Our biggest trees are saving the planet, and the Forest Service wants to cut them down

Not only do the biggest trees in our National Forests provide enormous value to local ecosystems, but they also play an outsized role in fighting global climate change. Recently published research shows that the largest 3% of trees on our Central and Eastern Oregon National Forests store 42% of all carbon stored throughout the forest.

Trees larger than 21” in diameter simply outpace smaller trees by a huge margin in the amount of atmospheric carbon they sequester every year. In terms of climate mitigation, the work that one large tree does is often equivalent to dozens of smaller trees.

Alarmingly, these large tree climate heroes are precisely those that the Forest Service wants to make available for commercial logging. As OPB reports, the “new research suggests that a U.S. Forest Service proposal to allow the cutting of larger trees on public lands east of the Cascades in Oregon and Washington will have an outsized impact on forest carbon storage in the Pacific Northwest.”

LandWatch is working with a broad coalition to stop this disastrous Forest Service proposal. We already wanted to save big trees on our public lands because of their beauty and the habitat they provide. Now we know that the whole world depends on preserving our region’s biggest trees to mitigate the worst effects of climate change.