Published 4:15 pm Wednesday, June 30, 2021
LONGVIEW, Wash. — Trees take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and that has inspired Norm Dick to work with conservation districts and rural landowners to plant trees.
Spending his own money, Dick, a 65-year-old retired attorney, buys and gives away fir trees. In two years, he has organized the planting of 18,107 trees in southwest Washington.
He has ambitions to plant many more. Aided by his son Larson, Dick started the Carbon Capture Foundation. As nonprofits go, it’s a seedling.
”We’re still trying to get our feet on the ground and figure out what we can do,” he said. “We want to do more than a feel-good thing.”
Father and son share concerns about climate change and acknowledge that to make a difference they will have to ramp up fundraising, organizing and hope other tree-planting groups around the world will, too.
The U.S. Forest Service estimates there are 1.4 trillion trees in forests in the Lower 48, according to a study published last fall. Forests cover about one-third of the country and uptake the equivalent of 14% of the carbon dioxide emitted by the U.S. economy.
The study found millions of acres were “poorly stocked.” If those acres were filled in with trees, forests could take up about 20% of carbon emissions. “There are opportunities on existing forestland to increase the contribution of forests to climate change mitigation,” the study concluded.
The U.S. emitted 6.5 billion metric tons of carbon in 2019, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. More than a decade ago, the Congressional Research Service looked at what it would take to offset 1 billion metric tons of carbon each year.
The report concluded that it would mean planting trees on up to about a quarter of the land now used for crops, pastures and rangeland.
Norm and Larson have their eyes on vacant pastures now growing weeds.
“Our real target is an area where the land can be improved and that would not be planted if not for us helping plant the trees,” Norm said.
The inspiration for this project came on a hunting trip in the fall of 2019. Norm and Larson were in the woods and saw a sign marking a tree farm planted by schoolchildren decades ago.
Larson, 28, posted a photo on social media. The reaction was positive. People liked the idea of planting trees to fight climate change. “It inspired us to think we can do something,” said Larson, a University of Washington graduate.
Norm leaped to the task. He ordered 10,400 fir trees from the state Department of Natural Resources nursery in Olympia, paying 38 to 68 cents a tree.
”When we bought them, we didn’t know what we would do with them,” he said. “It was pretty rugged figuring out where the 10,000 trees were going to go.”
Some trees went to individual landowners, including a lot of teachers. Others were distributed through conservation districts.
“We found good homes for them, but it was a struggle,” Norm said.
For the second year, Norm contacted agricultural high school teachers to see if their schools would participate in planting trees. The reaction was good at first, Norm said, but COVID-19 shut down contacts.
“What looked like it would be a deluge of interest, just dried up,” he said.
Still, more trees went into the ground. Norm donated trees to plant along a creek that runs through a ranch in Cowlitz County. The project was under the Volunteer Stewardship Program, a state-approved way for agriculture to meet its obligations to protect the land under the Growth Management Act.
With the months for planting fir trees past, Norm and Larson are making plans to scale up.
“We know the planting of trees needs to accelerate,” Larson said. “The hope is all groups combined will scale to those numbers.”
Even at a small scale, it’s been hard to find people to plant trees, Norm said.
“We’re still a half-inch deep in this to make it work,” he said. “It wouldn’t seem so hard to give stuff away.”
Age: 65
Occupation: Founder of Carbon Capture Foundation; retired attorney
Education: Lewis and Clark Law School, Portland
