The Coast Range Association embraces the Green New Deal with a proposal for carbon sequestration
This week, the Coast Range Association is delivering a forest carbon sequestration proposal to key climate leaders in Congress and the Oregon Congressional delegation. Here is what makes our proposal different.
On Nov. 5, 2019, over 11,000 scientists, led by Bill Ripple, distinguished ecology professor at Oregon State University College of Forestry, signed onto a letter published in BioScience arguing that now is the time to declare a climate emergency. Saving nature was among the scientists’ major recommendations in the letter: “Restore and protect ecosystems such as forests, grasslands, peatlands, wetlands, and mangroves, and allow a larger share of these ecosystems to reach their ecological potential for sequestering atmospheric carbon dioxide, a key greenhouse gas.”
For 25 years, the Coast Range Association has researched the invasion of Wall Street capital into Pacific Northwest forests. Heeding the call of U.S. House Resolution 109, the Green New Deal, and aware of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s call for atmospheric carbon removal, we went to work on a proposal for Oregon’s private industrial forestlands. We didn’t shy away from the issue of forest ownership by big capital.
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People, forests, Wall Street: Pick 2
The twin goals of carbon sequestration and a just and equitable transition mandated by the Green New Deal led us to propose two initiatives: land reform through the buyout of most industrial owners and the transfer of purchased lands to locally owned and operated social benefit enterprises. Admittedly, the proposed land reform is bold and ambitious. But no other forest climate solution we explored met the Green New Deal’s requirement of a just transition for forest workers and communities. Those hard facts led us to land reform and local ownership.
The nature of the beast
The need for land reform is based on the nature of today’s corporate timber business, often in the form of a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT), and their practice of intensive, financially efficient forestry. Corporate forest management is based on maximum financial return to investors. Corporate timber firms maximize profits by:
•Lowering regulatory and taxation costs through political power and influence.
•Adopting exploitative labor practices that harm workers and communities.
•Using financial cut cycles that result in landscapes of small, low-carbon plantations.
•Acquiring ever more small landowner holdings, which depopulates rural areas and harms local economies.
Today, a movement is building in Oregon to address corporate timber tax avoidance and the harm intensive forestry does to watersheds and drinking water. But two additional dramatic facts shaped our Green New Deal proposal.
Since the 1960s, at least 750,000 acres of nonindustrial forest ownership has been bought by big industrial owners. The loss of small forest holdings contributes to the depopulation of rural areas and depresses local economic vitality.
Follow the money
High-quality Oregon timberlands produce a cash flow that sends dollars to the owners and bondholders of timber companies. For example, Weyerhaeuser, a REIT and Oregon’s largest timber owner, states it has delivered $8 billion to shareholders since 2014. This is on top of what Weyerhaeuser paid to investors behind the company’s $6 billion in debt. The question arises: Who receives the cash from Oregon timberland sales?
A large portion goes to the direct expense of logging and hauling and replanting. But timber workers are ever more exploited and, like most blue-collar workers, haven’t had an inflation-adjusted wage increase in decades. The replanting workforce, largely made up of people with a Mexican or Central American heritage, work in downright oppressive work conditions. Even the owners of the contracting companies doing the actual timber work are suffering under the quest for high investor return.
STREET ROOTS INVESTIGATION: Oregon’s immigrant forestry workers have little recourse to pervasive exploitation and labor violations
Not the 1%
According to the Congressional Budget Office, in 2015 the top 10% of U.S. households (ranked by income before taxes and transfers) received nearly 90% of all capital income (capital gains, interest, rent and dividends, less corporate taxes). The top 1% received nearly 65%.
This trend also applies to Oregon’s 4.4 million acres of industrial forestland. The colonization of Oregon’s industrial forests by Wall Street capital has reshaped the rural economy, resulting in economic hardship, depopulation and a shrinking usable land base. Meanwhile, the forest’s economic surplus is shipped to the wealthiest U.S. households.
Land reform and new enterprise
Our forest carbon transition in support of rural prosperity drew inspiration from the 1930s New Deal. At that time, the federal government invested in new enterprise delivering electricity and telephone service to rural communities. Today, electric co-ops and people’s utility districts continue to serve Oregon’s rural communities. These successful social benefit businesses provide a road map to new forest ownership.
Just as with the New Deal’s rural electrification, our Green New Deal proposal calls for land reform to be financed by federal Carbon Sequestration Grants guaranteed through a working forest conservation easement on each property’s title.
The legal structure of new enterprise and ownership will be the same as with electric co-ops — state-chartered, nonprofit corporations grounded in local, democratic control. And as with electric co-ops, federal tax-exempt status will be granted under appropriate easement criteria.
The specific forest management practices employed will depend on provisions in each carbon easement and democratic process within each enterprise.
In addition to nonprofit co-op forest companies, we propose that local governments will qualify for sequestration grants to acquire watersheds for high-quality drinking water. Sequestration grants will also be made available to tribal governments for expanding tribal forestlands. Lastly, we envision grants for conservation land purchase where special forest habitat is required.
The hour is late
Dramatic disruptions to society’s economic fabric are never lightly undertaken. Rapid social transformation only occurs during times of crisis and massive structural stress. The crisis is here. The climate metrics are not improving, and the carbon budget will soon be used up. It is time to repurpose Oregon’s industrial forests in line with the climate emergency and the needs of rural people.
Opportunities to rebuild the U.S. economy and rebalance productive capital for social benefit are all around us. A Green New Deal national mobilization is an opportunity for Oregon to meet the climate emergency at the scale required. Anything less threatens the well-being of future generations.
A new day is possible for Western Oregon’s rural landscapes through a Green New Deal. We look forward to working with urban and rural voices on a land reform and social benefit forest agenda. The climate emergency is before us, but an equitable and more livable future awaits us.
A better world is possible.
Chuck Willer is the director of the Coast Range Association, a nonprofit that has been working since 1991 to find just protections for Western Oregon’s forests while supporting a vibrant rural economy.
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