Cutting Carbon by Hugging Trees: The Cumberland Forest Project
by Allie Lowy
When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”
-Mary Oliver
Everyone remembers the first forest where they felt fully entranced, their formative glimpses into the vital awareness that this was a wellspring of magic.
For me, it was the temperate forest that engulfed the Potomac River, rife with box elders, sycamores, magnolia. It was in these forests that I learned the value of silence, of listening intently and quietly — back pressed up against a tulip poplar — letting my ears fill with sparrow song. A chorus of tree frogs. The rare, melodic call of meadowlarks passing overhead. I learned that if I were still enough and paid close enough attention, I could catch a fleeting glimpse of an oriole’s fiery orange plumage. I learned that nature welcomed bare soles, and that dirt could cleanse you. I learned that the ferns were most verdant, the moss softest, the air most refreshing after it had rained. Yes, it was in these forests that I became intimately aware of the widest trunks for hide-and-seek, the canopies offering the most abundant refuge from a storm, the patches of wildflowers enveloped in energetic colors when the last vestiges of winter had retreated from the Earth and pockets of March sunshine christened the landscape anew.
In remembering, these recollections come to me in a visceral way: bitter persimmon juice, the astringent aftertaste that clings to your tongue; the intoxicating fragrance of honeysuckle near Lock 17; the chilling wind from atop my secret hideaway: that vast, birds-eye view that filled my mind with curiosity and wonder and awe.
Ecological writer Charles Eisenstein argues that our hope for the environmental movement lies in experiences such as these, in intimate emotional connections to wilderness and natural spaces, and in individuals who will fight to protect the landscapes that they consider sacred.
However, contemporary environmental discourse paints a grim picture. Modern environmentalists speak of natural words stripped from dictionaries, replaced with virtual vocabulary; children who can identify more Apple products than apple varieties growing in the wild. They speak of deforestation accelerating, unchecked, Loraxes bulldozed in the name of unfettered growth, and insatiable capitalist thirst for resources.
The horizon of possibility imagined by these writers, especially when it comes to forests, is not only inaccurate, but caustic to a vision of reasonable hope that today’s environmental movement desperately needs. Echoing Eisenstein, I believe that it is personal attachments to our formative landscapes that will save us, and we have reason to believe that this shift is already beginning to take place.
In the past century, the U.S. has reversed much of its Industrial Revolution-era deforestation — and forest cover is expanding, in large part due to restoration of previously forested land that was converted to farmland and then abandoned on the East Coast. A few weeks ago, I spoke to the the mastermind behind one of the most robust forest restoration initiatives on the East Coast, the Cumberland Forest Project. The project protects critical tracts of temperate forest in the Southeast from the degradation and logging that has historically characterized the region.
A Brief History of U.S. Deforestation and Reforestation
To be sure, deforestation in the U.S. skyrocketed in the mid-nineteenth century, as the railroads and steam-generated power of the late Industrial Revolution sparked an increase in demand for lumber. In the Eastern U.S., forest cover reached its lowest point in 1872. By 1904, lumber had overtaken agriculture as the main driver of deforestation, and, by 1920, more than two thirds of American forests had been logged (IUCN). It was in the early 1900s when conservation rose to prominence in the political arena. After touring Yosemite Valley with conservationist John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt created the U.S. Forest Service in 1905.
In the 1930s, three million Americans were employed to plant three billion trees under the first New Deal. Since the 1940s, forest growth in the U.S. has exceeded forest harvest. By 2000, forest growth exceeded harvest by 42 percent, and growth was 380 percent greater than it was in 1920. The greatest gains have been on the East Coast — the area most heavily logged by European settlers — where the average volume of standing wood per acre has nearly doubled in the past century.
From 1990 to 2010, deforestation in the U.S. was more than offset by reforestation – while around 950,000 acres of forest were lost, the nation added 19 million acres of forested land. This progress is in large part due to initiatives by groups like the U.S. Forest Service, the Arbor Day Foundation, and the Nature Conservancy.
At this point, you may be wondering why forests should be a high conservation priority — what important ecological functions do they serve?
For starters, forests are crucial carbon sinks: natural environments that absorb, and sequester, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Carbon sinks — which include the planet’s oceans, soils, and forests — collectively absorb one half of all carbon dioxide emitted by humans. Within the carbon sink category, forests are second to oceans in their capacity to suck up carbon.
In fact, in the acclaimed book Drawdown — which lists the top one hundred climate mitigation strategies in order of mitigation capacity — experts rate temperate forests number 12, stating that an additional 235 million acres of forestland will be naturally regenerated by 2050, sequestering around 24 Gigatons of carbon.
Forests as Carbon Sinks
Forests function as carbon sinks through photosynthesis, the process through which they use carbon, water, and light energy to produce glucose, water and oxygen. During photosynthesis, trees fix atmospheric carbon dioxide in their chlorophyll parts, and the carbon is then integrated to complex organic molecules which are used by the whole trees. Trees photosynthesize as they grow, and release carbon when they decay and die.
Experts have declared that, to meet our carbon goals of limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius by 2050, natural climate solutions will provide one-third of the cost-effective climate mitigation needed between now and then. One study concluded that, of these natural climate solutions, reforestation and conservation — practices that prevent forests from being converted to another land use, like agriculture — had the highest capacity for climate mitigation.
Other Ecological Benefits of Forests
Beyond their climate mitigation potential, temperate forests can improve human and ecological health in a number of other ways as well. Temperate forests improve air quality, protect water quality in the headwater streams that run through them, provide erosion and flood control, mitigate the severity of extreme heat and droughts, and support immense biodiversity in animal and plant life, giving way to thriving ecosystems upon which myriad complex natural processes depend. Three hundred million people live in forests worldwide, while 1.6 billion depend on them for their livelihoods — through a combination of the food and medicinal products these ecosystems supply.
Central Appalachian Forests
The Eastern Deciduous Forest ecosystem spans twenty six states, reaching from Florida up to southern Canada, and extends as far west as Minnesota. This forest includes large tracts of land that are recognized as high priorities for conservation on a global scale. For instance, the Southern Coniferous and Broadleaf Forests and the Appalachian Mixed Mesophytic Forests were listed as one of the top 200 most important areas in the world for biodiversity conservation.
One particularly important section of this region for wildlife is the Cumberland Gap area in Central Appalachia. Covering over 100,000 acres in the Appalachian Mountains, across Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee, the Cumberland Gap region is home to perhaps the most important wildlife corridor on the U.S. East Coast. Wildlife corridors enable safe passage for animals between habitat patches, and will become ever more important as cities continue to urbanize, fragmenting habitat, and as climate change continues to push habitats northward.
Despite centuries of logging, the Central Appalachian Region is widely renowned as a global biodiversity hotspot, providing habitat for rare populations of salamanders, freshwater mussels, and elk, and is home to a network of watersheds vital to the livelihood of native plants, animals, and humans. The Cumberland Gap region encompasses climate-resilient forests and more than 700 miles of headwater streams that feed into important sources of freshwater, including the Clinch, Cumberland, and Tennessee and Ohio River Systems. Perhaps most important, it is home to a critical south-to-north migratory corridor, which scientists believe could be one of North America’s most important “escape routes” as plant and animal species shift their ranges Northward, to cooler climates.
The Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest land conservancy, has been a key player in efforts to conserve Appalachian forest – securing forest protection, restoration, and afforestation through an array of policies that bridge landowners, businesses, and state governments.
In 2018, TNC conservationists were faced with a dilemma: they wanted to protect critical swaths of the Eastern Deciduous Forest, but they lacked the funding to purchase all of that land. They were looking at hundreds of thousands of acres in Appalachia – land that cost more than traditional nonprofit fundraising could support. They realized they needed a new economic model for conservation: one that allowed for impact capital and return on private investments. The solution they crafted was one of the largest-ever conservation initiatives the Eastern U.S. had ever seen.
Called the Cumberland Forest Project, the initiative safeguarded 253,000 acres of critical Appalachian forestland across two parcels: one in Southwest Virginia and one along the Tennessee and Kentucky border. What makes it unique is its innovative economic design: the Project includes an “impact investment fund that seeks competitive rates of return for third-party investors.” TNC manages the land, as the fund’s General Partner, but it is only one of several investors in the project.
For the first ten years, TNC will provide its investors with financial returns from three revenue sources: certified sustainable timber sales, carbon offset credits, and the eventual sale of the land. The project also entails permanent management restrictions for the land, emphasizing the value of forests in their own right, rather than just a source of short-term financial gains. I spoke to one of the architects of this groundbreaking project — Charlottesville Nature Conservancy scientist Bill Kittrell — to get crucial details on how this initiative came to fruition. Kittrell told me that TNC accomplished the project by buying land from landowners — most of which were large industrial lands where no humans lived.
Much of it was steep, mountain land that had been over harvested, which jeopardized water quality and biodiversity in nearby streams. A sizable portion of the land had been degraded from past ownership — like deep mining, surface mining, and mountaintop removal — but, by reforesting, TNC has restored a lot of the original biodiversity in abandoned mining lands, which has also reduced erosion and enhanced local water quality. In fact, in the past year, many of the rare salamanders, mussels, and bird species that once frequented the region have returned to their glorious homeland. Through the project, the Conservancy will sequester 10 million tons of carbon dioxide over the next 10 years. The contiguous forest tract is one of the largest intact forests in the world.
The Project will also protect the crucial aforementioned migratory corridor — which Kittrell called both a “climate superhighway” and a “climate-smart corridor,” because it will be an increasingly important corridor in coming decades, as the warming climate causes plants and animals to shift habitat ranges. Since the Project’s inception, Kittrell told me, these Appalachian forests have seen surges in a number of rare birds species, like cerulean warblers, as well as elk, and myriad rare stream species, such as the rough rabbitsfoot and Tennessee heelsplitter, which are found nowhere else on Earth.
Importantly, the Project protects swaths of forest that are certified to provide carbon credits through California’s carbon market. In California, businesses can offset up to 8% of their carbon emissions by paying for carbon to be absorbed elsewhere. One way to do this is by paying landowners — like the Nature Conservancy in Appalachia — to store their carbon in trees. This provides another crucial economic component to keep the Project viable.
Soon after the genesis of the Project, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam announced the Commonwealth’s largest-ever conservation easement, an agreement with landowners that would permanently protect 23,000 acres of forest in Virginia, requiring sustainable forest practices for at least 100 years. Kittrell told me that he has worked with TNC to craft a similar permanent easement across 50,000 acres of Tennessee, which will be announced at some point in the next year.
In words misattributed to Gandhi, but actually penned by Oregon naturalist and author Chris Maser, “What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.” With any luck, as we restore our forests, we can mend some of our broken relationships with the non-human world as well. Perhaps, along the way, we can begin to recognize the ineffable lessons forests have to teach us, and perhaps our children, too, will consider forests sacred.
