Page 18 - Georgia Forestry - Issue3 - Summer 2021

“They filter the water and control the flow to our streams. Nothing compares to it. The question for the water utilities is how much more is it going to cost them to clean and process that water coming off a Walmart parking lot.”
Monetizing forests’ water “services” is akin to selling trees’ “carbon credits,” which has been growing in popularity with corporations looking to offset their carbon footprints.
Another promising effort, says Andres Villegas, president and CEO of the Georgia Forestry Association, is the promotion of mass timber construction, a building technique that expands the timber market and is sustainable, archi- tecturally exciting and increasingly embraced by government regulators.
“Just this week, we visited a building in Washington, DC where they’re adding three stories onto a six-story building with mass timber technology,” Villegas said in late April. “You can’t do that with steel and concrete. It’s too heavy. Wood is just as strong but lighter. This means we can expand on current urban footprints with-
out taking new land from other places.” Put another way, Villegas says, “It could mean less of a concern about the acre- for-acre transfer of forestland for urban
growth. It’s more about how we grow.” Moore agrees that development in and of itself isn’t a bad thing. Efficient, thought- ful growth, she says, with an eye on infill construction and redevelopment and re-use of existing buildings, can prevent the need for expansion into forested land. “If we’re going to have a more resilient climate and growth future,” she says, “we need to think in terms of a three- legged stool. Those three pieces are land conservation, sustainable land use and
land stewardship.”
All three of those values point to pre-
serving forests not just for their own sake, but for the sake of what Davis calls the “critical infrastructure” that forests provide to all walks of life. Viewing forests in such a way, he says, requires a paradigm shift.
“I’ll be honest,” he says. “A lot of people, especially younger people, when they see a truck full of logs, they see a
truck full of dead bodies. ‘They’re cutting down the forests!’ And there are pieces of land that should stay parks and natural preserves because they’re so important biologically and ecologically. But what we have to understand is, these lands depend on the working landscapes that surround them. And that’s where the leadership has to come in and help people understand that working forests are a critical compo- nent of conservation.”
It all boils down to this: helping land- owners hang on to their trees depends on looking at forests in a new way.
They’re infrastructure, as fundamen- tal to modern life as roads and electric grids.
They’re providers of carbon seques- tration, air and water purification and biodiversity preservation, “services” that are financially valuable — and viable.
They’re a resource that can support and innovate existing urban environments — and save themselves in the process.
Brooks Mendell, president and CEO of forest supply forecasting and strategy firm Forisk Consulting, says he hasn’t
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