In an April 8 letter, a forester from Missouri criticized my recent My Turn piece in which I cited climate damage resulting from logging in our public forests [“National forests and parks different,” April 8]. The writer noted that “the national forests are meant to supply forest products so that we can rely on our own resources, not some other country.”
Massachusetts has no national forests and virtually no permanently protected forests. Recent research from the Woodwell Climate Research Center documents huge carbon emissions from logging national forests in Vermont and New Hampshire.
The mission of the National Forest Service was developed over a century ago as conservation for use. It has served industrial extraction of resources ever since. This mission, as I said in my piece, is hopelessly antiquated and should be overhauled in consideration of the climate emergency we now face.
Logging and fossil fuel extraction should no longer be promoted, since they are major causes of climate change. Both state-owned and national forests should instead be used for mitigating climate change and maintaining biodiversity. National forests contain more than three times as much land as the better protected national parks do.
Outmoded ideas about the management of our public forest lands at national and state agencies are inconsistent with recent scientific evidence. Globally, forests currently remove and store about a third of the human-caused carbon emissions each year. Recent research by scientists Beverly Law, William Moomaw and others has shown that we could more than double carbon capture and accumulation in our forests if we just stopped logging them.
If business-as-usual extraction of wood products and fossil fuels continues, the risk of catastrophic climate change will surely increase. There can be no product extraction on a dead planet.
Bart Bouricius of Montague is a member of the Wendell State Forest Alliance. He served on the faculty at State University of New York at Buffalo and is a former research associate at Selby Botanical Garden. He recently retired as adjunct professor from Hampshire College and has conducted research in boreal, temperate and tropical forests since 1972.