The Washington State Schools Land Trust
This is a post that I’ve been trying to finish since last October. It turns out a lot of relevant things keep happening in this topic space. The Washington State Schools Land Trust. 3 million acres, set aside in 1889 as part of the enabling act granting statehood, meant to provide a funding base for the school system of the new State. The grant was meant to support construction of primary schools statewide, state universities, other state educational institutions, and prisons, through ongoing working of those lands and management of those resources.
Today this means 3 million acres, 2.4 million of which managed for timber and forest products, with other uses like leasing revenues for agriculture, mining, minerals, commercial use, and sometimes land sales or swaps filling out the rest. The State Schools Trust also managed for multiple objectives, recreation, wildlife, water, conservation, and so forth — these objectives are frequently in tension where not every objective can be satisfied in the same place at the same time. These efforts contribute about $200M each year to the Washington State Education system.
That’s great. We do, however, have some challenges to the model. Some stakeholders wish we did more for climate and managing carbon with our forests, and 3M acres is a big chunk of forests. Others warn us to take more care to protect us from wildfire, or seek more fiber to produce the wood products that build our communities, or urge us to preserve habitat for species under pressure. All this to say, managing the land well by itself is not a trivial task and as the State Schools Trust we have a purpose for that management, a purpose that we can and should also consider. Do we preserve trees because trees store carbon, or do we promote housing density with these lands because housing density reduces the carbon impact of additional residents in our great State? Even the easy questions aren’t. And we haven’t even looked at where these lands originally came from and the injustice of the entire premise that these are our lands to do with as we please.
I started with a thought to speaking on Context, Policy, and Practice of management for our School Trust Lands, and while that’s useful and important there is a whole fitness for purpose question about funding our schools on timber sales that we should also interrogate. I’d prefer to de-tangle this knot a bit, to deal with the economic imperative to fund our schools separately from the management and practice of these particular 3M acres from the provenance of those lands and if we should be deciding for them at all. We need not let our understanding of what the State can do from 150 years ago limit our belief in what the State can become going forward.
School and Land Economics
Timber
$200,000,000 per year is nothing to sneeze at, and the distribution of these funds is particularly important to rural schools that do not raise as much of their school budget via property taxes due to their lower tax base. In the context of the State of Washington’s annual expenditures on schools, however, it is about half a percent of the annual total ($40B). Back in 1889 the timber sale pathway represented a reasonable means of turning the bounty of the state into an educated workforce to build that state’s future. In the intervening years, however, that educated workforce has transformed the State of Washington into a technology powerhouse. In the second half of the 20th century, you might have looked at the bounty of Washington and decided to fund our schools on the strength of our aerospace industry. These days you might look at the bounty of Washington and fund our schools on the strength of software, services, and data centers. The universal across time here has been that our educated workforce has enabled these evolutions, while the Schools Land Trust has not changed in its mission or main activities over this same time period.
While the specific numbers discussed here, especially yields for any given acre of land, may not hold up on each acre they are directionally illustrative and help us understand where we have the pull of opportunity and where we are left pushing a rope. The economic imperative to fund schools in the State cannot today be satisfied via the practices and approaches from the end of the 19th century. The easy answer is to put a small tax on Washington State Businesses, those entities that grew up here on the strength of the educated workforce that made their very existence possible. Individual companies, grown right here in Washington, bring in more revenue every quarter than the State spends on schooling all year in total. In a real way citizens pay for our schools twice, once with the tax on their homes and once with the tax on the State’s capacity to provide school funding from natural resource extraction. While our companies pay a property tax that is insensitive to the value produced on the bounty (e.g. the educated workforce) provided by the State.
· Establish corporate revenue tax to support State Schools. Retire property tax. An educated workforce is a prerequisite for a healthy economy, not a means to get ahead of the less well-off through the superior buying power of your neighborhood.
But, before we look at how to put our current economic bounty to work serving our future, we should review what we could be doing with 3M acres if we were really trying to maximize revenue. The state schools trust produces about $200M on 3M acres: $67 per acre per year ($164 per hectare). That’s quite modest: the UW Forests Pack Forest looks to produce around $205 per acre per year ($510 per hectare), and UC Berkeley Forests produces $2,025 per acre per year ($5,000 per hectare). This isn’t too surprising; Forestry schools have a free hand to conduct research and change their management practices as often as they like while the land trust has the imperative to provide consistent and predictable income over all time (136 years so far). Letting our university forestry departments manage the land meant to fund the Universities might triple our revenue, if we explored best in nation practices we might increase our revenue by 30x! That’s too simplistic of an analysis, but directionally points us towards something we should look into more directly. Berkeley Forests, in particular, has functional examples of every kind of harvest and significant burning and fuel management studies within their research forest. I had the pleasure of recently visiting and participating in a research workshop there and they aren’t managing for optimal revenue but they are also not managing to the same objective decade after decade. We’ve simply given our trust lands a static charter and settled into a static management outcome.
As a startup in forestry we see a lot of project economics and the biggest things a State can do to support forestry is to provide decadal stability for the demand for forestry products and a supply of fiber. What we often get, especially from the USFS, are random acts of forestry where projects pop up in isolation or without follow-up and demand signals are scrambled. The State has tools to encourage local industry development, and when it does can reap a 10:1 return on that investment through the improved economic activity around that stability in supply and demand. Creating a purchase inventive on biomass electricity can provide an outlet for forest thinning work that would otherwise not pencil. Mandating mass timber infrastructure can put the work of the DoT towards supporting forestry industry and revenues. We are the location of one of the US Mass Timber Hubs — we should act like it.
· $0.20 / kWh purchase price on biomass power from fuels management projects
· Bridge, Retaining Wall, Sound Control construction in the State of Washington should be sourced preferentially from Washington State origin mass timber products
· Leverage Module and Panelization for all State building construction
Tie land access to fiber to selection harvest and multi-age management, we are managing to multiple objectives despite trying to generate more revenue from the disruption. The State doesn’t need to own the timber producing lands to increase State revenues from timber in the state!
Non-Timber Revenue
Now, with a couple easy “making forestry work better” suggestions out of the way, let us look at making the land work better for the task of funding State services. A recent project, Horse Heaven Hills Wind Farm, has received a lot of attention and its economics are illustrative for what we can expect from productive land, so to speak. The power plant covers 72,000 acres and expected capacity will reach $575M at retail energy prices (wholesale PPAs will undoubtedly be lower). That’s 120x as productive in dollars per acre terms ($20k/ac per year) and achieves it by producing the clean electricity that our state needs to power its technology companies and keep its citizens comfortable. If we looked instead at building a data center… a Microsoft data center can be sited on 75 acres of land. Microsoft operates over 300 data centers, or about $1B in revenue per data center per year — or $14M per acre per year. Clearly there are non-timber land uses that quickly generate much more revenue than would be reasonable from the ongoing farming of trees. Finding an appropriate mix of uses frees our hand when considering what to do with the rest of the lands, if we only need to reserve 10% of the land for revenue generation, we can put the other 90% to work against non-revenue objectives without concern about the primary mission.
· High value project siting will dramatically improve land trust economic productivity. Locking our educational funding into a specific (currently productive) markets or segments is unwise and more a consequence of practice and culture than statute.
Dealing with the land
The enabling act grants 3M acres and requires a sale price of no less than $10/acre. California, when established, set aside 5M acres of which less than 500k remains in the state trust. There is precedent to unwind state ownership, in our State and others, which becomes important in specific contexts where the grant assumed by the state is in direct conflict with other grants established with, for instance, local tribes.
The state land trust was, plainly, all tribal land before it was a Territory of the United States or even Washington State. But our particular land grant is somehow worse, two tracts of the Yakama reservation were included in the land trust grant (1889) despite being part of the Yakama treaty reservation (1855). Despite recognizing this mistake around 90 years ago, we’ve been unable to find a way to make this right and restore ownership to these 92,000 acres. Even worse, the previously mentioned Horse Heaven Hills Wind Farm was sited over Yakama (and other) objections. Had the State gone to the tribe to lead the development of a wind farm the tribe may have found a different solution together — and helped all stakeholders find a more agreeable location for the facility. Instead, the land was selected by an out of state power developer to accrue revenue to an out of state corporation. We have the opportunity to perform economic development activities to make our state and stakeholders stronger together, and somehow keep finding a way to miss making the connection.
· Generally, use project development as a means to create essential service (e.g. clean power production), while establishing local governance and stewardship over Trust lands (transfer ownership). Take the statue-required transfer fee from a profit sharing agreement from the resulting facility.
· Specifically with respect to the Yakama, bundle those lands by right with development opportunity land transfers to right clear past wrongs.
Forest Health
Ok. Now with several economic concerns out of the way we can talk about how we manage to keep forests around moving forward. Last weekend I was able to attend a research workshop at Berkeley Forests down in California and the most popular topic was fuels management with fire. The new business of the research forest was specifically that they stand at the threshold of needing to adopt a position of “we must burn the forest to save the forest,” increasing their annual burning from tens of acres to hundreds (to establish a 12 year return interval for fire in their Mixed Sierra Conifer landscape). We, still, have more water in more places in Washington than California. We’re thankfully a few years behind the challenges they are facing. Washington forests span the very wet to the very dry extremes of forest landscape and we’ve, to date, been spared the vast biome swapping firestorms that have been sweeping through California since 2017.
Washington has our own university forestry departments and our own local expertise in forest health seeking answers for how best to manage our native lands. While the answer from these professionals to any forest management question will always start with “it depends,” some things about historic behavior and expectation are facts of our landscape. Forests burned more area at lower severity in the past. First nations burned their landscapes (from the Okanogan to the Islands of the Salish Sea) with purpose — to promote food production, to promote ease of travel, to control species mix, to honor and maintain their culture. We’ve lost that since we’ve become a state. Growing up in Eastern Washington we burned our fields to reduce community risk in the dry, windy, seasons; but there was a time when it wasn’t just grassland burning as a management tool.
Our forests produce 2–10 tons of excess biomass per acre per year. What does “excess” biomass mean, what is it? Trees, shrubs, forest landscapes are more than just a static set of dominant overstory trees, the accumulation of duff, litter, and importantly trees that lose out to the competition with their neighbors, pests, disease, and so forth create a steady accumulation of biomass that is balanced by some kind of sink — decomposition, accumulation, removal. We have the choice for what that extra biomass ends up doing. The choice we are defaulting into right now is accumulation; and our forests mostly have too many trees competing for the same water and light. In dry pine stands greater fire intensity has been observed, on the wet side we haven’t had the breakthrough (yet) but the stand refresh mode in wet mixed conifer is a stand replacing fire — we probably don’t want that to occur in our suburban landscapes.
And, our neighbors to the North have already seen these effects — mountain pine beetle and overwintering wildfires are the (not so) new normal. We are in a very special part of the world, and need to recognize that it is a matter of time until we deal with these challenges; not a question of if we might escape them. Foresters in BC are cross-planting trees from much further south, including giant sequoia from the central Sierra Nevada mountains, to better understand and prepare for the forest transformation already underway in their province. During the heat dome in 2021 the PNW lost around 1M acres of Douglas Fir and another 1M acres of True Fir following the stress of that 3-day span — heat and drought reduce the capacity to fight off pests, disease, and support competition. The changing climate, including timing of rainfall and annual minimum temperatures are putting new stresses on our forests that make them more prone to disease, pest, and disturbance than they’ve seen in the past — when combined with the ongoing epidemic of trees we end up with less healthy forests and fewer monarch and reduced old-growth survival going forward. The abandoned adjustments to the Northwest Forest Plan recognized that the greatest threat to our older and old growth forests is not logging, but climate change and severe fire. Logging, ranching, roads, planned or cultural fire… these all help establish a patchwork of forest types and that is where forest resilience comes from.
· Promote rebuilding the road networks — access supports all management
· Promote offtakes, such as biomass power plants sited in places where emissions can be mitigated (e.g. away from or downwind of our communities)
· Exempt Rx and Cultural burning from CAA accounting, restore humans as a keystone species in forest ecosystems, whos participation is essential for ecosystem health
If you want to perform service work (fuels reduction) to maintain your lands today you have to permit, fund, and account for all climate impacts (esp. Clean Air Act, Endangered Species Act, and NEPA). If you wait for a fire to escape suppression, however, none of the CCA, ESA, or NEPA oversight applies — the fire does not wait on the study findings. This leads us to operationalize the crisis instead of avoid the crisis, we’d all be better off with a freer hand to act — even our endangered species and air quality are worse off under the do-nothing hypothesis than when we perform the work. The basic counterfactual of the policy and regulation isn’t right for today’s environment. Today’s policies and habits lead us to put off proactive maintenance, it is expensive we say and we don’t know that it’ll pay off. $2,000/acre to reduce fuels for 5–15 years seems like a lot, until you consider fire-fighting costs at $100,000/acre and home losses like those we just saw in LA — tens of millions per acre and decades of hazardous cleanup, reconstruction, and displacement. We should stop looking at service work in our forests as a business that needs to pay its way and think about as a stewardship obligation necessary to maintain our communities and ways of life.
Community Development
The State Schools Trust lands are often turned to the task of enhancing our communities directly, providing leases for businesses or swapping lands to promote housing development in our communities and so on. These actions are nearly always controversial as on some level direct State intervention is seen as meddling, but this is literally the natural and expected action of the State — to help make decisions that achieve our otherwise intractable collective goals. The economic imperative constrains some of these decisions in ways that lead to profitable, but suboptimal, outcomes within the community. Relaxing that requirement, satisfying it elsewhere in the portfolio, allows the trust lands to focus on freeing up opportunities for civic services and not just profit in our communities. This is especially relevant when thinking about rights of way for things like transmission or transportation. To take another example from Yakama lands, there is/was a multi-part land and dam removal deal where BPA’s (Bonneville Power Administration) inability to act in a timely manner jeopardized the whole project and federal financing structure. Transmission interconnect queues and buildouts ought not limit our community development — that’s exactly the sort of thing a State is meant to resolve. As we showed earlier, the economic benefits from power or community development far outweigh the direct harvest revenue possible from these lands. We’re not even stretching the intent of charter!
· We should do more of this, its ok!
· Rights of way for rail, transmission, and housing are great places to start
· Value the increased tax base and not just raw extraction revenue
Carbon Management
And, now we’re ready to talk about carbon management. Carbon is a hot topic right now, pun intended, and folks love to look at a forest and say the best way to store more carbon is to not do anything! On a short-term view, yes, that’s true. Research will show that until you encounter a disturbance and look further than a few years down the road an untouched stand will put on more carbon than one you managed. But that breaks as soon as you look further down the path, or an incident occurs. When a high intensity fire occurs, and unmanaged lands burn with higher intensity than managed lands, the resulting fire burns hotter liberating carbon from the killed trees, the burned surface soils, and the resulting soils erosion post fire. High severity burns also risk the loss of forest entirely, large scale loss of regeneration, seed stock, or seed bed leaves the ecosystem in a heavy reset, where the capacity to support trees at all must be re-established. When one starts to look at forest or carbon lifecycles it very clearly suggests active management is where ongoing carbon storage can be achieved. This example from 2.5 million acres of western dry pine in Arizona plots carbon stocks as a function of time for treated and control stands — inability to look past the next financial quarter leads carbon advocated into a spiral of decline and loss when they block management work (fuels reduction, or thinning). Selective harvest, thinning from below, pre-commercial thinning, etc., all work to increase lifecycle timber yields by removing competition for light and water — the remaining trees in the stand replace the mass of those removed within 10 years. Sometimes the best way forward is to take a step back.
· Carbon storage is maximized with forest health, both through active participation with the forest
· Forest harvest in Washington should favor selective harvesting methods, those that create a distribution or patchwork of structures across the landscape
But before we go too far down this road, let’s take a different step back and make sure we’re solving the right problem. If we look at existing carbon offsets… a lot of them have burned already, and their buffer pools too. That’s if those carbon offsets weren’t just artifacts of the bulk landscape baseline selected to underpin the entire project. Ok, so maybe folks are just doing it wrong right now and we’ll sort it out in time — the premise of the offsets is still good, right? Nope.
Trees, biomass, atmospheric carbon, the whole lot are easily transformed. The bulk of a tree comes from the atmosphere, not the soil. It is the plants that build up the soils, not the other way around. They all operate on that similar 100-year lifecycle — long for a human but short of a State. Fossil fuels, on the other hand, come from an origin some 120M years past. The volume of fossil fuels extracted and remaining to be extracted dwarfs all living biomass on the planet — the origin of the carbon matters for balance in the carbon cycle. One simply cannot solve a fossil carbon problem with biological solutions (faster than fossilization) — it isn’t even in the frame when assessing the limits of carbon dioxide removal (biocarbon and atmospheric carbon are both in the same fast carbon cycle). We should manage our forest health for the trees and the forest, not as some silver bullet to undo the contribution of 250 years of fossil fuel extraction.
· We ought not attempt to fix a fossil fuel carbon management problem with forest management
· We ought to value soils, succession, and multi-aged management of our forested lands — carbon accrues where forests are resilient
We have plenty of agricultural land use transformation from forest to urban, farm, and/or grazing use to manage or unwind if we want to manage forests health. We don’t have to couple with fossil fuel or industrial carbon management to get the signal or motivation necessary to manage our forests and lands for their highest and best use and purpose.
That’s a wrap
I could go on, there are so many more topics relevant and related to our 3M acres of Schools Trust lands. Folks at the trust are dedicated to maintaining the land and producing revenue in support of our schools — it isn’t an easy challenge and we often tightly constrain our options out of tradition. Fundamentally, it is a bit silly to be funding our schools on timber sales — it is literally anachronistic. Forestry has plenty of challenges and opportunities without tying it to the much, much, larger schools funding challenge. Climate variability is already putting our forested lands under new pressures. We’ve been lucky so far, if the PNW losing 2M acres in a 3-day heat-dome event can be called lucky, in the Pacific Northwest but it is only a matter of time until we push beyond lived experience. We recently had a fire cross over to the west side, Sourdough fire, that caused utility disruption — something California has been experiencing regularly for the last 8 years and other portions of the mountain west are starting to see more regularly (e.g. Marshall fire in Colorado and regular power grid de-energizing since). We need to think about policies appropriate for the challenges ahead of us, and any number of different pathways for the State Schools Land Trust can help prepare us to be successful in the face of those coming challenges.
For anyone looking to go deeper, here are a few starter resources to get going:
Paul Hessburg, UW Professor and former USFS Ecologist out of Wenatchee on the epidemic of trees.
Fire ecologist view: https://fixtheforest.org/
Paper about specific fixes for Federal Policies: https://fireecology.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s42408-024-00301-y
Paper about specific fixes for Federal Wilderness: https://fireecology.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s42408-024-00297-5
Post Wildfire Debris Flows — Michael Lamb’s Caltech Watson Lecture
