The Dry Lake

I went on a little photo assignment today, with the goal of capturing the beauty of our most plentiful wood, poplar, in a recently installed ceiling. It was a little awkward showing up at a stranger's house to photograph their ceiling, but the Sharon and Powell were great sports and even posed for me and rearranged furniture. Here's some of the pictures from the trip:










Powell is quite a nature aficionado, and showed me the trail system he built behind his house in a steeply sloping wooded area. The whole understory was covered in rhododendrons (laurel) and was quite beautiful. As we were walking around, we got to talking about the elephant in the forest.




At the bottom of the hill we were on was a little kayak dock, and the neighbors had a large dock with boats somewhere between skips and yachts. The water, however, was nowhere to be found. In fact, the South Holston Reservoir was been almost twenty feet lower than normal, leaving the inlet that Powell and his neighbors shared high and dry. Powell and Sharon told me that the Southeastern Drought was to blame. In the past few years, the South has been experiencing a massive drought, straining the water supplies of many southern cities. Seeing the dry lake bed made me feel like I was watching a glacier melt or New Orleans drown, not thinking about or imagining what the future effect of climate change might be, but seeing it, here and now, with my own eyes.

As I headed home, feeling the disjointment of driving through the mountains while listening to an electronic radio station, I snapped a few pictures of the dryness of the lake.

This is the first weird thing I saw as I was driving to Powell and Sharon's house. Its a huge, two level dock in the middle of what looks like a normal field, with no sign of the lake anywhere in the landscape (I'm not hiding it with camera angles).

In this dramatic shot, the normal level of the lake is the top of the denuded slopes, where the silhouette of the land is straight, rather than tree covered.

More than just CO2?

I was looking through the Clean Coal website today, and ran across an in-house blog post that annoyed me.

Clean coal — it's more than just CO2

So, I posted the comment below. We'll see if it gets past the moderator.

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I think the title to this post sums up the main problem with "Clean Coal." The fact is, CO2 and other greenhouse gases are the main environmental problem of our time. Without addressing CO2, you don't get special points for simply complying to relatively weak environmental standards. Those standards address the problems of the past without addressing the problem of the present. Coal is the biggest point source emitter of greenhouse gases, so its up to you to step up to the plate.

Until you (the coal industry) have demonstrated that you can actually build a plant that will reliably sequester CO2, we can't afford to build a single conventional coal plant. Any coal plant that is built should have something to prove, a solid commercial demonstration of a carbon sequestration technology. We had a plant out here in Virginia that tried to claim it was "clean coal compatible" by setting aside a piece of land where they would place a sequestration plant when it became available. The claim was shot down because it was patently ridiculous.

Until you can demonstrate sequestration technology works, you cant build any new plants and truthfully claim that they are "Clean." Building plants now on the hope that this unproven technology works is a risk we simply can't afford to take.

The Plan

Allow me to explain my dream to you. I want to make ecological restoration pay for itself by building an organization that grows as it restores more forests. The organization would be focused on a replicable and self-replicating model which could adapt to any type of social and ecological environment. The model would work something like this:

• We buy or are granted a piece of land, preferably with some forested and some degraded habitat.
• We establish a small business* that uses the resources of the forested land sustainably.
• We use revenues from that small business, donations, and grants to plant more forest, thereby increasing the potential and future size of the enterprise.
• 10% of "profits"* from the small business go into a fund to get another piece of land and start the cycle over.

I believe the biggest obstacles to this plan are land acquisition and profitability. Another concern is that we would become so focused on profit that we lose sight of reforestation. Let me know if you'd be interested in helping with this effort.

*See my previous post, The Question, for a list of ideas for such businesses.
*In the non-profit world, what is normally known as "profits" are called "net-positive revenue." The difference is that this revenue cannot leave the organization.