 Without further ado, I would like to introduce somebody who I greatly admire and have had a few opportunities in the past to collaborate with, Bill Muma. He is an emeritus professor of international environmental policy at the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at Tufts. He was the lead author of five intergovernmental panel on climate change reports. He serves as co-director of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts, which he co-founded. And he is a visiting scientist at Woodwell Climate Center. He has a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Williams and a PhD in physical chemistry from MIT. And he is one of those really rare and precious gems who has a tremendous amount of experience in the scientific community, which he brings to bear on the world of activism and making change for the better. And he is one of the key co-authors of an important paper on proforestation, which is the topic he's going to address. Thank you so much, Bill, for being with us. Thank you very much for having me and for that kind introduction. All right. Proforestation, a simple solution to an urgent problem. And there you see a real Vermont scene in the Green Mountains. And they've not always looked that way. I did a little digging. And it's hard to believe, but just a little over 100 years ago, this is what Vermont looked like. Deforestation for agriculture, which was obviously pretty low-grade agriculture when you see that picture on the left. And a lot of it done for the sheep culture, which flourished in the early 19th century. And by the end of the 19th century, it pretty much died out. And on the right, this wasn't for agriculture. This is the deforestation that took place for timber production. And this is on the White River near Sharon, Vermont, around 1900. That is solid logs in the river there. I mean, you can imagine what that meant for deforestation. It always amazes me that a relatively small group of people with nothing but axes and cross saws could deforest 80% to 90% of Vermont and West in Massachusetts and New Hampshire and Maine in, well, it took them maybe 100 years or more to do it, but they were able to do it. So now, of course, we have much bigger machines that can do it even faster. But there's been deforestation and there's been regrowth. And this graph on the right is taking from some work that was done by Bill Keaton at the University of Vermont and some of his colleagues for a report that was done for Harvard Forest called Wildlands and Woodlands, just showing the change of the six New England states. Vermont is the red line there. You can see the deforestation from 90% coverage in 1600 down to a low of, well, this shows 35%. I've seen other figures that say that it was probably as low as 15% at some points. But notice that since 1900, it's been coming back up. And that's true of all the New England states. But I just want to make the point that this is just an area and it's not the same thing as forest because this counts things like just tree farms, for example, which are a great thing for production, but they're not great for forests. And then the dashed line just shows the rise of population in New England during that time. And here's a picture of Vermont deforestation in the 21st century. And I want to thank Mark Norris for some of these photos. This is not called clear cutting, actually. This is actually called a shelter wood cut, I would think. This is what this one is, which means that you leave a few trees behind to reseed the area. But you can see that it doesn't leave a whole lot. There's not much ecological function left in this forest. However, this is still considered forest land. It would be true if there were not a single tree on it. And that's a strange thing about the way we keep the books. New England and upper New York state are noted for their forests. And this is a wonderful reconstructed satellite image of our forested lands, the green being forest areas. The clear areas running up the west side of Vermont there is basically the Hudson Valley. And similarly, in Western Massachusetts, it turns out to be the Connecticut River that's the agricultural lands. This is a different map. This is put out by the US Forest Service. It's the Forest Inventory Analysis, the US Forest Service. And this is called the Carbon Online Estimator. And during the Trump administration, it was taken offline. I happened to copy this and keep it before that happened. I believe this is from 2010. So it's a little bit out of date maybe, but it's still pretty good. But it tells an amazing story about our part of the world. The dark green colors represent the highest carbon density. And this happens to be metric tons per hectare, but think of 10 tons per acre. And I'll show you some data in tons per acre in a moment. Notice that southern Vermont, southern New Hampshire, in Western Massachusetts, all the way down into just northwest Connecticut, is the deepest color of green, which means that it's somewhere around 130 metric tons per hectare, whereas Maine is bright pink, which is 40. In other words, the amount of carbon on each acre in Maine is less than 1 third what it is in our area. And that green spot there around the juncture of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts is the largest high density carbon area in the eastern United States, north of the Great Spoky Mountains, as far west, possibly as Montana and Idaho. It's really remarkable. It's an extraordinary inheritance that we have. And this is what has happened. This, and by the way, you notice a big green spot there in upper New York state, which is the Adirondack Reserve, which has been protected as forever wild by an amendment to the New York State Constitution in the 1890s. And then below it is a smaller area or a less dense area. That's the Catskills, also a reservation in New York state. And so those are protected areas. Our areas in our part of the country are not protected, as I will show you momentarily. But this has always just amazed me. When I saw this, I couldn't believe it. And I looked it up. Turns out the reason Maine is so low is because they have continued the kind of harvesting that you saw in that picture of the White River with all the logs in it. And there are no trees there that are very big anymore. I gave a talk up there recently. And I said, well, can't you do something besides either pulp wood or bioenergy? And they said, no, there are no trees that are big enough. By the way, notice in Upper Vermont in the northeast corner, that is also very low in carbon density and upper New Hampshire. And that's in part because of the bioenergy electric power stations in North in Burlington and in Upper Berlin, Berlin and Upper New Hampshire. So this is what a really nice intact forest in New England looks like. On the left, we see some really big tall trees, good sized. On the right, we see a very biodiverse forest with many different tree species. And oh, yes, other things. There are mosses, there are ferns. When we talk about biological diversity, we're not just talking about having, do we have 10 or 20 or 30 species of trees. We have probably hundreds of species of smaller plants. We have at least dozens, if not 100 species of fungi, which turns out to be exceedingly important for the fertility of the soil in a forest. And an article just came out a couple of weeks ago concluding that the biodiversity of living species in soils may be a quarter of all species on Earth. Everything from bacteria to various kinds of worms and springtails and all sorts of things. So I have colleagues in Australia who pointed out to me that we're not protecting forest to protect biodiversity. Basically, if it's not biodiverse, it's not a forest. It may just be a bunch of trees. And we have a lot of situations that are basically a bunch of trees. And unfortunately, the forestry industry cannot see the biodiverse forest for the trees. They only see the trees as a commercial product. So one of the things I want to talk to you about, because I'm a climate scientist. And so climate change has been a big issue for me for now 32 years. I always say that it shows you how effective I've been as a climate scientist that we're still wrestling with what are we going to do about climate change? But I've been trying, and I will keep on trying. But it turns out that trees and forests are responsible for reducing the amount that goes into the atmosphere every year by 29% or 30%. Let's say 30% to keep it simple. And other plants on land add another 3% or 4% to that. So living plants suck up carbon dioxide. And in the presence of water and sunlight, they turn it into wood. An amazing bit of chemistry that we have not come close to duplicating. And I want to talk a little bit about the connection to climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is an organization at the UN that was developed and opened for business in January 1989. And it was designed to have scientists provide kind of a state of the science of climate change for governments and for the public, and for the private sector, for that matter. Everybody needs to know what's going on. And they usually publish about every six years. This next one's going to be longer than that, seven years, I think, between partly because of the COVID pandemic. And they publish and kind of bring everybody up to date with what do we know now that we didn't know six or seven years ago? And then in addition to that, they have these special reports. And actually, a special report on renewable energy for climate mitigation that I played a major role in the last one I did for the IPCC. Then in 2018, they were asked by governments to write a special report on what's called global warming of 1 and 1 1⁄2 degrees Celsius. That's 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit for those of us in America who are metrically challenged. And the reason for that is that governments in Paris in 2015 all agreed that temperatures should not rise more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. And every attempt should be made to keep them temperatures from rising more than 1 and 1⁄2 degrees. And so governments said, OK, we've stated our contributions or what we're willing to do, but what is it going to really take to keep temperatures from rising more than 1 and 1⁄2 degrees Celsius? 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. And the IPCC did all their analysis of all the science that's out there. And they wrote the following, that in order to keep temperatures from rising excessively, that is above 1 and 1⁄2 degrees, global net anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions must decline by about 45% from 2005 levels by 2030, reaching net zero around 2050. Now, we've got to take a look at that very carefully. What is a net zero as compared to a zero? And so let me give you a little primer on how this works. So what it really means is we must simultaneously reduce our combustion emissions and all other greenhouse gases, everything, methane emissions, nitrous oxide from fertilizers and agriculture, some of the chemicals we release, the refrigerants and our refrigerators and heat pumps and air conditioners, we've got to reduce all that so that it's down by about 45%. So we must simultaneously reduce those and increase the removal of atmospheric carbon dioxide by forest growth. That is the thing that's going to make it possible. So let me just run you through. This is a diagram, looks complicated, but I'll simplify it for you, of the global carbon cycle. Where is the carbon and where does it go? And it is the main heat trapping gas. It's responsible for about 2 thirds of the global warming that has occurred since the start of the Industrial Revolution in 1750. So let's just run through this. So if we look on the left side, we can see there are coal reserves, oil reserves, gas reserves. And every year, we're emitting about 9.4 billion tons of carbon as carbon dioxide from burning those. And then we are also emitting about 1.6 billion tons in addition, making a total of 11 billion tons, from mostly deforestation and converting forest into other uses, urban lands, agriculture, and the like. So that's what we're putting in. Now, the thing that to me has always been absolutely remarkable is the annual increase isn't 11 billion tons every year. It's 5 billion tons. How's that possible? Well, it's only possible thanks to a little help from our friends, the natural world. 3.4 billion tons is taken up by vegetation on land, mostly forests, also wetlands, also grasslands, also in some agricultural soils, although many agricultural soils emit more than they absorb. And so there's 3.4 billion tons going in there and 2.5 billion tons going into the ocean for a total of, let's call it, 6 billion tons. So we put in 11. The increase is 5 and nature is taking out 6. That's basically the story. And the question is, and I've known this for many years, and suddenly about 10 or 12 years ago, it began to dawn on me, not only is nature helping us out, but we could help out nature to take out more. So it turns out a lot of other people have had this idea. And I'll just give you three examples from recent years of research that's come out. A group in Germany by Karl Heinz-Arab and his research group concluded that if we altered forest management to let more trees grow, it would allow global forests to accumulate twice as much carbon as they currently do. The title of the paper was actually kind of interesting. It says, a surprising result. The way we manage forests and grasslands is only allowing us to store as much, remove and store as much as half, half as much as they're capable of. That was kind of the title of the article. Then also in that year, there was an amazing paper by Jim Lutz out in Utah who had a team, which must have had thousands of people working on it, because they looked at 48 forests around the world, tropical forests, temperate forests, boreal forests, measuring trees, and determining how much carbon was in them. And what they discovered was that, and this is a direct quotation from the paper, quote, the largest 1% of trees in mature and older forests comprised 50% of forest biomass worldwide. Why is that important? Because carbon that is in forests, this is just in the trees. The above ground part of trees is carbon that's not in the atmosphere. And in addition to this, there's probably another 15% underground in the roots. And there could be another 50% stored in the soils of the older forests, much less in younger forests. And so there's this myth that somehow, since these big trees aren't absorbing carbon as rapidly as they once did, we should cut them down and replace them with fast-growing younger trees. Okay, think about this a moment. We won't get back to the four carbon that's out of the atmosphere in the forest until those trees that we just planted are as old as the ones we just cut down. And in a moment, I'll show you just how much we emit when we cut them down. So big trees, remember that, big trees, which are usually older trees, are hugely important in solving the climate problem. And then this paper just came out in 2020. The potential for growing forests to accumulate carbon by natural regrowth is better than active management and has been underestimated by about a third. That's a paper that just came out in September of last year. So we're learning new things about this all the time and it's all pointing in the same direction. But we've known about it for a long time. This is from a paper in 1990. I know Mark Harmon and he's actually just retired from Oregon State University. And this paper was published and he came up with this result that really startled people. How much carbon is in an old growth forest and how much is in a sustainably managed forest? One, where we cut it and carefully let it grow back and then we cut it again and carefully let it grow back. And it turned out in this particular case, as you can see the old growth forest had about 611 tons of carbon per hectare and the managed forest only had 274. Little trees just do not store much carbon. And this does not even take into account the soil carbon. A lot of soil carbon is lost when things are harvested. So this is how it works. So here we are with a 40 year harvesting cycle. So originally, this is how much carbon was stored in the forest, this is schematic just to show you how it works. So those were all cut down. And then the forest was allowed to grow back for 40 years and then it was harvested again. Then it was allowed to grow back again it was harvested again. And if you take, the red line is kind of an eyeball average for this. So there's this much less carbon in this sustainably managed forest than there was in the old growth forest. But wait, isn't an old forest gonna die? Yes, trees are gonna die. But when they do, they stand for a long time storing carbon. When they fall to the ground, they store carbon. A lot of that carbon goes into soils. And by the way, when there's an opening in the forest canopy, new trees start growing. So this jagged edge up here indicates kind of this, trees dying, new trees growing kind of thing. Although this is misleading because now we know that the leaves and the needles that get composted build up in the soils. And so the actual curve should look more slowly increasing because of what's going on in the soils. Closer to home, but that was out in the Pacific Northwest. Closer to home, Bill Keaton and one of his colleagues, Nunnery did this analysis again about over 10 years ago. And they looked at the way forest are harvested. And it ranges from on the left clear cutting to the right, leaving it alone. And the light color is the amount of carbon that's stored in wood products. And I'll say more about what that actually turns out to be later on. So here roughly half of it is stored in wood products in here less than half and here much less than half. And this is a shelter wood cut we talked about. This is ITS individual tree selection with various assumptions about the level of the cut. But none of them store as much carbon as does a forest that's been left growing of the same type. And so this argument that the forestry industry is making that, well, if we need to store more carbon, so we'll cut down more trees and store it in wood products. Doesn't seem to work out that way. Here is just something this was done from the Department of Conservation and Recreation here in Massachusetts, looking at a Norway spruce saw timber, which is a non-native species that we planted back in the 20s and 30s. And you can see that if you use even age management that it crops pretty quickly if you harvest it around 2013, let's say, or something in this period, and then it would grow back over the future like this and still not be back where it was for 100 years. If we did uneven age management, we would be just maybe a little bit better off if we did extended rotations longer times between harvesting we'd be here. But if he just let it keep growing for 100 years, there'd be much more carbon in that forest than by harvesting it. And that doesn't count what goes into things. So here I am in Mohawk Trail State Forest. This is a place that I was introduced to by Bob Leverett standing next to one of his favorite trees. It's a very big tree that has, I don't know, four or five tons of carbon in it. It's a white pine. It's 160 years old. We talk here about planting trees. That's a good thing to do, no question about it. But letting them grow is better. And pro forestation management, which is the term we invented to talk about this allows forest to reach their biological potential for a carbon storage in trees and soils. It also optimizes biological diversity because larger trees accumulate the most atmospheric carbon over time. And they store the carbon in the wood of their trunks and limbs. Roughly half the weight of this tree, dry weight of wood is carbon. So that's where it is. But this is just a magnificent grove of very large old trees that are 150 to 200 years old. Now that doesn't go back to 1600, but it goes halfway back to 1600. And the regrowth that dark green area I showed you is probably the most successful reforestation example in the history of the planet. And it all came about because everybody discovered they couldn't farm in New England anymore and there was better farming in Ohio. Then they cut down all the trees in Ohio. Cutting down trees has a price, a carbon price. This paper was published by the people at the US Forest Service. So I'm not making this up. It wasn't done by a group of tree huggers. It was done by an agency that's dedicated to cutting down trees. So the question is how much carbon is lost from forest in the US? And what you can see is there are a lot of things that cause it. This little light blue is land conversion, about 3% of the carbon is lost to that. Almost 5% is due to insect damage, 3.7% due to fire. It's probably a little higher now because we've had some bad fires in the last couple of years. Wind losses right here in the tan light green drought. And what's the red? That's the emissions, those are the emissions that are associated with cutting down the trees. How's that possible? Well, it turns out it's possible because it's only about one, about half of the wood that's harvested even makes it to a sawmill. And then more of the wood is lost there. So these residues either are left to decay and release carbon dioxide, or some of them are recovered and taken to the sawmill and burned for energy. In either case, relatively rapidly, the carbon dioxide goes into the atmosphere. Now I did a, I've read this paper, I was just stunned by it. And I decided, I said, well, how much is this? Well, it's 162 million metric tons of carbon per year. And what is that compared to other sectors? And I found that it's slightly greater than the 149 million metric tons of carbon per year in all the buildings released by all the buildings in the United States, not counting the electricity, but the heating, the waste we generate, the leakages we have from our air conditioners, refrigerators and other things. So this was a real eye-opener for me to realize just how this is why in those figures from Keaton and all, there's so little carbon stored in products. And working with colleagues out in the Pacific Northwest, Dr. Beverly Law and Dr. Tara Hudiburd, she's, Bev is at Oregon State University College of Forestry and Tara is at University of Idaho School of Forestry. They did an analysis of the forestry industry and the carbon in the state of Oregon. And that started around 1900. And we had data that came through 2015. So we had a record of 115 years. And the question was of all the carbon that was harvested, all the trees that were harvested and the carbon they contained, where is that carbon today? And indeed some of it is in long-lived wood products, 19%. 16% is in landfills and 65%, almost two thirds of it is in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. That's pretty stunning. So this argument about how useful this is is not useful. Using some data that Bob Leverett has put together on some white pine stands here in Western Massachusetts, just south of the Vermont border. So it's almost Vermont. It probably works in Vermont too. How does, this is what sort of illustrates how proforestation works. And one is to note that if you have a stand of white pines that's 50 years old, they're about 22 tons per acre. And if you'd let them grow for 50 years, they'd be 47 tons per acre. But if you harvest them and you sustainably harvest them which means you wait to cut them again when they've come back to where they were before, 22 tons. You would have 22 tons at the end of 100 years. But if you'd let them grow, you'd have 47 tons. That is proforestation. That's the benefit you get. And if you repeat this for another 50 years and cut them, you're back to 22 tons. If you'd let them grow, you'd have 76 tons. This is the big tree story. It's the accumulation of carbon out of the atmosphere that's so important because if it's in the trees and in the soils, it's not in the atmosphere. And it's the amount in the atmosphere that determines how much heat gets trapped and changes our climate. Now, the people who talk about using wood to replace fossil fuels often use the argument. We'll manage this sustainably. So basically if you do that, you have 22 tons of carbon, you burn it, it goes to zero in the forest and 22 tons in the atmosphere. It grows back over 50 years and you're back to 22 tons in the forest and 22 tons out of the atmosphere. And then you do it again and you go to zero in the forest and 22 tons in the atmosphere. And after 150 years, you're back at 22 tons again. That's called carbon neutral. Well, carbon neutral is clearly not good enough and it's not nearly as good as proforestation which is letting them grow for the next 100 years. And you say, well, I don't have 100 years to wait. Look, we have trees that are 50 years old now that can grow this in the next 50 years when we absolutely have to have it. We have trees that are 30 years old now that will grow in the next 50, 70 years to add huge amounts of carbon. So that's the important message here. So this is just showing what some of these older forests look like. And let's see, I think that's Bob Leverett right there on the right with the tape around the tree measuring it. But these remnants that we have of these old growth forests which are actually not primary forests because they were harvested once and they only started regrowing maybe 200 years ago. They were harvested maybe 250 years ago. And so this is what they look like today and give us an idea of what could happen if we let more of our forests continue to grow. Now thanks to Mark who sent me some information and then Lisa Hogue who sent me the Green Mountain Forest plan. I just, you know, I asked the rhetorical question. So why does the Forest Service want to do these big cuts in the Green Mountain National Forest? And because it's in their plan and why do they have a plan? Well, here are statements taken directly from there. I won't read the whole thing verbatim but it says Forest Service inventories have shown that a number of timbers, and this is the, I picked the one south of Route 9 because that's closest to me. By the way, I'm speaking to you, 400 feet from the Vermont border. So I can't claim to be a Vermonter but I can assure you that Vermont winter has come across the border into the part of Massachusetts I'm in. So it's overstocked with trees. Oh my God, it's overstocked with trees. Can you imagine that? Some tans of trees have poor form, declining vigor, insect disease or physical damage from the elements being wind to a degree that would designate them as low quality stands, low quality for what? Low quality for timber, low quality for biological diversity, maybe not. One of the great examples of this was in the Pacific Northwest where there was a trash tree as it was called by the industry of a Western coniferous tree, kind of scrunchy scrunchy little tree. Turns out that the bark of that tree contained a chemical which we know is toxol which became the most effective agent in treating breast cancer that's ever been discovered. But it was a trash tree from a timber point of view. And here's a phrase I really love. Some stands are now mature or over mature. I doubt there's a tree in that forest that's more than 120 years old, maybe 150. And these are trees that have a lifetime of 300 years, 400 years, some maybe even more but over mature and desired tree size, desired for what? The sawmill, age and quality have been achieved already or their growth levels have dropped off. They're not growing as fast as they used to but they're still storing a lot more every year than planting new trees would do. These stands are now ready to be harvested before saw log quality is reduced where the trees decline in economic value and die. So there it is. It's all about economic value and saw logs. And the other thing of course we have here in New England is we have these power plants particularly in Vermont, New Hampshire and in Maine. And they're trying to build one in Massachusetts now with huge subsidies. Why the subsidies? Because it's more expensive than anything else. If we didn't have subsidies, these would not exist. When New Hampshire pulled the subsidies under their wood burning power plants, they all shut down. When Massachusetts set stringent standards for how much they could emit, the, I think it was two or three plants in Maine shut down because they couldn't make it anymore. So we're charging people more to put more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and put in a lot of air pollution from burning this wood. And this is what's happening actually in the Southeast US. We're gonna know this because this company in Viva is planning to move to Maine and New Hampshire and the Vermont can't be far behind to make wood pellets which are exported to Europe. And the US is the leading exporter of wood pellets in the world. And the largest coal burning plant in Great Britain has converted two thirds to burning these wood pellets. And it's on the order of 10 million tons a year as being exported from North Carolina. And I love the statement that in Viva the company makes. This was on their websites, they've taken it down now but we take sawdust as leftover from sawmills. They're cutting the big trees into wood that goes into house building. The sawdust is collected, it's made into pellets. Well, these are the logs going in to be turned into sawdust to be made into pellets. And on the right shows you their careful land management. Little remains but stumps and puddles. And the company in England says, oh, we never deforested. Here's a picture of where their fuel was coming from in North Carolina. We should also know that in addition to climate change our plant and animal species are threatened and they're deteriorating rapidly. And this was a big report that came out a year ago, well, in 2019, it's almost two years ago now. And we're losing this to the breaking point. A million species of plants and animals are headed towards extinction and land used direct exploitation, climate change, pollution and invasive species. We need to protect 30% of land and only, that should say only 2% of Vermont land is protected by law. So forest laws and reduction in native species and when you look at these areas they end up have a lot of invasive species. And so here in Massachusetts, we're seeing the same sort of thing putting out subsidies of $175 million to burn for electricity. And it will be, of course, in a community of poor people, many of them people of color in Springfield which is already an asthma capital. And we're needlessly cutting these. And here's an example of the kind of things we're seeing here and I'm sure you'll see from the Forest Service. This was described as a desired condition. This is what it came out looking like. Complex stands with age class, size class and species diversity. Reduce the number of hazardous trees. I mean, you go in the woods and they're just all about to fall on you if we don't take them down and reduce these other species. So missing from the Vermont Green Mountain Forest Plan, no mention of carbon stocks. This plan was developed before climate change was really on the agenda. No discussion of harvesting and its resiliency to climate change, big trees are far more resilient to fire, drought and everything else than little trees. No analysis of the harvest of the impact on plants, fungi, soil carbon. No discussion of implications for biodiversity other than, well, we'll open up more areas that'll support deer for hunting. Just what we need more deer and more ticks. Then it doesn't mention soil loss. So here's my proposal that we established two types of forests. One, a carbon reserve that we have these strategic forest carbon reserves for forest carbon and ecosystem services like biodiversity. These happen to be two very prominent climate scientists who study the role of carbon in forests from the Woodwell Climate Research Center. Or analysts establish some other forests that are for industrial production. This is a picture I took, I could do this five times a day driving back and forth between Williamstown and Boston, these trucks are just taking it out and 90% of our wood is exported. There's a program called 30 by 30. It's originally an international agreement called the Convention on Biological Diversity that 30% of land and water should be protected by 2030. This is a Vermont picture. It'd be awfully nice if that were protected. But this is how much is protected. This is actually from our paper on proforestation. And what you can see is, here's the percentage of land that's in forests, the green bars here, here's Vermont. And it looks like it's about 80, I don't know what here's Vermont, about 80%. And these little yellow and red things down here, let's bring that out. We look at Vermont and we see that about 3.5% is intact forest meaning it's contiguous large forest and only 2% of that is protected. So Vermont is a far away from 30 by 30, but you're not alone. I mean, the rest of us aren't doing that well either in terms of our total amount that's protected. So Massachusetts is considering two bills to protect state forests. Vermont only has this 2%, but this bill 2871 would basically protect all of the state forests from harvesting for commercial purposes. And the goal would be to conserve them as intact ecosystems, primarily influenced by natural processes. And then for our wildlife management areas, 30% of them would be maintained under the 30 by 30. So let me just wrap up right here. Strategies for closing this so-called sequestration gap between what we put in and what nature takes out. We obviously have to reduce our emissions from all sources, but we need to prevent deforestation, the draining of wetlands, soil loss and restore them as essential to avoid irreversible and catastrophic climate change and to make us more resilient. Now, proforestation management is far more effective than planting a trillion trees. It is also one of the least costly options for removal and storing additional carbon dioxide. Those trees work every day of the week, every day of every week of the year and they don't ask for overtime or time off on weekends or anything else. They just keep growing and it's a wonderful resource that we have. So let it grow. So it is getting late, but we wanted to have some time to do some question and answer. And there are many, many questions in the chat which is exciting to see. We have a couple of people who are going have been asked to go through some of those questions and pick a few for us to address to Dr. Muma and to Mark. So we'll spend a bit of time doing that and then have a very quick wrap up and closing. So Jennifer and... Thank you, Rachel. So I have our first question here for Dr. Muma. Two bills have been introduced in Massachusetts, HD 2871 and HD 3197, which would designate most state lands as parks or reserves that are off limits to logging with the goal of conserving intact natural ecosystems to maximize carbon storage and biodiversity. Is this a good idea and should Vermont take this step? I'm not gonna follow the trap of telling Vermonters what they ought to do. So I'll avoid answering it that way. I'll tell you what we're doing in Massachusetts and I'm not even sure we're gonna do it, but this is what we're trying to do. The state parks, I forget now, but it's maybe eight or 9% of the total land area. The state always sells these, makes these agreements and loses money on them. And they're always undercutting, I guess that's maybe not an appropriate term, but they're always undermining the private woodland owners in terms of the price that they can get because it lowers the value of private landowners who want to sell their trees for lumber. So it seems to me there are at least three reasons why there's no reason for the state to be doing it. And because these are the public's land, they're not the purview of the private timber industry and I have nothing against the private timber industry. I mean, we all will be using wood products for a long time, but we should recognize, which we have only recently begun to recognize the importance of these forests for helping us address climate change to have some vestige of our rich, biodiverse heritage that we were given, but which we keep losing. So by the way, the US Forest Service estimates that only 7% of US forests are over 100 years old. These were forests that were, what, 10,000 years old when we arrived at, when the Europeans arrived in 1600. And many of them were, they'd been around a long time. They managed to manage themselves pretty well. Now we have changed that dynamic and there may be situations where we do have to intervene to get them on track to be viable forests. But the goal would be to say, let's start with our public lands and create these strategic forest carbon reserves. And so that's what's behind these two Massachusetts piece of legislation. And if that's what Vermonters would like to see with their state forests, more power to them. I mean, if you look at that map, I mean, we in Western Massachusetts, you in Vermont and the people in Southern New Hampshire, we have the most carbon dense region. And in fact, the tallest trees in the whole Northeastern United States are, believe it or not, in Western Massachusetts. It's astounding. And we have very few remnants of true old growth forests but we have what would be called old forests because they're more than whatever it is, 70 years old in forest service terms. And those species have lifetimes of 200 years, 300 years, some of them 400 years. So they have a long ways to go before they're senile. And so we should keep some of them around, I think. So that's our motivation. I hope that's helpful to the Vermonters in the room. Thank you. We've got about 35 questions and a number of people have asked this same one. Is there a percentage of our forests that we should strive to put under pro-forestation focus management? That's a good question. And it's an interesting one right now because President Biden called for joining this global 30 by 30 initiative, which by the way is on the way to being 50 by 50, 50% by 50 being protected. This is for every country in the world. And what would it mean to set aside 30% of Vermont wouldn't all be forest, obviously. I mean, there's Lake Champlain, there are other areas of river basins and things that would be important. So 30%, that seems like a big chunk, but more than 80% of Vermont is forested. So we're not talking about taking it all. And I think what we need to do is do a scientific study of which are the lands that are going to be accumulating the most carbon, having the greatest biodiversity and setting those aside, making that a decision that we wanna do. In other words, we're managing it for protecting our climate system. And then we're managing other lands for production of forests. Dr. Mooma, for our next question, we have a teacher from New Hampshire. And the question they ask, it certainly applies to schools here in Vermont and questions teachers may have. So the question is, I am a chemistry and earth system teacher at Hanover High School in Hanover, New Hampshire. We have developed a climate action plan for the high school and students are currently writing an RFP for sustainably harvested wood pellets. It sounds like we are searching for a product that doesn't really exist, question Mark. What would you recommend a high school in New Hampshire use for its heat source question? We are currently burning wood pellets. Okay. Well, the problem with wood pellets is that, although it's claimed that they're just made from residues and so forth, it turns out that way more than half of them are made from whole trees. That's a problem. As you probably in Hanover know, Dartmouth College considered shifting its whole heating system for its entire campus to wood. And they spent a year examining that and just discovered that it was more expensive than other things that they could do. I think ultimately we're all going to be heating with heat pumps. I'm in a house right now that we started building 15 years ago that's heated by a ground source heat pump. We had some 10 below days here, comfortable as could be here in this house. You get three or four units of heat for every unit of electrical energy. So it's really efficient. And that means it can be run by renewable sources. So I'm run by solar energy at night. I draw from the grid, but I buy from low carbon of renewable energy sources. So I'm zero net energy. In fact, I'm zero positive energy. I put out more electricity than I use in a year. And more and more people are doing this. So I would look into those alternatives and see what we could do. The other problem with wood pellets and burning wood generally of course is the air pollution which is ultrafine particles which are in a COVID crisis is not what we need for our lungs. So the product exists, but it's very destructive of forest lands when it gets to be a very large industry. Okay, here's a question that I think a lot of people would like to know the answer to. Can we talk about the trade-offs in terms of wildlife habitat when one manages only for carbon and only in this no-cut manner? Obviously the habitat objectives are in the plans for a reason. Right. Well, it turns out what species do we have the fewest of? In other words, where are we most affected? It is the species that live in older forests. With all due respects, we don't need to look at say our national forests and say I've got to have X percent of early successional habitat. There is plenty of early successional habitat in other forests in Vermont and in Massachusetts and in every place else. So I don't think we have to worry that there won't be a place for whatever species you want to take care of. There was a meeting that I attended and the person from Fish and Game spoke and he said, we're gonna have 20% early successional and something of this and that and the other thing. And I said, how about for old growth species? He says, oh, I guess we'll put in 10% over here. And I said, how long will it take you to get that? I know it'll take you to get early successional. It'll take you about two days. But how long will it take you to get old growth habitat? It'll take decades, maybe centuries. So we just need to find a way to think about this and I'm not opposed to having some early successional. I mean, I have someone like property and I have some older trees that are 150 to 200 years old on the property. And I think it's possible to find places to do each. If I could just add to that just a little bit, not much to what Dr. Moomow said, but it's this idea of early successional habitat in creating space for certain species is promulgated a lot. And it sounds good when you first hear it. And when I first started learning about forests and how they were being managed, I thought, oh, that sounds like a good idea. Till you realize they're managing for a species that isn't naturally here or it isn't naturally here in the numbers that they're trying to get. So we have a situation where we clear cut our forests, certain species moved in. Now we're trying to say, oh, let's keep those species around. We should let the forests regrow and then the natural species will return. They also talk about how they need early successional habitat for certain birds that are declining across the US. Well, where those birds normally reside, those areas should be addressed, not trying to take the northeast and make it such that it can attract and have birds that normally are in the Midwest. Okay, so you really need to get behind the details to understand a lot of what's promoted about why cutting trees are good to really understand the motivations. The motivation is to cut trees and create forest products. That's right. I'd like to step in here and just say we have one more question and then we'll wrap up. So Dr. Mooma, you've presented a compelling case for why we should apply the concept of proforestation to forests across our region. What do you think are the greatest policy opportunities to rapidly scale up the application of proforestation principles around New England or around the US? That's a really good question. Let me preface it by saying, I'm not blaming the people in the Forest Service for coming up with a plan they came up with. It's the one they're told to do. And they've done it and they're very competent and they do it well. However, at the time they did it 15 years ago, climate change was not on the agenda. We now know that climate change is racing and getting worse and worse and worse. And we need to do everything we can to hold that off. So I think what we need to do, I do think I like this idea of, and notice I'm not saying we should do it everywhere, but we should have some strategic forest carbon reserves and we start with public lands because those are already ours to do with what we decide to do. Rewrite the rules and I can assure you that the competent people in the US Forest Service will implement them well. And then there's another dimension to this which is actually working in places right now. There are surveys done by the Forest Service that show that far fewer than half the private land, forest landowners actually want to harvest their forests. But they often are forced to because they get a medical bill that got to send a child to university they've got an unexpected expense. What if they were paid in Massachusetts you get a tax rebate if you manage your forest with a registered forester to be harvested periodically. Suppose you were being paid to keep your trees growing in a pro-forestation management system and you get that payment once a month instead of once every 50 years or 30 years or whatever your rotation cycle is. It turns out that where that's being done is very successful and it's being done in the Amazon right now. It's being done in California right now. It could be being done in Vermont and New England. And where would the money come from? Well, let's transfer some of the subsidies that we're now putting in to harvest, harvesting our public lands in ways that aren't even economically viable. Let's stop the subsidies for fossil fuels that we have in this country and transfer those subsidies to these private landowners. I've talked to a number of them. They said that would be great. It would not stop the forestry industry we would still have wood products because there's still enough people who do want to cut their forest and produce lumber. So I think it's a two-fold public and private approach to maintaining more of our forests. And if I could just close with one statement, probably all familiar. I mean, what the Forest Service began was a huge improvement over what was happening before. The rampant just absolute. I showed you those early pictures early. They're only just a little over a hundred years ago. People have been living in Vermont for 300 years. So a lot of damage was done in that time. But Gifford Pinchot when he created the US Forest Service had this dictum, a very utilitarian one. He said conservation should accomplish the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time. He also recognized that forests were important for water. So it wasn't even just timber production he was thinking of. I can't put words in his mouth because he's long gone. But if I look and say what is the greatest good for the greatest number today, I'd say it's addressing climate change and protecting our vanishing biological diversity on the planet. That's a hugely important thing to be doing. Now again, that's not maybe the only thing we should be doing because we're talking about multiple uses for our forests. But it has to be, it should be, now it's none of it. It needs to be a significant part of it is what I would argue. Thank you for letting me just make that little statement. Thank you. Well, that's actually a great closing. I could just add one thing to, or just something Dr. Moomow said. He said it much better maybe than what I was trying to emphasize that the folks who work for the Forest Service, they do a really good job doing what they are told to do and what the focus of the Forest Service is. If we were successful in doing something like recognizing the Green Mountain National Forest as a strategic carbon reserve, which when you look at the map, it is, they would do an outstanding job of taking care of that and managing to that point. And that's just what we need to work towards as citizens to forward that goal. Thanks, Mark. Yeah, I think that the amount of interest that we've seen in this event to the fact that we have a new potentially more receptive administration in place, maybe we have some opportunities where we can really think boldly about trying to implement some of these ideas. And of course, allowing pro-forestation as Bill and others have pointed out, it's not only about carbon, it's about biodiversity, it's about our waterways, it's about many other things, recreational opportunities and so on and so forth. So yeah, with that, I would just like to say thank you to the still 221 participants that are here with us. We went over 300 for a little while there, which again, as I said, it's really inspiring to see so much interest. And I hope people will visit the Standing Trees Vermont website. We are just recently come together and we're still formulating our ideas and our plans about how to proceed. And we invite you to join us in formulating that and carrying this forward. And hopefully we'll have some other events coming up soon. I think it's really helpful to have these kinds of events where we can get together, learn and help advance our understanding of these matters. So once again, thanks everybody and have a good night, stay safe and get vaccinated. Yes, good. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Yes, thanks. Thank you, Dr. Moomout. Yeah. Bye.