Happy almost new year! This post is a long-overdue roundup of several of my favorite stories from the past year, and a commitment to write more in 2024.
2023 found me digging deeper into themes I’ve been pursuing for the past several years. One of my goals, both with my commissioned writing and with this newsletter, is to elevate journalism about nature and make it more than just a subtopic within “environmental” or “climate” journalism. A story I wrote about how fire is being used to restore forests in the Southeast is an example of how I’m trying to do that. It’s not primarily an “environmental” story or a “climate” story; it’s a straight-up nature (and people — because people are part of nature) story. I hope you enjoy it!
Along similar lines, I also continued my exploration of so-called “nature-based climate solutions” — the idea that forests, soils and other ecosystems can help get us out of our climate change dilemma. This idea obviously represents a very utilitarian view of nature — that it’s valuable only insofar as it can address a human-caused problem. My conclusion: We still need a lot more evidence that these solutions can actually make a meaningful impact on the climate. And needless to say, even if they can’t, that doesn’t diminish the value of nature one iota.
Give these stories a read and let me know what you think!
(And apologies to folks who just migrated over from my now-defunct personal newsletter and are seeing this for a second time. I promise no more repeat posts.)
Meet the Fire Starters Restoring One of North America’s Greatest Forests, Audubon Magazine, Fall 2023
Every year, the media reliably inundate us with alarming and sensational coverage of wildfires destroying forests and property — in the West, in Australia, in the Amazon. Over the past year, fires in Canada sent smoke over much of the U.S. and set off air quality alerts in places like D.C., something pretty much unprecedented at least in my time living here. A fast-moving wildfire in Lahaina, Hawaii tragically killed 100 people. Wildfire coverage is obviously important: people need to know about threats to their health and safety. Wildfires are also gripping and visually spectacular, and readers respond to that.
But the way the media cover fire obscures a major truth: Both for nature and for humans, fire is largely a positive force. In fact, many of our most important ecosystems need the creative and regenerative power of fire to thrive. And virtually every terrestrial ecosystem anywhere is adapted to some amount of fire, ranging from annual burning in many savannas and grasslands to a fire every few centuries in the wettest rainforests. Without those regular flames, both nature and human societies are at risk. At a global scale, scientists worry not just about destructive wildfires (and resultant carbon emissions), but about a growing fire deficit.
People once understood the importance of fire. For millennia, people around the world wielded it to their own benefit and that of nature. Here in North America, Indigenous people were masters of fire, using it to promote beneficial trees and plants, keep hunting paths clear, keep pests at bay and for many other purposes. Only in the last century or so have we largely lost our connection to fire. I, for one, had not even heard of the concept of prescribed fire until around the age of 30, when I lived for a year in Wisconsin and had a chance to participate in a prairie burn.
The loss of fire has had major consequences. Perhaps most relevant to the average person is that many forests and grasslands have become far more vulnerable to the uncontrolled wildfires that tend to make the news. Fire-dependent forests and grasslands are also losing biodiversity as they become displaced or choked with invasive species. Yet one rarely sees a media story that portrays fire in a positive light.
That blind spot was the impetus for this story. A few years ago, while on assignment in North Carolina, I met a gregarious character named Jesse Wimberley. Jesse had a job I had never heard of: He's the coordinator for the nonprofit Sandhills Prescribed Burn Association. The job involves seeking out forest owners, of which there are countless thousands in his part of the world, and helping them learn to use fire safely and responsibly on their land. What Jesse does is especially important in the Southeast, where most land is privately owned, and where several major forest types, including longleaf and shortleaf pine, need fire to thrive. A natural evangelist with an ability to talk to anyone, Jesse has proven to be exactly the type of person needed to rebuild a lost culture of land stewardship.
As I dug in, I learned that Jesse's work was also embedded in a much larger story. Fire, it turns out, was originally suppressed as part of the larger colonial program of Indigenous erasure. Today, it's held back by, among other things, a militaristic, male-dominated professional fire culture built around the idea that every fire should be suppressed. Luckily that's starting to change. More women, Indigenous people and people of color are working in fire, and they, along with folks like Jesse, are helping to restore “good fire” as a force on the landscape — and, at least in the Southeast, to foster a culture that's more friendly to well-managed fire. (It turns out that the Southeast is the one part of the U.S. where remnants of traditional fire culture have hung on.) I found it fascinating to see what I originally envisioned as a nature story colliding with larger societal trends.
Given that I was writing for Audubon, I also focused on the important of fire for wildlife. The longleaf pine forests of the American Southeast are critical habitat for numerous species, the most iconic of which is the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker. Both the pine and the woodpecker have made remarkable recoveries in certain areas, especially military bases that were forced to develop prescribed burning programs as a result of the federal Endangered Species Act. This recovery also benefits thousands of other species that live in healthy longleaf forests — most of them in the understory that regular fires keep open. But the vast majority of longleaf forests, and fire-adapted ecosystems in general, do not see nearly enough fire.
As beneficial as it can be, prescribed fire is not a panacea for all of our ecological and climate challenges, as this recent piece in Inside Climate News shows. It can be costly and complicated to burn well, and like wildfire, prescribed fire can negatively impact local air quality. Still, I hope my story can play a small but meaningful role in helping improve how we take care of our forests.
(I want to acknowledge my editor, Hannah Waters, and photographer Evan Barrientos, who both helped make this story shine.)
Resetting carbon offsets from the bottom up, Anthropocene Magazine, Fall 2023
Readers of this newsletter probably don’t need convincing that climate change is a real and serious problem. And you’re probably aware that one major proposed climate solution is to use trees to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Trees are about half carbon by mass, and as they grow, they take up carbon from the air and store it in wood. Since trees grow seemingly on their own, they give the impression of offering a free climate lunch, and scientists have published optimistic estimates of how much carbon the world’s forests can store.
But growing trees isn’t truly free, because there’s a sizable opportunity cost: It’s often more profitable to cut trees down, either to clear land for farms and buildings or to sell the trees themselves, than to just let them grow.
To change the economic calculus, groups like The Nature Conservancy have promoted forest carbon offsets: Companies that emit carbon pay landowners to either plant trees on unforested land or grow existing ones longer. It’s a great idea in theory, but it has proven hard to implement in a way that convincingly reduces the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Forest carbon offset programs have been accused of fraud and pilloried in numerous media stories and a much-watched John Oliver video.
My story looks at one offset program, the Family Forest Carbon Program, that claims to have solved many of the problems that tripped up the industry. Unlike many programs, this one focuses on small-scale, typically hobbyist landowners. These folks, who number in the millions in the U.S. alone, are usually not in it for the money, but they rarely have the expertise to optimally manage their forests.
I profile one Pennsylvania landowner who has signed up to keep his trees growing for at least the next two decades. He’s received a modest amount of money. But perhaps more importantly, he’s now connected to professional foresters who can help him manage his forest for arguably more important (but less monetizable) factors such as health and biodiversity.
This program hasn't worked out all the kinks, and even if it eventually does, it’s important to recognize that programs like this will never be THE solution for climate change. To solve climate change, we must end most uses of fossil fuels and run our economy on nuclear, solar and wind and other carbon-free energy sources. Anyone who suggests that so-called “nature-based climate solutions” can play more than a secondary role in tackling global warming is either fooling themselves or trying to fool you.
But if forest carbon programs can be scaled up to a sizable fraction of America’s privately owned forest land — an area roughly as large as California and Texas combined — they could help blunt the rise in temperatures, while also giving us healthier forests. And perhaps more importantly, they can be an antidote to cynicism that too easily leads us to conclude that nothing we do matters.
Shaky Ground, Science, July 27, 2023
The Biden Administration Bets Big on ‘Climate Smart’ Agriculture, Yale E360, July 13, 2023
(Also published by the Food and Environmental Reporting Network)
These two stories are in some ways a followup to one of my most popular stories to date, which examined how a long-held paradigm in soil science has recently been overturned — the soil science equivalent of Einstein being proven wrong.
The new stories cover how this emerging soil science is intersecting with a major effort to persuade American farmers to farm in ways that reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and store carbon in their soils. If you see similarities to the previous story on forest carbon, you’re not wrong: Both are attempts to harness natural climate solutions on privately owned land through incentive-based systems. And both have required navigating some fraught scientific territory.
Soil carbon and agricultural greenhouse emissions may feel like somewhat wonky terrain. But wonky or not, this effort has emerged as a linchpin of the Biden administration’s agriculture and climate agenda. In my reporting, I discovered that many soil scientists, while applauding the overall focus on improving soil health, harbor grave doubts about whether farm soils can really sock away meaningful (and verifiable) amounts of carbon while still producing ever-greater amounts of corn, soybeans and other commodities.
There are also major hurdles to getting farmers to adopt climate-friendly methods. Many people feel that making agriculture truly sustainable and climate friendly will require a more fundamental overhaul of our food and farming system — something that would be politically and economically challenging, to say the least.
Beyond practical questions of whether this or that climate solution is ready for prime time, these stories gave me an opportunity to delve further into the fascinating world of soil science. It always amazes me that the soil right under our feet is essential to life, yet we seem to lack fundamental knowledge about how it works.
Fortunately, in part due to the recent interest in soil carbon, that is starting to change, and soil scientists are starting to build a new and more rigorous paradigm on which to build their discipline. Getting media outlets interested in soil stories can be a challenge, but I hope to continue to follow this fascinating field as it evolves and matures.
And with that, I wish you a good start to 2024.