Who Wants To Buy a Tree for $17,500?

In recognition of Earth Day, The Washington Post published a wonderful essay on a single tree in an old growth forest.

The heart of the story, of the tree’s story, is that a logging firm had valued this one single tree at $17,500 and was keenly willing to pay this price to chop it down. The tree was a 500 year old Sitka spruce, well known for its fine grains and value in making musical instruments. It’s also massive — apparently a tree of that size could produce 6,000 board feet of lumber.

So, the case for the logging company is pretty straightforward. A market is ready to pay $17,500 plus for that felled tree. The logging company’s broker could find a buyer before the saw touched the trunk of that tree.

But here is the wrinkle — there is another set of values — equally important as making a home or a violin — that the tree provides when it’s left in the ground. That one tree holds 13 metric tons of carbon dioxide, keeping that C02 out of the atmosphere and preventing global warming — that would represent the energy usage of about one million homes.

That same spruce tree also has been used for Indigenous medical and spiritual purposes over the years, providing berries and needles for their teas and medicines.

The problem with these other values is, though, that they are very hard to capture in cold, hard cash.

The tree’s role in mitigating climate change is starting to be valued through nascent carbon markets. These markets are new and quite hard to access, but they provide financial compensation to those who would conserve wild spaces — carbon sinks — and keep the carbon in the ground and the trees. But it’s hard to find those markets — many parts of the world have not yet created the markets (offsets systems), and those who have placed too low a value on the carbon to fully capture the role that wilderness plays in stopping climate change.

But it’s a start. It used to be assumed/implied by the market system that intact wilderness had no value. We knew exactly how much money we could make cutting down the tree. And we also knew how much we would make by leaving the tree in place — nothing.

These new emerging markets for ecosystem services are starting to place value on the ability of a tree to mitigate climate change and protect biodiversity. The value is still low — that tree I referenced above would probably generate less than $1,000 in carbon offset revenue. It’s a far cry from the $17,500 a logger could get for it. But it’s a start. And in the new world of blended philanthropic and private finance, it may be enough to tip the balance and save that particular tree.

Markets have played a huge role in allowing us to place value on what we value in society — i.e., nice homes and musical instruments, for example. Now, let’s use them to place value on the other things we value — protecting a planet that our very survival depends on.earth

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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