I Pledged $1 Million to Plant New Trees. My Money Could Have Been Better Spent.

A few years ago, feeling the need to do my part to slow global warming, I pledged $1 million to plant a million native conifer trees, many of them in areas burned by wildfires in Oregon’s Cascade Mountains, to remove and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Most of that money went to reforestation projects on national forest land carried out by a nonprofit I began. The work was overseen by the U.S. Forest Service.

At the time, my friends in the conservation world warned me against it. The agency manages its lands for multiple uses, including timber harvesting, and has allowed the cutting of carbon-rich, old-growth forests whose destruction contributes to global warming. They also suggested that replanting burn zones was often misguided because in many places, forests historically tend to return on their own.

I asked the Forest Service to guarantee that the saplings planted using my money would not grow up only to be logged later by the timber companies. The agency declined. But overcome, I suppose, by pie-in-the-sky do-gooderism, I pledged the money anyway.

Over the next few years, over 650,000 trees were planted. Today, with a balance of over $250,000 remaining, we’re on track to exceed the target of one million trees.

I should be happy, right? I wish I was. A subsequent event made me reconsider my decision.

Last year the Forest Service went forward with the logging of dozens of mature ponderosa pines along a popular bike trail running past my backyard. The stated reason was to reduce the risk of fire, though ponderosa pines are among the most fire resistant in the forest. When a citizen offered to buy out the big trees from the logging contract, the agency declined, citing the fact that a contract was already in place.

The cutting of those big pine trees troubled me, especially here in Oregon, where the state’s temperate forests have among the highest carbon densities in the world.