February 17, 2018
Dear President Miller, Speaker Busch, Chairman Barve, Members of the House Environment and Transportation Committee, Distinguished Legislators:
I write to you today to ask your support for improvements to Maryland’s 1991 Forest Conservation Act, as contained in the bills HB 766 and SB 610. Therefore, please consider what follows as my formal testimony on the bills.
I’m reaching out to you as a Maryland resident - and writer - since 2005, and from my experience saving forests in New Jersey, where I was an environmental leader from 1988-2001, and where I served as Director of Conservation for New Jersey Audubon Society.
Maryland and New Jersey share many geographic and ecological features - and development pressures as well. In New Jersey, caught between the real estate markets of Philadelphia and New York, forests didn’t stand a chance until they were protected by explicit, powerful regulations in the form of protective zoning: first in the NJ Pinelands (at 1 house per 20/40 acres) in 1979, and then in the Highlands, our watershed area, in 2005 with similar stringencies.
Of course, under the ideological pressures of our time – its reigning Neoliberalism economics and the anti-regulatory, anti-tax and anti-government commandments that form its basis, these pioneering land-use protections, what I have since come to call “Social Democracy for Nature,” have been greatly weakened under Governor Hogan’s former good friend, now retired, Chris Christie. Chris Christie was an environmental horror story for New Jersey. And Social Democracy for people has been on the defensive, in retreat, for decades now in its Western European heartland.
Now I’ve taken a long bath in the political spirit of Maryland, which in matters of natural resource protection, has not used state or regional regulatory powers in land-use matters at anywhere near the intensity with which New Jersey felt compelled to employ them. That’s despite the scientific case for protecting forests, and Tom Horton’s wonderful writing about their ability to filter pollutants, for the air as well as the water, and how sensitive water bodies are: their micro-organisms, the base of the aquatic food chain, start to suffer when the adjacent land use changes hit just 10% disturbance. As you will shortly see, those impacts hit home in some surprisingly rural areas of Western Maryland, that still have a lot of forest cover.
And I know from many long summer bike-rides what it feels like to leave hot, sunny farm and suburban areas and hit a ten degree temperature drop upon entering one of the remaining forests.
However, in the winter of 2018, forest protection is not just a matter of air and water pollution filtering, the classic environmental services which our own Professor Herman Daly tells us our capitalism refuses to factor into its marginal utility calculations No, forest protection has become one of the two great pincer movements to stop global warming, the biological sequestration side, where an acre of forest pulls in six tons of CO2 per year and gives back four tons of oxygen. Of course the other great side of the strategy, the movement to stop using fossil fuels, to keep them buried, including natural gas, the great change needed in our energy regimes, is being addressed this legislative session by two competing schedules of urgency for renewable definitions and solar and wind targets.
This global warming urgency to keep temperature changes to 2 degrees centigrade or less therefore should have greatly ratcheted up our commitment to protect forests, far beyond the feel good, non-regulatory measures of former Governor O’Malley’s Forest Preservation Act of 2013, with its call for “no net loss of forests.” It’s sobering to recall that Maryland, at the time of settlement in the 17th century, had approximately 90 percent forest cover, and that 2013 legislation asked us to settle today for just 41% coverage. It’s not good enough. Despite the modest goals, the modesty apparently didn’t register with the development community. When I looked at the data, I saw continuing forest losses of about 2,000 acres per year, and I found that 18 of the 21 counties reported that they planted less than what they lost to development between 2008 and 2016. Those years witnessed, and painfully so, 23,403 acres of forest cleared, and only 6289 planted, with some of the most shockingly poor ratios of loss and meager replacement coming in from Prince Georges and Charles Counties.
I support this bill as perhaps the best we can do under the current balance of power, or should I call it more accurately, imbalance of power between development and real estate forces and the consciences of conservation minded citizens – and the Maryland land-use traditions, but I’m not “going quietly.” Here’s where the bill falls short, and ought to be improved.
First, the replacement ratio of 1:1 is scientifically implausible. That’s because the loss of a 150 year old climax forest with full understory, and the next generation replacement mainstay trees rising up, and accompanying botanical and biological complexity, right down to the fungi and mushrooms and root systems intertwined deeply in the soils, cannot be reproduced by planting, not in 50 years, not in one hundred probably: it will not have the same integrity as the “wasted” original. So the ratio is laughable and woefully inadequate, even upon the distorted terms of just replacing the main species of trees, which will take 30-50 years.
Some scientists seem to understand this, even if it’s guidance for the renewables bills now pending, where the very term bio- renewable as applied to pulp mills and bio fuels runs into the same problem of appropriate ratios for biological replacement. This is a big problem when it comes to trees and forests, as opposed to grasses and other forms of quick growing bio-energy sources. It can be partly resolved by using the Fifth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC5) definition: “any form of energy from solar, geophysical or biological sources that is replenished by natural processes at a rate that equals or exceeds its rate of use. “ To me, the ratio of planting would have to be in the range of 10-20 acres to one lost to even begin to meet the spirit of this definition, and in terms of the biological complexity lost by ripping out nature’s descending micro webs of centuries’ formation, even that falls far short – and perhaps they can never be fully recreated by man once lost, by just planting replacement trees. (See page 8 of Arjun Makhijani’s fine work: Prosperous, Renewable Maryland: Roadmap for a Healthy, Economical and Equitable Energy Future, Nov. 2016).
We must all understand what Gustave Speth, who was Dean of the Yale School of Forestry (to bring the matter close to the topic at hand), a cautious and science driven man who has served on many prestigious national and international environmental commissions, wrote in his profound 2009 work, “The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability.” For a long time, I kept writing that it was the Bridge “at the end of the world.” It was a grim reminder without illusions. He did hold out hopes for a vast change in the relation of our economy to nature, but those hopes have been left hanging, if not dashed, since he wrote it.
Speth said the time for our traditional, compromised conservation measures had passed: they had failed to protect nature from the shattering effects of “too much”: too much economic pressure; too much over-harvesting; too much pollution; too much fragmentation in small increments of habit integrity, by the regulatory “wave-through,” for example. My contemporary illustration would be what is being done under General Permits, for pipelines for natural gas, waived through wetlands, over stream crossings, under rivers. All these “too muchs” add up to a deeply impaired natural world, humankind’s inherited “infrastructure, and now China and India and all the “emerging markets” want the same rights to tear it , nature, further to shreds, and are succeeding, with of course, conflicting measures coming too little and too late.
Cautious, conservative Professor James Gustave Speth, from a much storied forestry school, had reached in 2009 the same conclusions I had at the end of my formal environmental career in New Jersey in 2001: despite many significant victories, we were losing the larger struggle to preserve enough of nature intact.
And what would he say about a bill that leaves out Garrett and Allegany counties entirely on the theory that they have a lot of forests left (65% or so in Garrett) and so don’t need to protect what they have? What has been saved is mostly state land. But they are multiple use forests inside, with lots of “timber harvesting.” The local power brokers complain it’s too much that has been saved, the region is poor and needs more growth. The forests outside the public boundaries, they don’t have much protection at all, only on the steepest slopes and I have my doubts about the local enforcement even there (and in fact when I toured Green Ridge State Forest this winter I saw some timber harvesting on what seemed to be far too steep slopes.) And the majority of forests today, even in Garrett, 65% or so, are in small lots, in private hands with aging owners, ripe for over-harvesting or conversion to small fragmented estates with a mansion at the center. If that happens, say goodbye to biological integrity, whatever the outcomes of timber harvesting.
Take a look, for example, at the Savage River State Forest Sustainable Forest Management Plan , from November 2015, as thorough and candid a document about forests and their ecological integrity as we are likely to see, still stressing timber harvesting though, but beginning to acknowledge what Speth has taught us, as well as the earlier ecological prophets: the hour is late and biological integrity is at stake, rising up to be equal in priority of guidance measures to the sustainable timber harvesting handed down to us by the Gifford Pinchot school from the turn the of 19th century, which has heavily influenced Maryland’s Forest Service as told in Champ Zumbrun’s history of Green Ridge State Forest.
The conventional political economy reasoning is that we shouldn’t have Garrett and Allegany county come under the more stringent measure of the bills before us – after all, they’re sparsely populated, have forest cover of 65%, 25% or so above the 41 % no net loss threshold. With so many acres under the protection of the state, and so few people, everything must be fine out here in Western Maryland, right? Think again.
On page 22 of the Savage River State Forest Management Plan, we learn that the fabled Georges Creek watershed, home to some of the worst impacts of 19th and 20th century resource extraction - coal and timber harvesting - “was among the lowest ranking for stream and river biodiversity in the state (83 of 84).”
And from an earlier page, “Based on the Physical habitat Index (PHI) 49% of the stream miles in Garrett County had minimally degraded habit, 33% had partially degraded habitat, and 18% had degraded or severely degraded habitat.” Garrett County, with so few people and such fine trout streams: how could that be? Maybe 65% of forest cover in its steep native terrain and poor soils is not enough, and maybe they have been removed from too many crucial, unstable lands, and ought to be given careful job and life- regenerating care under a new CCC, WPA.
What’s that you say, we can’t afford it in Maryland? Well, we can if the recipient is not nature or our troubled, drug-addicted youths, the new lost generation, but rather Amazon’s eastern headquarters, where literally billions from a state usually obsessed with balanced budgets is not too much to place on the table when the recipient is seen as having the nation’s highest standing: the successful mega-firm. A state and a governor willing to offer carte blanche in the way of corporate infrastructure desires. For the forest bill at hand we tip-toe cautiously as we watch the fundamental, primal human infrastructure – nature’s integrity – destroyed before our very eyes – and we worry about too onerous burdens placed upon the very destroyers themselves.
This is a bill of modest improvements at a time and in a place that is inclined to shy away from facing the full implications of our not-so-modest current dire predicament for nature, and in the unresolved tensions which exist between economic development and the protection of that nature. I think we ought to define and protect our best remaining forests from any development conversion, and ought to put our youth, and unemployed of any age or gender, for that matter, to work planting those species which will deliver the most global warming-fighting benefits as well as pollution control – and also deliver some useable products for our economy decades from now.
We should raise that statewide forest cover goal from 41% to 65%, and plant in the areas where we now suffer the forest absence’s the most: stream corridors, steep slopes, and the least productive farm soils. And if not much can be grown on our former abandoned surface mine sites, why not site substantial solar facilities on them? Solar ought to be one of the economic pillars of our economic futures in Western Maryland, and not the Warrior Run type coal burning plants built so late into our fates, in 1999, a decade after scientist James Hansen was led to the Republican gags and gallows.
And I think the ecological scientists – and we have many fine ones in Maryland – ought to be more deeply involved in the planning for the work for a new CCC/WPA: there are many complex considerations to go into the what and where of biological restoration. I don’t believe for a moment, as one powerful conservative Republican in Congress said, that “only the private sector can create jobs.” I’m on the hook to write about a vision for the economic future of Rural Red State America, just to make it public.
We have some guidance for where we ought to go and the conflicts that have to be settled between too much forest “utility” and retaining what’s left of biological integrity – and improving upon it. It’s an old debate, grounded in the one between John Muir and Gifford Pinchot from the dawn of the 20th century.
And I do have additional worries about how the state environmental establishment views our public and private forests. State “Fish and Game” establishments have for a very long time been oriented to hunting and fishing and timber harvesting – the economic side of setting aside public lands. What I hear at the public presentations I’ve gone to at the Appalachian Labs and the college forums here in Frostburg sounds too reassuring to me. For example, the DNR’s Brian Eyler, the point man on deer management, told me and the audience that on state lands in Western Maryland, the deer are not chewing away the biological integrity of the understory and the next generation of trees – as they certainly have in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. (Please see William Stolzenburg’s “Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators,” (2008), especially his presentation of the shocking fate of Gary Alt, a state employee in Pennsylvania who tried via public speaking tours to call attention to the damage the deer herds were causing, and “where the forests had entered a state of reproductive arrest.” It’s in a chapter entitled “Bambi’s Revenge.”
Perhaps Maryland is doing much better with ecological protection within the forests it manages on public lands. That was Eyler’s stance. Yet I’m looking for, calling for, an ecological assessment of the state of Maryland’s forest lands – public and private – a baseline, which if it exists, exists today only in the disparate reports from each state forest – like the somewhat reassuring one from the Savage River State Forest.
It is time, because of the evolution in scientific thinking, and our great ecological losses, for such an assessment to be done by truly independent ecologists in the needed specialties and from outside the boundaries of the existing state environmental establishment. I trust my eyes when they see virtually no understory growing alongside our famous hiking and biking trail, too many portions of it, between Frostburg and Cumberland. The damage may be on private land, but it is, as best I can judge, still the destruction of our forest’s future – not from a developer but from a part of nature thrown out of sync.
Much of the pathway and the illumination of our economic/conservation troubles, even on public land, can be found in Neil M. Maher’s “Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (Oxford Univ. Press, 2008). The earliest CCC work was rooted in the existing forestry tradition of sustainable utility, practiced by FDR himself on his family property along the Hudson River. When the CCC got carried away with planting the wrong species in the wrong place and in clearing too much wilderness land for public recreation, and proposed grand scenic highways, as fine as that legacy was that they left us, they were chastised for their simplicity and destructiveness towards nature by the rising generation of ecologists – among them Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall.
Those early lessons still stand, but I’m for putting as many too work in scientifically guided planting as we can. Many lives in the America of 2018 are being thrown away without a guiding purpose, without a clear national or state purpose – the worshipful wisdom of “let the market do it” is proving unsatisfactory - and I can think of no better purpose right now than saving existing forests, fighting global warming and giving our lost youth the healthful work and re-introduction to nature that left such a glowing personal and societal legacy from our first serious go at in the 1930’s. The CCC was one of the most popular programs from the New Deal. We can learn from it, improve upon it and make another go at it delivering as much for nature as for the people whose lives it saved when our economic system collapsed, 1929-1932,
If that offends some developers and too much of cautious conservation Maryland, so be it. That’s where we are as a society interwoven with a broken nature, and there is not a moment to spare to do much, much better, to reweave as many broken strands of it as we can, always remembering that we still are human beings with limits - though now we are in charge, like it or not, of our own entwined dual fates, humans and nature. It’s an open question as to whether we’re up to the task.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Sincerely,
billofrights
Frostburg, MD