ESCANABA — At the spring 2025 meeting of the Michigan Society of American Foresters (SAF), former forester Dr. Denise Keele — now the executive director of Michigan Climate Action Network (MiCAN) — delivered a presentation entitled “Why Climate Advocates Should Love Foresters.”

While Keele was a forester and a river guide down in Tennessee, she met Mike Smalligan, who hosted the recent event. Smalligan, a forest stewardship program manager with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, introduced Keele to the audience and explained that she has “huge influence in a huge network” as MiCAN is made up of around 150 other organizations.

“One of my goals for SAF is not only that we are a professional society that’s welcoming for rural, urban, economic, ecological and everything in between, but is also a society that … has influence upon society,” Smalligan said. “We as a society need to find ways to have greater influence on society and on policy.”

With that, he passed it off to Keele — also an SAF member — whose transition to the political and climate action spheres arose from her experience in forest management.

After beginning her career with the Tennessee Division of Forestry, she saw that litigation against foresters — even against the USDA Forest Service — was disregarding professional expertise and hindering effective forest management.

“These people have no idea about forestry or the actual science and art of growing trees, yet they’re making decisions every darn day without that expertise,” said Keele, referring to policy-makers in capital cities.

She found herself at the State University of New York (SUNY) College of Environmental Science and Forestry studying forest policy. After achieving her Ph.D., she taught environmental policy at Western Michigan University and formed a grassroots coalition in Kalamazoo to address climate change. Her action and success took her to the top of the Michigan Climate Action Network in 2022.

“77% of Michiganders believe in climate change. 66% are concerned about it,” Keele said at the SAF spring meeting. “There’s a very, very vocal minority of around 10% that are in the climate denial category.”

To address the climate problem, she said, solutions are needed that are “urgent and bold” but also equitable. Meeting that mission to check all the right boxes is difficult, Keele said; while many climate activists are urgent and bold, many aren’t able to devise equitable plans.

Foresters, however, are poised to meet those goals, she said.

“You are truly on the equitable and bold and urgent side with all of us, because you’re thinking about the values of ecology and the communities and the places,” Keele told the SAF.

She said that she hopes to encourage both climate activists and foresters to work together, since they have similar objectives.

“If I remember some of my (forestry) training, keeping forests for the long term is our number one goal. That is also what your climate justice advocates want to see out there,” Keele stated.

The forestry industry in the United States is more responsible than in some other nations. Globally, forestry contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, but in the U.S., the forestry sector actually removes 13% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, Keele reported.

“Forest land remaining forest land contributes to about a 10% overall sink for Michigan’s carbon dioxide emissions,” she said, indicating a chart that showed that it was the type of land use that had the greatest impact on reducing emissions. “We love you, foresters. … You are sequestering carbon, you are contributing to that net sink, and you are offering up what we call ‘nature-based solutions.'”

Good nature-based solutions to climate change, Keele explained, benefit both the natural environment and human communities.

A plan produced by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) established some goals for the year 2030. Nature-based solutions, it said, should contribute 30% of climate change mitigation efforts.

Keele encourages tree health experts and people with power to expand and protect forested land near urban areas; trees in places like those can help improve air quality and reduce heat islands.

While economical and easier to achieve than some other solutions, nature-based solutions unfortunately aren’t enough to solve climate change on their own, Keele said.

“We’re gonna need all those trees. But they can’t be a substitute for stopping the use of fossil fuels,” she said.

Michigan’s Clean Energy and Jobs Act passed in November 2023 to help hit some of the goals identified in the MI Healthy Climate Plan, which emerged from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) to “position Michigan as a leader in climate action,” protect natural resources and wildlife, and make the state energy-independent.

The Clean Energy and Jobs Act requires utility companies to produce at least 60% renewable energy by 2023 and 100% clean energy by 2040. “Renewables” include biomass, biogas and waste-to-energy. “Clean” energy includes nuclear power, hydrogen, and natural gas with carbon sequestration.

Power generation from solar and wind needs to increase, Keele said.

“If we just did solar and wind, we’d need about 209,000 acres to meet the goals of the Clean Energy and Jobs Act,” she said.

She then put it into perspective: 2.5 million acres of private land in Michigan is currently used for corn production, with 750,000 acres of cornfields dedicated to ethanol production.

“So we only need a third of the land we’re currently using on ethanol to place all the solar and wind that Michigan ever needed,” Keele calculated.

After the presentation, someone asked about rooftop solar.

“I’d rather see solar panels on every school and church and mall before we consider forested spaces,” the audience member said.

Keele agreed. Many people support putting solar panels on existing structures.

But unfortunately, “the way that our utility structure and our net metering works, there’s currently a huge disincentive to that,” Keele said.

One thing the Clean Energy and Jobs Act did was raise the limit of how many Michiganders were allowed to generate their own rooftop solar power from 1% to 10%.

“We would like to eliminate that cap so that everyone does exactly what you’re saying and puts it on those parking lots and on those rooftops,” Keele said. “I hope you can come be advocates with me for that, because that’s how we save more land from any conversion whatsoever.”

Though the topic of her presentation was controversial, the forester-turned-academic-turned-activist hopes that her message of convincing environmentalists and foresters to work together struck the right chords.

“Climate justice is an ecological approach, and that is where I think you will find a lot of common ground with many of the advocates that I work with,” Keele told the MAF audience. “They are going to see that you literally are the Lorax speaking for the trees, and that is exactly what they will appreciate, because they are also underrepresented and marginalized. It’s all the same philosophy.”