Moving beyond scorched-earth policies

As the flames roared toward my home near Mora recently, I thought about the harsh reality we collectively faced. We can decry decades of forest mismanagement, but the problem is the inevitable outcome of putting short-term financial concerns ahead of longterm collective benefit.

The question essentially boils down to how we pay for the enormous amount of forest thinning required to get our forests back to pre-colonization stand densities (current densities are often 100x historical levels). The only way is through developing markets for the 80 percent of our forests that are non-marketable timber. The solution, in part, lies in our renewable energy choices.

We currently choose the lowest-priced renewable energy. Wind and solar power are about 4 cents per kilowatt cheaper than biomass energy produced by combusting non-market timber. And yet this myopic accounting misses the point that there is a huge cost to not supporting community and ecosystem-sustaining energy policies. For well-implemented biomass energy, not only is carbon negative and creates local jobs — by thinning forests, it also mitigates wildfire. These are things solar and wind energy never do. When one considers all the costs, biomass energy not only provides us with renewable energy, it saves us billions of dollars in firefighting costs and untold human suffering.

In tragedy, there is opportunity. Recent events are a wake-up call providing new incentives to think more holistically about the needs of our land and communities by finding energy solutions that are empowering and not just powering.