Map (left) by Dominick DellaSala and Island Press / photo (right) by John Schoen. Northwest Coastal Map: Coastal temperate rainforests, among the rarest ecosystems on Earth as well as being the most carbon dense, stretch along the Pacific Coast from northern California to the Alaska panhandle. Thriving lichen is a sign of a healthy forest ecosystem. This one is laden with lichen, which doesn’t harm the tree but provides food and habitat for birds, small mammals and amphibians. What’s at stake in protecting much of what’s left? How can government policy on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border do more to preserve old-growth, perhaps the most effective means we have of slowing the alarming rate of global warming - letting tall, old trees grow taller and older in large, fully intact ecosystems? Douglas fir are among the oldest, tallest trees in Olympic National Park. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change releases its most dire report yet, I’ve invited DellaSala, past president of the Society of Conservation Biology, to join me on this hike to discuss the value of old-growth forests. And there’s not much left here on the Olympic Peninsula or just north of us in British Columbia.”Īs humans endure one of the worst summers ever punctuated by climate catastrophes around the world, and the U.N. The diversity of life that is all around us is incredibly rare. “These old trees have built up a massive accumulation of carbon in their trunks and soil, acting like a sponge to pull greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, helping to cool the planet. “We are walking in an ancient landscape that’s been here since at least the retreat of the Pleistocene glacier period 10,000 years ago,” DellaSala tells me. The shade from these trees enables regionally overfished salmon, perhaps the single most critical species in this old-growth forest, to swim in cool creek waters, to die naturally and decompose, fertilizing these woody giants or providing food for bears, eagles and wolves. You can have a marbled murrelet, a threatened seabird, nesting in lichen in a notch at the top of the canopy.” You can have a single tree vole that’s staked out a single tree as its territory. You can have an amphibian at the top of the Doug fir, living its entire life on a branch.
There are entire ecosystems we can’t see. I joined DellaSala, an Oregon-based forest ecologist, in what has been his career-long place of study, one of the rarest forest ecosystems on Earth: an old-growth coastal temperate rainforest, which stretches in a narrow continuous Pacific Northwest band from below San Francisco, California, north through Oregon and Washington, and western British Columbia to the panhandle of Alaska.ĭellaSala looks up, marveling, and pointing out the mutual dependence between flora and fauna: “The branches of these big trees are accumulating mosses and lichens for decades, centuries. So do a lot of other species as a result.” Here, all this lichen is telling us we’re in a good air shed. “Lichens are the canary in the coal mine for clean air. “Smell that?” The smell is crisp and refreshing, a lush green scent in late July on the Olympic Peninsula. Walking along Barnes Creek amid towering old-growth hemlock, red cedar and Douglas fir, Dominick DellaSala points to the lichen, hanging thick like Spanish moss from the limbs shading our path. says the world must aggressively reduce carbon emissions now, as scientists press the Biden administration to create a national Strategic Carbon Reserve to protect a further 20 million hectares (50 million acres) of mature forested federal lands from logging to help meet U.S.
But elsewhere in the province, 97% of all tall, old-growth forest has been felled for timber and wood pellets.
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