National forests across the West are facing dire threats from politicians, the timber industry and the Forest Service.

The public is currently being misled into thinking that our forests are ‘unhealthy’, and that they need to be ‘restored’ due to ‘beetle infestations’ and ‘insects and disease’.

All of this is a euphemism to drastically ramp up logging on the forests.

America’s national forests are not unhealthy. Some people may want forests to look a certain way, but that desire or perception ignores scientific research, which suggests that fungi, bacteria, insects, disease and wildfire are key components of forest function and resiliency. If you want a healthy forest, these natural processes must be allowed to play out.

Efforts to ‘thin the threat’ and use thinning for ‘fire hazard reduction’ across Western landscapes is largely unsubstantiated in scientific literature.

Recent studies suggest forests with stands of ‘dead trees’ are at no more risk of burning – and possibly less – than thinned forests. Dead trees generally burn slower because they do not have oil-rich needles or resins.

To the contrary, thinning ‘live trees’ places fine fuels like needles and cones on the ground, and opens the forest canopy to greater solar penetration and wind, resulting in overall drier forest conditions and flammability.

How did the forests ever survive without logging?

The Forest Service is currently identifying ‘priority areas’ on the national forests that need to be treated (read logged). A provision of the 2014 Farm Bill gives the agency the ability to expedite logging projects, including in roadless areas, designed to reduce fuels and prevent the chance of “uncontrollable wildfires”.

Public involvement is simultaneously being minimized, and robust environmental analysis is unfortunately being short-changed.

Fire frequency and intensity in the West are predominantly climate and weather driven. An overwhelming amount of scientific evidence shows that drought, warm temperatures, low humidity and windy conditions drive wildfire intensity. Tree-density and beetle infestation does not drive fire intensity and behavior.

The predominantly mixed conifer forests of the West have evolved with fire. Wildfires are not ‘catastrophic’ but rather necessary for nutrient cycling, soil productivity and providing habitat for insects, birds and mammals. Wildfire is a natural disturbance event critical to forest function and resiliency. A more accurate term for Western landscapes is ‘fire-scapes’.

Building roads and logging in post-fire landscapes is also unnecessary and harmful. ‘Salvage logging’ impedes forest succession, can increase soil erosion, and impair streams, fish habitat and water quality. Scientists are discovering that ‘snag forests’ are one of the most biologically rich and diverse habitat types, rivaled only by old growth.

The Forest Service’s age-old war on forests

Politicians and the timber industry are assaulting America’s National Forests.

Managed forests are neither healthier, nor more resilient to wildfire. Beetle infestation and fire intensity are mainly climate and weather driven. Fungi, bacteria, insects, disease and wildfire are natural processes important for forest function and resiliency.

The real catastrophe is the Forest Service continues to lead its century-old war on wildfire by supporting commercial logging and fire suppression to the detriment of American taxpayers and forest ecosystems.

Brett Haverstick is education and outreach director for Friends of the Clearwater, a grassroots advocacy group that works to protect the public wildlands, wildlife, and waters in the Clearwater basin of beautiful north-central Idaho.

The Wild Clearwater Country is the northern half of the Big Wild, which contains the largest remaining roadless, and undeveloped stretch of wildlands left in the lower 48 states. Only Alaska has more ecologically intact and wild country.

The Clearwater is a place of dense, moist forests of ancient fir and cedar, parted by crisp, cool streams. It’s a special place where you can listen to swift water flowing through intimate, deeply-cut canyons, and you can smell aromatic, spacious stands of ponderosa pine climbing the ridges above.

It’s a landscape where grey wolves, wolverines, lynx, bears, and mountain goats roam far-reaching ridgetops and lush, river-bottom valleys. Unlike many other places, the Clearwater still allows individuals to immerse themselves in solitude and inhale the soft breath of untrammeled wildness.

This irreplaceable landscape lies between the forests of the St. Joe River to the north, and the rapids of the Salmon River to the south, with the spine of the Bitterroot Divide to the east. Learn more.

This article was originally published on CounterPunch.

On 13th April, Drax Plc, operator of Drax Power Station, will be holding its AGM in York, sparking protests both locally and in London where its major investors have their offices.

Campaigners will be highlighting Drax’s involvement in dirty energy, its links with climate change and deforestation, and its continued reliance on government subsidies – which could instead be going to support genuinely renewable energy – to keep afloat.

While Drax describes itself as “Europe’s largest decarbonisation project”, its portfolio now covers three forms of dirty energy: coal, biomass, and, since 2016, gas: Drax has acquired four yet-to-be-built gas fired power stations, and Opus Energy.

Drax opened in 1974 as a coal-fired power station, and in 2012 it began the process of converting three of its six generators to run on biomass in the form of imported wood pellets. This conversion is now complete, with 65% of the electricity Drax generated in 2016 coming from biomass.

Despite its claims to be “preparing for a post coal future”, Drax remains among the UK’s largest burners of coal, importing it from places such as Colombia – where the coal industry is responsible for air and water pollution and land grabs resulting in the disposession of indigenous communities from their land, and the impoverishment, ill health and growing malnutrition among those not evicted outright.

In spite of which, Drax is still the UK’s biggest CO2 emitter

Drax remains the UK’s single largest emitter of CO₂, and is now also the world’s largest biomass power station, burning the equivalent of more than the UK’s total annual wood production each year. In 2016 Drax burnt pellets made from approximately 13 million tonnes of wood, while the UK’s annual production is around 11 million tonnes.

Biomass is considered by industry and government calculations to be lower carbon than coal because it is assumed that the carbon emitted will be reabsorbed by new trees planted to replace those that were burnt. However, burning trees today releases carbon into the atmosphere today, and any new trees planted won’t reach maturity and absorb the same amount of carbon for decades.

At a time when we need to be rapidly reducing our carbon emissions, it makes no sense to create such a ‘carbon debt’. The atmosphere doesn’t care whether CO₂ in it comes from burning biomass or coal.

If trees are left standing, they will continue to absorb carbon, contribute to ecosystems and provide habitat and food for other species. If they are cut down, this is lost and can’t be replaced quickly, if ever. A forest ecosystem takes decades to mature, and to reduce the trees’ importance to their carbon sequestration capacity is a massive oversight and an incomplete way of looking at a forest.

The clear-cut forests of America

Just over half of the wood burnt at Drax comes from the United States, and most of this is supplied by the pellet company Enviva.

Enviva sources wood from clearcut wetland forests, important ecosystems which are home to a wide variety of animal and plant species and have been classified as global biodiversity hotspots by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which also considers them “some of the most biologically important habitats in North America“.

Many of the species who live in these forests are now threatened by habitat fragmentation from logging and land conversion. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), it is difficult to restore these forests after logging because they take a long time to mature and being logged once can alter flooding patterns, reducing the diversity of plant and tree species when the forest does eventually regenerate.

Supplying biomass to UK and European power stations is a major driver of forest destruction. A local resident says: “When I see wood pellet ships leave our port, I don’t see the vessel. I see the miles of clearcuts I know happened. It’s a feeling of loss.”

Drax also sources some pellets from plantations, which have taken the place of forests in some areas of the southern United States. The biomass industry points to these plantations as evidence that its activities are not reducing forest cover, but a monoculture plantation does not support as many other species as a forest does, is more likely to deplete the soil and water and may rely on spraying with agrochemicals.

Promoting bioenergy

As the only currently operating coal-fired power station in the UK to have converted to biomass, Drax is playing an important role in pushing bioenergy as a replacement for coal and making it appear to be a ‘sustainable’ option.

Two other biomass power stations currently being built, Lynemouth (another converted coal power station) and MGT Tees (a purpose-built biomass power station), plan to source their pellets from Enviva.

Drax’s research and development of necessary infrastructure, including specially adapted railway carriages and storage domes for biomass pellets, will be important if large scale import-reliant biomass is expanded further in the UK. Drax also owns a pellet retail business and is in the process of expanding its pellet mills in the US.

Through engagement with the community using local media and Corporate Social Responsibility activities Drax is making further attempts at equating biomass with sustainability in people’s minds. For lobbying the government and EU, Drax has hired the PR company Edelman, whose other clients have included E.On, Shell, Walmart and Burger King.

Drax’s CEO Dorothy Thompson chairs the Sustainable Biomass Partnership (SBP), a biomass certification scheme set up and administered entirely by energy companies. Unsurprisingly, the SBP has concluded that Drax’s biomass is sustainable – based largely on reports written by Drax itself. Environmental NGOs have described this certification scheme as “little more than industry greenwash“.

The recent appointment of a senior Drax official – Dr Rebecca Heaton – to the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, a body set up to advise the UK government on reducing its carbon emissions, provides Drax with another opportunity to influence government and popular opinion about the feasibility and sustainability of biomass.

£1.5 million subsidies – at our expense!

Drax has been receiving renewable energy subsidies since the start of its conversion to biomass. In December 2016, Drax started receiving another more lucrative subsidy, called a Contract for Difference (CfD), bringing Drax’s total subsidies for the year up to £541 million, or nearly £1.5 million a day, a figure which will rise further in 2017 thanks to the CfD.

These subsidies are paid out of a surcharge on your electricity bill. At a time when 6.59 million households in the UK are considered to be ‘fuel poor’ (having to spend more than 10% of household income on heating), these subsidies are very badly misplaced.

Imagine what we could achieve if rather than subsidising forest destruction, we invested this amount of money into energy saving, retrofitting buildings to make them more energy efficient, or generating genuinely renewable energy.

Reliance on dirty energy is not acceptable, whichever way you spin it. Biomass is a dangerous false solution to climate change and subsidising it is a waste of bill payers’ money.

We will be telling Drax and its investors at the company’s AGM that instead of paying for forest destruction and increased carbon emissions with our electricity bills, we want to reduce our energy demand, protect forests and build more democratic energy systems.

Communities around the world want to address the consequences of climate change, and companies like Drax are getting in the way.

Frances Howe is a bioenergy campaigner with Biofuelwatch.

Photos courtesy of the Dogwood Alliance.

More information

• AxeDrax AGM 2017.
• Recently updated campaign info about Drax.
• Facebook event for the London demo.
• Facebook event for the York demo.

National forests across the West are facing dire threats from politicians, the timber industry and the Forest Service.

The public is currently being misled into thinking that our forests are ‘unhealthy’, and that they need to be ‘restored’ due to ‘beetle infestations’ and ‘insects and disease’.

All of this is a euphemism to drastically ramp up logging on the forests.

America’s national forests are not unhealthy. Some people may want forests to look a certain way, but that desire or perception ignores scientific research, which suggests that fungi, bacteria, insects, disease and wildfire are key components of forest function and resiliency. If you want a healthy forest, these natural processes must be allowed to play out.

Efforts to ‘thin the threat’ and use thinning for ‘fire hazard reduction’ across Western landscapes is largely unsubstantiated in scientific literature.

Recent studies suggest forests with stands of ‘dead trees’ are at no more risk of burning – and possibly less – than thinned forests. Dead trees generally burn slower because they do not have oil-rich needles or resins.

To the contrary, thinning ‘live trees’ places fine fuels like needles and cones on the ground, and opens the forest canopy to greater solar penetration and wind, resulting in overall drier forest conditions and flammability.

How did the forests ever survive without logging?

The Forest Service is currently identifying ‘priority areas’ on the national forests that need to be treated (read logged). A provision of the 2014 Farm Bill gives the agency the ability to expedite logging projects, including in roadless areas, designed to reduce fuels and prevent the chance of “uncontrollable wildfires”.

Public involvement is simultaneously being minimized, and robust environmental analysis is unfortunately being short-changed.

Fire frequency and intensity in the West are predominantly climate and weather driven. An overwhelming amount of scientific evidence shows that drought, warm temperatures, low humidity and windy conditions drive wildfire intensity. Tree-density and beetle infestation does not drive fire intensity and behavior.

The predominantly mixed conifer forests of the West have evolved with fire. Wildfires are not ‘catastrophic’ but rather necessary for nutrient cycling, soil productivity and providing habitat for insects, birds and mammals. Wildfire is a natural disturbance event critical to forest function and resiliency. A more accurate term for Western landscapes is ‘fire-scapes’.

Building roads and logging in post-fire landscapes is also unnecessary and harmful. ‘Salvage logging’ impedes forest succession, can increase soil erosion, and impair streams, fish habitat and water quality. Scientists are discovering that ‘snag forests’ are one of the most biologically rich and diverse habitat types, rivaled only by old growth.

The Forest Service’s age-old war on forests

Politicians and the timber industry are assaulting America’s National Forests.

Managed forests are neither healthier, nor more resilient to wildfire. Beetle infestation and fire intensity are mainly climate and weather driven. Fungi, bacteria, insects, disease and wildfire are natural processes important for forest function and resiliency.

The real catastrophe is the Forest Service continues to lead its century-old war on wildfire by supporting commercial logging and fire suppression to the detriment of American taxpayers and forest ecosystems.

Brett Haverstick is education and outreach director for Friends of the Clearwater, a grassroots advocacy group that works to protect the public wildlands, wildlife, and waters in the Clearwater basin of beautiful north-central Idaho.

The Wild Clearwater Country is the northern half of the Big Wild, which contains the largest remaining roadless, and undeveloped stretch of wildlands left in the lower 48 states. Only Alaska has more ecologically intact and wild country.

The Clearwater is a place of dense, moist forests of ancient fir and cedar, parted by crisp, cool streams. It’s a special place where you can listen to swift water flowing through intimate, deeply-cut canyons, and you can smell aromatic, spacious stands of ponderosa pine climbing the ridges above.

It’s a landscape where grey wolves, wolverines, lynx, bears, and mountain goats roam far-reaching ridgetops and lush, river-bottom valleys. Unlike many other places, the Clearwater still allows individuals to immerse themselves in solitude and inhale the soft breath of untrammeled wildness.

This irreplaceable landscape lies between the forests of the St. Joe River to the north, and the rapids of the Salmon River to the south, with the spine of the Bitterroot Divide to the east. Learn more.

This article was originally published on CounterPunch.

On 13th April, Drax Plc, operator of Drax Power Station, will be holding its AGM in York, sparking protests both locally and in London where its major investors have their offices.

Campaigners will be highlighting Drax’s involvement in dirty energy, its links with climate change and deforestation, and its continued reliance on government subsidies – which could instead be going to support genuinely renewable energy – to keep afloat.

While Drax describes itself as “Europe’s largest decarbonisation project”, its portfolio now covers three forms of dirty energy: coal, biomass, and, since 2016, gas: Drax has acquired four yet-to-be-built gas fired power stations, and Opus Energy.

Drax opened in 1974 as a coal-fired power station, and in 2012 it began the process of converting three of its six generators to run on biomass in the form of imported wood pellets. This conversion is now complete, with 65% of the electricity Drax generated in 2016 coming from biomass.

Despite its claims to be “preparing for a post coal future”, Drax remains among the UK’s largest burners of coal, importing it from places such as Colombia – where the coal industry is responsible for air and water pollution and land grabs resulting in the disposession of indigenous communities from their land, and the impoverishment, ill health and growing malnutrition among those not evicted outright.

In spite of which, Drax is still the UK’s biggest CO2 emitter

Drax remains the UK’s single largest emitter of CO₂, and is now also the world’s largest biomass power station, burning the equivalent of more than the UK’s total annual wood production each year. In 2016 Drax burnt pellets made from approximately 13 million tonnes of wood, while the UK’s annual production is around 11 million tonnes.

Biomass is considered by industry and government calculations to be lower carbon than coal because it is assumed that the carbon emitted will be reabsorbed by new trees planted to replace those that were burnt. However, burning trees today releases carbon into the atmosphere today, and any new trees planted won’t reach maturity and absorb the same amount of carbon for decades.

At a time when we need to be rapidly reducing our carbon emissions, it makes no sense to create such a ‘carbon debt’. The atmosphere doesn’t care whether CO₂ in it comes from burning biomass or coal.

If trees are left standing, they will continue to absorb carbon, contribute to ecosystems and provide habitat and food for other species. If they are cut down, this is lost and can’t be replaced quickly, if ever. A forest ecosystem takes decades to mature, and to reduce the trees’ importance to their carbon sequestration capacity is a massive oversight and an incomplete way of looking at a forest.

The clear-cut forests of America

Just over half of the wood burnt at Drax comes from the United States, and most of this is supplied by the pellet company Enviva.

Enviva sources wood from clearcut wetland forests, important ecosystems which are home to a wide variety of animal and plant species and have been classified as global biodiversity hotspots by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which also considers them “some of the most biologically important habitats in North America“.

Many of the species who live in these forests are now threatened by habitat fragmentation from logging and land conversion. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), it is difficult to restore these forests after logging because they take a long time to mature and being logged once can alter flooding patterns, reducing the diversity of plant and tree species when the forest does eventually regenerate.

Supplying biomass to UK and European power stations is a major driver of forest destruction. A local resident says: “When I see wood pellet ships leave our port, I don’t see the vessel. I see the miles of clearcuts I know happened. It’s a feeling of loss.”

Drax also sources some pellets from plantations, which have taken the place of forests in some areas of the southern United States. The biomass industry points to these plantations as evidence that its activities are not reducing forest cover, but a monoculture plantation does not support as many other species as a forest does, is more likely to deplete the soil and water and may rely on spraying with agrochemicals.

Promoting bioenergy

As the only currently operating coal-fired power station in the UK to have converted to biomass, Drax is playing an important role in pushing bioenergy as a replacement for coal and making it appear to be a ‘sustainable’ option.

Two other biomass power stations currently being built, Lynemouth (another converted coal power station) and MGT Tees (a purpose-built biomass power station), plan to source their pellets from Enviva.

Drax’s research and development of necessary infrastructure, including specially adapted railway carriages and storage domes for biomass pellets, will be important if large scale import-reliant biomass is expanded further in the UK. Drax also owns a pellet retail business and is in the process of expanding its pellet mills in the US.

Through engagement with the community using local media and Corporate Social Responsibility activities Drax is making further attempts at equating biomass with sustainability in people’s minds. For lobbying the government and EU, Drax has hired the PR company Edelman, whose other clients have included E.On, Shell, Walmart and Burger King.

Drax’s CEO Dorothy Thompson chairs the Sustainable Biomass Partnership (SBP), a biomass certification scheme set up and administered entirely by energy companies. Unsurprisingly, the SBP has concluded that Drax’s biomass is sustainable – based largely on reports written by Drax itself. Environmental NGOs have described this certification scheme as “little more than industry greenwash“.

The recent appointment of a senior Drax official – Dr Rebecca Heaton – to the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, a body set up to advise the UK government on reducing its carbon emissions, provides Drax with another opportunity to influence government and popular opinion about the feasibility and sustainability of biomass.

£1.5 million subsidies – at our expense!

Drax has been receiving renewable energy subsidies since the start of its conversion to biomass. In December 2016, Drax started receiving another more lucrative subsidy, called a Contract for Difference (CfD), bringing Drax’s total subsidies for the year up to £541 million, or nearly £1.5 million a day, a figure which will rise further in 2017 thanks to the CfD.

These subsidies are paid out of a surcharge on your electricity bill. At a time when 6.59 million households in the UK are considered to be ‘fuel poor’ (having to spend more than 10% of household income on heating), these subsidies are very badly misplaced.

Imagine what we could achieve if rather than subsidising forest destruction, we invested this amount of money into energy saving, retrofitting buildings to make them more energy efficient, or generating genuinely renewable energy.

Reliance on dirty energy is not acceptable, whichever way you spin it. Biomass is a dangerous false solution to climate change and subsidising it is a waste of bill payers’ money.

We will be telling Drax and its investors at the company’s AGM that instead of paying for forest destruction and increased carbon emissions with our electricity bills, we want to reduce our energy demand, protect forests and build more democratic energy systems.

Communities around the world want to address the consequences of climate change, and companies like Drax are getting in the way.

Frances Howe is a bioenergy campaigner with Biofuelwatch.

Photos courtesy of the Dogwood Alliance.

More information

• AxeDrax AGM 2017.
• Recently updated campaign info about Drax.
• Facebook event for the London demo.
• Facebook event for the York demo.

National forests across the West are facing dire threats from politicians, the timber industry and the Forest Service.

The public is currently being misled into thinking that our forests are ‘unhealthy’, and that they need to be ‘restored’ due to ‘beetle infestations’ and ‘insects and disease’.

All of this is a euphemism to drastically ramp up logging on the forests.

America’s national forests are not unhealthy. Some people may want forests to look a certain way, but that desire or perception ignores scientific research, which suggests that fungi, bacteria, insects, disease and wildfire are key components of forest function and resiliency. If you want a healthy forest, these natural processes must be allowed to play out.

Efforts to ‘thin the threat’ and use thinning for ‘fire hazard reduction’ across Western landscapes is largely unsubstantiated in scientific literature.

Recent studies suggest forests with stands of ‘dead trees’ are at no more risk of burning – and possibly less – than thinned forests. Dead trees generally burn slower because they do not have oil-rich needles or resins.

To the contrary, thinning ‘live trees’ places fine fuels like needles and cones on the ground, and opens the forest canopy to greater solar penetration and wind, resulting in overall drier forest conditions and flammability.

How did the forests ever survive without logging?

The Forest Service is currently identifying ‘priority areas’ on the national forests that need to be treated (read logged). A provision of the 2014 Farm Bill gives the agency the ability to expedite logging projects, including in roadless areas, designed to reduce fuels and prevent the chance of “uncontrollable wildfires”.

Public involvement is simultaneously being minimized, and robust environmental analysis is unfortunately being short-changed.

Fire frequency and intensity in the West are predominantly climate and weather driven. An overwhelming amount of scientific evidence shows that drought, warm temperatures, low humidity and windy conditions drive wildfire intensity. Tree-density and beetle infestation does not drive fire intensity and behavior.

The predominantly mixed conifer forests of the West have evolved with fire. Wildfires are not ‘catastrophic’ but rather necessary for nutrient cycling, soil productivity and providing habitat for insects, birds and mammals. Wildfire is a natural disturbance event critical to forest function and resiliency. A more accurate term for Western landscapes is ‘fire-scapes’.

Building roads and logging in post-fire landscapes is also unnecessary and harmful. ‘Salvage logging’ impedes forest succession, can increase soil erosion, and impair streams, fish habitat and water quality. Scientists are discovering that ‘snag forests’ are one of the most biologically rich and diverse habitat types, rivaled only by old growth.

The Forest Service’s age-old war on forests

Politicians and the timber industry are assaulting America’s National Forests.

Managed forests are neither healthier, nor more resilient to wildfire. Beetle infestation and fire intensity are mainly climate and weather driven. Fungi, bacteria, insects, disease and wildfire are natural processes important for forest function and resiliency.

The real catastrophe is the Forest Service continues to lead its century-old war on wildfire by supporting commercial logging and fire suppression to the detriment of American taxpayers and forest ecosystems.

Brett Haverstick is education and outreach director for Friends of the Clearwater, a grassroots advocacy group that works to protect the public wildlands, wildlife, and waters in the Clearwater basin of beautiful north-central Idaho.

The Wild Clearwater Country is the northern half of the Big Wild, which contains the largest remaining roadless, and undeveloped stretch of wildlands left in the lower 48 states. Only Alaska has more ecologically intact and wild country.

The Clearwater is a place of dense, moist forests of ancient fir and cedar, parted by crisp, cool streams. It’s a special place where you can listen to swift water flowing through intimate, deeply-cut canyons, and you can smell aromatic, spacious stands of ponderosa pine climbing the ridges above.

It’s a landscape where grey wolves, wolverines, lynx, bears, and mountain goats roam far-reaching ridgetops and lush, river-bottom valleys. Unlike many other places, the Clearwater still allows individuals to immerse themselves in solitude and inhale the soft breath of untrammeled wildness.

This irreplaceable landscape lies between the forests of the St. Joe River to the north, and the rapids of the Salmon River to the south, with the spine of the Bitterroot Divide to the east. Learn more.

This article was originally published on CounterPunch.

On 13th April, Drax Plc, operator of Drax Power Station, will be holding its AGM in York, sparking protests both locally and in London where its major investors have their offices.

Campaigners will be highlighting Drax’s involvement in dirty energy, its links with climate change and deforestation, and its continued reliance on government subsidies – which could instead be going to support genuinely renewable energy – to keep afloat.

While Drax describes itself as “Europe’s largest decarbonisation project”, its portfolio now covers three forms of dirty energy: coal, biomass, and, since 2016, gas: Drax has acquired four yet-to-be-built gas fired power stations, and Opus Energy.

Drax opened in 1974 as a coal-fired power station, and in 2012 it began the process of converting three of its six generators to run on biomass in the form of imported wood pellets. This conversion is now complete, with 65% of the electricity Drax generated in 2016 coming from biomass.

Despite its claims to be “preparing for a post coal future”, Drax remains among the UK’s largest burners of coal, importing it from places such as Colombia – where the coal industry is responsible for air and water pollution and land grabs resulting in the disposession of indigenous communities from their land, and the impoverishment, ill health and growing malnutrition among those not evicted outright.

In spite of which, Drax is still the UK’s biggest CO2 emitter

Drax remains the UK’s single largest emitter of CO₂, and is now also the world’s largest biomass power station, burning the equivalent of more than the UK’s total annual wood production each year. In 2016 Drax burnt pellets made from approximately 13 million tonnes of wood, while the UK’s annual production is around 11 million tonnes.

Biomass is considered by industry and government calculations to be lower carbon than coal because it is assumed that the carbon emitted will be reabsorbed by new trees planted to replace those that were burnt. However, burning trees today releases carbon into the atmosphere today, and any new trees planted won’t reach maturity and absorb the same amount of carbon for decades.

At a time when we need to be rapidly reducing our carbon emissions, it makes no sense to create such a ‘carbon debt’. The atmosphere doesn’t care whether CO₂ in it comes from burning biomass or coal.

If trees are left standing, they will continue to absorb carbon, contribute to ecosystems and provide habitat and food for other species. If they are cut down, this is lost and can’t be replaced quickly, if ever. A forest ecosystem takes decades to mature, and to reduce the trees’ importance to their carbon sequestration capacity is a massive oversight and an incomplete way of looking at a forest.

The clear-cut forests of America

Just over half of the wood burnt at Drax comes from the United States, and most of this is supplied by the pellet company Enviva.

Enviva sources wood from clearcut wetland forests, important ecosystems which are home to a wide variety of animal and plant species and have been classified as global biodiversity hotspots by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which also considers them “some of the most biologically important habitats in North America“.

Many of the species who live in these forests are now threatened by habitat fragmentation from logging and land conversion. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), it is difficult to restore these forests after logging because they take a long time to mature and being logged once can alter flooding patterns, reducing the diversity of plant and tree species when the forest does eventually regenerate.

Supplying biomass to UK and European power stations is a major driver of forest destruction. A local resident says: “When I see wood pellet ships leave our port, I don’t see the vessel. I see the miles of clearcuts I know happened. It’s a feeling of loss.”

Drax also sources some pellets from plantations, which have taken the place of forests in some areas of the southern United States. The biomass industry points to these plantations as evidence that its activities are not reducing forest cover, but a monoculture plantation does not support as many other species as a forest does, is more likely to deplete the soil and water and may rely on spraying with agrochemicals.

Promoting bioenergy

As the only currently operating coal-fired power station in the UK to have converted to biomass, Drax is playing an important role in pushing bioenergy as a replacement for coal and making it appear to be a ‘sustainable’ option.

Two other biomass power stations currently being built, Lynemouth (another converted coal power station) and MGT Tees (a purpose-built biomass power station), plan to source their pellets from Enviva.

Drax’s research and development of necessary infrastructure, including specially adapted railway carriages and storage domes for biomass pellets, will be important if large scale import-reliant biomass is expanded further in the UK. Drax also owns a pellet retail business and is in the process of expanding its pellet mills in the US.

Through engagement with the community using local media and Corporate Social Responsibility activities Drax is making further attempts at equating biomass with sustainability in people’s minds. For lobbying the government and EU, Drax has hired the PR company Edelman, whose other clients have included E.On, Shell, Walmart and Burger King.

Drax’s CEO Dorothy Thompson chairs the Sustainable Biomass Partnership (SBP), a biomass certification scheme set up and administered entirely by energy companies. Unsurprisingly, the SBP has concluded that Drax’s biomass is sustainable – based largely on reports written by Drax itself. Environmental NGOs have described this certification scheme as “little more than industry greenwash“.

The recent appointment of a senior Drax official – Dr Rebecca Heaton – to the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, a body set up to advise the UK government on reducing its carbon emissions, provides Drax with another opportunity to influence government and popular opinion about the feasibility and sustainability of biomass.

£1.5 million subsidies – at our expense!

Drax has been receiving renewable energy subsidies since the start of its conversion to biomass. In December 2016, Drax started receiving another more lucrative subsidy, called a Contract for Difference (CfD), bringing Drax’s total subsidies for the year up to £541 million, or nearly £1.5 million a day, a figure which will rise further in 2017 thanks to the CfD.

These subsidies are paid out of a surcharge on your electricity bill. At a time when 6.59 million households in the UK are considered to be ‘fuel poor’ (having to spend more than 10% of household income on heating), these subsidies are very badly misplaced.

Imagine what we could achieve if rather than subsidising forest destruction, we invested this amount of money into energy saving, retrofitting buildings to make them more energy efficient, or generating genuinely renewable energy.

Reliance on dirty energy is not acceptable, whichever way you spin it. Biomass is a dangerous false solution to climate change and subsidising it is a waste of bill payers’ money.

We will be telling Drax and its investors at the company’s AGM that instead of paying for forest destruction and increased carbon emissions with our electricity bills, we want to reduce our energy demand, protect forests and build more democratic energy systems.

Communities around the world want to address the consequences of climate change, and companies like Drax are getting in the way.

Frances Howe is a bioenergy campaigner with Biofuelwatch.

Photos courtesy of the Dogwood Alliance.

More information

• AxeDrax AGM 2017.
• Recently updated campaign info about Drax.
• Facebook event for the London demo.
• Facebook event for the York demo.

National forests across the West are facing dire threats from politicians, the timber industry and the Forest Service.

The public is currently being misled into thinking that our forests are ‘unhealthy’, and that they need to be ‘restored’ due to ‘beetle infestations’ and ‘insects and disease’.

All of this is a euphemism to drastically ramp up logging on the forests.

America’s national forests are not unhealthy. Some people may want forests to look a certain way, but that desire or perception ignores scientific research, which suggests that fungi, bacteria, insects, disease and wildfire are key components of forest function and resiliency. If you want a healthy forest, these natural processes must be allowed to play out.

Efforts to ‘thin the threat’ and use thinning for ‘fire hazard reduction’ across Western landscapes is largely unsubstantiated in scientific literature.

Recent studies suggest forests with stands of ‘dead trees’ are at no more risk of burning – and possibly less – than thinned forests. Dead trees generally burn slower because they do not have oil-rich needles or resins.

To the contrary, thinning ‘live trees’ places fine fuels like needles and cones on the ground, and opens the forest canopy to greater solar penetration and wind, resulting in overall drier forest conditions and flammability.

How did the forests ever survive without logging?

The Forest Service is currently identifying ‘priority areas’ on the national forests that need to be treated (read logged). A provision of the 2014 Farm Bill gives the agency the ability to expedite logging projects, including in roadless areas, designed to reduce fuels and prevent the chance of “uncontrollable wildfires”.

Public involvement is simultaneously being minimized, and robust environmental analysis is unfortunately being short-changed.

Fire frequency and intensity in the West are predominantly climate and weather driven. An overwhelming amount of scientific evidence shows that drought, warm temperatures, low humidity and windy conditions drive wildfire intensity. Tree-density and beetle infestation does not drive fire intensity and behavior.

The predominantly mixed conifer forests of the West have evolved with fire. Wildfires are not ‘catastrophic’ but rather necessary for nutrient cycling, soil productivity and providing habitat for insects, birds and mammals. Wildfire is a natural disturbance event critical to forest function and resiliency. A more accurate term for Western landscapes is ‘fire-scapes’.

Building roads and logging in post-fire landscapes is also unnecessary and harmful. ‘Salvage logging’ impedes forest succession, can increase soil erosion, and impair streams, fish habitat and water quality. Scientists are discovering that ‘snag forests’ are one of the most biologically rich and diverse habitat types, rivaled only by old growth.

The Forest Service’s age-old war on forests

Politicians and the timber industry are assaulting America’s National Forests.

Managed forests are neither healthier, nor more resilient to wildfire. Beetle infestation and fire intensity are mainly climate and weather driven. Fungi, bacteria, insects, disease and wildfire are natural processes important for forest function and resiliency.

The real catastrophe is the Forest Service continues to lead its century-old war on wildfire by supporting commercial logging and fire suppression to the detriment of American taxpayers and forest ecosystems.

Brett Haverstick is education and outreach director for Friends of the Clearwater, a grassroots advocacy group that works to protect the public wildlands, wildlife, and waters in the Clearwater basin of beautiful north-central Idaho.

The Wild Clearwater Country is the northern half of the Big Wild, which contains the largest remaining roadless, and undeveloped stretch of wildlands left in the lower 48 states. Only Alaska has more ecologically intact and wild country.

The Clearwater is a place of dense, moist forests of ancient fir and cedar, parted by crisp, cool streams. It’s a special place where you can listen to swift water flowing through intimate, deeply-cut canyons, and you can smell aromatic, spacious stands of ponderosa pine climbing the ridges above.

It’s a landscape where grey wolves, wolverines, lynx, bears, and mountain goats roam far-reaching ridgetops and lush, river-bottom valleys. Unlike many other places, the Clearwater still allows individuals to immerse themselves in solitude and inhale the soft breath of untrammeled wildness.

This irreplaceable landscape lies between the forests of the St. Joe River to the north, and the rapids of the Salmon River to the south, with the spine of the Bitterroot Divide to the east. Learn more.

This article was originally published on CounterPunch.

On 13th April, Drax Plc, operator of Drax Power Station, will be holding its AGM in York, sparking protests both locally and in London where its major investors have their offices.

Campaigners will be highlighting Drax’s involvement in dirty energy, its links with climate change and deforestation, and its continued reliance on government subsidies – which could instead be going to support genuinely renewable energy – to keep afloat.

While Drax describes itself as “Europe’s largest decarbonisation project”, its portfolio now covers three forms of dirty energy: coal, biomass, and, since 2016, gas: Drax has acquired four yet-to-be-built gas fired power stations, and Opus Energy.

Drax opened in 1974 as a coal-fired power station, and in 2012 it began the process of converting three of its six generators to run on biomass in the form of imported wood pellets. This conversion is now complete, with 65% of the electricity Drax generated in 2016 coming from biomass.

Despite its claims to be “preparing for a post coal future”, Drax remains among the UK’s largest burners of coal, importing it from places such as Colombia – where the coal industry is responsible for air and water pollution and land grabs resulting in the disposession of indigenous communities from their land, and the impoverishment, ill health and growing malnutrition among those not evicted outright.

In spite of which, Drax is still the UK’s biggest CO2 emitter

Drax remains the UK’s single largest emitter of CO₂, and is now also the world’s largest biomass power station, burning the equivalent of more than the UK’s total annual wood production each year. In 2016 Drax burnt pellets made from approximately 13 million tonnes of wood, while the UK’s annual production is around 11 million tonnes.

Biomass is considered by industry and government calculations to be lower carbon than coal because it is assumed that the carbon emitted will be reabsorbed by new trees planted to replace those that were burnt. However, burning trees today releases carbon into the atmosphere today, and any new trees planted won’t reach maturity and absorb the same amount of carbon for decades.

At a time when we need to be rapidly reducing our carbon emissions, it makes no sense to create such a ‘carbon debt’. The atmosphere doesn’t care whether CO₂ in it comes from burning biomass or coal.

If trees are left standing, they will continue to absorb carbon, contribute to ecosystems and provide habitat and food for other species. If they are cut down, this is lost and can’t be replaced quickly, if ever. A forest ecosystem takes decades to mature, and to reduce the trees’ importance to their carbon sequestration capacity is a massive oversight and an incomplete way of looking at a forest.

The clear-cut forests of America

Just over half of the wood burnt at Drax comes from the United States, and most of this is supplied by the pellet company Enviva.

Enviva sources wood from clearcut wetland forests, important ecosystems which are home to a wide variety of animal and plant species and have been classified as global biodiversity hotspots by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which also considers them “some of the most biologically important habitats in North America“.

Many of the species who live in these forests are now threatened by habitat fragmentation from logging and land conversion. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), it is difficult to restore these forests after logging because they take a long time to mature and being logged once can alter flooding patterns, reducing the diversity of plant and tree species when the forest does eventually regenerate.

Supplying biomass to UK and European power stations is a major driver of forest destruction. A local resident says: “When I see wood pellet ships leave our port, I don’t see the vessel. I see the miles of clearcuts I know happened. It’s a feeling of loss.”

Drax also sources some pellets from plantations, which have taken the place of forests in some areas of the southern United States. The biomass industry points to these plantations as evidence that its activities are not reducing forest cover, but a monoculture plantation does not support as many other species as a forest does, is more likely to deplete the soil and water and may rely on spraying with agrochemicals.

Promoting bioenergy

As the only currently operating coal-fired power station in the UK to have converted to biomass, Drax is playing an important role in pushing bioenergy as a replacement for coal and making it appear to be a ‘sustainable’ option.

Two other biomass power stations currently being built, Lynemouth (another converted coal power station) and MGT Tees (a purpose-built biomass power station), plan to source their pellets from Enviva.

Drax’s research and development of necessary infrastructure, including specially adapted railway carriages and storage domes for biomass pellets, will be important if large scale import-reliant biomass is expanded further in the UK. Drax also owns a pellet retail business and is in the process of expanding its pellet mills in the US.

Through engagement with the community using local media and Corporate Social Responsibility activities Drax is making further attempts at equating biomass with sustainability in people’s minds. For lobbying the government and EU, Drax has hired the PR company Edelman, whose other clients have included E.On, Shell, Walmart and Burger King.

Drax’s CEO Dorothy Thompson chairs the Sustainable Biomass Partnership (SBP), a biomass certification scheme set up and administered entirely by energy companies. Unsurprisingly, the SBP has concluded that Drax’s biomass is sustainable – based largely on reports written by Drax itself. Environmental NGOs have described this certification scheme as “little more than industry greenwash“.

The recent appointment of a senior Drax official – Dr Rebecca Heaton – to the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, a body set up to advise the UK government on reducing its carbon emissions, provides Drax with another opportunity to influence government and popular opinion about the feasibility and sustainability of biomass.

£1.5 million subsidies – at our expense!

Drax has been receiving renewable energy subsidies since the start of its conversion to biomass. In December 2016, Drax started receiving another more lucrative subsidy, called a Contract for Difference (CfD), bringing Drax’s total subsidies for the year up to £541 million, or nearly £1.5 million a day, a figure which will rise further in 2017 thanks to the CfD.

These subsidies are paid out of a surcharge on your electricity bill. At a time when 6.59 million households in the UK are considered to be ‘fuel poor’ (having to spend more than 10% of household income on heating), these subsidies are very badly misplaced.

Imagine what we could achieve if rather than subsidising forest destruction, we invested this amount of money into energy saving, retrofitting buildings to make them more energy efficient, or generating genuinely renewable energy.

Reliance on dirty energy is not acceptable, whichever way you spin it. Biomass is a dangerous false solution to climate change and subsidising it is a waste of bill payers’ money.

We will be telling Drax and its investors at the company’s AGM that instead of paying for forest destruction and increased carbon emissions with our electricity bills, we want to reduce our energy demand, protect forests and build more democratic energy systems.

Communities around the world want to address the consequences of climate change, and companies like Drax are getting in the way.

Frances Howe is a bioenergy campaigner with Biofuelwatch.

Photos courtesy of the Dogwood Alliance.

More information

• AxeDrax AGM 2017.
• Recently updated campaign info about Drax.
• Facebook event for the London demo.
• Facebook event for the York demo.

On 13th April, Drax Plc, operator of Drax Power Station, will be holding its AGM in York, sparking protests both locally and in London where its major investors have their offices.

Campaigners will be highlighting Drax’s involvement in dirty energy, its links with climate change and deforestation, and its continued reliance on government subsidies – which could instead be going to support genuinely renewable energy – to keep afloat.

While Drax describes itself as “Europe’s largest decarbonisation project”, its portfolio now covers three forms of dirty energy: coal, biomass, and, since 2016, gas: Drax has acquired four yet-to-be-built gas fired power stations, and Opus Energy.

Drax opened in 1974 as a coal-fired power station, and in 2012 it began the process of converting three of its six generators to run on biomass in the form of imported wood pellets. This conversion is now complete, with 65% of the electricity Drax generated in 2016 coming from biomass.

Despite its claims to be “preparing for a post coal future”, Drax remains among the UK’s largest burners of coal, importing it from places such as Colombia – where the coal industry is responsible for air and water pollution and land grabs resulting in the disposession of indigenous communities from their land, and the impoverishment, ill health and growing malnutrition among those not evicted outright.

In spite of which, Drax is still the UK’s biggest CO2 emitter

Drax remains the UK’s single largest emitter of CO₂, and is now also the world’s largest biomass power station, burning the equivalent of more than the UK’s total annual wood production each year. In 2016 Drax burnt pellets made from approximately 13 million tonnes of wood, while the UK’s annual production is around 11 million tonnes.

Biomass is considered by industry and government calculations to be lower carbon than coal because it is assumed that the carbon emitted will be reabsorbed by new trees planted to replace those that were burnt. However, burning trees today releases carbon into the atmosphere today, and any new trees planted won’t reach maturity and absorb the same amount of carbon for decades.

At a time when we need to be rapidly reducing our carbon emissions, it makes no sense to create such a ‘carbon debt’. The atmosphere doesn’t care whether CO₂ in it comes from burning biomass or coal.

If trees are left standing, they will continue to absorb carbon, contribute to ecosystems and provide habitat and food for other species. If they are cut down, this is lost and can’t be replaced quickly, if ever. A forest ecosystem takes decades to mature, and to reduce the trees’ importance to their carbon sequestration capacity is a massive oversight and an incomplete way of looking at a forest.

The clear-cut forests of America

Just over half of the wood burnt at Drax comes from the United States, and most of this is supplied by the pellet company Enviva.

Enviva sources wood from clearcut wetland forests, important ecosystems which are home to a wide variety of animal and plant species and have been classified as global biodiversity hotspots by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which also considers them “some of the most biologically important habitats in North America“.

Many of the species who live in these forests are now threatened by habitat fragmentation from logging and land conversion. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), it is difficult to restore these forests after logging because they take a long time to mature and being logged once can alter flooding patterns, reducing the diversity of plant and tree species when the forest does eventually regenerate.

Supplying biomass to UK and European power stations is a major driver of forest destruction. A local resident says: “When I see wood pellet ships leave our port, I don’t see the vessel. I see the miles of clearcuts I know happened. It’s a feeling of loss.”

Drax also sources some pellets from plantations, which have taken the place of forests in some areas of the southern United States. The biomass industry points to these plantations as evidence that its activities are not reducing forest cover, but a monoculture plantation does not support as many other species as a forest does, is more likely to deplete the soil and water and may rely on spraying with agrochemicals.

Promoting bioenergy

As the only currently operating coal-fired power station in the UK to have converted to biomass, Drax is playing an important role in pushing bioenergy as a replacement for coal and making it appear to be a ‘sustainable’ option.

Two other biomass power stations currently being built, Lynemouth (another converted coal power station) and MGT Tees (a purpose-built biomass power station), plan to source their pellets from Enviva.

Drax’s research and development of necessary infrastructure, including specially adapted railway carriages and storage domes for biomass pellets, will be important if large scale import-reliant biomass is expanded further in the UK. Drax also owns a pellet retail business and is in the process of expanding its pellet mills in the US.

Through engagement with the community using local media and Corporate Social Responsibility activities Drax is making further attempts at equating biomass with sustainability in people’s minds. For lobbying the government and EU, Drax has hired the PR company Edelman, whose other clients have included E.On, Shell, Walmart and Burger King.

Drax’s CEO Dorothy Thompson chairs the Sustainable Biomass Partnership (SBP), a biomass certification scheme set up and administered entirely by energy companies. Unsurprisingly, the SBP has concluded that Drax’s biomass is sustainable – based largely on reports written by Drax itself. Environmental NGOs have described this certification scheme as “little more than industry greenwash“.

The recent appointment of a senior Drax official – Dr Rebecca Heaton – to the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, a body set up to advise the UK government on reducing its carbon emissions, provides Drax with another opportunity to influence government and popular opinion about the feasibility and sustainability of biomass.

£1.5 million subsidies – at our expense!

Drax has been receiving renewable energy subsidies since the start of its conversion to biomass. In December 2016, Drax started receiving another more lucrative subsidy, called a Contract for Difference (CfD), bringing Drax’s total subsidies for the year up to £541 million, or nearly £1.5 million a day, a figure which will rise further in 2017 thanks to the CfD.

These subsidies are paid out of a surcharge on your electricity bill. At a time when 6.59 million households in the UK are considered to be ‘fuel poor’ (having to spend more than 10% of household income on heating), these subsidies are very badly misplaced.

Imagine what we could achieve if rather than subsidising forest destruction, we invested this amount of money into energy saving, retrofitting buildings to make them more energy efficient, or generating genuinely renewable energy.

Reliance on dirty energy is not acceptable, whichever way you spin it. Biomass is a dangerous false solution to climate change and subsidising it is a waste of bill payers’ money.

We will be telling Drax and its investors at the company’s AGM that instead of paying for forest destruction and increased carbon emissions with our electricity bills, we want to reduce our energy demand, protect forests and build more democratic energy systems.

Communities around the world want to address the consequences of climate change, and companies like Drax are getting in the way.

Frances Howe is a bioenergy campaigner with Biofuelwatch.

Photos courtesy of the Dogwood Alliance.

More information

• AxeDrax AGM 2017.
• Recently updated campaign info about Drax.
• Facebook event for the London demo.
• Facebook event for the York demo.

One of the biggest modern myths about agriculture is that organic farming is inherently sustainable.

It can be, but it isn’t necessarily. After all, soil erosion from chemical-free tilled fields undermined the Roman Empire and other ancient societies around the world.

Other agricultural myths hinder recognizing the potential to restore degraded soils to feed the world using fewer agrochemicals.

When I embarked on a six-month trip to visit farms around the world to research my forthcoming book, Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life, the innovative farmers I met showed me that regenerative farming practices can restore the world’s agricultural soils.

In both the developed and developing worlds, these farmers rapidly rebuilt the fertility of their degraded soil, which then allowed them to maintain high yields using far less fertilizer and fewer pesticides.

Their experiences, and the results that I saw on their farms in North and South Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Ghana and Costa Rica, offer compelling evidence that the key to sustaining highly productive agriculture lies in rebuilding healthy, fertile soil.

This journey also led me to question three pillars of conventional wisdom about today’s industrialized agrochemical agriculture: that it feeds the world, is a more efficient way to produce food and will be necessary to feed the future.

Myth 1: Large-scale agriculture feeds the world today

According to a recent UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report, family farms produce over three-quarters of the world’s food. The FAO also estimates that almost three-quarters of all farms worldwide are smaller than one hectare – about 2.5 acres, or the size of a typical city block.

Only about 1% of Americans are farmers today. Yet most of the world’s farmers work the land to feed themselves and their families. So while conventional industrialized agriculture feeds the developed world, most of the world’s farmers work small family farms. A 2016 Environmental Working Group report found that almost 90% of US agricultural exports went to developed countries with few hungry people.

Of course the world needs commercial agriculture, unless we all want to live on and work our own farms. But are large industrial farms really the best, let alone the only, way forward? This question leads us to a second myth.

Myth 2: Large farms are more efficient

Many high-volume industrial processes exhibit efficiencies at large scale that decrease inputs per unit of production. The more widgets you make, the more efficiently you can make each one. But agriculture is different.

A 1989 National Research Council study concluded that “well-managed alternative farming systems nearly always use less synthetic chemical pesticides, fertilizers, and antibiotics per unit of production than conventional farms.”

And while mechanization can provide cost and labor efficiencies on large farms, bigger farms do not necessarily produce more food. According to a 1992 agricultural census report, small, diversified farms produce more than twice as much food per acre than large farms do.

Even the World Bank endorses small farms as the way to increase agricultural output in developing nations where food security remains a pressing issue. While large farms excel at producing a lot of a particular crop – like corn or wheat – small diversified farms produce more food and more kinds of food per hectare overall.

Myth 3: Conventional farming is necessary to feed the world

We’ve all heard proponents of conventional agriculture claim that organic farming is a recipe for global starvation because it produces lower yields. The most extensive yield comparison to date, a 2015 meta-analysis of 115 studies, found that organic production averaged almost 20% less than conventionally grown crops, a finding similar to those of prior studies.

But the study went a step further, comparing crop yields on conventional farms to those on organic farms where cover crops were planted and crops were rotated to build soil health. These techniques shrank the yield gap to below 10%.

The authors concluded that the actual gap may be much smaller, as they found “evidence of bias in the meta-dataset toward studies reporting higher conventional yields.” In other words, the basis for claims that organic agriculture can’t feed the world depend as much on specific farming methods as on the type of farm.

Consider too that about a quarter of all food produced worldwide is never eaten. Each year the United States alone throws out 133 billion pounds of food, more than enough to feed the nearly 50 million Americans who regularly face hunger. So even taken at face value, the oft-cited yield gap between conventional and organic farming is smaller than the amount of food we routinely throw away.

Building healthy soils, gaining healthy profits

Conventional farming practices that degrade soil health undermine humanity’s ability to continue feeding everyone over the long run. Regenerative practices like those used on the farms and ranches I visited show that we can readily improve soil fertility on both large farms in the US and on small subsistence farms in the tropics.

I no longer see debates about the future of agriculture as simply conventional versus organic. In my view, we’ve oversimplified the complexity of the land and underutilized the ingenuity of farmers.

I now see adopting farming practices that build soil health as the key to a stable and resilient agriculture. And the farmers I visited had cracked this code, adapting no-till methods, cover cropping and complex rotations to their particular soil, environmental and socioeconomic conditions.

Whether they were organic or still used some fertilizers and pesticides, the farms I visited that adopted this transformational suite of practices all reported harvests that consistently matched or exceeded those from neighboring conventional farms after a short transition period.

Another message was as simple as it was clear: Farmers who restored their soil used fewer inputs to produce higher yields, which translated into higher profits.

Sustainable farming is the future

No matter how one looks at it, we can be certain that agriculture will soon face another revolution. For agriculture today runs on abundant, cheap oil for fuel and to make fertilizer – and our supply of cheap oil will not last forever.

There are already enough people on the planet that we have less than a year’s supply of food for the global population on hand at any one time. This simple fact has critical implications for society.

So how do we speed the adoption of a more resilient agriculture? Creating demonstration farms would help, as would carrying out system-scale research to evaluate what works best to adapt specific practices to general principles in different settings.

We also need to reframe our agricultural policies and subsidies. It makes no sense to continue incentivizing conventional practices that degrade soil fertility. We must begin supporting and rewarding farmers who adopt regenerative practices.

Once we see through myths of modern agriculture, practices that build soil health become the lens through which to assess strategies for feeding us all over the long haul.

Why am I so confident that regenerative farming practices can prove both productive and economical? The farmers I met showed me they already are.

David R. Montgomery is Professor of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.