On this recent snowy day, his forest lab looked utterly natural - a few wind-strewn trees lying under a canopy of beech, birch, and maple. But looks were deceiving; Keeton and others had logged and carefully shaped the wooded slope, using chainsaws and other machinery to emulate what happens in woodlands over centuries.
Using Mother Nature as a blueprint, Keeton, a University of Vermont forestry specialist, has developed a technique that allows for logging while maximizing the carbon kept in the forest and out of the atmosphere, where it can trap the sun's heat and drive global warming.
The work by Keeton and others offers landowners a way both to profit from selling timber - though less than under conventional forestry practices - and contribute to the fight against global warming, at a time when keeping carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere is becoming a political, environmental, and economic priority.
"When the climate problem became more public and people began to worry about the amount of carbon we're putting into the air, their eyes began to turn to our forests," said Bob Perschel, northeast region director of the Forest Guild, an association of professional foresters. The best way to keep carbon in a forest is to leave it alone, but given the reality of logging, "the question is, what can we do in our forests to sequester more carbon?"
Interest in trees' carbon-storage abilities comes on multiple fronts. In a bill now being refined, US Representative Edward Markey, the Malden Democrat leading House efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, has proposed setting aside a portion of income from auctioning off carbon credits - licenses to cover the amount of carbon dioxide polluters release - to support practices that increase the carbon stored in forests, crops, and soil.
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