Ranting to /dev/null

Clear cut the forests

Okay, nothing quite that drastic, but Wired is running a piece on "green heresies," environmentally brilliant moves which are currently anathema to the majority of the environmentalist community. One of these is that old growth forests actually produce more carbon dioxide than they consume.

It seems counterintuitive. The accepted wisdom is that trees suck of CO2 and put out O2. Well, kind of. Trees do use CO2 in their metabolic processes, but they do most of this while they're growing, most of which occurs during the first few decades of their lives. Thinking about it this way, it makes sense. There's a lot more carbon in wood than in the little sugar trees produce to keep themselves running. Once trees age, they start to lose limbs and eventually die, and the process of rotting--or burning--releases all that carbon back into the atmosphere.

The article suggests a brilliant idea: treating forests as carbon reducing crops. Clear cut the old-growth forests, use what lumber is still good, then bury, don't burn, the scrap. Burning forests contributes an incredible amount to the carbon in the atmosphere. Then push to use wood as a construction material, for both structures and household goods. So fewer metal chairs, more wooden ones. Same for floors, walls, etc. Imagine the hippy street cred: "The wooden cabinets, furniture, and paneling in my house aren't an extravagance, they actually represent upwards of a ton of carbon removed from the atmosphere!"

As to the ecological impact... I know for a fact that Pennsylvania could use about a million less deer, so I don't think there's much in the way of risk there, especially if you slowly rotate through acreage. A few acres cut and planted every year and after a decade or two, you've turned a huge swath of forest into productive landscape all while having minimal impact on the ecology of the area due to planting and incremental expansion.

Plus, hardwood floors are cool.