I try to understand forests and economics, basically trees and how humans benefit from them, and then exactly how those benefits impact the landscape.

Also, when you talk about the landscape, the interaction between the landscape and the carbon stored in those trees. Trees contain a huge amount of carbon; they account for about one-third of the climate mitigation potential on Earth. That’s massive. Trees minimize the impacts of climate change. So, if we benefit from trees and we can figure out a way to have more of them, we can keep more carbon out of the atmosphere.

One critical thing is that there are more trees in the U.S. now than there were 100 or 150 years ago. And the reason is, in large part, economics.

As a result of markets, both agriculture and forestry have become more efficient. Agriculture has gotten more intensive, so we need less land to grow the food we need. That’s freed up a huge amount of land for trees. We can grow trees on plantations, which means we don’t have to cut down as many old-growth or second-growth forests that people want to protect.

So instead of tying yourself to a tree to save it, why not pay for a tree?

I like to think about it this way: You see those signs that say, “Think of the trees before you print this page.” I like to think, print the page, because you’re going to have more trees. If we didn’t demand paper, we might actually have fewer trees in the world.

By investigating the markets of trees. We have models that analyze how consumer demand —  such as for paper, wood for houses, etc. — translates into on-the-ground management of forests and on-the-ground competition between forests and the agricultural sector. So that's one way we look at it. 


The second way is we spend a lot of time thinking about the non-market uses of trees. People spend time hiking, camping, fishing in forests. We try to calculate the recreational value. If we can quantify that, we can understand the trade-offs between multiple uses of the landscape for consumer purposes.

In the 1990s, trees were a disappearing resource. There’s been a huge change both in the U.S. and around the world. Around the world, for 150 years, the primary process of land use has been deforestation because of an exploding population. We needed more land to produce food.

But in the last 30 years, that has really switched because of intensification in the agricultural sector (rising crop yields) and the forestry sector (re-planting and re-growing trees). Deforestation has slowed down dramatically in many places like Latin America and Southeast Asia, for example. We're kind of seeing this sea change in how forests are being used around the world.

In the U.S., in the 1980s and 1990s, we had the maximum harvesting on our federal forests. But as a result of the Endangered Species Act, we stopped cutting trees on federal forest lands in the western United States.

So where were we going to get wood? There was a huge increase in prices on wood products, it incentivized people to plant trees and increase the number of plantations in the south. So, we saw a big expansion in forest plantations in the southern U.S.

Today, these are both the biggest source of timber in the U.S. and the biggest source of carbon sequestration in the U.S. They've become a massive set of lungs for the Earth. And that same process has happened in many different places around the world. 


It's exciting to see we can potentially have a completely renewable system, where we're basically able to regenerate as much as we use every year on a global scale. 


It's more evidence that if we can figure out ways to harness our economic system, we can create a better future for everyone.