Redwood Reader

Pacific Lumber offers to sell 60,000 acres
Environmental groups may bid for forest land
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/02/11/BUGCOH6SVN1.DTL
PALCO reacts to allegations of liquidation by Kara D. Machado, 2/10/2006
http://www.eurekareporter.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?ArticleID=8352
Two important land sale issues popped up Friday. The first is the report of Pacific Lumber selling about a quarter of their timber holdings. They characterize the lands as ranchland and comparatively unproductive Douglas fir lands, retaining the core redwood lands. Douglas fir lands are worth maybe a thousand an acre, while redwood commands grape like prices in the range of ten thousand an acre. Redwood is worth roughly double Douglas fir per board foot per thousand. Douglas fir has the additional expense of replanting for best recovery, although blocks are cut for natural reseeding. And it is Douglas fir growing in the steep wet coastal valleys most susceptible to road failure and mass wasting that results in road building costing 34000 dollars per mile.
These Douglas fir lands are the very heart of my experiences in restoration studies concerning the fungal by product glomalin and its role in landscape stability. Douglas fir is the best suited vegetative cover in the high rainfall areas outside the redwood zone, especially to the west of the redwoods. With a large percentage of acres off limits due to streamside buffers and steepness rules, why should PL pay taxes on or maintain these lands? Unfortunately these lands will lose the trained oversight now provided by the company to multiple owners with varying agendas. Some will hopefully go to environmentally minded concerns.
This taken together with the gloomy report in Northcoast Journal about our economic woes just points up the need for more serious planning. We have repeatedly called for an easy way for local landowners to be paid for set asides for carbon sequestration. Prior plans did not account for ground storage of fungal by products, which can be up to forty percent of annual photosynthetic production, and is not necessarily all lost once a tree is cut. Sixty thousand acres at 100 dollars per year would be six million in income. A hundred dollars an acre per year could be enough to do TSI an fire safety and do the maintenance and improvements that would be part of an ongoing concern, a long term ag project using trees to clean the air, now that global warming is upon us. Like bandwidth, carbon storage is an invisible asset that should be creating its own opportunities in the open market and returns for forest land owners.
For the same reason we see the Forest Service proposal to sell timberlands to meet road and school money issues as the worst way to make sure no child is left behind. The school will be the only thing left in their town. And selling capital assets to meet annual expenses is just bad business. The people deserve better than this on every level. We would lose the professional oversight America has invested in. We would lose our opportunity to do something about taking some carbon out of the air for the benefit of water and wildlife concerns, a win-win-win situation. Again, selling off those carbon storage rights could pay this bill every year while requiring no new effort at all, only guarantees against clear cuts and unnecessary road building. We also point out that management for carbon storage does not gain as much by having contiguous parcels and the worry about that becomes less of an issue.
Timber is not dead but timbering rugged wild lands is too costly to continue. Another source of revenue must open up or these lands will fall further into decline. A program of paying for carbon storage will see a return of streams and fisheries, more wildlife habitat, less dangerous runoff, more late summer water, and jobs that can not be exported. Out of the area money will pay for the right to manage these lands properly and the pressure will come off the trees to justify owning TPZ lands.
A tax could be placed on this income to cover lost timber tax revenue. As a withholding tax it might never be missed as the entire check is a bonus to the landowner anyway and will generate income tax as well. This would be collected every year on every acre in the program, rather than just those harvested that year. That would be a lot more stable for schools and roads.
We have laid out a relatively cheap and easy screening program in our earlier Carbon Credits article that could give a sense of the scale of opportunity here. Public agencies should be able to take advantage of these opportunities as well and gain some non-budget discretionary funds for local improvements.
Humboldt County has the scientific clout to quantify the actual amount of carbon stored using the formula that includes glomalin. While we can be sure of what is occurring, there is plentry of science left to do concerning accumulation, depth of deposition, the effect of soil glue at varying degrees of slope and so forth. Since I started this blog two years ago the number of hits for glomalin has gone from 12 to over 14,000. USDA, starting with just a couple of press releases, lists 826 papers that mention glomalin and Mattias Rillig at the University of Montana (invited visitor school of HSU Forestry Club several years ago) is publishing something new almost every month, much of it concerning glomalin and other causes of aggregation in soils, including forests. This is a huge amount of research money that directly affects us and no one even seems aware of the lost opportunity.
Humboldt County needs to get its economic footing back, and the heart of wealth is land. Timber, even heavily regulated, is still going to out pay carbon storage in prime locations and these will remain productive for the foreseeable future. But the rest of us can greatly benefit from using our understanding of our natural setting and applying it to some really difficult problems we face as a community, a nation and globally.