Lying in the name of Renewable Energy and Fire Prevention. Burning Our Forests in Place of Coal. Ecosystems Up in Smoke.

Environmentalists trust corrupt energy corporations and governments who pretend to eliminate fossil fuels by using wood as a coal substitute. Is burning our forests a solution to climate change?

Starting in December, I am teaching a course called Trees & Forests: Why forests are our greatest climate asset, and how that works.

Please check out my courses at harthagan.net. 

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In this article, I will teach you:

• the secret to saving our bird populations

• wildfire myths that are destroying our forests

• how our public agencies exist to promote the timber industry, not protect our forests

In so doing, I hope to persuade you that Trees & Forests are the most important environmental topic of our day, because of the myriad benefits they provide and the powerful forces arrayed against them.

The importance of our forests

“The Word for World is Forest,” said Ursula K. LeGuin in the title of her 1972 novel. This may be a bit overstated, but not by much. If we don’t have forests, then we don’t have a world, at least not one in which we and our fellow species can thrive. 

Forests cover 30% of land on earth, but contain 80% of terrestrial species, according to the United Nations and the World Wildlife Foundation. And forests have a little known role in regulating our climate. According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), “Forests are a stabilising force for the climate. They regulate ecosystems, protect biodiversity, play an integral part in the carbon cycle, support livelihoods and can help drive sustainable growth.”

How fast are we losing our forests and why?

According to Global Forest Watch, “From 2001 to 2023, there was a total of 488 million hectares (about 1.2 billion acres) of tree cover loss globally, equivalent to a 12% decrease in tree cover since 2000 and 207 Gt of CO₂ emissions.”  That’s a 12% decrease in just over 20 years. 

According to Our World in Data, “Half of the global forest loss occurred between 8,000 BCE and 1900; the other half was lost in the last century alone.” 

Along with solar, wind and hydro, “bioenergy” is being pushed and subsidized, resulting in rapid deforestation of forests in the US southern states, as well as British Columbia in Canada. According to the Southern Environmental Law Center, in 2019 alone, 6.6 million green tons of forest were cut for bioenergy, the equivalent of 71,000 acres of forests. Bioenergy refers to the process of cutting down trees, turning them into wood pellets, and shipping them to the UK and the EU to burn in place of coal. 

This is what I mean by the “forces arrayed against our forests.” Everyone, including environmentalists themselves, is lining up to consume our forests in what looks like business as usual, just with heavier equipment and bigger factories, such as the wood pellet plants peppering the American South and the mammoth electric utilities in the UK and EU that once burned coal but now burn our forests.

What can we do? 

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that knowledge is power. 

“Get an education because an educated person is harder to fool.” --Anonymous

The first thing we do is to understand how things work. Let’s understand how “renewable” energy works. And let’s understand how our forests work. Only then can we intelligently wield our power as citizens.

So here goes. 

Let’s ask: 

• What does a healthy forest look like?

• What does a healthy forest contain?

• What species are necessary to feed the food chains of a healthy forest?

• Under what conditions does a forest provide a home for the maximum number of plants and animals?

Meet Dr. Doug Tallamy

One of the great teachers of forest health today is Dr. Doug Tallamy, from the University of Delaware. I have followed Dr. Tallamy for years, and I recommend that you check out his work, e.g., on this YouTube video, or read one of his books such as Nature’s Best Hope.

From Dr. Tallamy I have learned the importance of caterpillars in a forest ecosystem. Did you know that 96% of terrestrial birds depend on insects to complete their life cycle? The life cycle includes reproduction and raising young. Mostly, young birds need caterpillars to complete their life cycle, caterpillars being the larval form of butterflies & moths. Most caterpillars do NOT survive to maturity, but instead become food for birds and predatory wasps, thus sending their energy up the food chain.

An ecosystem is a flow of energy, via the food chains. If you want to know how much energy is flowing through a forest ecosystem, count the number and diversity of caterpillars, because caterpillars are a strong indicator of insect populations. Strong insect populations mean a healthy flow of energy through the ecosystem.

Carolina Chickadee

How many caterpillars do you think the diminutive (4 oz.) Carolina Chickadee needs to raise one nest of three chicks. You would be forgiven for saying several hundred, or maybe even 1,000. But you have two parents foraging from 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., returning to the nest about every three minutes, often with more than one caterpillar in their beak at a time. That’s over 400 caterpillars per day, over 14 days for a total of 6,000 caterpillars. 

That’s just one pair of one species raising one nest of chicks. And the chickadees can only cover a radius of about 100 yards. So all 6,000 caterpillars have to reside within a 100 yard radius. 

But you don’t want just one nest of one species. You want multiple species in the same area. So if you do the math, you need hundreds of thousands of caterpillars per acre per year.

For Dr. Tallamy’s explanation of this, see this video starting at 7 minutes.   

Carolina chickadee requires about 6,000 caterpillars per year to feed its young. These all come from a radius of 100 yards or less. (Photo by Doug Tallamy)

Where do all those caterpillars come from?

Caterpillars feed on plants, mainly trees. Since different caterpillars feed on different plants and trees, you want the forest to contain a diversity of native plants and trees. In the Eastern United states, top performing trees in the eastern United States include native species of oak, maple, birch, willow and cherry.

So, the first thing that comes to mind is to “Plant trees!” That seems to be the universal solution, mouthed by politicians and corporations, along with a few hard working and well-intentioned people who actually know what they are doing. 

But it’s not how many trees we plant, it’s how many we don’t cut down. It doesn’t matter how many trees we plant if the logging industry is cutting them down faster than they can grow back. 

Forests grow at a rate of one to three percent per year. The sun, the rain, the seeds and the birds (who are seed spreaders) will do most of the work if we leave the forest alone.

Replacing mature forest with tree plantations

Instead, we use heavy equipment to chew up our forests faster than they can ever recover. We cut mature forests and replace them with tree plantations. Tree plantations are about as ecologically valuable as a parking lot, or worse, especially with all the herbicides, insecticides and fungicides.

A tree plantation typically features one tree species, often pine or spruce. Therefore, it lacks the biological diversity necessary to support life. Here is an excellent video (Stop Planting Trees!)  pointing out the differences between mature forests and tree plantations and the folly of tree planting, especially since it sets the stage for gigantic wildfires.  

Biological diversity means bird food!

Biological diversity is important because more diversity supports more species and therefore gives birds a steadier food supply.

Dr. Tallamy teaches about the specialized feeding habits of caterpillars. Caterpillars are picky eaters. Each species is limited to a narrow diet of leaves in the forest.

For example, Dr. Tallamy set up a camera at his Pennsylvania homeplace to capture the comings and goings of a white-eyed vireo, a sparrow-sized gold, black and gray migratory songbird whose populations range from Maine to Missouri to Mexico to Cuba and Florida.

White eyed vireo feeds its young with a diversity of caterpillars made possible by a diversity of plants and trees in the landscape. (Photo by Doug Tallamy)

The following illustrates the variety of caterpillars and the plants and trees on which the caterpillars had been feeding. On camera, the white-eyed vireo was caught feeding on the caterpillars of: 

• the spicebush swallowtail butterfly, which had been feeding on a spicebush

• the chestnut schysura moth, which had been feeding on a viburnum bush

• the drab prominent moth, which had been feeding on a sycamore tree 

• the eight-spotted forester moth, which had been feeding on a grape vine, and 

• the blinded sphinx moth, the lunate zale moth and the tufted bird dropping moth, all of which had been feeding on black cherry trees

For Dr. Tallamy’s explanation, see this video, starting at 19:30.  

So you can see how one species of bird benefits from a variety of caterpillar species, each of which depends on specific plant species.

Creating stable food supplies

If you have a variety of native trees, then you have food for a variety of caterpillars. Since caterpillar populations fluctuate, you don’t want to depend on any one population. But several species together create a diverse and therefore stable diet for caterpillar predators. Populations of any particular caterpillar species will rise and fall naturally from year to year. But when some are down, others are up, resulting in a steady diet for the birds. 

The principle here is that diversity of food sources means stability of the food supply, which is good for bird populations. 

But we are rapidly eliminating plant diversity and caterpillar diversity and therefore bird diversity in our misguided effort to generate renewable energy that is not renewable.

How “renewable” energy is not renewable 

In the name of “renewable energy” we are rapidly clearcutting our forests and replacing them with tree plantations, which have none of the diversity that caterpillars and birds require. In so doing, they are also eliminating the organic matter (e.g., dead trees and leaf litter) which tends to capture rainfall while providing food, nutrients and a living space for myriad fungi and insect larvae (e.g., beetles), which are vital in the circle of life.

We are clearcutting and “thinning” our forests mostly under mostly false pretenses. The logging industry, with the full-throated support of the US Forest Service, falsely claims that they need to remove trees for the health of the forest, or to prevent forest fires, or to save the climate from excess carbon dioxide. The irony is that by all accounts, wood pellets emit more carbon dioxide than coal. But this “renewable” energy gets heavy subsidies under the much celebrated Paris Agreement. 

Fire prevention does not prevent fire

Lies abound.  Do a google search for “forest thinning” or “fuel reduction” and you will see the logging industry and the US Forest Service itself tell you that felling trees (and selling them for profit) is necessary because this prevents forest fires and is good for forest health because they are “restoring” the forest to a more natural state, i.e., with less density.

They are using heavy equipment to “restore” the forest to its natural state. Part of the pretense here is that a century of fire suppression has been both necessary and successful, resulting in a forest that is unnaturally dense. But my sources indicate that fire suppression has not been successful and has not been necessary. Furthermore, it is a myth that, historically, our forests were less dense. It is also a myth that logging mimics the ecological benefits of fire.

I recommend the excellent book Smokescreen: Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forests and Our Climate, by Dr. Chad Hanson. Here is my interview with Chad Hanson. 

The timber industry and the US Forest Service promote the false claims that logging is necessary to protect human lives and buildings from fire. But the way to protect humans and our infrastructure is to protect the infrastructure directly (via “home hardening”), and not pretend that forest “thinning” and “fuel reduction” and fire breaks can suppress fires. On average, thinning and fuel reduction cause fires to burn hotter and faster, partly because “you can’t stop the wind with a chainsaw.” (Chad Hanson)

Such strategies have not prevented forest fires and have not slowed the progress of forest fires, which typically travel at less than a fraction of one mile per hour, in plenty of time for people and wildlife to get out of harm’s way. 

But “thinning,” “fuel reduction” and “fire breaks” do provide excellent excuses for logging companies, to extract the biggest trees at public expense. Ironically, the biggest trees happen to be least likely to burn and the most ecologically valuable, so removing them comes at great ecological and financial cost while providing no benefit. 

Conclusion

The “environmental” community and our government have teamed up with the greediest corporations to eliminate our forests. Our forests could be bringing us rain, while preventing flooding and drought and providing a home for bees, butterflies and birds. Instead, they are being chewed up in a vain attempt to decarbonize an industrial civilization that some say will never decarbonize. But we will lose our forests in the meantime.

If we cut down all our forests and  burned them, we would have enough electricity for a year, and then what? By all accounts, “bioenergy” (i.e., biomass, burning trees in place of coal) emits more carbon and more particulate pollution than coal, while bringing flooding and noise pollution to low income communities in the American South. It fails every single test of sanity.

There is nothing environmental here. This is just business as usual, posing as change.

Please check out my courses at harthagan.net. 

PS, Here is a video advertising the world’s most powerful heavy equipment for chewing up our forests.