Where are Californias dead trees going? A forest advocate turned detective to find out

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Set us as preferred McFARLAND, Calif. — A white SUV drives past fields of grapes and nut trees and pulls to a stop on the dirt shoulder across the highway from a strange tableau: Thousands of burned tree trunks stacked neatly to the end of a country block, a mountain range of chipped wood piles rising behind them.Logs dangle like toothpicks from machines with hydraulic claws, and the whole scene is enveloped in dust.The driver in the SUV waits.

At 8:26 a.m., a red and white 18-wheeler loaded with chips pulls out of the yard near McFarland and turns south.When it’s almost out of sight, she starts her engine and follows.“I have to be careful,” she says.

Once, a driver spotted her and pulled over until she drove on.She assumed he thought he was being targeted by ICE.Maya Khosla, a wildlife biologist for hire and filmmaker and poet between gigs, was getting on-the-job training in a new role: detective.

Her mission: To find what happens to tens of thousands of dead trees being cut and trucked out of California’s Sierra Nevada.Khosla is part of a coalition of forest advocates who suspect the trees, which were killed in a wildfire, are being burned to generate electricity.The burning of “waste” wood and other organic material to produce energy is known as biomass energy.

Khosla and other environmentalists see the burning of dead trees as one environmental harm compounding another, arguing that biomass burns dirtier than coal and, contrary to the industry’s claims, is not renewable because it takes a century or more for new trees to recapture the carbon.And that is why, on a weekday in September, Khosla is tailing the truck on Highway 99, to see whether it’s headed to a biomass plant.The chips were made from trees killed in the 2020 Castle fire, an inferno that left thousands of acres of standing dead trunks.

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