The timber industry should amend SB 365 and move forward

By BILL CHAISSON
Because I grew up exploring the New Hampshire forests, they represent the iconic forest to me. In the same way, because I grew up in various places around New York City, I compare all cities to it.

I moved to Rochester, New York after living in New England and found the forests of western New York to be wanting. They seemed young because they were, and they seemed less diverse and lush than New England forests probably because the white-tailed deer population had eaten the entire understory. 

So, with my recent return to regular contact with the forests of New Hampshire, I have become conscious about their role in the economy of this state. In the first Claremont City Council meeting I found out that not only did the city own forest land, but they managed it to provide an income for the city. I am not aware that this is done in New York State. It certainly was not done in the Finger Lakes region, where I lived for many years and covered board meetings in an awful lot of towns.

I knew of New York municipalities that owned land, but I do not recall them treating their forests as a resource.

There is a well-known division among environmentalists between conservationists and preservationists. Preservationists are often associated with organizations like the Sierra Club, which are primarily about putting land off limits from most uses. Conservationists take a more pragmatic approach and rely on scientific management techniques to manage the land in a sustainable manner.

The scientific understanding of forests evolves constantly. Consequently management techniques have changed much over the years. For this reason, the forestry practices of the past may not always look particularly enlightened now, but that turns out to be the case with preservation as well.

Many ecosystems in North America now lack their top predators or those species are too rare to fulfill their role. This makes it difficult to simply “leave the land alone.”  Some sort of management is necessary to preserve a balance.

In New Hampshire right now there is an interesting management quandary before the legislature in the form of whether or not to sustain the governor’s veto of Senate Bill 365.

Regional activists have protested the bill because, in addition to insuring a market and a price for  biomass products, it includes subsidies for the burning of municipal waste. These are apples and oranges, as far as the activists are concerned.

When you burn biomass (in this case, wood), you are creating heat to drive turbines and releasing carbon dioxide as a waste product. But this carbon dioxide does not add to the greenhouse effect, because it is drawn from the “short-term reservoir” of carbon. Biomass is constantly burning and decaying naturally and is thereby in communication with the atmosphere on an ecological time scale. 

Fossil fuels, in contrast, have been buried for millions of years. Burning them releases carbon dioxide and other gases that have been locked away in the geology, so their release upsets the balance  among the oceans, atmosphere,  biosphere and the geosphere (solid earth).

The foresters and the timber companies are not actually growing wood just to burn it either. They grow wood for all kinds of things and most of what is carted off for burning would otherwise be waste. Once upon a time it was not waste because it was used for paper making, but we don’t make much paper around here anymore and fuel for hauling is more expensive too.

The timber industry therefore finds itself in the energy industry. The energy industry is not a free market. It is full of all kinds of government intervention. If the timber industry asks for legislation that insures that they will be able to dispose of a portion of their output that would otherwise be waste in a way that makes money for them, that isn’t greed or “socialism.” They are simply trying to carve out their place in the energy industry the way that all the other participants do.

Is SB 365 the way to do this? No, not really, because of the inclusion of the municipal waste burning language. Municipal waste is not a renewable resource the way wood is. For one thing the contents are not well regulated. Just putting aside all the toxins that may be in there, think about the plastic that people throw out. That plastic is made with fossil fuels, so that carbon is drawn from the long-term reservoir in the geosphere and burning it adds to the greenhouse effect.

Furthermore, we need to focus on reducing the amount of municipal waste we generate, not simply get rid of it through burning it. Now that the Chinese will not take our recycling anymore, we need to get serious about building a domestic industrial sector that takes in recycled materials at one end and puts out new products at the other. Burning waste does not encourage the kind of creative thinking we need now.