Would logging legacy forests in Whatcom County help or hurt climate change?
Protecting legacy forests is a goal for many environmental groups in Whatcom County, but logger Randy Schillinger believes people would be less willing to protect these forests if they knew more about the benefits of logging on climate change.
“If we’re interested in meaningful solutions to climate change, setting aside more working public forestland isn’t the answer,” said Schillinger, CEO of Hampton Lumber. “Doing so would be a costly misdirection that wastes valuable time, resources and opportunities.”
Hampton operates 10 sawmills in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia, including one in Randle, Washington, in Lewis County. It produces more than 2 billion board feet of lumber for domestic and international markets, according to its website.
The way Schillinger sees it, forests need to be managed to protect from large fires and to provide lumber that can be used in construction of green buildings, such as cross-laminated timber. That includes legacy forests, he told The Bellingham Herald in an interview.
Schillinger said he didn’t want to fight on this topic, and instead just wants to educate the public on forest management.
Legacy forests is an unofficial term used to describe mature sections of forests that were logged sometime before 1945, and have recovered naturally in the decades since. However, these forests are too young to be protected by the state. Many organizations want these forests to have the same protections as old growth trees, those that have never been logged and can be over a century old.
Save the trees — and air
A rally to spread the message of protecting these legacy or mature forests was held in August at the Maritime Heritage Park Amphitheater in Bellingham. The event was hosted by RE Sources and The Center for Responsible Forestry.
“No one is advocating for a complete end to logging on state lands,” Brel Froebe, executive director for The Center for Responsible Forestry, told The Herald. “We are talking about how to manage forests to best store and sequester carbon and minimize the release of CO2 caused by logging.”
Climate change has created longer and more-active wildfire seasons, experts believe, which can release large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. This in return makes forest fires worse in a never ending cycle. The California wildfires of 2020 released about 127 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent into the atmosphere.
An idea to reduce the impact of forest fires is to manage forests through logging, Schillinger said, which is an idea supported by many logging industries besides Hampton.
While some forest management can help reduce forest fires, Froebe acknowledges, there is also research to show that logging can actually make forest fires worse.
While some types of forest management like thinning can be helpful, mature forests are generally more resilient to fires when they have been untouched, he said.
Logging after a forest fire can also be helpful to preventing future fires.
Even when the timber is turned into useful wood materials that can be used in green building like mass timber, a lot of CO2 is lost in the logging process, either in the root systems, bark or sawdust. (Mass timber building is an alternative type on construction that uses cross-laminated wood in tall buildings instead of steel or concrete. This type of building is quicker, stores carbon longer and lowers the carbon footprint of a building by 20-40%.)
While this type of construction does lower the carbon footprint of a building, it also increases the demand for logging.
In a letter to President Biden and Congress from 2021, many of the nation’s scientists warned that logging across the nation releases over 723 million tons of uncounted CO2 each year — over 10 times the amount released by forest fires.
Another issue is leakage, the idea that for every forest that isn’t cut down locally, it will increase the demand of timber in places that do not have the same protections as Washington State. Because climate change is a global issue, this will still negatively impact the environment by releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, advocates say.
“Restricting harvests in Whatcom County, where they are already done in a thoughtful, sustainable manner, is a high-cost, low-return activity from a climate perspective,” Schillinger said. “I do not think most residents, if given the facts, would support outsourcing Washington’s wood manufacturing capacities to places less equipped to protect other environmental values of forests in the process.”
Froebe argues that Washington should not lower itself to the standards of other places in a race to the bottom, and instead needs to be seen as an environmental leader.
Forest practice rules in Washington are designed not just to protect the climate, but the environment as a whole, including public resources such as water, fish and wildlife habitat, Froebe told The Herald.
“Just because some countries like India or China continue to burn coal does not mean the U.S. should continue to burn coal; just because some states or countries have low forestry standards does not mean we should not attempt to improve our own to reflect climate change,” Froebe said.
This story was originally published November 4, 2023 at 5:00 AM.
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