Redwood Reader

It was reported yesterday by Reuters via Grist from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change that carbon sequestration was practical with trees after all, and should be considered part of the national strategy to deal with climate change. They are talking in the seventy-five dollar a ton for removal and are scared it would take an area of forest the size of the state of Texas. As a longtime advocate of CO2 capture via natural resources to restore watersheds and forests, and as a component of public land use policy, I am glad to see the shift in policy but dismayed by the obvious lack of information about how much of what can be sequestered. I also note European carbon credits are trading in the five-dollar range. How can we convince our government to look at its own science and see the benefits to so many struggling aspects of landscape degradation?
As far as I can tell, I am the only one seeing carbon sequestered in association with trees as a key reason watersheds and forests are failing in the West. Yet I have only connected dots from several sciences to solve a problem on a piece of land. What causes landslides? What are the roles of roots and fungi? Why do streams go dry? All these paths were answered when glomalin is included in the landscape makeup, enough glomalin stored in the ground to store several years worth of rainfall in the root zone of the forest.
Glomalin also shows us that all the carbon accounting is off by a considerable amount. Before the discovery it was thought 8% of the carbon processed by trees was stored in the soil as humic acid. With the discovery of glomalin that amount jumped to 27%. Its properties of binding soil particles creating water storage is well documented for topsoil but has yet to be carried over into forestry. The role of fungi in the forest is not well understood, and their byproducts unrecognized because glomalin is tough and durable, and had been thrown out in earlier research.
Nevertheless, its enemies are the things that come with development- running water, sunlight, and ambient air all help destroy glomalin, which reverts to CO2. So huge amounts of carbon are being released from the soil we have never accounted for. New ‘best management practices’ can reduce that considerably. Being a product of many fungi associated with most growing plants production continues as species change as land conditions change. High turnover areas are well studied in croplands but long term storage has not, only that there is more glomalin in places left alone for a decade or two.
The Pacific Northwest has an amazing variety of fungi associating with trees. Their job is to help the tree gather nutrients and water. They actively condition the soil to absorb and store water for the forest to use in dry season. Experiments with raised CO2 show rapid growth of trees and even faster rates of glomalin production. The rapid growth seems to provide its own solutions to problems like nitrogen and ozone. It is also the very conditioning we need to restore the streams supporting anadramous fisheries. I was told my creek would run all year again once conifers got established in the area. This is why.
So carbon dioxide becomes the very tool we need to reestablish order in the forest. Carbon credits could pay for it. The entire US (Forest Service homepage shows 193 million acres, more than the 148 million called for in the Pew Report) seeing the forest this way, and counting the glomalin sequestered as well as the trees, should show what is possible. Parkland, preserved land and non-industrial timber holdings also stand to benefit and or assist, in fact every conceivable land use has the ability to store carbon and benefit from an abundance of it. It also carbon dioxide as the healing power of nature for scarred landscapes (New Scientist reports this week on battlefield recovery) from development and resource extraction. It gives us a scale of rainfall retention from full old growth to reforested area, with less in pasture or meadow, but still a factor in the lawn percentages of paved and roofed areas. This may well assist urban planners in the design, use and locations of open space, parks and yards as well as storm water catchment, diversion and/or storage.