I want to echo the comments made in Al Norman’s column of Aug. 19, “Seeing the forest through the trees.”
The latest research on forests is just what Norman wrote in his column. While individual trees (and the soil that surrounds them) are absorbing and storing millions of pounds of carbon, they increase their capacity by becoming connected in forests that cooperate and protect each other.
Forests have a self-perpetuating culture, to help each other thrive. And they have been at it for millions of years. They are living beings that have been growing, reproducing, and providing for themselves, and mutually supporting each other. (Note: We humans also have a great deal to learn about the benefits of cooperation from forests.)
Forests still offer us a way out of our environmental endgame, if we just stop burning their fossilized remains (coal, oil, and gas), and stop cutting trees down for profit. In spite of the science clearly showing that we humans have to make changes just so we can breathe, we seem to be headed for destruction by burning too much “fossil fuel ” as Earth’s tipping points are breached one by one. The whole thing is interconnected. Forests are one of the best possible — and by far least expensive — ways to pull the carbon out of the atmosphere and store it.
We have the challenge of building into state and local law that forest land, three acres or more, is classified as “undevelopable protected land.”
Sixty-nine percent of Greenfield respondents to the Open Space Recreational Plan survey are in favor of “permanently protecting forests in Greenfield from development.”
Pamela Kelly
Greenfield