Catch Up #8 - A Toe in the Impossible
Beginning in 2025, this adventure in bearing witness to the decade will be captured and shared in periodic updates. These updates will be structured around three areas of focus: In the Forests, What’s There to Love? and The Wider World. Though the preceding “catch up” entries have had a primary focus on what we’re been experiencing and adapting to in the forests, as 2025 begins, it feels appropriate and important to dip my toe into the impossible – capturing events in the world beyond the forests that influence life within the forests. The five years since 2020 have been uniquely eventful and challenging. With full admission of my selective bias, here are thumbnail summaries of those intertwined “wider world” happenings that feel most relevant and significant to life in the forest. I offer them with the belief that sticking a toe in is better than nothing. I caution the reader and myself to remember that though events related to human impacts on climate are significant, they are just one of many interwoven forms of events deserving of our attention.
1 – Good News - Many of the events that I will summarize will be viewed by many of us as “bad news”. Because of that, we’ll lead off with good news. Building off of decades of hard work and innovation, we are experiencing a dramatic and widespread transition – perhaps a revolution – in how humans access and use energy. Front and center is our passing of the long sought tipping point where the costs of renewables have fallen below the costs of fossil fuels. As hoped for and expected, passing this milestone has further accelerated necessary transitions – all across the world. The rate and scale of change has been further accelerated by a wide range of public policy incentives including subsidies supporting changes away from polluting forms of power and investments in reducing our energy needs. As this has happened, we’ve had a chance to see the ways in which the drivers of basic economics can be more powerful than the ups and downs of political changes. In the United States, political leaders, on all levels have successfully taken climate-related leadership on an unprecedented scale, particularly from 2021 through 2024.
2 – Impacts of Exotics - Though organisms have moved to new parts of the globe throughout time, with or without help for humans, in the past five years the rate, scale and impacts of these movements seem to have both accelerated and become more apparent. This includes many forms of life, including insects, plants and diseases. Examples on our more local scale include the arrival in our region of Emerald ash borer and Mediterranean oak borer. On the global scale, we’re aware of the lasting impacts of the movement of the COVID 19 virus and the tumult and damage that it caused and continues to cause. As a reminder of the intertwined impacts of challenges, we see how insect and disease attacks weaken forest systems which make them more vulnerable to rising stresses from climate and how, conversely, climate stressed forests become more susceptible providing habitat for organisms that exacerbate the stress and damage. We learn from similar looping interactions between human health and COVID.
3 – Tracking the Numbers - The following trends are worth tracking and considering. Co2 levels in the atmosphere were 413.55 ppm on Jan. 9, 2020 and have risen to 426.26 five years later. The amount of carbon being burned in that same period rose from 34.37 billion metric tons to 37.41 bmt. Increases in average global temperature have both been in line with what scientists have projected while also, in many cases, accelerated more rapidly than models have predicted. Reports in January 2025 indicate that the earth’s average global temperature has now risen above the 1.5*c from preindustrial levels that policy makers have worked hard not to exceed. Research continues to show how changes in key aspects of the earth’s functioning, such as ocean temperatures, extreme weather and sea level rise, are directly linked to such fundamental numbers as the amount of carbon burned and atmospheric Co2 levels.
4 – United States Leadership – Our forests and forest businesses are impacted by governmental leadership on all levels, from county to state to nation to global. While oscillations between conservative and liberal presidential administrations are nothing new in this county, the impacts of the changes over the past five years feel unprecedented. In 2020, we found ourselves working with the chaos that was a hallmark of Trump’s leadership. Since 2017, hopes for global cooperation working toward shared climate goals were assaulted. The impacts of four years under a President who viewed and treated climate change as a hoax and had no commitment to acknowledging and addressing the biodiversity crisis were significant. With the Biden administration setting a new path starting in January 2021, recommitting our country to the Paris Agreement and passing powerful climate-related legislation, the potential for meaningful climate solutions became more promising. With the elections in November of 2024, the rollercoaster ride took a second major dip, leaving major uncertainties in essentially all aspects of the relationships between people and land. While federal laws such as the Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act and Clean Air act have served as powerful drivers of restoration and conservation efforts in our forested region, it feels likely that those power dynamics will change significantly in the coming months and years. The election of Donald Trump to a second term in November 2024 was a major setback for many of the initiatives that will have direct impacts on our family and the forests. The rightward swing that we’re living with in the U.S. is aligned with larger, global trends that work against global cooperation to shape needed solutions.
5 – The Power of Heat – In June of 2021 our understandings of how normal summer hot spells could impact us, our forests and our region experienced a major reset. With temperature near the forests spiking at 116*, roughly ten degrees higher than anything previously experienced, both we and the forests were shocked. Leaves withered, tree needles were scorched and water was rapidly drawn from the forest. This was not the forests’ first, recent experience with high temperatures. Now, looking back on four years of assessing the impacts of heat on the forests, it appears that the prolonged heat of the summers of 2016 and 2017 created more stress than the spiked heat of 2021. We believe that this was due to the higher level of residual moisture in the early summer and the relatively short duration as opposed to the earlier spells that were longer and came later in the summer when the forest was much drier. Our concerns about localized heat are paralleled by our experiences of following the serious increases in heat spread across many vulnerable and often crowded parts of the world. Climate researchers rightly encourage us to consider the increases in heat stress, and its growing impacts on people, communities and ecosystems, as one component of the wider phenomenon of the many forms of extreme weather.
6 – And Plants and Animals? This assessment of larger scale trends that impact our forests would be incomplete without attention to how efforts to understand and address unravelling biodiversity are faring. One way to make this long, important and complex story very short is to acknowledge the parallels to international efforts to acknowledge and meaningfully address the climate crisis. Launched at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, the Convention on Biodiversity is a multilateral treaty focused on stopping and reversing the loss of biodiversity. Though 196 countries have sign on, the United States never has. The most recent COP 16 conference what held in November 2024 and a summary is provided here. As will climate-focused efforts, international cooperation continues but the problems become more pressing on essentially all scales.
7 - What Can a Person Do? State Level Initiatives – I can understand why many look back on the past five years with a focus on all that did not happen in terms of climate solutions. At the same time, I feel that this approach causes them to miss the many positive and impactful actions that have been taken, at many scales and across many geographies. Those of us who have sought and longed for reliable support for climate smarter forestry from our state government have reason to be encouraged by decisive actions taken since 2020. The following four, linked commitments are particularly important for Oregon forests:
- When Executive Order 20-04 was signed by Governor Brown in March of 2020 it directed all state agencies to develop and submit plans for reducing and regulating greenhouse gas emissions. This has impelled all levels of state government to engage with climate issues and opportunities with new attention and commitment.
- One example of how a state agency responded to the order is the Climate Change and Carbon Plan approved by the Oregon Board of Forestry in November of 2021. The plan sets ambitious goals for the Department of Forestry.
- In July of 2023 the state legislature passed its Climate Resiliency Package (HB 4309) which was followed in September 2023 by the Natural and Working Lands Bill (SB 530). Among other benefits, the legislation invested $10B into a fund to support climate solutions on natural and working lands. In total, all of these legislative actions have created an environment that is much more supportive, in tangible ways, of reshaping forests and forestry to be both more resilient and to provide climate solutions.
When climate-concerned people questioning “what difference can I make?”, I encourage them to consider the ways that the thoughtful, strategic hard work of many Oregonians contributed to the valuable changes in public policy since 2020. I take heart in seeing the ways that Oregonians are effectively using state government to help craft meaningful climate solutions. Between 2021 and 2024 parallel and complementary progress was made throughout federal government.
8 - Accelerating Climate Smarter Forestry – Linked with and supported by the innovative policy making summarized above, the past five years have brought new partnerships working to accelerate the transition toward climate smarter forestry. Examples include:
- Through the summer of 2022, aseries of forest-based workshops brought a diverse mix of 70, forest-connected Oregonians to seek common ground agreement on how best to accelerate the transition to climate smarter forestry. Participants were inspired to learn about good work already underway and to discover ways to work together in the future. A report on the project is shared here.
- Beginning in 2022, the federal government directed significant funds to support the expansion of markets for climate smart commodities, including wood. Several groups from our NW region have successfully secured funding and are actively investing it. One example is the Climate Smart Wood Group.
- One final example of locally-driven initiative to implement and accelerate climate smarter forestry is the Climate Smart Forestry in Washington County Project. With leadership from the Oregon Department of Forestry and Tualatin Soil and Water Conservation District, a mix of committed partners are working answer: “what does CSF mean in this specific place? What will be most helpful to local forest decision makers? And how might we best accelerate the transition toward CSF?”. The hope and aim is to build on this pilot project to support the development of similar projects across Oregon. These projects are examples of tangible, place-based steps to reach the goals committed to in the state’s Climate Change and Carbon Plan.
9 - A New Era for Wildfire – Across our region, continent and world the evidence is clear that climate change accelerated by human actions is a primary driver of wildfire behaving in unprecedented ways. Changes include fires becoming larger, more intense and damaging, fire seasons expanding to larger portions of the year, fire fighting costs increasing beyond the capacities of government to fund them and fires powerfully reshaping both human and ecological communities. It seems clear that the factors driving these changes are only likely to accelerate with time. Here in Oregon, this transition has been both incremental but also punctuated by one, major event. Beginning on Labor Day (Sept. 2) 2022 a unique combination of conditions aligned to ignite the most impactful complex of forest wildfires in Oregon’s history. The multiple fires taught or reminded Oregonians that large wildfires in western Oregon are definitely not a thing of the past. These fires, combined with similar subsequent fires, in Oregon and the region, have elevated questions, in the minds of many, of how to understand, minimize and live with wildfire. Like the fires, public debate is often intense about how humans should best interact with forests and the roles of fire in them. These debates fuel an increase in recognition that there is a need and urgency to shift from “business-as-usual” forestry practices to new practices that are better adapted to ever changing realities.
10 - Taking Wing - We’ll end by travelling to an unlikely place for a good news story to bookend the ones that we started with. Who knew that a major rebuilding of the state’s largest airport could play a forceful role in helping Oregonians refocus and reconsider their relationships to our region’s remarkable forests? By making the countercultural choice to work toward closer alignment between values and actions, the Port of Portland showed how careful selection of wood that reflects organizational values is both possible and important. Culminating with the opening of the new terminal in September of 2024, region-wide communications related to this remarkable project have positively influenced how many Oregonians view, think about and, potentially, treat forests. Time will tell what lasting impact the project might have. Those of us committed to the transition toward more respectful forestry have long worked to create tangible, financial incentives to drive necessary change. Though aspects of the airport project moved us closer to that goal, in 2025 that goal remains unmet in a meaningful way. As one of the forests in which wood used in the airport grew, our Hyla Woods forests have been and continue to be impacted by this innovative project. Helpful summaries are provided here and here.
In Conclusion - With this I’ll call it quits on sticking a toe into the overwhelm waters of summarizing some of the highest points of forest-shaping events in the world beyond the forests. Having learned my lesson, I look forward to reporting on similar events in smaller, more easily digested portions. Of course, ongoing and often unpredictable change, on all scales, is one thing that we can count on.
