A dirty secret: The liquidation of redwood forests on publicly-owned lands in California
It’s reasonable to expect that publicly owned redwood forest lands — the most carbon-dense forests on the planet — can help curb climate change. Yet, a recent talk by my colleague John O’Brien pieces together the story of how the State of California pillaged 50,000 acres of precious redwoods in Jackson Demonstration State Forest (JDSF) since acquiring it in 1946.
Contrary to PR materials issued at the time promising to reverse the ravages of past commercial logging in the western half of the forest, they promptly liquidated nearly 20,000 acres of remaining virgin primary forest, taking virtually every tree **over** 22” inches in diameter, including scores of majestic old-growth trees that perhaps exceeded 20 feet in diameter and were thousands of years old.
Today, only 450 acres of old-growth forest are left in JDSF (covering less than 1% of their original area), and second-growth trees (those next-in-line replacements for the giants previously logged) continue to be cut and monetized to picnic benches and the like. New measurements show that while 5% of Calforna’s pre-industrial redwood forest lands are left, only 2% of second-growth forest remain.
Sadly, we are going backwards.
Managed as commercial timberland, the state currently removes about 10–15 million board-feet of timber each year from Jackson. While the state asserts that this is “sustainable logging”, the reality is that carbon storage is kept in check compared to what would occur if the forest was managed with the climate in mind, and the standing carbon today is a small fraction of what it was prior to state ownership.
In his talk, O’Brien also meticulously documents a hopeful dimension of the story. While logging operations had for decades impeded the increased carbon storage in JDSF for decades, following extensive public outcry and a lawsuit around the year 2000 a relatively brief 10-year cessation of logging and more muted resumption of cutting after led to a remarkable ~50% increase in standing forest biomass.
That said, thanks to new LiDAR data from the GEDI project on the International Space Station, O’Brien accurately locates the scant area of surviving old-growth forest and maps the extent of biomass loss from past logging, showing how long the scars remain, and how very slowly some areas recover. These high-fidelity images are remarkable and show detail not at all visible in ordinary satellite images. Other new data show that individual redwood trees’ growth rates in JDSF and elsewhere have slowed and even stopped as they turn into “zombie forests” in response to the stresses of climate change (higher temperatures, less fog, less rain). This reality invalidates the State’s strenuous assertions that new growth will re-sequester carbon released by their logging operations.
Continued publicly-funded logging in Jackson thus runs counter to California’s otherwise progressive climate goals. This and similar stories get scant media attention, due to the remote locations of these areas, the opacity of the public agencies managing them, and the “inconvenient truth” that what is frequently called “sustainable forest management” is anything but carbon-neutral.
Watch O’Brien’s talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBPMrgjAsb0
