Lea Sloan

Anyone spending time in a mature or old-growth forest, looking, listening and breathing its air, knows what science only recently has begun to understand. Old forests are ecosystems made of interdependent networks of organisms: trees, fungi, and entire food chains of microorganisms. They nurture and protect a universe of life, up to and including mammals that live there. 

Old forests are allies of humans battling climate change because of their capacity to “eat” carbon and bank it. Through their leaves, trees draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and use it to grow woody tissue, bark, and roots. Carbon is also stored in forest soil, traded among billions of micro-organisms, webs of interconnecting root-hairs, fungi and organic matter. 

Forests can store carbon for hundreds – even a thousand years or more.

These universes are destroyed when forests are logged, their carbon freed to speed climate change.