“Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat…”. December has arrived, holiday music is on the radio, the snow is falling, the cocoa is made- the Holiday Season has arrived! At the Galena Creek Visitor Center, Yuletiders are coming to buy Christmas Tree cutting permits made available by the USFS, hoping to find a beautiful White Fir tree for Santa to visit.
It might seem counterintuitive to forestry and environmental science to cut down trees. After all, trees help absorb CO2 in the atmosphere, giving us oxygen to breath. Why then, does the USFS allow (and encourage) Merry makers to cut down trees? The surprising answer is that many American forests have too many trees. Cutting Christmas trees helps promote forest thinning, or the act of reducing the amount of trees in our forest. Forest thinning creates hardier forests by creating areas that are less dense, less competitive, and more fire resistant, according to the USFS. Previously, all fire was suppressed from forests, allowing buildup of more flammable shrubs, which in turn made wildfires more unpredictable, hotter, and spread further. More tree-dense areas increase competition for sustenance- those trees which don’t get enough nutrients die, and then creates more fuels for wildfires to rip through, says the USFS. Christmas trees help with USFS efforts to make American forests more sustainable.
Unfortunately, the Christmas season doesn’t last all year, and trees, like all living things, don’t last forever. At some point, everyone has to un-deck the halls and throw out their Christmas trees. But what are the environmental impacts of this? According to Earth.Org, the answer depends on how you dispose of your tree. When your tree dies (or Christmas ends), mulching or burning your tree emits, on average, 3.5 kilograms of carbon dioxide (CO2). However, we’ve all seen Christmas trees left by our garbage cans on street corners, awaiting the garbage truck to pick them up and take them to the local landfill. This method (the landfill option) emits 16 kg of CO2; four times as much as mulching.
We haven’t even gotten into fake trees! Artificial trees seem eco-friendly, right? They are reusable, and don’t involve cutting down trees. However, artificial trees, at one point or another, will always end up in a landfill. According to Earth.Org, plastic, artificial trees emit 40 kg of CO2 when thrown away. This means that artificial trees contribute more greenhouse gases (and toxic chemicals from plastics), causing increased warming of this planet and worsening of climate change conditions.
To end with a quote from Smokey Bear, “Only YOU can prevent forest fires” by cutting your Christmas trees in US National Forests.
