[youtube]https://youtu.be/5IzM4dYOvZY[/youtube]
Dogwood Alliance
Our Forests. Our Strength.
Amanda Rodriguez
Amanda is a first generation Cuban American. As a child in West Virginia, she saw first-hand the impact of forest destruction. Now, she helps others support Dogwood Alliance’s vital mission and applies her skills to online and web marketing. A poet, essayist, and fiction writer, Amanda is also the filmmaker of Dogwood’s "Stories Happen in Forests" documentary. She holds a Masters degree from Queens University of Charlotte and a BA from Antioch College. Amanda has been with Dogwood Alliance since 2010.
Until electricity rates rise substantially, the highest and best use of forested landscapes dedicated to growing commercial wood products will be for construction grade timber products. Biomass will continue to be an important revenue generating bi-product, but will not be the main product on anything but the most marginal timberlands. Carbon that is sequestered and released in our life time will remain a better alternative than that which was sequestered thousands of years ago and stored underground. Non-merchantable whole trees whether from forest thinnings or clearcuts are perfectly appropriate for use as energy. If there is no other commercial use for these during forest management activities, the only other alternative is open air burning, producing no by-product but atmospheric carbon (among other emissions). Unfortunately for this campaign, forests are fuel, whether they burn in uncontrolled wildfires or within emission controlled burners for electricity and heat. Trees will continue to grow and decompose as part of the natural carbon cycle.
Biomass is not healthy. Once people find out what it means they vote it out. There are cleaner energy sources. Trees may be renewable energy, but we need them in the ground, not burning and causing pollution.
Christmas Island 2.0?
Please do not use our forests as fuel for electricity! Thank you.
Over-harvesting forests is bad enough. Harvesting forests simply to burn the wood is double bad, and extremely wasteful. It takes hundreds to thousands of years for a forest ecosystem to develop into a healthy system, where everything is well balanced. Cutting down the trees and ripping up the land is highly destructive to the environment and contributes to many forms of destruction. There are far better sources of energy. It is time to start making use of these other forms of energy.