Forestry and Friends: February ‘24

We had a great Forests and Friends session today.

We covered a lot of ground, as we normally do, and this short summary captures a lot of the links that were/are relevant to the train of conversation so you can follow along at home. We’d love to see you in person next month, one of the most powerful things we can do in the face of climate uncertainty is to talk about it with others.

Are you suggesting trees migrate?!

One of the top questions folks ask is are we losing our favorite native trees? In some cases, the answer is yes, and foresters and researchers are doing the work to help understand which kinds or tree will be suited to our neighborhoods in 40 years or more. When planting a tree one has to look far down the road to understand if it is well-suited to its environment, what will this environment look like in 2 or more generations? How can we make smart decisions in the face of this uncertainty? Studies are ongoing, and it is important to do this in an organized way. We’re moving into a time when what it means to be an invasive species will be in flux — the biome is really becoming invasive here no longer suiting the trees that have been living there for generations. Some of the work underway in BC is here.

Some of the trees that nominally grow in the PNW include local exotics like Dawn and Coastal Redwood and locals like Red Cedar, Douglas Fir, Hemlock, Sitka Spruce (especially the Olympic Peninsula). You’ll see many individual giant sequoia and Coastal Redwood growing open (yard trees here) in the PNW — I suspect they were brought north as part of the search for gold as the 49-ers moved north from California up the coast and into Alaska. Trees like the Coastal Redwood will look well adapted over the span of our lifetimes, good for the first 300 years but, without that coastal fog they’ll eventually die before full maturity (yeah, 300 years is just barely adulting: 400–500 years to maturity for these trees).

Fire is important for culling the next generation (or succession). A single giant sequoia death opens a gap in the canopy that 10,000 saplings can sprout into, but only one of them gets to live 2,000 years. Fires help bring the numbers down so the survivors can grow to be the strongest and eventually the exarch trees like the one just lost. This process is disrupted with contemporary fire that blows past healthy disruption and goes straight on to catastrophe. Crowded stands put those trees under great stress, with extreme competition for light and water leading to weakness, disease, susceptibility to pests. An acre might carry 800 juvenile trees per acre, but as that acre ages it’s health will depend on some of those trees failing to reduce the pressure on the others. With 125 years of fire suppression in the west the adjustment from current overstocked stands to sustainable carrying capacity requires many fewer stems per acre so they can grow to become thicker stems.

Thinking across time is… not normal and not human. One great book to help introduce the necessity and influence of time was Marcia Bjornerud’s Timefulness: How thinking like a geologist can help save the world. This is a book I’ve often recommended, having already long passing on my own copy.

We lost how many acres of trees due to the heat dome?

The single-week heat event in 2022 led to 2M acres of tree die-off. Climate isn’t necessarily getting wetter or dryer or hotter on average (or very quickly on average) but it is getting to that average in more extreme ways. In the Seattle area we’ve seen record numbers of dry days in a row and a record number of days below 70F in the same year. These extremities are particularly difficult for some local species to deal with, like the Western Red Cedar, which likes its feet wet but doesn’t like to use a snorkel and can’t go 6 months between sips. Firmageddon, as the heat dome is known, hit the local True Fir populations particularly hard. Our local climate and habitability zones are changing and it is hitting those local species particularly hard.

· True Fir 1.23 M acres (White, Grand, Red, Noble, and Shasta)

· Douglas Fir 680k acres

Let’s go with… magic, then. Mushrooms!

Paul Stamets is a local scientist, mycologist, dude who strongly reminds me of my father in photos. We landed here in the Stamets universe partly because of the mushroom hat, since I serve as Earth Force’s Chief Hat Officer, and mostly because mushrooms are amazing and will save the world.

I definitely recommend his prepared talks, like this TED talk, and I have a copy of Mycelium running (though to be honest if you’ve gone down the rabbit hole it gets a bit repetitive). What does this mean for forestry? I believe there is an opportunity to put saprophytes to work breaking down the woody residues of forestry operations, taking a multi-year decomposition process converting biomass to CH4 and CO2 and turning it into a half-year process producing sugars in the soil… that’s awesome for ecosystem building. But there is so much we don’t know and understand about these organisms, we can neither control them or expect them to behave or perform to our expectations. The saprophytes so useful at breaking down woody biomass debris can just as easily consume healthy, living, trees. And in the scale side of consideration, it is one thing to deploy a NW mix of fungi into your garden and quite another to go treat tens or hundreds of thousands of acres of California forestland, for instance, with essentially a mono-culture cocktail of species pulled out of their place. That’s really the lesson of normal forestry (and the failures of) — the practice and the place are intimately connected; you cannot do one without respect to the other and get a good outcome.

For the Volts’ fans, we talked about hot rocks.

One of today’s friends is about to go to a startup pitch event next week and despite our encouragement he wasn’t willing to give his pitch on the spot. To help out we looked up the TED talk of John O’Donnell, a very earnest and hopeful presentation about how a box of hot rocks are going to help displace 15% of global CO2 emissions. Rondo just successfully completed their Series B fundraise a few weeks after this presentation, it represents a particularly close approximation of (what I presume to be) their fundraise pitch — at least in sentiment and framing of their business. This is a talk that is worth the 10 minutes.

We are pretty certain that if the pitch contest is broadcast we’ll be able to pirate the signal and share it with everyone, we’re totally looking forward to it going great. The Rondo story was recently featured on Volts, which is a great conversation about industrial heat from last year featuring a lot of hot rocks.

Credit Kharma and requests for Social Security Numbers.

Online data proliferation is basically a given these days, you probably are already included in multiple data breaches by this point. Many ‘safe’ password practices aren’t as safe as we think they are — the primary requirement these days is to have a different password for each site. That way when one of those sites is inevitably compromised none of your other sites’ accounts will be compromised along with it. This is mentally taxing, though, and that’s where password services come in — these days the browser handles a lot of this but LastPass or 1Password are 3rd party solutions you can turn to — whichever you choose, it is a best practice to use a hardware 2-factor solution on the password that protects the password manager (be it browser or 3rd party solution).

Many examples of forms being sent by businesses and utilities already populated with the last applicant’s personal details — even computer purchases with other people’s (other customer’s) email addresses. We all shared some examples of data hygiene mistakes; I’ve personally received an email from a group I was about to interview with containing the interview-loop debrief from the prior candidate — it was super awkward. Our personal details tend to get out

Trogdor!

Finally, the most important link of the night was a blast from the internet past, Homestar runner’s Trogdor. This week I brought home a nostalgia purchase, the Trogdor board game — and the whole family helped out with the burninating of the countryside. This really didn’t have any climate connection, but that’s ok. It was Majestic, and the Vs were consummate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90X5NJleYJQ

A good time was had by all, and next month I hope to bring some news from the field and welcome some more first-time attendees to spend a few hours talking climate and forests together.

Cheers all!