February 17, 2024 • 25 mins
Millions of lush, healthy trees make up New England's forests, and those trees could end up being a major player in the fight against climate change. For nearly a century, the New England Forestry Foundation has made it their duty to conserve and cultivate our woodlands, and as we look ahead to an uncertain future, the Foundation is embarking on a new five-year pilot program, hoping to utilize the very trees we enjoy to help reduce our carbon emissions. Bob Perschel, Executive Director of the Foundation, offers a forestry primer in this episode, along with an in-depth explanation of their "30 Percent Solution" to mitigate the impacts of our changing climate on the land we love.
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(00:07):
From WBZ News Radio in Boston.This is New England Weekend, where each
week we come together we chat aboutall the topics important to you and the
place where you live. It's sogood to be back with you again this
week. I'm Nicole Davis. NowI firmly believe that those of us living
here in New England are especially luckywhen it comes to our surroundings. I've
talked about this on the show afew times, but think about it.
(00:29):
We've got beautiful rivers, got themountains, the Atlantic Ocean, and then
of course our thousands of acres offorests, just miles and miles of beautiful
trees. We can have epic foliageif everything turns out right. It's just
stunning. Would you imagine that allthese trees we have around here, just
being trees can actually be a majorcontributor in the fight against climate change.
(00:51):
It's true, says the New EnglandForestry Foundation in Littleton, and they've got
a new plan in mind to makethat happen. Bob Parshall is the executive
director of the New England Forestry Foundation, and Bob, it is great to
have you on board for this episode. Before we really get into the plan.
I do want to hear about that. But for those of us who
might not be too familiar with yourwork, what you do. I really
want to touch on the history ofthe foundation because it's been around for a
(01:15):
while. I think about one hundredyears in fact, sure, and in
fact this is our eightieth year.We'reselvating our eightieth year. This is nineteen
forty four. A group of people, mostly from the Boston area, that
owned woodlands around New England understood thatthere was a problem. New England is
(01:38):
heavily forested. It's the most forestedregion in the country. We're over eighty
percent forested. Maine is the mostforested state. A lot of people don't
realize that because we have a lotof people in cities. But New England
is a heavily forested area and it'sa wonderful place to live. That's where
we like it. But a lotof those forests, almost all of them
(02:00):
were owned by private individuals. They'renot in the hands of the federal government.
Some of the lands are, someof them are owned by state governments,
but over seventy percent of our landscapeis owned by private individuals. People
like you and me. We couldown fifty acres or one hundred acres,
some people owned two or three thousandacres, and then up north there are
(02:23):
large commercial owners that people can owna million or more acres and they're in
the business of practicing forestry producing products. So our founders understood that for most
of the landowners in New England,there was no expertise they could turn to,
so there weren't professional foresters available toadvise them. So that was the
(02:47):
problem in nineteen forty four, whichNew England Forestry Foundation addressed by hiring a
staff of twelve fourteen foresters and tellingthem go out into New England and make
a home and make a business.Okay. So they spread out across New
England and began to offer their servicesto these forest landowners. And so for
(03:12):
much of nef's history, that's whatthey did until they reached the point where
the business of forestry grew enough sothat there was a cadre of independent consulting
foresters that was the intent, thatwere able to offer their services to the
public. And I was one ofthose where I was a practicing consulting forester
(03:36):
after I got out of forestry school, and I would sometimes compete with the
NEF foresters for the attention of landowners. And around that time NEF decided,
we don't have to do this anymore. There are people like Bob and other
consultants out there that can do thiswork. So it accomplished its first objective
is to provide those services broadly tolandowners. Moved into its next objective,
(04:01):
which in the nineties the problem wasthese large commercial ownerships up in northern New
England were selling all their forest land. So they made an economic decision coming
out of their economics people in onWall Street, that it wasn't important anymore
for them to own these vast ownershipsand then also own the mills that produced
(04:24):
the wood. So they separated theirforest from their mill capacity and began to
sell millions of acres off. Andthat was the very big concern is where
would that go, who would buyit, how would they manage it?
So I was involved in that issue. I didn't work for NEF at the
(04:44):
time, but NEFF joined the effortand what they did. What NEF was
able to do at that point wasto show the way it was able to
establish the largest conservation easement in theworld at the time was almost a million
acres and to give them perspective,Rhode Island is a million acres. Yeah,
(05:08):
right. So this property, itwas called the Pingri Easement. The
owners of this seven hundred and fiftythousand acres approximately decided that if they could
work with NEF and they would agreeto set that forest aside forever and never
develop it, always keep it inforest land, manage it as they had
(05:31):
been for over one hundred years,continue to manage it. So NEF showed
the way that some of these largelandscapes could be protected by large conservation easements,
and it was the first one todo that, and millions of acres
have now been protected in New Englandby conservation easements. So there's a second
(05:54):
objective that they accomplished it it wasit really showed the way leading to the
third where we are now, andthat's sort of my tenure at NEF has
been how do we address climate changethrough the management and protection of New England
forests? And that's the mission,the third mission we're on today, and
(06:15):
we're making some progress. Well let'stalk about that. Because I am not
a forester, and I'm grateful youare, but I think that many of
us take our forests for granted.We just assume they're always going to be
around, and despite the fact thatclimate is changing and we are feeling these
weather impacts, I don't think wereally take into consideration what it's doing to
(06:36):
our vegetation, what it's doing toour forests. So how are we seeing
the impacts of climate change in theforest in New England right now? There's
two parts to those questions. Oneis how is climate affecting our forest and
the health of our forest? Andthe second one is how can our forests
become part of the solution to halting, stopping reducing climate change. The first
(07:00):
one is things are getting warmer,since we're seeing we're getting more rainstorms as
we've seen over this past year inVermont and also in Massachusetts, we're pretty
devastating. But that's happening in theforest as well, So we're keeping our
(07:25):
eye on that. We need toprotect our trees and our roads and our
systems in our forests for that.The climate is getting warmer, So there
are some trees that in the pastthey've been plentiful. Now they're having a
hard time regenerating because the soils arewarmer. So as we as foresters look
into the future and we have toplan for one hundred years. Trees grow
(07:46):
for a long time. We knowthat the climate's going to change, and
today we can begin to anticipate howwell those trees will be able to grow
in thirty, forty, fifty orone hundred year years. So we're starting
to change the kinds of trees wereemphasizing in the forest and selecting other trees
(08:07):
that are more adaptable we think toclimate change. So those are just just
a couple of examples of what's happening, and of course that impacts wildlife and
biodiversity. Things are changing. Ijust talked to a forester that I've known
a long time. He used towork in Massachusetts. He moved to West
(08:28):
Virginia for twenty five years and nowhe's back. And he put me up
and he said, in West Virginiathere's a tremendous amount of attention to medicinal
plants in forests like kinse, youknow, And so he said, what's
happening is the climate is changing,and the people that are using and buying
(08:52):
and the manufacturing products from those plantsare worried. And now they're beginning to
look at New England because they believethat these plants will now start to grow
more in the new climate in NewEngland. Oh wow, there is an
example of people trying to look intothe future and predict what's happening. If
we take a look at what's happeningnow a little bit further north here,
(09:16):
are there any species that are beingessentially phased out here in New England,
Like you mentioned the Gin saying mightdo better up here now with this climate.
What's happening around here that might bedoing better at this point and at
an Labrador or Nova Scotia or somethinga little bit further north. Well,
the best example, and the onethat's sort of darest to most of hearts
of New England is the sugar maple, where we get our maple syrup from.
(09:39):
So you know, we're familiar withmaking maple syrup here in New England,
particularly in Vermont. It's well knownthey make a lot of it in
Canada too. The climate is changingenough so that sugar maple trees, maple
trees we can predict, are notgoing to do that well in the new
warmer climate. So over time,the amount of those maple trees will be
(10:05):
fewer in New England. You'll stillfind them more now in Canada, right,
so the industry will probably move north. It's not happening overnight. You
know, trees that are alive andgrowing right now, they've been established,
you know that they will make itthrough. It's the new regeneration. It's
(10:26):
the new trees that are continually regeneratedin the forests that we're pretty sure we'll
see less of those in the future. So that's going to have a big
impact on the people that produce maplesyrup and also the beauty of the fall
foliage. You know it will change. Wow, we're already seeing that.
(10:46):
I feel I don't know. Again, I'm coming at this as somebody who
is not an expert, but Ifeel like the foliage over the past couple
of years, especially we've had allthat rain as you mentioned, I just
feel like the foliage has been veryblah lately. It's just not good these
days. And I know that thewarmer climate does have something to do with
that. Yeah, it's you know, like weather and climate, they're different
(11:09):
things. So it's really we getasked that question a lot. It's hard
to say, you know, climatehas caused the colors to change because every
year the weather is different. Ifit's a wet fall or a dry fall,
things will be different. So thingsare changing, let's just put it
that way, and the colors willnot be the same. In some places
(11:33):
they may be better, right,you know. We can see red maple
trees being more prolific taking over someof the sites, and they're brilliant.
They have beautiful color, right,but not in the same timing as the
other trees, so the things willbe different. My kind of a side
(11:54):
story on that is I used tomanage the forest that old Sturbridge Village owned
in Sturbridge, Mass. They eventuallymoved that forest to town ownership, but
the villagers to own a thousand acresout back of their forest, and as
part of the management I did forthem is I began to pay a lot
(12:16):
of attention to what I thought wouldbe good foliage trees. So there's a
beautiful hillside that you can see ifyou're headed south towards Hartford on I eighty
four and Sturbridge to look to yourright, there's a water tower up there
and I did some thinnings up thereand accentuated trees that I thought would be
more beautiful for foliage. I wasa young forester. I had a lot
(12:37):
of ideas, and I knew itwould take a long time, but I
did that, and I thought,well, maybe I really did something.
I watched this over the years,and then we had this tornado, no,
the Brimfield tornado. Of course,it came right over the hill,
right through, and you still seethat today when you drive by that stretch.
(13:00):
I know exactly where you're talking about. You can see where it just
took out all those trees, andthose are my treat I'm sorry, those
are the ones that I was managing, partly for beautiful foliage. So sometimes
that's the thing about for us.You know, they grow a long time.
Trees grow. You have to thinklong term, and things change.
(13:22):
So the second part of the questionI said, is in an era of
climate change, and we're really worriedabout the next thirty years of climate change,
and we're like, if we don'tget our act together, then we
really have some big problems. Sowe're trying to do as much as we
can to turn this ship around atleast in the next thirty years. The
(13:43):
problems will continue after, but thenext thirty are really important. So we're
now being asked by climate experts whatcan forest do to help us mitigate climate
change in the next thirty years.And that's the particular issue that our organization
has applied itself too, and we'vecome up with some surprisingly good answers to
(14:07):
be helpful on that. Okay,well let's talk about it then. I
mean, you got this thirty milliondollar grant from the USDA, You've got
this really impressive five year pilot,Like you said, you've got this idea,
you've got this vision. What doyou have planned to try and tackle
this? So first the primer onthis one. Everybody knows I hope that
trees pull in carbon dioxide from theair. Yes, so that's our climate
(14:33):
problem. We've got too much carbonin the atmosphere. We'd like to take
it out. Trees are the machines, the green machines. I sat down
and added them up. We havethirty one point seven billion trees growing right
now in New England, so wedon't have to really plant more trees.
We have to think about how wetend and manage the ones that are in
(14:56):
the ground right now. Okay,so trees pull in carbon dioxide. And
fix the carbon into the trunks ofthe trees, and eventually that gets into
the forest and the forest floor.So that's good. You know, these
are carbon eating machines that pull thecarbon out of the atmosphere. So the
first question is how much carbon canour forests pull in and store in the
(15:20):
forest and keep it out of theatmosphere. But that's only part of one
of three parts of this equation.The other part is we all need things
in our lives. Products we haveto build houses. We want books and
paper and toilet paper and tissue paper. These come from forests. So then
(15:41):
the second question is how much carboncan be stored in the products that we
produce from wood. Because when weharvest a tree and make a board out
of it and put the board intoyour oak flooring in your house, the
carbon is in the floor that Inever think that, but you're right.
(16:03):
The tree that we harvested, weregrow another tree that pulls carbon out of
the air, puts it in theforest, but we've stored it in the
building. So that's the second partof the equation. The third part of
the equation is if you look atbuildings, tall buildings in Boston or any
other city over five stories. They'remade out of steel and concrete. To
(16:27):
make steel and concrete, you haveto burn a lot of fossil fuels.
You have to heat this up totwenty seven hundred degrees. So while we
make steel or concrete, we're puttinga lot of carbon into the atmosphere.
If we can replace the steel inconcrete with wood, we get a substitution
(16:48):
benefit. That carbon is never putinto the atmosphere. Trucking the logs to
the mill and sawing that does createcarbon pollution too. You have to add
that up, but when you compareit to making steel or concrete, it's
a tremendous difference. So when weanswer the question how can forest be helpful
(17:10):
for climate change? We have tocalculate as we're managing the forest in different
ways, how much carbon is inthe forest, how much will be in
wood products, and which fossil fuelpolluting products can we substitute And when you
add all those up, which wedid. We looked at our practices over
(17:30):
eighty years and we said, wethink we're doing a pretty good job.
What if we codified those practices andthen modeled them out across the landscape and
said, what if everybody did whatNEF has been doing. We call it
exemplary forestry practices, but if everybodydid that across New England. We modeled
(17:51):
that out and the answer was stunning. It really amounted to thirty percent of
all the carbon emissions we need toreduce as a region could be offset by
just changing our forestry practices and puttingthat carbon into longer lived building products.
Wow. So we say we havea thirty percent solution. This is big
(18:15):
and while we're doing it, wecan improve the forest and do a lot
of good things and work with thelandowners. So it's a win win win
in a lot of ways for us, and that's why we receive this grant
you talked about. The US governmentsaid, we think you have a good
idea and we'd like you to testthis out and prove your concept. So
(18:37):
we have a five year grant thatwe're working with the landowners of New England
to get them to change their practicesand then we're measuring the results. We're
pretty confident we're going to get whatwe're saying, but we're proving this now
on the ground, so we're workingwith family forest landowners, we're working with
the large commercial owners in and we'realso working with the native tribes in New
(19:03):
England on their own properties to helpthem as well. In this Wow,
how has the response been so far? Obviously you're just getting started in a
five year pilot program here, butI'm hoping that the response has been positive
so far. Yeah, we're justat the beginning, so we don't have
figures to show, but we havethe concept out there. We're having discussions
(19:25):
with these folks and we're talking aboutthis. We think we've got something that
can really work because we're using themarket system here. So when we talk
to a landowner, particularly the largelandowners up in Maine, they're in business.
They need to make money, ofcourse, so we're saying, look,
we can do a couple of thingshere. If you work with us,
(19:48):
we can help you change your forestpractices so that over a long term,
you're going to make more money.But while you're doing that, you're
also going to be storing more carbonand you're going to be helping the climate
change. What's not to like there. That's a pretty good result. But
the question now that we're digging intois well, how much will you pay
(20:10):
us and what exactly what do wehave to do, and that's what we're
working on. So we're saying,these are the changes you need to make.
And just today we were talking aboutwhere now we have to price that.
Will we pay you one hundred dollarsper acre or will we pay you
something else? So those are kindof easy things to do. It takes
(20:32):
some work, but they're not rocketscience here. You know, we're just
figure that out and we feel prettyconfident we can do that. I wanted
to say one more things. We'retalking a lot about forestry right our forest
of New England. They're beautiful,we love them, we cherish them.
The real way to help climate changeis to do three things. One is
(20:56):
we have to stop losing our forestsbecause some of them are being harvested,
cut down and parking lots built andall the carbon goes away then and we
can't do anything. So we're losingforests acre by acre, day by day
in New England. Then we needto stop that, just stabilize our forest
(21:18):
base. That's number one. Numbertwo is I talked a lot about management.
Not every forest should be managed.To set some forests aside and just
say we're just going to let naturetake its course. That's important for certain
kinds of wildlife, and that justletting the trees grow they store more carbon,
so that's important. But we can'tset them all aside, or we'd
(21:42):
have no wood products and then we'duse more steel in concrete. So a
system approach to this, and that'swhen you get to the forestry. But
I just wanted to be clear becausewe have really great partners that are out
there trying to set land aside aswild places as wilderness and we support that.
(22:03):
As I said, New England isover eighty percent forested, but only
three percent of New England is ina wild condition and that should be more.
So our target with our colleagues isten percent. Okay, right,
So what do we need to do? Stop losing forests, build that reserve
system up from three percent to tenpercent, and then use these example where
(22:29):
forestry practices and manage the forest better. If we can do all that,
we can deliver this thirty percent solution. It's ambitious, but it sounds like
you're on a path, you knowwhat you're doing, You've got some great
minds around you, and it soundstoo like you've got community support. So
you're going to need that from thelandowners, from you know, people in
rural areas, and the company owners. It sounds like you're rallying everybody behind
(22:52):
this. But if people want tofind out more about this program, if
they want to learn more about thefoundation, maybe they are listening in New
Hampshire and said, I've never heardof this, this is amazing. How
can they find out more about yourwork. We have a new website that
we launched and that's where I woulddirect people. So it's New englandforestreet dot
org. Okay, so you cango there and find out all about these
(23:15):
programs. I mentioned the smaller familyforest owners. There's two hundred and fifteen
thousand of them out there. Wow, that's a lot. Yeah. So
your listeners may be one of them, or they may know somebody that is
one, and so spread the word. We can all join together and make
(23:37):
this happen. This is a sortof a regional community effort. A lot
of the forest and a lot ofthe forest production is north up in Maine.
A lot of the people in NewEngland live in Massachusetts and consume a
lot of wood. So there's youknow, there's a regional effort that needs
to take place across state lines sothat we can make this happen as a
(24:00):
regional community rather than just thinking stateby state on this. Yeah, and
even people who live in Massachusetts mighthave a vacation home in New Hampshire with
you a couple hundred acres that isjust sitting there for most of the year.
You know, maybe it could bebetter managed, or maybe somebody from
Maine and vice versa has a homein Massachusetts. So you're right, it's
(24:21):
the six states coming together getting thisdone. We're really good about sticking together
around here. So I've got hopeon that. And our hope is bolstered
by the fact that New England hasalways been a leader in conservation, going
back one hundred or one hundred andfifty years. You know, some of
the Henry David Threau and people thathave had great conservation ideas. New England
(24:45):
leads the way globally, and nowit's time for us to do it again.
We think we're in a good positionto show the rest of the country
and the rest of the world howthis could work. All right, New
England Forestry dot org dot Orgnewenglandforestry dotorg really insightful and cool stuff. So
Bob Ruschelle, thank you so muchfor your time on the show. This
(25:07):
was really informative. Nicole, thankyou. It was great to talk about
this. Have a safe and healthyholiday weekend. Please join me again next
week for another edition of the show. I'm Nicole Davis from WBZ News Radio
on iHeartRadio.
From WBZ News Radio in Boston.This is New England Weekend, where each
week we come together we chat aboutall the topics important to you and the
place where you live. It's sogood to be back with you again this
week. I'm Nicole Davis. NowI firmly believe that those of us living
here in New England are especially luckywhen it comes to our surroundings. I've
talked about this on the show afew times, but think about it.
(00:29):
We've got beautiful rivers, got themountains, the Atlantic Ocean, and then
of course our thousands of acres offorests, just miles and miles of beautiful
trees. We can have epic foliageif everything turns out right. It's just
stunning. Would you imagine that allthese trees we have around here, just
being trees can actually be a majorcontributor in the fight against climate change.
(00:51):
It's true, says the New EnglandForestry Foundation in Littleton, and they've got
a new plan in mind to makethat happen. Bob Parshall is the executive
director of the New England Forestry Foundation, and Bob, it is great to
have you on board for this episode. Before we really get into the plan.
I do want to hear about that. But for those of us who
might not be too familiar with yourwork, what you do. I really
want to touch on the history ofthe foundation because it's been around for a
(01:15):
while. I think about one hundredyears in fact, sure, and in
fact this is our eightieth year.We'reselvating our eightieth year. This is nineteen
forty four. A group of people, mostly from the Boston area, that
owned woodlands around New England understood thatthere was a problem. New England is
(01:38):
heavily forested. It's the most forestedregion in the country. We're over eighty
percent forested. Maine is the mostforested state. A lot of people don't
realize that because we have a lotof people in cities. But New England
is a heavily forested area and it'sa wonderful place to live. That's where
we like it. But a lotof those forests, almost all of them
(02:00):
were owned by private individuals. They'renot in the hands of the federal government.
Some of the lands are, someof them are owned by state governments,
but over seventy percent of our landscapeis owned by private individuals. People
like you and me. We couldown fifty acres or one hundred acres,
some people owned two or three thousandacres, and then up north there are
(02:23):
large commercial owners that people can owna million or more acres and they're in
the business of practicing forestry producing products. So our founders understood that for most
of the landowners in New England,there was no expertise they could turn to,
so there weren't professional foresters available toadvise them. So that was the
(02:47):
problem in nineteen forty four, whichNew England Forestry Foundation addressed by hiring a
staff of twelve fourteen foresters and tellingthem go out into New England and make
a home and make a business.Okay. So they spread out across New
England and began to offer their servicesto these forest landowners. And so for
(03:12):
much of nef's history, that's whatthey did until they reached the point where
the business of forestry grew enough sothat there was a cadre of independent consulting
foresters that was the intent, thatwere able to offer their services to the
public. And I was one ofthose where I was a practicing consulting forester
(03:36):
after I got out of forestry school, and I would sometimes compete with the
NEF foresters for the attention of landowners. And around that time NEF decided,
we don't have to do this anymore. There are people like Bob and other
consultants out there that can do thiswork. So it accomplished its first objective
is to provide those services broadly tolandowners. Moved into its next objective,
(04:01):
which in the nineties the problem wasthese large commercial ownerships up in northern New
England were selling all their forest land. So they made an economic decision coming
out of their economics people in onWall Street, that it wasn't important anymore
for them to own these vast ownershipsand then also own the mills that produced
(04:24):
the wood. So they separated theirforest from their mill capacity and began to
sell millions of acres off. Andthat was the very big concern is where
would that go, who would buyit, how would they manage it?
So I was involved in that issue. I didn't work for NEF at the
(04:44):
time, but NEFF joined the effortand what they did. What NEF was
able to do at that point wasto show the way it was able to
establish the largest conservation easement in theworld at the time was almost a million
acres and to give them perspective,Rhode Island is a million acres. Yeah,
(05:08):
right. So this property, itwas called the Pingri Easement. The
owners of this seven hundred and fiftythousand acres approximately decided that if they could
work with NEF and they would agreeto set that forest aside forever and never
develop it, always keep it inforest land, manage it as they had
(05:31):
been for over one hundred years,continue to manage it. So NEF showed
the way that some of these largelandscapes could be protected by large conservation easements,
and it was the first one todo that, and millions of acres
have now been protected in New Englandby conservation easements. So there's a second
(05:54):
objective that they accomplished it it wasit really showed the way leading to the
third where we are now, andthat's sort of my tenure at NEF has
been how do we address climate changethrough the management and protection of New England
forests? And that's the mission,the third mission we're on today, and
(06:15):
we're making some progress. Well let'stalk about that. Because I am not
a forester, and I'm grateful youare, but I think that many of
us take our forests for granted.We just assume they're always going to be
around, and despite the fact thatclimate is changing and we are feeling these
weather impacts, I don't think wereally take into consideration what it's doing to
(06:36):
our vegetation, what it's doing toour forests. So how are we seeing
the impacts of climate change in theforest in New England right now? There's
two parts to those questions. Oneis how is climate affecting our forest and
the health of our forest? Andthe second one is how can our forests
become part of the solution to halting, stopping reducing climate change. The first
(07:00):
one is things are getting warmer,since we're seeing we're getting more rainstorms as
we've seen over this past year inVermont and also in Massachusetts, we're pretty
devastating. But that's happening in theforest as well, So we're keeping our
(07:25):
eye on that. We need toprotect our trees and our roads and our
systems in our forests for that.The climate is getting warmer, So there
are some trees that in the pastthey've been plentiful. Now they're having a
hard time regenerating because the soils arewarmer. So as we as foresters look
into the future and we have toplan for one hundred years. Trees grow
(07:46):
for a long time. We knowthat the climate's going to change, and
today we can begin to anticipate howwell those trees will be able to grow
in thirty, forty, fifty orone hundred year years. So we're starting
to change the kinds of trees wereemphasizing in the forest and selecting other trees
(08:07):
that are more adaptable we think toclimate change. So those are just just
a couple of examples of what's happening, and of course that impacts wildlife and
biodiversity. Things are changing. Ijust talked to a forester that I've known
a long time. He used towork in Massachusetts. He moved to West
(08:28):
Virginia for twenty five years and nowhe's back. And he put me up
and he said, in West Virginiathere's a tremendous amount of attention to medicinal
plants in forests like kinse, youknow, And so he said, what's
happening is the climate is changing,and the people that are using and buying
(08:52):
and the manufacturing products from those plantsare worried. And now they're beginning to
look at New England because they believethat these plants will now start to grow
more in the new climate in NewEngland. Oh wow, there is an
example of people trying to look intothe future and predict what's happening. If
we take a look at what's happeningnow a little bit further north here,
(09:16):
are there any species that are beingessentially phased out here in New England,
Like you mentioned the Gin saying mightdo better up here now with this climate.
What's happening around here that might bedoing better at this point and at
an Labrador or Nova Scotia or somethinga little bit further north. Well,
the best example, and the onethat's sort of darest to most of hearts
of New England is the sugar maple, where we get our maple syrup from.
(09:39):
So you know, we're familiar withmaking maple syrup here in New England,
particularly in Vermont. It's well knownthey make a lot of it in
Canada too. The climate is changingenough so that sugar maple trees, maple
trees we can predict, are notgoing to do that well in the new
warmer climate. So over time,the amount of those maple trees will be
(10:05):
fewer in New England. You'll stillfind them more now in Canada, right,
so the industry will probably move north. It's not happening overnight. You
know, trees that are alive andgrowing right now, they've been established,
you know that they will make itthrough. It's the new regeneration. It's
(10:26):
the new trees that are continually regeneratedin the forests that we're pretty sure we'll
see less of those in the future. So that's going to have a big
impact on the people that produce maplesyrup and also the beauty of the fall
foliage. You know it will change. Wow, we're already seeing that.
(10:46):
I feel I don't know. Again, I'm coming at this as somebody who
is not an expert, but Ifeel like the foliage over the past couple
of years, especially we've had allthat rain as you mentioned, I just
feel like the foliage has been veryblah lately. It's just not good these
days. And I know that thewarmer climate does have something to do with
that. Yeah, it's you know, like weather and climate, they're different
(11:09):
things. So it's really we getasked that question a lot. It's hard
to say, you know, climatehas caused the colors to change because every
year the weather is different. Ifit's a wet fall or a dry fall,
things will be different. So thingsare changing, let's just put it
that way, and the colors willnot be the same. In some places
(11:33):
they may be better, right,you know. We can see red maple
trees being more prolific taking over someof the sites, and they're brilliant.
They have beautiful color, right,but not in the same timing as the
other trees, so the things willbe different. My kind of a side
(11:54):
story on that is I used tomanage the forest that old Sturbridge Village owned
in Sturbridge, Mass. They eventuallymoved that forest to town ownership, but
the villagers to own a thousand acresout back of their forest, and as
part of the management I did forthem is I began to pay a lot
(12:16):
of attention to what I thought wouldbe good foliage trees. So there's a
beautiful hillside that you can see ifyou're headed south towards Hartford on I eighty
four and Sturbridge to look to yourright, there's a water tower up there
and I did some thinnings up thereand accentuated trees that I thought would be
more beautiful for foliage. I wasa young forester. I had a lot
(12:37):
of ideas, and I knew itwould take a long time, but I
did that, and I thought,well, maybe I really did something.
I watched this over the years,and then we had this tornado, no,
the Brimfield tornado. Of course,it came right over the hill,
right through, and you still seethat today when you drive by that stretch.
(13:00):
I know exactly where you're talking about. You can see where it just
took out all those trees, andthose are my treat I'm sorry, those
are the ones that I was managing, partly for beautiful foliage. So sometimes
that's the thing about for us.You know, they grow a long time.
Trees grow. You have to thinklong term, and things change.
(13:22):
So the second part of the questionI said, is in an era of
climate change, and we're really worriedabout the next thirty years of climate change,
and we're like, if we don'tget our act together, then we
really have some big problems. Sowe're trying to do as much as we
can to turn this ship around atleast in the next thirty years. The
(13:43):
problems will continue after, but thenext thirty are really important. So we're
now being asked by climate experts whatcan forest do to help us mitigate climate
change in the next thirty years.And that's the particular issue that our organization
has applied itself too, and we'vecome up with some surprisingly good answers to
(14:07):
be helpful on that. Okay,well let's talk about it then. I
mean, you got this thirty milliondollar grant from the USDA, You've got
this really impressive five year pilot,Like you said, you've got this idea,
you've got this vision. What doyou have planned to try and tackle
this? So first the primer onthis one. Everybody knows I hope that
trees pull in carbon dioxide from theair. Yes, so that's our climate
(14:33):
problem. We've got too much carbonin the atmosphere. We'd like to take
it out. Trees are the machines, the green machines. I sat down
and added them up. We havethirty one point seven billion trees growing right
now in New England, so wedon't have to really plant more trees.
We have to think about how wetend and manage the ones that are in
(14:56):
the ground right now. Okay,so trees pull in carbon dioxide. And
fix the carbon into the trunks ofthe trees, and eventually that gets into
the forest and the forest floor.So that's good. You know, these
are carbon eating machines that pull thecarbon out of the atmosphere. So the
first question is how much carbon canour forests pull in and store in the
(15:20):
forest and keep it out of theatmosphere. But that's only part of one
of three parts of this equation.The other part is we all need things
in our lives. Products we haveto build houses. We want books and
paper and toilet paper and tissue paper. These come from forests. So then
(15:41):
the second question is how much carboncan be stored in the products that we
produce from wood. Because when weharvest a tree and make a board out
of it and put the board intoyour oak flooring in your house, the
carbon is in the floor that Inever think that, but you're right.
(16:03):
The tree that we harvested, weregrow another tree that pulls carbon out of
the air, puts it in theforest, but we've stored it in the
building. So that's the second partof the equation. The third part of
the equation is if you look atbuildings, tall buildings in Boston or any
other city over five stories. They'remade out of steel and concrete. To
(16:27):
make steel and concrete, you haveto burn a lot of fossil fuels.
You have to heat this up totwenty seven hundred degrees. So while we
make steel or concrete, we're puttinga lot of carbon into the atmosphere.
If we can replace the steel inconcrete with wood, we get a substitution
(16:48):
benefit. That carbon is never putinto the atmosphere. Trucking the logs to
the mill and sawing that does createcarbon pollution too. You have to add
that up, but when you compareit to making steel or concrete, it's
a tremendous difference. So when weanswer the question how can forest be helpful
(17:10):
for climate change? We have tocalculate as we're managing the forest in different
ways, how much carbon is inthe forest, how much will be in
wood products, and which fossil fuelpolluting products can we substitute And when you
add all those up, which wedid. We looked at our practices over
(17:30):
eighty years and we said, wethink we're doing a pretty good job.
What if we codified those practices andthen modeled them out across the landscape and
said, what if everybody did whatNEF has been doing. We call it
exemplary forestry practices, but if everybodydid that across New England. We modeled
(17:51):
that out and the answer was stunning. It really amounted to thirty percent of
all the carbon emissions we need toreduce as a region could be offset by
just changing our forestry practices and puttingthat carbon into longer lived building products.
Wow. So we say we havea thirty percent solution. This is big
(18:15):
and while we're doing it, wecan improve the forest and do a lot
of good things and work with thelandowners. So it's a win win win
in a lot of ways for us, and that's why we receive this grant
you talked about. The US governmentsaid, we think you have a good
idea and we'd like you to testthis out and prove your concept. So
(18:37):
we have a five year grant thatwe're working with the landowners of New England
to get them to change their practicesand then we're measuring the results. We're
pretty confident we're going to get whatwe're saying, but we're proving this now
on the ground, so we're workingwith family forest landowners, we're working with
the large commercial owners in and we'realso working with the native tribes in New
(19:03):
England on their own properties to helpthem as well. In this Wow,
how has the response been so far? Obviously you're just getting started in a
five year pilot program here, butI'm hoping that the response has been positive
so far. Yeah, we're justat the beginning, so we don't have
figures to show, but we havethe concept out there. We're having discussions
(19:25):
with these folks and we're talking aboutthis. We think we've got something that
can really work because we're using themarket system here. So when we talk
to a landowner, particularly the largelandowners up in Maine, they're in business.
They need to make money, ofcourse, so we're saying, look,
we can do a couple of thingshere. If you work with us,
(19:48):
we can help you change your forestpractices so that over a long term,
you're going to make more money.But while you're doing that, you're
also going to be storing more carbonand you're going to be helping the climate
change. What's not to like there. That's a pretty good result. But
the question now that we're digging intois well, how much will you pay
(20:10):
us and what exactly what do wehave to do, and that's what we're
working on. So we're saying,these are the changes you need to make.
And just today we were talking aboutwhere now we have to price that.
Will we pay you one hundred dollarsper acre or will we pay you
something else? So those are kindof easy things to do. It takes
(20:32):
some work, but they're not rocketscience here. You know, we're just
figure that out and we feel prettyconfident we can do that. I wanted
to say one more things. We'retalking a lot about forestry right our forest
of New England. They're beautiful,we love them, we cherish them.
The real way to help climate changeis to do three things. One is
(20:56):
we have to stop losing our forestsbecause some of them are being harvested,
cut down and parking lots built andall the carbon goes away then and we
can't do anything. So we're losingforests acre by acre, day by day
in New England. Then we needto stop that, just stabilize our forest
(21:18):
base. That's number one. Numbertwo is I talked a lot about management.
Not every forest should be managed.To set some forests aside and just
say we're just going to let naturetake its course. That's important for certain
kinds of wildlife, and that justletting the trees grow they store more carbon,
so that's important. But we can'tset them all aside, or we'd
(21:42):
have no wood products and then we'duse more steel in concrete. So a
system approach to this, and that'swhen you get to the forestry. But
I just wanted to be clear becausewe have really great partners that are out
there trying to set land aside aswild places as wilderness and we support that.
(22:03):
As I said, New England isover eighty percent forested, but only
three percent of New England is ina wild condition and that should be more.
So our target with our colleagues isten percent. Okay, right,
So what do we need to do? Stop losing forests, build that reserve
system up from three percent to tenpercent, and then use these example where
(22:29):
forestry practices and manage the forest better. If we can do all that,
we can deliver this thirty percent solution. It's ambitious, but it sounds like
you're on a path, you knowwhat you're doing, You've got some great
minds around you, and it soundstoo like you've got community support. So
you're going to need that from thelandowners, from you know, people in
rural areas, and the company owners. It sounds like you're rallying everybody behind
(22:52):
this. But if people want tofind out more about this program, if
they want to learn more about thefoundation, maybe they are listening in New
Hampshire and said, I've never heardof this, this is amazing. How
can they find out more about yourwork. We have a new website that
we launched and that's where I woulddirect people. So it's New englandforestreet dot
org. Okay, so you cango there and find out all about these
(23:15):
programs. I mentioned the smaller familyforest owners. There's two hundred and fifteen
thousand of them out there. Wow, that's a lot. Yeah. So
your listeners may be one of them, or they may know somebody that is
one, and so spread the word. We can all join together and make
(23:37):
this happen. This is a sortof a regional community effort. A lot
of the forest and a lot ofthe forest production is north up in Maine.
A lot of the people in NewEngland live in Massachusetts and consume a
lot of wood. So there's youknow, there's a regional effort that needs
to take place across state lines sothat we can make this happen as a
(24:00):
regional community rather than just thinking stateby state on this. Yeah, and
even people who live in Massachusetts mighthave a vacation home in New Hampshire with
you a couple hundred acres that isjust sitting there for most of the year.
You know, maybe it could bebetter managed, or maybe somebody from
Maine and vice versa has a homein Massachusetts. So you're right, it's
(24:21):
the six states coming together getting thisdone. We're really good about sticking together
around here. So I've got hopeon that. And our hope is bolstered
by the fact that New England hasalways been a leader in conservation, going
back one hundred or one hundred andfifty years. You know, some of
the Henry David Threau and people thathave had great conservation ideas. New England
(24:45):
leads the way globally, and nowit's time for us to do it again.
We think we're in a good positionto show the rest of the country
and the rest of the world howthis could work. All right, New
England Forestry dot org dot Orgnewenglandforestry dotorg really insightful and cool stuff. So
Bob Ruschelle, thank you so muchfor your time on the show. This
(25:07):
was really informative. Nicole, thankyou. It was great to talk about
this. Have a safe and healthyholiday weekend. Please join me again next
week for another edition of the show. I'm Nicole Davis from WBZ News Radio
on iHeartRadio.
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