This is the first in a series of posts envisioning ways individuals can participate in the removal of carbon from the environment. Providing such experiences is core to the LOT mission.
The setting: Mid-summer, Park City Utah, 2022.
You’ve agreed to spend A Morning harvesting dead wood in the Uintah-Wasatch-Cache National Forest on Tuesday, during your annual week-long biking/golf/hiking vacation with your business school buddies and their families, in Park City UT.
The 20-passenger bus arrives in downtown Park City at 8 AM. The bus is clean, pleasant, recognizable, nicely appointed, and already contains a driver and a guide. Notably, the bus is electric and charged from a solar-powered source.
Your business school crew includes 8, and you are combined with a church group of 11 on the same bus. You introduce yourselves to each other as you board and settle in for the half hour trip to the harvest site.
The guide has a lot to tell you. Beyond the obligatory safety instructions, she touches on the ecological and practical benefits of what you are about to do, including cooling the planet, through carbon sequestration, and reducing fire risk. She describes how your work today will be automatically captured in your carbon account and help offset your carbon footprint.
She describes the harvest site preparation process that occurred several months earlier under the direction of a forester motivated to maintain habitat and maximize photosynthesis.
She describes what to expect when the team arrives at the harvest site, and the setup process when the group arrives. She reviews how to respect the forest in this ecologically sensitive environment.
As the bus drives past the centralized wood sequestration site (on the way to the harvest site), she describes the wood storage process, the expected length of time of sequestration, and the developed and emerging technologies for sequestration. She also describes the carbon offset market and how selling the offsets subsidizes LOT’s activities as a not for profit organization.
You conclude that the guide is fun, personable, answers questions, and knows her stuff. You are happy to learn that she and the driver will morph into team leaders during the harvest when you arrive.
The roads get smaller and become dirt roads. The bus stops when it arrives at the harvest site. You are excited for a number of reasons, but one is that the team has special access to locations normally inaccessible by the general public.
The trailhead is already equipped with the needed resources for the harvest. These include: Two golfcarts/ATVs pulling trailers to haul wood over as much as half a mile at a time; A dumpster and lift mechanism to move harvested wood into the dumpster; Two electrified golfcarts/ATVs and four trailers; and a cabinet containing useful handtools, workgloves, coveralls, hats, bugspray, wheelbarrows, sunscreen, water, and snacks. There is also a porta potty!
The trailers are designed to carry up to a ton of wood at a time away from the worksite to the trailhead, and will ferry people and equipment back and forth over the course of the morning.
After a brief orientation and setup, the team sets off down the trail, walking or riding. You notice the trail is already prepared to minimize the environmental impact of human feet, ATVs, and trailers. Some preparations are permanent, like laying gravel on the trail, which will be useful again in five years when the next harvest occurs. Other equipment is temporary, like bridges designed for reuse elsewhere, or reusable hard plastic matting. All of this would have occurred during harvest site preparation several months earlier.
Upon arrival at the worksite, perhaps a half mile down the trail, your team leaders (formerly known as the driver and the guide) spring into action. They distribute handtools and wheelbarrows, and direct the team where and how to fan out. They assign driver roles to those less physically able, and organize subsets of teams for specialized types of activity.
You notice the worksite is prepared for you. Wood is cut into liftable sizes and distributed around the area, up to one hundred yards in each direction. Most of the cut wood appears to have been dead for several years, but some appears to have been cut in the last few months, as the forester seeks optimal photosynthesis and habitat maintenance.
You use the handtools available to you to pick up cut wood from the forest floor and place it in wheelbarrows. You wheel the wood to the trailer and dump it. You use the variety of handtools available to you to load your wheelbarrow, and settle for the moment on the ‘grabber’. When the team leader suggests you work together on a larger piece of wood, you gather friends together. The teamwork is kind of fun.
As you work, you gravitate towards other people on the project. You talk with Fred about his startup, Irma about her planned retirement, and Billy about the recent passing of his uncle.
After an hour the team lead calls a 15 minute break. She distributes snacks and water, and talks about the particular ecology of this location. She invites the team on a 3 minute walk to a high point where she gives some perspective on where the team are. She tells people to slow down if they look tired.
Then, back to work for an hour. You gravitate towards the pastor of the church group and agree to keep in touch in the future. The time has flown because you have had conversations, learned a lot, and enjoyed the outdoors. The team has collected 50 tons of wood that will be stored at the sequestration site you saw earlier for hundreds of years!
You get back on the bus and return to Park City by noon. You take a swim in the hotel pool, eat lunch, and take a nap. Then you head out for an early evening bike ride. When you return from the ride you note that your carbon account has been credited 2.5 tons of CO2. ALMOST IN THE BLACK!
It’s been a good day! Tomorrow we golf!
