It’s hard for us to relate to trees as our pioneer predecessors did. Imagine coming from England, a land where nothing was not already owned and civilized. They had come from a country that had been thoroughly ecologically conquered. All the habitable and arable land was occupied. The few forest resources left were gatekept by the ruling class. Farms, a place where just a few trees are permitted to cast shade, were held by aristocratic families and impossible to own.
Picture, then, a settler traveling from New England, in the established colonies, west through New York to the Western Reserve in Northern Ohio. He is greeted with dense forests populated with towering oak trees, leafy maples stretching to the canopy, smooth behemoth beech trees with ghost grey bark, and stands of valuable black walnut. Many settlers looked right past the shade of the trees and fixated instead on the stupendously rich soil on the forest floor that had built nutrients for millenia. With oxen, axe, and hand saw they ripped down the trees in a flash. Others, looking at the virgin, towering oaks saw the timber in stands to be harvested for buildings and homes. Still others pictured the raw materials for creating charcoal to fire blast furnaces to create household and military iron goods from hinges to pots to cannonballs. From the settlement of the Western Reserve in Northeast Ohio to the late 1800s, a period of just under 100 years, Ohio was reduced from an estimated 95% forest cover to only 20% forest cover.
Ohio settlers probably imagined that the forest was an inexhaustible resource. They’d never seen anything like the dense, dark interiors that shut out the light and stole sounds from the air. Equally so, a visitor to the Hocking Hills region in SE Ohio, today, can’t possibly imagine that those hills were pretty much completely denuded before 1900. The skeletons of what we see now in those forest-rich ridges were stark and covered in stumps.
That was then
This is now
The Hocking Hills region sits within a handful of state forests and parks: Zaleski, Vinton Furnace, and Tar Hollow. To the Northeast lies Wayne National Forest. Even the private land is covered in trees, with clover-studded yards carved out of the dense forest on the few spots where you can create a level lot for a house. In 2011, Wayne Coyne, lead singer of the Flaming Lips, on his visit to the annual Nelsonville Music Festival, held in the Hocking Hills region annually probably said it best “It’s great to be here with you in the trees.”
On the edge of one of those forests, in a small field by a parking lot, sits the ruins of the Hope Furnace. Established in 1853 to smelt iron, the enterprise lasted just twenty years. It wasn’t the economy, or new technology, or bad management that killed the business, no, it was a lack of resources. Next to the furnace would be a charcoal kiln, which would be tended 24 hours a day and fed the timber that didn’t make it to the saw mill for chairs and rafters. Furnaces required 300 to 350 acres of trees annually to run. Just picture that- an acre of forest a day: cut, split and tossed in a giant earthen oven to create charcoal. Old growth Ohio forest was dense mix of hot-burning Oak and Hickory, perfect raw materials for creating the charcoal that fired the furnaces all over Ohio and Michigan to smelt the iron for dutch ovens, fire grates, cannonballs, and the iron cladding for American warships. The charcoal was supplemented with coal, but the forests were the main producer of energy right up until the point when they didn’t exist anymore. All of it done by hand. If you can overlook the scale of the destruction involved, it’s a miraculous feat of human industry.
The Hopewell furnace, established 50 years earlier, was even more short-lived: in 1802, two ambitious brothers, James and Daniel Heaton, looked out upon the densely forested hills of Northeast Ohio and said to themselves, “We’re going to make a fortune smelting iron.” By 1803 their smelting operation, the Hopewell Furnace was built, and seeing the writing on the wall, they sold their operation to another businessman in 1807. By 1808 the operation was bust. What had changed? The forests had been depleted.
Wood burns hot and bright and it is lovely to the eye, but if you’ve ever burned wood in an open fire to keep yourself warm, you have an idea of just how much firewood is needed. Armload after armload can be burned for just one overnight. Compare firewood to the energy in just one cup of oil driving a piston to create electricity. There are 135,000 BTUs in a gallon of kerosene vs. 53,440 BTUs in a similar weight of dried wood. The energy concentration in fossil fuels is astounding. Making wood into charcoal achieves some of that concentration in energy, but the net loss in that primitive method, where not only your raw material but also your energy source for creating the charcoal is wood, made for an extinction-level use of the forests.
Charcoal Furnace
It’s romantic to think of a natural society where people harvest wood from the forest and cook over fires, but at the scale which humans live, we’d be out of wood in weeks, our air would be choked with smoke and ash, and we’d soon be sharpening the few sticks we had left to kill each other to protect our food sources.
Again, as a visitor to the Hocking Hills Region, one of Ohio’s most popular tourist destinations, where there is no cell phone signal and the sun is blotted out by dense forests, you’d have little idea that 130 years ago, the entire region was hillsides of stumps and severely depleted agricultural land. The national arc was much the same with forest, with an estimated 46% of the land being forest in 1630, a reduction to 34% or 759 million acres in 1907 and then stabilized, and even a slight increase to 765 million acres of forest land. A skeptic might point out that we cut down the forests and never built them back, but one has to take into account the explosive growth of the US population since 1907. The US Census cites a population of 92 million in 1910 vs a population of 330,000,000 in 2010. Over a 100 years, a tripling of the population, and forested land has increased!
Of course, the movement West had a lot to do with this, but even as populations grew in rust belt states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Indiana, their forested areas have grown. Indiana probably suffered the worst denuding, from 90% of forested land to 6% (!) in 1920 to 19% at present day. Michigan was a pine plank resource for much of the building of midwestern cities, including famously the rebuilding of Chicago after the disastrous fire of 1871. In fact, the denuding of pines along Lake Michigan north of Muskegon created the Silver Lake Sand Dunes, an expanse of sand worth the visit, but not a practice to be repeated. Northern Michigan and Southeast Ohio re-forestation efforts were both boosted, ironically, by the poor soil beneath the canopies, as farmers quickly used up the nutrients and moved on to more green-able pastures.
So, we learned. Our new found land was not an endless well of milk and honey, but it was a renewable land. We learned slowly as we had to endure the dustbowl after the ignorant destruction of native grasses on the plains, the dumping of industrial runoff into our rivers, and the ruination of the soil around factories in our dense cities. Some soil is damaged so bad that we’ll never farm it again. Some rivers are so polluted they don’t exist anymore, like Walworth Run, which has been subsumed by notorious body-dumping ground Train Avenue in Cleveland. Eventually water is renewed, and dirty soil can be removed and replaced, and the air obviously can be cleaned (just compare pictures of Beijing and New York City), but the unique feature of trees is that their replacement is rapid. Trees are planted and in thirty years go from seed to towering giants. The efforts of the CCC and other civic groups turned ugly, ravaged hills into forested paradises in just a few decades.
What’s even better is that if you just leave well-enough alone creation will sort itself out. We wring our hands and agonize over saving the earth. Activists block traffic and dump paint on Stonehenge and stage die-ins in awkward attempts to make people care more. In the case of the forests, a known hedge against global warming, you just have to get out of creation’s way. If you’ve ever had the chance to watch an abandoned property in Ohio over a couple decades, you’d have seen a natural progression. Weeds come first and out-compete the grass quickly. Next, small shrubs and woodier bushes grow as well. As these weeds rise and fall, and as autumn leaves shed and compost, the soil is ready for pioneer trees like box alders and locust. These are relatively ugly trees with little commercial value, but their falling leaves contribute to the layer of hummus, their roots break up the soil underneath the surface, and their shade limits the growth of weedy understory. Soon, in just a few years, the micro-environment is just right for maple, oak, and hickory to come back and declare the area forest territory, like a chest-out, dominant gang member. So, what do these forests do then?
According to the greenies, forests sequester CO2, our modern bugaboo and scapegoat. Poor CO2, about as hated as Trump, or even more so. At the risk of sounding like a scientist, which I am not, I just want to point out a couple facts that people gloss over all the time. First of all, trees and all plants, need CO2 to live. Some older folks may remember admonitions from the pre-Al Gore days about talking to your plants, since lifegiving CO2, the leftover gas from our lungs natural filtering process, is expelled when you breathe or talk. That’s right, take a deep breath, exhale, and have some shame about your contribution to climate change. Greenhouses literally dose their artificial growing environments with CO2 to spur rapid growth of plants and vegetables. CO2 is a naturally occurring element of our atmosphere, without which, again, absolutely no plants would exist on this planet.
The second inconvenient fact is that our friends the trees are absolutely complicit in this diabolical plot. In fact about half of the CO2 they use during photosynthesis is expelled back into the atmosphere. According to one study by Australian National University published in 2017, the greenies were then starting to panic (panic being a well-developed and sought after emotion for eco-scientists) about the fact that forests are responsible for “about 10 to 11 times the emissions from human activities, rather than the previous estimate of five to eight times.” Well shit. I guess we should just give up. The natural cycle of tree respiration was thought be already causing five to eight times the output of super polluters China and India, now it’s at ten to eleven, and please strap on your panic suit, will only accelerate as the CO2 in the atmosphere makes trees and plants grow faster.
Old Man’s Cave in the Hocking Hills
Again, I’m not a scientist, but which one is it, greenies? Will the world burn like Saint Greta is constantly telling us, or will we be choked out of our homes by a Land-of-the-Lost-like jungle that breaks our cities foundations and smashed in our windows.
Out in the west, we seem to have gone to the other extreme, as the dry temps, lengthy drought cycle, and mandated forest policies have created conditions for wildfires beyond previously seen conflagrations. Again greenies will say that the gargantuan wildfires of the past few years are due to climate change. NOAA says the rising global temperature warms the forest, creates aridity, and makes wood more burnable. This is just ludicrous. The cycles of western, mountainous forests have always been dry conditions most of the year, snow for the winter, and snow melt for the spring. Very little rain and very little retention of moisture. It’s like saying you can burn a cake baked for an hour at 351 vs. one baked for an hour 350 F. Take a walk through a forest in Sierra Nevadas and smell the vanilla-tinted air from the acres and acres of drying, desiccated understory left to pile up over the last 50 years. See the homes built along beautiful ridges in the middle of these forests, then take a step back and realize that these developers have placed these stately homes in a pile of tinder so combustible that it would make a bushcraft neckbeard drool. The well-meaning, sensitive, but reactionary idiots in our forest service have embarked upon a policy of fire-suppression and demonizing of logging. In some ways you can’t blame them– look at Indiana being reduced to 6% forest. The new-thinkers out West certainly weren’t going to repeat the mistakes of the past, but they have. They have willfully misunderstood how the forest works, and when their puffed up ignorance caught up to them in the massive destruction of the California wildfires, they blamed a 1 degree increase in world temperature and natural cycle of drought.
Say it with me: forests are renewable. I’m a bit of a reactionary myself, so I get it. I flirted with vegetarianism for two years since I thought animals were being treated horribly in factory farms. I still think that, but the taste of a bacon cheeseburger beat me. I didn't shop at WalMart for about twenty years since I felt they were destroying American manufacturing by selling made-in-China garbage. Now everyone does, so I shop a lot at used stores and through online resellers. When I needed two beach chairs for an outdoor concert, WalMart was the solution for the price of a single $20 bill. You may say I gave up, but I prefer to say I’m practical. It’s time for the forest service and big Science to take a deep breath and smell the bacon and loosen the reins of their management, have a cheeseburger, and grab a beach chair from WalMart.
When the Midwest's forests were depleted, our ancestors had the wisdom to look around at the denuded hillsides and realize that they’d really screwed up. From this come-to-Jesus-moment, the Forest Service was born, and Americans found real success in rebuilding our forests.The CCC planted pine and locust which quickly grew and recovered denuded hills. The best thing, though, that we discovered, was not only that forests were renewable, but if we left well-enough alone, they could re-establish their hold on the wild on their own.