Backyard 31 
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Individual trees sequester more carbon the larger they grow: A forty-inch-diameter red oak (left) adds about two-tenths of an inch 
to its trunk diameter every year, but this new layer of biomass stores approximately the same amount of carbon as an entire six- 
inch-diameter tree elsewhere in the author’s backyard forest. 
relative to the region’s total forest area.!* Wild- 
lands also have the potential to sequester much 
additional carbon. Because of a lengthy land-use 
history of forest clearance and intensive logging, 
northeastern forests are, on average, only about 
20 to 30 percent of their maximum potential 
age (80 to 100 years versus 350 to 400 years) and 
store only about half their potential carbon. An 
eighty-year-old forest today can, in most cases— 
barring a major disturbance such as a windstorm 
or insect infestation—continue to accumulate 
carbon for at least the next two hundred years 
in live and dead trees and in the soil. 
Another management option I have is refor- 
estation: allowing an existing field to return to 
forest. I have begun reforestation on a small sec- 
tion of lawn along the edge of my property. Over 
the next fifteen years, this patch of regrowing 
forest may store as much as twenty-five times 
the aboveground carbon as the grassy lawn it 
replaced.!© Hence, reforestation has tremen- 
dous potential to sequester additional carbon on 
little-used pastures, agricultural fields, vacant 
lots, municipal fields, and small lawns on resi- 
dential properties.'!’ There is a good reason for 
this potential: a site in which the trees have 
