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Forest Journalism for a Sustainable Future

All things to all people? Competing interests complicate forest management

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“Forest ecosystems are complex, more complex than we can think.”

The late Jack Ward Thomas, a research wildlife biologist and former chief of the U.S. Forest Service, often recited this line in speeches he gave.

He was only referring to ecosystems.

Throw in economics and social wants and desires, and the equation becomes significantly more complicated.

All forests can’t be all things at all times in all places. You can’t have an old-growth and a young forest at the same time. A forest can’t maximize carbon storage and reduce the wildfire risk at the same time. [Read more…]

i-Tree app: How much is a tree worth?

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According to the last census, 81 percent of Americans live in urban settings, so urban trees are the only forests most people encounter day to day.

And that’s if they are lucky enough to live or work in the forested part of a city.

“The 135 million acres of urban and community forests are perhaps the most valuable, hardest-working forests in the country,” says Paul Ries, co-chair of the Sustainable Urban and Community Forestry Coalition.

That’s a bold statement when you consider corporate forests that produce billions of board feet of timber every year or uniquely American treasures like Olympic or Yosemite national parks.

Is Ries biased? Maybe, but he also has hard numbers to back up his statement: 1.6 million jobs with an $82 billion payroll, over $5 billion in energy savings and almost $5 billion in carbon sequestered in trees.

An assessment of human health benefits puts the figure at $6.8 from urban forests in the U.S. There is no disputing that urban forests encounter the most people. [Read more…]

Publisher’s Notebook: What is a forest?

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California’s sequoia groves fit many people’s definition of a forest. Photo: Bethany Atkins

Everyone knows what a forest is. Right?

As a forester and forest ecologist for decades, the definition of a forest is second nature to me and must be the same for everyone else. Right?

Wrong.

In fact, my notion of a universal definition was challenged several times recently in conversations with people who have markedly different perspectives from my own. [Read more…]

Publisher’s Notebook: Federal energy policy must be firm, but fair

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Dave Atkins
Dave Atkins

When I was a kid, my Dad was more than just my Dad. He was also the leader of my YMCA club, 15 rambunctious boys who gathered one evening a week to learn lessons of respect, trust and responsibility, followed by time to play games (the primary incentive to attend) in the gym.

During the school year, we would play various sports on Saturday mornings against other clubs. For a dozen years or more, my Dad led Y clubs for my older brother and then me, no easy task as you can imagine. He used to talk about his philosophy for imposing discipline upon the chaos we would naturally generate: “firm but fair.” It meant the rules applied to everyone, all the time, but they also had to be fair, neither arbitrary nor capricious.

It meant my brother and I got no special breaks because Dad was the leader. Nor did it help the fast-talking, “yeah-but” kid that could normally sell milk to the dairyman. It wasn’t until I was older and in the working world, and eventually when I was a dad myself, that I came to fully appreciate and understand his approach and its applicability in many other situations – even including energy policy. [Read more…]

Maryland researchers: Crushed wood is stronger than steel

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New ways to process wood to add strength and take advantage of the renewable nature of trees and forests continue to surface.

Scientists at the University of Maryland recently published a paper detailed tests where they boiled wood in a soup of sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfite to soften and partially dissolve some of the fiber before crushing it. The process produced a densified wood that is many time stronger and yet much thinner.

This combination opens up the potential for uses in new and different products, including car bodies. This article from the scientific journal Nature includes a slow-motion video, shown above, of metal shooting through natural wood and densified wood. [Read more…]