Wednesday, 8:00 AM. Twelve degrees, wind W, calm. The skies are partly cloudy and the barometer predicts the same.
The photos are of the Xcel Energy power plant in Ashland. I have been watching it for several years as they have increased the use of waste wood from mills and urban forestry to supplement their coal power production.
Xcel has some great conservation programs, among them a successful peregrine falcon reintroduction program that utilizes nesting sites on their high smoke stacks, so I have a degree of confidence in what they do.
Now, I understand the coal is being phased out, to be replaced with forest biomass harvested from the surrounding area. Such harvesting is like clear-cutting on steroids, since it takes everything that will burn, leaving not even slash on the ground. There are few models which can predict long term effects of such land use, and looks to me like an endeavor likely to be fraught with “unintended consequences.”
I hope Xcel and the DNR have thought this one through very carefully. How will nutrients be recycled into the harvested site to sustain re-growth? How will new trees and other plants be regenerated? What will happen to habitat for forest creatures when even the slash is removed? How will biodiversity be affected?
Clear-cutting in the forests of the Pacific Northwest is a process of wanton destruction which leads almost any reasonable observer to believe that Nature will have its retribution. Harvesting for biomass has the same aura about it. Photos of logging in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, when hardly a tree remained in the northland, can give an approximation of what it will look like...utter devastation. Do we never learn? For a very good discussion of the topic, see the winter 2008 issue of Mazina'igan, published by the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission.
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