I’m on a mission to put forest
protection at the fore
of our national climate conversation in
the US but before I get there I want to
tell you about this photograph this
picture represents the story of my life
this is a simple black-and-white
photograph but it’s one of my most
prized possessions it’s a picture of me
with my parents walking down a dirt road
in the middle of a forest off the island
of de fust ski just off the coast of
South Carolina across the river from
where I grew up I was fortunate enough
to be raised as a free-range wild child
in the low country of South Carolina and
when I look at this picture I remember a
time when I was so connected to nature
we lived by the rhythms of the tides I
remember climbing in the big live oak
trees with the moss hanging down
I remember hours of building forts with
my sister of the pomp from the palm
fronds of the Palmetto trees and I
remember running through the tall pine
trees and finding all kinds of treasures
on the forest floor like bones and
feathers and even arrowheads
when I look at this picture my life
makes sense hundreds of stories of time
spent in the woods that shaped my life
and for the last 20 years I’ve dedicated
my adult career to protecting the
forests of the southeastern US to this
day I still play and run in the forest
and as an adult I’ve grown to appreciate
the forest as a place where I can escape
the digital industrial and technological
world that has dominated human society
for the last hundred years I know that
I’m not alone in terms of my
relationship to the forest I was
reminded of this just in July when I was
at a forty forest storytelling event in
Durham where a dozen or so people got up
on stage and told their own personal
stories about forests and these were
people of very different professions
religions races all kinds of backgrounds
but the one thing that really stuck with
me was the fact that
after story was about how forests had
inspired people at a time of despair
where provided them hope at a time when
they needed it most in their life or
help them to overcome some challenges
some of them very small but some of them
actually quite large and I know each of
you in the room today probably has your
own story to tell about how forests have
inspired you in some way we live in one
of the most challenging moments in the
history of humanity we are facing one of
the biggest challenges we’ve ever faced
climate change is real humans are
causing it and if we do not do a course
correct in a very short period of time
we are on a sure path to extinction
now forest protection around the world
is starting to be seen as a major
priority especially for those countries
in the tropics that have been living a
little bit closer to nature than we have
for the last couple of hundred years but
in the u.s. forest protection is fairly
a blip on the climate radar but there is
some good news about climate change
there is an unprecedented effort right
now happening globally people all over
the world are coming together behind a
single goal to keep temperatures from
increasing 1.5 degrees over that by the
end of this century and that’s
incredible that we have this kind of
international cooperation that’s
happening right now to solve this
problem it’s also encouraging to me that
scientists have pretty much figured out
what it is we need to do to solve this
problem and we need to do two things one
is we need to stop putting so much
carbon into the atmosphere and this is a
story that we’ve been told a lot in the
US and we’re getting it we’ve got to get
off fossil fuels and we’ve got to move
to clean renewable energy like solar and
wind power but the story that’s not
being told is that that is not going to
be enough and that’s because there’s a
second thing that we have to do now
to solve a climate crisis and that is
that we actually have to start reducing
the amount of carbon that is in the
atmosphere because once we emit carbon
it can hang
in the atmosphere for hundreds thousands
of years and scientists have recorded
this year that the amount of carbon in
the atmosphere is now at 410 parts per
million the last time that the earth had
410 parts per million of carbon in the
atmosphere humans did not exist and
climate scientists have pretty much
consent that the safe level of carbon
for humans in the atmosphere is 350
parts per million so we’re at 410 we
have to get to 350 how are we going to
get there
forests that’s how we’re gonna get there
we will not solve the climate crisis
without forests now there’s two options
that we have for how we could use
forests as a solution to climate change
that are being proposed right now and
let me just propose these here for you
all and let’s decide together what makes
the most sense
the first option looks like this and
it’s a big factory and it’s an
industrial process where we take trees
we burn them to generate electricity in
place of coal and then we trap the
carbon and we store it underground and
the idea there is because trees suck
carbon out of the atmosphere that we
suck that carbon it’s stored then it
gets burned and we capture it suck it
capture it repeat and we’re sucking
carbon out of the atmosphere the problem
with this technology is it is incredibly
expensive it’s going to cost trillions
of dollars it has not been tested we do
not know whether it will work or not any
of us it does work we don’t know that it
will work on the scale needed to affect
the global atmosphere on the other hand
oh the other thing that this will
require is massive amounts of trees
which means that we would have to grow
trees in rows as crops and have an
industrialized landscape in order to to
make this work
option number two we protect our natural
forests too often we humans are looking
to technology to solve all our problems
and while technology certainly can solve
some of our problems we do not look to
nature enough
for answers forests represent our best
technology for removing and storing
carbon from the atmosphere they’ve been
doing it for 300 million years
and in fact the reason why humans were
even able to evolve onto the land of
this earth is because of the role that
forests played in helping to stabilize
the amount of carbon in the atmosphere
creating just the right conditions for
humans to be able to survive this is our
best technology and we know it works and
we know it can work at a global scale
and in addition if we protect our
natural forests and restore our natural
forests we also get a lot of bonus
material we get added flood control
natural flood control we get added water
stabilization and purification we get
natural air conditioning things that are
really going to matter in the 21st
century as we start to experience a
change in climate and in addition we get
cool creatures like owls and snakes and
bears and birds and these creatures
lives are also now integrally tied to
the decisions that we humans are going
to make about what choice we’re gonna
take choice number one or choice number
two so I imagine everybody in this
audience is probably thinking option
number two why not option number two
well I think the thing that we have to
realize is that the scale-up of forest
protection is a really big idea right we
as humans for the last couple hundred
years have not been doing a very good
job of protecting much of the Earth’s
forests so this requires us to really
rethink a lot of things it requires up
to shift the way that we value what’s
important and we have to start
recognizing the value of nature now I’m
about to tell you some stories about
forest destruction in our own backyard
that are not being told right now
because while in the tropics they’re
scaling up forest protection as a
climate solution where you haven’t quite
yet gotten it yet in the u.s. that we
have a huge problem in our own backyard
in 2014 scientists produced for the
first time global maps of forest cover
loss around the world using satellite
data the dark purple represents those
areas that are highest rates of forest
cover loss and you can see that the
United States has a lot of dark purple
and in particular in the United States
you can see that the dark purple is in
the southeastern coastal plain of the US
forest disturbance from logging in the
southeastern region is four times that
of South American rainforest why are we
not talking about forest protection as a
critical climate issue in the US where
the world’s largest producer and
consumer of wood products logging causes
carbon stored to be released and so
while we’re logging our forests we’re
also helping to contribute carbon
emissions into the atmosphere our
government isn’t reporting these
emissions right now but scientists who
are studying this and who have
calculated the amount of emissions
coming from logging are showing that the
emissions are staggering and that this
problem is way bigger than we realize
right now and a lot of times we’ve been
told the story that our forests grow
back we have a lot of forests across the
landscape look at all the trees well
what we’re not being told is that it
takes over a hundred years
first forest to recover once it’s been
logged in terms of just the carbon that
we’ve lost the benefit the climate
benefit that we’ve lost when we’ve
logged our forests we also haven’t been
taught in history the history of our
country’s forests and what has happened
to our forests over the course of the
last couple of hundred years and you can
see from these maps in 1620 we had vast
acres of old-growth intact forest
landscapes by 1850 which is around the
beginning of the Industrial Revolution
you can see from 1850 to 1926 and then
to 1990 we had lost pretty much all of
our intact old-growth forests at
landscapes across the US this was our
Earth’s original climate stabilization
system and over the course of the last
couple of hundred years as a part of the
Industrial Revolution we’ve not only
been putting too much carbon from fossil
fuels into the atmosphere but
we’ve been pumping carbon into the
atmosphere that was otherwise stored in
our forests and we’ve degraded our
climate stabilization system so why do
old forests matter so much
this graph shows this very clearly it’s
a simple bar graph it shows on the right
a force that’s 60 years old on the left
is an old-growth forest and that
represents how much carbon is stored in
a young forest versus an old forest so
we can see by this graph that if we were
to grow for us old again we could suck
out a lot of carbon from the atmosphere
and this is especially true for us in
the u.s. because across our country
though trees can live to be hundreds
even some over a thousand years old less
than 15% of our forests across the
country are older than a hundred years
and in the southeastern coastal plain
less than five percent of our forests
are over a hundred years old so by
growing for us folding in protecting our
natural for us we can suck a lot of
carbon out of the atmosphere and our
forests have a critical role to play we
also hear a lot that we replant we’re
really good at replanting forests in the
southeastern US and in the US as a whole
but the what they mean when they say
we’re replanting five for every tree
that we cut down is this an industrial
tree plantation that’s treated like a
crop sprayed with herbicides and
fertilizers we’re very good at growing
forest for wood products we’re not good
at growing forests for things like flood
control and carbon storage and water
stabilization and wildlife and
biodiversity this is exactly what they
mean when they say replant the forest so
we’ve got a landscape that looks like
this this is the picture a bird’s eye
view of a degraded climate stabilization
system and a degraded flood control
system a patchwork of clear-cut sand
tree farms and young forests and the
cost of this forest degradation is huge
and it impacts the most vulnerable among
us the poorest in our community and that
let’s just face it typically means
people of color in the southeastern US
are bearing the brunt of the impacts of
this
forest could be providing significant
flood control at a time and we need it
the most but with a rate and scale of
logging that’s four times that of South
American rainforest we’re not getting
the optimum protection for these
communities that we do that we need I
wish I could say that we are moving in
the right direction and that we’re
starting to embrace forest protection in
the US as a critical climate solution
but unfortunately we’re moving backwards
we’re moving in the direction of option
number one we are the southeastern US
has just become the world’s largest wood
pellet manufacturer where they’re being
exported to Europe and burned in power
stations to generate electricity in
place of coal as renewable energy this
photograph shows a map of the green dots
being the existing facilities the yellow
dots being those that are planned or
proposed I’m very encouraged and
inspired by these two women right here
they’re in our backyard and a little
town in Richmond County North Carolina
they’re two african-american women who
are mobilizing their community and
saying enough is enough they’re
mobilizing their community to stop the
world’s largest wood pellet manufacturer
from building another wood pellet mill
in North Carolina and they need our
support and our help they are saying
standing up and saying no and people are
starting to support this effort and we
have an opportunity right now to
actually return the tide on the wood
poet industry in North Carolina but
forest protection needs to become a part
of our discussion at a national level
about climate change I’m very encouraged
by the campaigns that have been run that
where we have targeted on the problem of
coal burning and we’ve actually started
to transition to solar and wind power
and it’s because of people speaking up
standing up it’s because of public
pressure or let’s not let’s just be very
clear about this it’s because of public
pressure that we are moving away from
coal and starting to move towards solar
and wind power we can do the same for
our forests but it requires every single
one of us in this room to stand up and
make their voices heard this is an
all-hands-on-deck
and we can no longer sit back and expect
that one person or some kind of
technology is going to solve this
problem this is a problem that only we
as humans can coming together it can
solve and we need you to plug in and
join this movement click onto this
website and you can join the movement
and we need you to contact your
governors and your local elected
officials your members of Congress and
let them know that we need them to start
investing in forest protection and
restoring our natural flood control
system and restoring our forests ability
to do its job in helping to protect us
against the worst effects of climate
change and the end of the day we have
something so beautiful if we make this
turn as humanity I believe that if we
just listen to the story that the forest
is telling us right now about our
relationship human relationship with the
forest it would go something like this
you humans have lived in harmony with us
for us for thousands of years and it’s
really only been in the last couple of
hundred years that you have separated
yourself from our relationship you have
treated us with such disrespect that
it’s almost on the point of abuse and we
can help you solve this problem but not
if you keep abusing us if you let us
grow old and wild again we can ensure
that humans can continue to thrive on
this planet into the next century
and we can ensure that generations to
come can find their own inspiring
stories in the forest thank you
you
protection at the fore
of our national climate conversation in
the US but before I get there I want to
tell you about this photograph this
picture represents the story of my life
this is a simple black-and-white
photograph but it’s one of my most
prized possessions it’s a picture of me
with my parents walking down a dirt road
in the middle of a forest off the island
of de fust ski just off the coast of
South Carolina across the river from
where I grew up I was fortunate enough
to be raised as a free-range wild child
in the low country of South Carolina and
when I look at this picture I remember a
time when I was so connected to nature
we lived by the rhythms of the tides I
remember climbing in the big live oak
trees with the moss hanging down
I remember hours of building forts with
my sister of the pomp from the palm
fronds of the Palmetto trees and I
remember running through the tall pine
trees and finding all kinds of treasures
on the forest floor like bones and
feathers and even arrowheads
when I look at this picture my life
makes sense hundreds of stories of time
spent in the woods that shaped my life
and for the last 20 years I’ve dedicated
my adult career to protecting the
forests of the southeastern US to this
day I still play and run in the forest
and as an adult I’ve grown to appreciate
the forest as a place where I can escape
the digital industrial and technological
world that has dominated human society
for the last hundred years I know that
I’m not alone in terms of my
relationship to the forest I was
reminded of this just in July when I was
at a forty forest storytelling event in
Durham where a dozen or so people got up
on stage and told their own personal
stories about forests and these were
people of very different professions
religions races all kinds of backgrounds
but the one thing that really stuck with
me was the fact that
after story was about how forests had
inspired people at a time of despair
where provided them hope at a time when
they needed it most in their life or
help them to overcome some challenges
some of them very small but some of them
actually quite large and I know each of
you in the room today probably has your
own story to tell about how forests have
inspired you in some way we live in one
of the most challenging moments in the
history of humanity we are facing one of
the biggest challenges we’ve ever faced
climate change is real humans are
causing it and if we do not do a course
correct in a very short period of time
we are on a sure path to extinction
now forest protection around the world
is starting to be seen as a major
priority especially for those countries
in the tropics that have been living a
little bit closer to nature than we have
for the last couple of hundred years but
in the u.s. forest protection is fairly
a blip on the climate radar but there is
some good news about climate change
there is an unprecedented effort right
now happening globally people all over
the world are coming together behind a
single goal to keep temperatures from
increasing 1.5 degrees over that by the
end of this century and that’s
incredible that we have this kind of
international cooperation that’s
happening right now to solve this
problem it’s also encouraging to me that
scientists have pretty much figured out
what it is we need to do to solve this
problem and we need to do two things one
is we need to stop putting so much
carbon into the atmosphere and this is a
story that we’ve been told a lot in the
US and we’re getting it we’ve got to get
off fossil fuels and we’ve got to move
to clean renewable energy like solar and
wind power but the story that’s not
being told is that that is not going to
be enough and that’s because there’s a
second thing that we have to do now
to solve a climate crisis and that is
that we actually have to start reducing
the amount of carbon that is in the
atmosphere because once we emit carbon
it can hang
in the atmosphere for hundreds thousands
of years and scientists have recorded
this year that the amount of carbon in
the atmosphere is now at 410 parts per
million the last time that the earth had
410 parts per million of carbon in the
atmosphere humans did not exist and
climate scientists have pretty much
consent that the safe level of carbon
for humans in the atmosphere is 350
parts per million so we’re at 410 we
have to get to 350 how are we going to
get there
forests that’s how we’re gonna get there
we will not solve the climate crisis
without forests now there’s two options
that we have for how we could use
forests as a solution to climate change
that are being proposed right now and
let me just propose these here for you
all and let’s decide together what makes
the most sense
the first option looks like this and
it’s a big factory and it’s an
industrial process where we take trees
we burn them to generate electricity in
place of coal and then we trap the
carbon and we store it underground and
the idea there is because trees suck
carbon out of the atmosphere that we
suck that carbon it’s stored then it
gets burned and we capture it suck it
capture it repeat and we’re sucking
carbon out of the atmosphere the problem
with this technology is it is incredibly
expensive it’s going to cost trillions
of dollars it has not been tested we do
not know whether it will work or not any
of us it does work we don’t know that it
will work on the scale needed to affect
the global atmosphere on the other hand
oh the other thing that this will
require is massive amounts of trees
which means that we would have to grow
trees in rows as crops and have an
industrialized landscape in order to to
make this work
option number two we protect our natural
forests too often we humans are looking
to technology to solve all our problems
and while technology certainly can solve
some of our problems we do not look to
nature enough
for answers forests represent our best
technology for removing and storing
carbon from the atmosphere they’ve been
doing it for 300 million years
and in fact the reason why humans were
even able to evolve onto the land of
this earth is because of the role that
forests played in helping to stabilize
the amount of carbon in the atmosphere
creating just the right conditions for
humans to be able to survive this is our
best technology and we know it works and
we know it can work at a global scale
and in addition if we protect our
natural forests and restore our natural
forests we also get a lot of bonus
material we get added flood control
natural flood control we get added water
stabilization and purification we get
natural air conditioning things that are
really going to matter in the 21st
century as we start to experience a
change in climate and in addition we get
cool creatures like owls and snakes and
bears and birds and these creatures
lives are also now integrally tied to
the decisions that we humans are going
to make about what choice we’re gonna
take choice number one or choice number
two so I imagine everybody in this
audience is probably thinking option
number two why not option number two
well I think the thing that we have to
realize is that the scale-up of forest
protection is a really big idea right we
as humans for the last couple hundred
years have not been doing a very good
job of protecting much of the Earth’s
forests so this requires us to really
rethink a lot of things it requires up
to shift the way that we value what’s
important and we have to start
recognizing the value of nature now I’m
about to tell you some stories about
forest destruction in our own backyard
that are not being told right now
because while in the tropics they’re
scaling up forest protection as a
climate solution where you haven’t quite
yet gotten it yet in the u.s. that we
have a huge problem in our own backyard
in 2014 scientists produced for the
first time global maps of forest cover
loss around the world using satellite
data the dark purple represents those
areas that are highest rates of forest
cover loss and you can see that the
United States has a lot of dark purple
and in particular in the United States
you can see that the dark purple is in
the southeastern coastal plain of the US
forest disturbance from logging in the
southeastern region is four times that
of South American rainforest why are we
not talking about forest protection as a
critical climate issue in the US where
the world’s largest producer and
consumer of wood products logging causes
carbon stored to be released and so
while we’re logging our forests we’re
also helping to contribute carbon
emissions into the atmosphere our
government isn’t reporting these
emissions right now but scientists who
are studying this and who have
calculated the amount of emissions
coming from logging are showing that the
emissions are staggering and that this
problem is way bigger than we realize
right now and a lot of times we’ve been
told the story that our forests grow
back we have a lot of forests across the
landscape look at all the trees well
what we’re not being told is that it
takes over a hundred years
first forest to recover once it’s been
logged in terms of just the carbon that
we’ve lost the benefit the climate
benefit that we’ve lost when we’ve
logged our forests we also haven’t been
taught in history the history of our
country’s forests and what has happened
to our forests over the course of the
last couple of hundred years and you can
see from these maps in 1620 we had vast
acres of old-growth intact forest
landscapes by 1850 which is around the
beginning of the Industrial Revolution
you can see from 1850 to 1926 and then
to 1990 we had lost pretty much all of
our intact old-growth forests at
landscapes across the US this was our
Earth’s original climate stabilization
system and over the course of the last
couple of hundred years as a part of the
Industrial Revolution we’ve not only
been putting too much carbon from fossil
fuels into the atmosphere but
we’ve been pumping carbon into the
atmosphere that was otherwise stored in
our forests and we’ve degraded our
climate stabilization system so why do
old forests matter so much
this graph shows this very clearly it’s
a simple bar graph it shows on the right
a force that’s 60 years old on the left
is an old-growth forest and that
represents how much carbon is stored in
a young forest versus an old forest so
we can see by this graph that if we were
to grow for us old again we could suck
out a lot of carbon from the atmosphere
and this is especially true for us in
the u.s. because across our country
though trees can live to be hundreds
even some over a thousand years old less
than 15% of our forests across the
country are older than a hundred years
and in the southeastern coastal plain
less than five percent of our forests
are over a hundred years old so by
growing for us folding in protecting our
natural for us we can suck a lot of
carbon out of the atmosphere and our
forests have a critical role to play we
also hear a lot that we replant we’re
really good at replanting forests in the
southeastern US and in the US as a whole
but the what they mean when they say
we’re replanting five for every tree
that we cut down is this an industrial
tree plantation that’s treated like a
crop sprayed with herbicides and
fertilizers we’re very good at growing
forest for wood products we’re not good
at growing forests for things like flood
control and carbon storage and water
stabilization and wildlife and
biodiversity this is exactly what they
mean when they say replant the forest so
we’ve got a landscape that looks like
this this is the picture a bird’s eye
view of a degraded climate stabilization
system and a degraded flood control
system a patchwork of clear-cut sand
tree farms and young forests and the
cost of this forest degradation is huge
and it impacts the most vulnerable among
us the poorest in our community and that
let’s just face it typically means
people of color in the southeastern US
are bearing the brunt of the impacts of
this
forest could be providing significant
flood control at a time and we need it
the most but with a rate and scale of
logging that’s four times that of South
American rainforest we’re not getting
the optimum protection for these
communities that we do that we need I
wish I could say that we are moving in
the right direction and that we’re
starting to embrace forest protection in
the US as a critical climate solution
but unfortunately we’re moving backwards
we’re moving in the direction of option
number one we are the southeastern US
has just become the world’s largest wood
pellet manufacturer where they’re being
exported to Europe and burned in power
stations to generate electricity in
place of coal as renewable energy this
photograph shows a map of the green dots
being the existing facilities the yellow
dots being those that are planned or
proposed I’m very encouraged and
inspired by these two women right here
they’re in our backyard and a little
town in Richmond County North Carolina
they’re two african-american women who
are mobilizing their community and
saying enough is enough they’re
mobilizing their community to stop the
world’s largest wood pellet manufacturer
from building another wood pellet mill
in North Carolina and they need our
support and our help they are saying
standing up and saying no and people are
starting to support this effort and we
have an opportunity right now to
actually return the tide on the wood
poet industry in North Carolina but
forest protection needs to become a part
of our discussion at a national level
about climate change I’m very encouraged
by the campaigns that have been run that
where we have targeted on the problem of
coal burning and we’ve actually started
to transition to solar and wind power
and it’s because of people speaking up
standing up it’s because of public
pressure or let’s not let’s just be very
clear about this it’s because of public
pressure that we are moving away from
coal and starting to move towards solar
and wind power we can do the same for
our forests but it requires every single
one of us in this room to stand up and
make their voices heard this is an
all-hands-on-deck
and we can no longer sit back and expect
that one person or some kind of
technology is going to solve this
problem this is a problem that only we
as humans can coming together it can
solve and we need you to plug in and
join this movement click onto this
website and you can join the movement
and we need you to contact your
governors and your local elected
officials your members of Congress and
let them know that we need them to start
investing in forest protection and
restoring our natural flood control
system and restoring our forests ability
to do its job in helping to protect us
against the worst effects of climate
change and the end of the day we have
something so beautiful if we make this
turn as humanity I believe that if we
just listen to the story that the forest
is telling us right now about our
relationship human relationship with the
forest it would go something like this
you humans have lived in harmony with us
for us for thousands of years and it’s
really only been in the last couple of
hundred years that you have separated
yourself from our relationship you have
treated us with such disrespect that
it’s almost on the point of abuse and we
can help you solve this problem but not
if you keep abusing us if you let us
grow old and wild again we can ensure
that humans can continue to thrive on
this planet into the next century
and we can ensure that generations to
come can find their own inspiring
stories in the forest thank you
you
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