Day One: The Pitfall of Forest Offsets?
Thursday, June 19th, 2008, 2:45 PM
“First do no harm.” Those were the insightful four words of Hippocrates’ principle of medicine. But it’s not such a bad principle for any intervention we make in health or in the environment.
One of the most popular (or at least the most public) forms of climate change mitigation, pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, has been the big push for tree planting. Flying on Virgin Atlantic? Offset your travel with trees. Picking up an Enterprise Rental Car? Offset your emissions with some trees.
But get this: That tree planting might not be so neutral for Mother Earth.
As John Paull, a researcher from Australian National University, said in one of today’s sessions: Many of these forestry efforts use massive doses of chemicals to grow those saplings and maintain those forests.
If you think forest certification systems are the answer to the pesky problem of pesticides in forestry, both the Forest Stewardship Council and the Pan-european Forest Certification Council allow chemical use.
[Correction: In the original post, I said that the PEFC would also allow genetically modified trees, according to Paull. But in a General Assembly decision in 2007, the PEFC adopted rules that GMO material cannot be included in certified material. Our thanks to a helpful blog reader.]
Paull quotes the Forest Stewardship Council standards, which state in Standard 6.6a: “Strive to avoid the use of chemical pesticides.” But the Forest Stewardship Council also directs foresters to comply with local law. So while the chemical Simazine is banned under FSC standards, for instance, in Australia the country-wide exemption for the chemical overrides this ban.
Furthermore, forestry chemicals are typically aerially sprayed, making it that much harder to contain contamination making it that much more likely that chemicals spread into waterways and other places we don’t want them to go.
Many of the chemicals used in forestry are also used in combination with each, increasing their potential toxicity and the question-mark factor about their potential to cause harm.
So what chemicals are in use? Paull listed them off: During pre-planting and at the early growth stages, herbicides like Atrazine can be combined with as many as twenty-five others to increase their impact. Faunacides, like 1080, that target browsing animals are also common. (At this point, Paull displayed images of some of these warm and fuzzy guys: “Are we going to heal the planet by killing wallaby’s or possums?”) Then, there are the insecticides that target native insects and, finally, the fungicides that can be applied for up to fifteen years, or more.
Quoting Mencken, Paull said, “For every complex problem there is a simple solution, and it’s wrong.” In other words, our strategy of tree planting as a carbon offset might seem a simple answer, but when we’re turning to chemical forestry, it may not be the eco-solution we’re hunting for.
Paull’s solution was an organic forestry certification. But while we may be far from achieving such a certification system, we at least can pressure the forestry certifying bodies to toughen up their positions. As Paull said, “Carbon offsets using chemicals in our forestry is trading on a lie, and the lie is that we can heal the planet with pesticides.”
June 19th, 2008 at 7:59 pm
The use of chemicals in forestry is a global problem. In the U.S., the EPA conducts toxicological and ecological analysis of forestry herbicides prior to approving the chemicals for use.
However, in the EPA’s analysis a false assumption is made that the herbicides are used only “once or twice” per tree crop rotation (50-80 years). This fallacy–that the chemicals are only applied at the very start of planting to give the young trees a boost–is supplied by the industry being regulated and is perpetuated throughout the entire regulatory system. By making this assumption, it is easy to brush off the impacts to wildlife, to plant communities, and to water quality and human health as short term and negligible.
In reality, in California and throughout the U.S., herbicides are applied repeatedly–sometimes as many as ten times in a rotation–thereby guaranteeing that the forest floor is completely denuded and dead. Many times the very conifers the industry is trying to grow are killed or stunted from the powerful chemicals and mixtures.
In Shasta County alone, in Northern California in 2006, nearly 80,000 pounds of pure chemical herbicides were applied to the state’s forests, in the headwaters of streams which supply water for millions of Californians. Statewide, 260,000 pounds of herbicides were applied to these forests, among the most conifer-diverse ecosystems on the planet, home to the Giant Sequoia and the Coast Redwood–the world’s largest trees.
An organized global effort must be made to end the unethical and unsustainable poisoning of the planet’s forests. To pretend that once magnificent forests can be converted to tree farms which can play a role in carbon sequestration is an epic lie. Furthermore, tree plantations are highly flammable in many climates such as California’s, and will remain so throughout their lifetimes–they cannot serve as reliable carbon sinks.
July 1st, 2008 at 9:33 am
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