts of a 60-year-old spruce-fir stand on our property, every fir has died, presumably from drought stress.
As an arborist, I have seen formerly healthy, vigorous oaks dead a year later. I suspect prolonged spring rains resulting in inundation of the roots in some cases, defoliation by anthracnose (also weather related) in others.
White pine decline (site specific and drought induced) has resulted in the gradual conversion of
mature pine stands to a greater hardwood component.
My point is that any change in the forest will most likely be “tree by tree” and not a wholesale change in forest type. Locally, the relative abundance of different species will change as well as the actual species mix. Maine has oaks and hickories. As individual
trees die, they may in fact be replaced by more oaks and hickories until an oak-hickory forest results.
New England natives planted in Maine but not naturalizing yet may begin to do so. (Think dogwood, pin oak, and tulip tree).
On a local level, climate-induced changes are already occurring in the forest. To be sure, this is only the beginning.
Kurt Woltersdorf, Sanford, Maine
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Why We Hunt
To the Editors:
The article “The Long View,” by Stephen Long (Winter ’08), deserves applause from both hunters and non-hunters alike.
As a retired forest technician who is hopelessly addicted to bird hunting in upstate New York, I more than admire his ability to describe the hunt in a way that expresses my deepest feelings. One would assume that both non-hunters and anti-hunters would begin to glimpse beyond the curtain of why some of us persist in going afield with gun and dog.
For the past 30 years, the urban elitists that moved from the metro area to the rural Northeast have brought their antihunting, anti-firearm sentiments with them. When I was a boy in southern New England, hunting and gun ownership was respected and taken for granted by the country folk. Today, if you are a hunter, you are in the minority.
Unfortunately, the majority of hunters cannot (or will not) explain why they hunt to those who don’t. This communication gap between the “dos” and the “don’ts” has not helped the hunters’ cause.
I have read some pretty decent pro-hunting treatises over the years, and Mr. Long (in his own way) has accomplished this. The final paragraph of “The Long View” is a wonderful summary and provides much food for thought for those that don’t.
Robert Barker, Evans Mills, New York
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Healing Warmth
To the Editors:
In your recent article by Chuck Wooster titled “A Cord is a Cord is a Cord,” Chuck mentions the fact that burning firewood does not contribute to climate change since “the carbon in wood . . . is already in the biosphere.” I have been heating my home with a woodstove for over 35 years and could not survive in this climate without the intense, radiant, and what I consider to be healthy and healing warmth of a wood fire. Lately I have been concerned that I am contributing to global warming by burning wood. Could you possibly elaborate on this issue for your readers and give us more information about the carbon released from wood smoke as opposed to fossil fuels? Also, what does the moisture content of the wood being burned have to do with carbon emissions (if any) and with the amount of harmful particulates and gases being released?
I understand that in some parts of the country, wood burning has been banned. I think a lot of this is because people are burning wet wood or aren’t familiar with running woodstoves and furnaces efficiently, causing them to make excessive smoke. As for me, I would be devastated if it ever came to the banning of wood heat. I hope that, with proper education and information, people will be able to continue to use this resource.
George Reynolds, Addison, Vermont
Chuck Wooster responds:
Carbon is constantly cycling through the biosphere, sometimes, for example, as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, sometimes as carbonic acid in the oceans, and sometimes as cellulose in wood. Burning wood for heat doesn’t alter this fundamental relationship; it simply takes carbon from one location in the biosphere and moves it to another.
Burning coal or other fossil fuels, however, does upset this balance because it takes carbon atoms that have been locked up underground (and not circulating in the biosphere) and re-injects them into the system, increasing the atmosphere’s ability to retain heat. Think of a greenhouse – the original metaphor for global warming – as an example. If you started swapping panes of glass around on the greenhouse’s roof, you wouldn’t be changing the building’s ability to retain heat. You’d just be changing the location of the panes. But if you bought a bunch of new panes and added them to the roof – effectively making the glass layer thicker – you would quickly see the greenhouse grow hotter. That’s what fossil fuels do.
In the rural parts of the Northeast, where wood is plentiful, people are few, and firewood can be harvested sustainably, burning wood is an excellent choice, because it doesn’t contribute to global warming. If there were so many of us here, however, that we ended up deforesting the region and fouling the air with woodsmoke, those advantages would quickly evaporate. Meanwhile, burning dry wood (wet wood doesn’t change the carbon equation but does reduce efficiency and increase pollutants) in an efficient stove with plenty of air to insure a clean burn is a wonderful, local, and very hands-on approach to solving a global problem.
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NW in Good Company
To the Editors:
I’d like to say that we are becoming accustomed to receiving our periodic issues of Northern Woodlands, the way we anticipate delivery of National Geographic and Scientific American. Instead of its pages being turned quickly and ending posthaste in the recycling bin, the magazine levitates amiably between the living room coffee table and the kitchen breakfast table, and occasionally wanders into the bedroom, entertaining us for several weeks. It is nice to read an intelligent magazine for a change, one whose every paragraph, even if its content may be irrelevant to our daily way of doing things, seduces us with its liveliness and depth of insight, and even occasionally encourages us to engage in that most monumental of endeavors: change.
Robert Brown Butler, Mahopac, New York
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Tree Tops
To the Editors:
I am writing about the article in the winter issue of Northern Woodlands entitled “An Appreciation of Debris.” I thought the article was excellent and offered good research. The larger picture at the beginning of the article is a scary one, at least for me. It illustrates how a small number of efficient forest workers can remove the above-ground biomass. The monetary value of the large piles of tree tops is usually insignificant to the landowner, but perhaps its value to the forest is not insignificant.
What were the conclusions from the experts on what to leave behind? We find, in Minnesota, that undefined state biomass guidelines for snags and coarse woody debris (CWD) were adequate for forest productivity. In Massachusetts, the “good” news about calcium is that when only 50 percent of the biomass is removed, the current level of calcium would be replenished in 71 years. But what happens if a couple more extractions of biomass occur within 71 years?
In the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests’ manual Good Forestry in the Granite State, we learn that we should manage for CWD by “retaining material that currently exists and allowing its accumulation where it is currently missing.” I don’t find this very helpful, simply because of the varying
amounts of CWD found in forest.
Last, the Forest Stewardship Council’s standard for greencertified forests in the north includes a requirement that harvesters leave enough dead woody material to “provide nutrient capital and habitat.” So how much is enough?
With poor guidance coming from the experts, why not just leave the tops in the forest as we have always done, and err on the side of more is better?
Bruce Spencer, New Salem, Massachusetts
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Ol’ Man Sycamore
To the Editors:
Thank you, Virginia Barlow, for the sycamore article in the winter issue. I thought you might get a kick out of this picture. I visit this tree at least once a year when I take cross country runners to a race that is held at Bowdoin Park in Wappingers Falls, New York, just below Poughkeepsie.
John Casserly, Canton, New York
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