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Living Forests
A whole systems approach
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Living Forests
A whole systems approach
Living Forest Report Press Release
November 9th, 2022
We are not apart from Nature; we are a part of Nature. This is a central contradiction of modern life. Our challenge as humans, activists, scientists and artists is bring us back into the system of which we are only a part.
-- Center for the Study of the Force Majeure
The Center for the Study of the Force Majeure and Living Forests are pleased to announce a major new publication as a part of our work in supporting forest regeneration. The result of several years of study supported by a Wood Innovations Grant from the US Forest Service, we hope these findings will have an impact in understanding the complexities underlying wood utilization on the long-term resilience of forests in the Eastern Sierra Nevada. Increasing Pace & Scale of Wood Utilization: From the Eastern Central Sierra and Western Nevada is a landscape survey and investigation of the possibilities for standing up resilient forest product industries in a 300,000-acre section of the Sierra Nevada centering around Lake Tahoe.
Goals of science-based forest management practices include modifying fire behavior, improving wildlife habitat, and restoring the natural regime of low intensity frequent fires that are necessary for ecological processes. These forest management practices have the added benefit of reversing the massive contribution wildfires make to greenhouse gasses, turning forests into factories for sequestering carbon instead. As temperatures continue to increase and droughts get longer and deeper, the urgency of accomplishing this work increases. Improved management and restoration of forests and other ecosystems reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase carbon storage, with the potential to offset one- fifth of the net annual emissions in the United States.
Fresh approaches are needed to address the forest crisis effectively and comprehensively.
New innovative solutions are required to address the forest crisis effectively. Finding better uses for the wood and woody biomass generated by forest management projects in the Eastern Sierra and Western Nevada is needed to maximize overall reduction of life- cycle carbon emissions, and to realize more economic value from timber removed to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires.
This study evaluates emerging wood technologies and growing markets for wood products. An array of options was assessed, which can be broadly classified as “Build, Burn, or Bury.” Burn represents converting biomass to energy in various forms, ranging from firewood to small or large-scale biomass energy facilities; Build represents storing biomass in durable materials, commercial lumber and other primary building products, including community-scale mills and production of engineered wood. Finally, Bury represents returning biomass to the soil in various forms including compost, ground covers and biochar. The study evaluates each of the options through lenses of carbon sequestration potential, economic cost and benefit, scale, and feasibility.
Living Forests continues working towards supporting ecologically appropriate ways to manage our fire adaptive landscapes.
This publication was funded by a grant from the US Forest Service Wood Innovation Program, with additional support from the Annenberg Foundation and the UC Santa Cruz Division of the Arts.
For future updates please visit: @CenterfortheForceMajeure
The west covers 11 states. The west is a physical presence of 1.3 million square miles. The west is home for 72 million people, and within its terrain is 1.3 million of now fire endangered acres of forest.
We’re proud to announce that the Center received a Wood Innovations Grant from the US Forest Service to form a Wood Utilization Team for California and Nevada!
The team and its intentions
The Living Forests (formerly Saving the West) team was organized in 2016 by the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure to promote a whole systems approach to the challenges of fire and drought in the Sierra Nevada and ultimately across the intermountain west. We have become a collaborative group bringing a range of individuals, organizations, artists, scientists, policy makers and community groups committed to building enduring environmentally informed end-to-end solutions. We believe success is available only when we can inspire the development a 21st century forestry model.
We support the development of a renewable wood products economy, creating a sustainable economic engine for thousands of people in historically depressed areas. The beneficial effects of a renewable wood based economy transcend traditional economic virtues. In a virtuous cycle, good environmental stewardship becomes good economic development. Wildlife, water quality, quality of work and life all improve.
Not reaching crown fire status, the ground fire becomes self-cancelling after thinning work at the UC Berkeley Sagehen Creek Field Station, 2016
Living Forests is a project of the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure an art science research group within the Arts Division at University of California Santa Cruz
The Center for the Study of the Force Majeure brings together artists, scientists, engineers and planners and visionaries to design mitigation systems and policies that respond to the issues raised by global temperature rise at the scale that they present.
We focus on identifying and developing what we call Whole Systems approaches that merge environmental, social and economic patterns of organization. These in turn generate comprehensive complex systems where human stewardship is at the service environmental stewardship.