Biomass Created by Biomess

How Did this Happen?

by Kathleen Jachowski

   Opportunities can be found everywhere. Right now the big one is how to, among other things, economically create and sell energy from the billions of tons of dead and dying trees on our national forests. 

    Tons of material is going to be produced as implementation of the Healthy Forest Restoration Act gets underway. This recently passed landmark legislation is a serious attempt to address the fire risks and poor forest health conditions which are ravaging public lands, watersheds and communities.

   California’s catastrophic forest fires helped to finalize agreement on this well intended national legislation. Without the California fires, it is very doubtful that such legislation would have passed into law. Crisis is a huge motivator where public policy is concerned.

   This legislation would not have been necessary if we, as a nation, had been allowed to implement the numerous strong environmental laws already on the books. Political realities of today made passage of this special legislation necessary and in large measure brought us to this point. These include in part:

   *A general public that is unfamiliar with what a forest environment must have in order to thrive. This lack of understanding has been easily manipulated and exploited by extremists who crafted public messages that formed public opinion to further their anti-forestry agenda;

   *A general lack of appreciation by extremists for the rights of fellow Americans to operate under existing laws and not have the legal system abused with excessive and unreasonable appeals and lawsuits;

   *A weakened skill level within political and professional resource groups to articulate the balanced picture of natural resource utilization;

   *A general public that has been neglected for the most part by industry folks and federal agencies who could have, but chose not to pay for ‘messaging’ consistently and broadly to the urban public to help them understand resource utilization on public lands; and

   *Resource agencies, filled with talent, that knew what needed to be done for the sake of forest health but lost the capacity, for whatever reasons, to convey those concepts to a perplexed and confused public. This ‘public’ was left to draw their own understandably poor conclusions based on misinformation. 

   There are others, but you get the drift. All of the above could have been avoided if appropriate value and recognition had been placed on the political reality that ‘public messaging’ is one of the best mechanisms to achieve outstanding stewardship of natural resources. Public messaging is about respecting the reality that the general public needs consistent and honest messaging. The more urban the nation becomes, the more important this is. 

   The forest health and fire risk crisis on our public lands have outdistanced the general public’s understanding of forestry issues so far that no time is now left to bridge the information gap. Our national forests and related watersheds and communities are at a point of ‘melt down’ (read: ‘burn down’). 

   The need to speed management actions on our forests with a minimum of appeals and lawsuits is what has created the Healthy Forest Restoration Act. The fire and health risks are so great that decades in court battles will only cost more lives and resources.

   The closer that forest fires have burned to cities and towns, the closer the forest health crisis has come into political focus! Now we see the forest for the fires, so to speak!

   So now we will begin to restore, thin, harvest, and clean up. It will be a slow start, as much of the timber industry’s infrastructure necessary to achieve these goals has been decimated by political environmentalism over the last twenty years. 

   The larger challenge is what do we do with the material that is removed? It has to be shipped somewhere for processing and then marketed. 

   There is great opportunity to convert this material into such things as energy to heat buildings and to run utilities. We are, though, still a long way from making such a conversion to energy as economically feasible as using coal.

   However, an even greater and more important opportunity exists for us as a nation. It is the opportunity to learn from having created the need for such legislation. We must ask ourselves, what did we do for a very long time which created this biomass mess in which we now find ourselves?

   This legislation creates a learning opportunity as large as the volume of biomass it is meant to address.

   Kathleen Jachowski is a free lance writer and public speaker on natural resources and cultural issues.  She can be reached at: www.jachowskispeaks.com.

To the Forest Service:

   Here in the West, water has replaced timber as the primary raw material the public needs from its forests. 70 percent of the water consumed in our western towns and cities rises from publicly owned forests. Every time a faucet is turned on in Denver, Salt Lake City, Missoula, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles or here in Phoenix, the user enjoys a gift of life from an often-distant forest. Yet the myth persists that harvesting timber from forests degrades water quality, when in fact water quality remains very high when the harvesting is done properly. 

   By contrast, I know of nothing that degrades water quality or disrupts forest hydrological function more than a stand-replacing wildfire. The fact that this truth rarely makes news – save for the flash floods that follow many wildfires - is your failing, because as communicators it is your job to dispel myths and to publicly challenge misstatements of fact. Yet few in the Forest Service do it because, as many say, “we don’t want to take sides.”

   This will sound unnecessarily harsh – and I don’t mean it to be – but if you cannot bring yourself to side with the truth you should get out of the public information business and let somebody willing to defend science-based forestry take your place

(Excerpted from “What is the Forest Service doing right and what is it doing wrong?”, a speech by James D. Petersen, Executive Director, The Evergreen Foundation;  Publisher, Evergreen Magazine; to the USDA Forest Service Office of Communications and Legislative Affairs Conference; November 18, 2003)