Redwood Reader

15. The Problem with Preservation for Resource Protection
As the science involved in natural resource recovery improves, methods of healing the landscape and its bounty come under review. Outside of lawsuits, the purchase of land for public benefit is about the only way concerned citizens can impact land use patterns they feel are unduly harsh. When public money is used, public access is involved and recreation is mandated. The increased number of visitors often trigger problems of their own. Land comes off the tax rolls and commercial uses are prohibited or regulated. Appointed overseers, whether BLM or Parks, are forced to accommodate many user groups that normally would not be part of resource management whether protection or recovery. Private owners cannot sustain management when plans are tried in court at every turn, and so cashing out to big money environmental groups has become a major avenue of preservation. The problem with this is that the land comes off the tax rolls, stops creating income and providing jobs, needs its own revenue stream for maintenance and/or counts on over extended and overworked agencies to hold title and perform all administrative tasks. Meanwhile large family operations are trying to preserve their stewardship through reduced inheritance taxes and conservation easements. All of this costs money, and often the source is the very resource that needs attention. Local economies are forced to count on tourism as their primary income, and the land cannot pay for the work needed as skilled labor is lost. Customary uses critical to local concerns are lost in the agency shuffle as each agency tries to protect its area of expertise. And long term preservation agreements may block future uses not currently considered.
The environment and climate change are far more related than scientists studying either recognize. Today in New Scientist climate scientists are predicting lower river flows in middle latitudes and higher flows in tropics and the Boreal north due to precipitation changes caused by global warming. The time scale is 300 years. The scientists predict a 4 fold increase of carbon dioxide over 'Pre-industrial levels". Obviously not all the facts are in yet, but we argue against many of these premises.
Carbon dioxide has been rising unnaturally since man first started tilling the ground, cutting forests and diverting water. These activities all destroy glomalin, releasing ground stored CO2 into the atmosphere. Therefore our pre-industrial baseline reflects some agriculture and development and not just natural occurrences. Glomalin destruction is not accounted in any of today’s measures of CO2 sources.
The vegetation-precipitation interface zone has been substantially impacted, as has drainage worked out in the landscape over thousands of years. The ability of the ground to absorb and store moisture will restore itself if left alone long enough. This means we need to protect and rehabilitate these lands in a manner that restores functioning forest, watersheds and streams. It means we can accelerate the process by tree planting, reducing tillage, minimizing ground disturbance in development and recreation and protecting the resource by fuel reduction and moisture retention. It means carbon dioxide is the key to regenerating the lost unknown resource, glomalin. We actively participate in CO2 reduction by restoring our landscape while it helps retain soil moisture from precipitation events. Eventually the forest will reassert itself but the problems remain the same- forest removal if left in production and complete preservation if not. There is no room to allow recovering land to come online without extraction dollar threats.
Quantifying glomalin production, longevity, and accumulation reveals the true extent of forest production from the resource carbon dioxide, and its relation to tree size. Earlier models of wood plus humic acid underestimated carbon storage. This same ignorance has led to massive releases of stored carbon from modern development and land uses. We are paying the price of ignorance. Emissions alone do not explain the rapid rise. The time for running the numbers has arrived. A scale relating time between ground disturbances and the amount of CO2 released from the soil can provide a set of rules to reduce this unexpected source. Baseline references can be established for vegetation types and condition of the land as well as optimum stocking levels for sustainable glomalin production while in timber production. This is the very definition of sustainable forestry.
Baseline references are also needed to determine carbon storage in different vegetative and climatic settings. Every living thing absorbs carbon so we can get a handle on the carbon budget in many ways, with every one participating. Long term storage under conditions that can normally produce income will need a payment mechanism quantified by science and with attractive alternative economic appeal. The Kyoto Agreement will not, through emissions reductions, solve the problem. Global carbon storage awareness, funded by international carbon storage leasing with long period contracts (easements) prohibiting major ground disturbances or commercial logging can make immediate impacts. Acquisition and restoration money saved, preservation of the tax base, the roadless issue and having fisheries restored justify investigation of this emerging market.