A view of the Calapooya Mountains in the Umpqua National Forest. Photo from U.S. Forest Service.
We all know there’s something special about Oregon’s forests.
A new study by the Wilderness Society says if you’re looking for a place to store carbon, Oregon forests are the best in the nation.
Using Forest Service data, the Society says the top ten best forests for storing carbon are all in the Pacific Northwest. Six of them in Oregon, three of them are in Washington and one is in Alaska.
A burned stand in the B&B Complex. The 2003 fire in Central Oregon killed about half the tallest trees. This photo by Garrett Miegs of OSU was taken in 2007.
Is Smokey Bear wrong?
A forestry professor at Oregon State University says its time we took another look at forest fires. John Bailey says we need to accept that fires actually do a lot of good for the forests. He says the billions we spend to control fires doesn’t really prevent them, it merely delays them.
And if climate change really does bring about more frequent and more intense fires, Bailey says that may not be a bad thing.
Senator Ron Wyden has introduced a bill that makes it easier to harvest biomass from federal forests. According to the Roseburg News-Review, current law doesn’t allow small trees, limbs, brush and other material collected during forest thinning to be used as biomass fuel. The paper says Wyden is trying to encourage forest thinning because he thinks it will create jobs and leave less fuel on the ground for wildfires.
But biomass plants using leftover wood may not be environmentally friendly. There’s a debate over a proposed plant in Eugene. See this story from last week.
