treesource

Forest Journalism for a Sustainable Future

Sherry Devlin

About Sherry Devlin

Sherry Devlin is a longtime Montana journalist who, for 25 years, covered natural resources and the environment for the Missoulian. She is an editor/reporter for Treesource.org and can be reached at [email protected].

Mass timber: The next great disruption of construction, wood products industries

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Murray Grove, a nine-story apartment complex in London’s Hackney borough, was made from cross-laminated timber manufactured by KLH, an Austrian company. Photo: Waugh Thistleton Architects

The seeds of Andrew Waugh’s great disruption were planted in 2003.

“Back then, people were saying we could ‘fix’ climate change by putting a solar panel on top of everything we built,” he remembered. “But we knew that wasn’t even close to enough.”

So Waugh’s East London architectural firm started studying mass timber, knowing it was the truly renewable building material – albeit largely unknown and untested in large-scale developments.

“We were entranced by the opportunities this new material could provide,” he said. [Read more…]

Collaborative effort works to restore New Mexico’s Jemez Mountains

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A long-running collaborative effort in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico is proving the potential for communication, compromise and change when diverse groups sit down together.

The Southwest Jemez Mountains Resilient Landscapes and Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Project extends across 210,000 acres in the Santa Fe National Forest, Valles Caldera and Pueblo of Jemez.

Citizens, scientists, environmental leaders and timber workers are working together toward a shared goal: to return the Jemez Mountains’ forests to a more natural state.

That means overcoming the impacts of large-acreage grazing dating back to the late 1800s and a century of wildfire suppression. Both practices had disastrous consequences on the forest that burst into public consciousness when the combination of drought, global warming and overgrown forests ignited mega-fires such as 2011’s Las Conchas.

[Read more…]

Federal spending bill includes long-awaited wildfire funding fix

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Firefighters watch the approach of last fall’s Thomas Fire in Ventura, California, Los Padres National Forest. Photo: U.S. Forest Service

The $1.3 trillion spending bill headed for a vote in Congress this week includes a bipartisan measure creating a disaster fund to help fight the wildfires that have swept Western states in recent years.

Fundamentally changing how the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies pay for wildland firefighting, the bill would set aside more than $20 billion over 10 years in an emergency fund that could be tapped when firefighting budgets are depleted.

In the past, the Forest Service has been forced to raid non-fire accounts to pay for firefighting costs, thereby depleting funds needed for timber management, prescribed burning and other fire-prevention work. [Read more…]

Ohio man works to restore vestige of state’s old-growth forests

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“Just to see a critter out doing its natural thing unobstructed and in its natural environment is very fulfilling. I think now that we have this property, we might as well make the effort to restore what we can,” David Hague said. Photo: Ohio’s Country Journal

Before European settlement changed everything in its path, the 44,000 square miles that are now Ohio were notable for their 42,000 square miles of virgin forest.

Today, there are a few square miles of old-growth forest in Ohio.

And that’s where David Hague’s story begins. [Read more…]

Former Forest Service chiefs to Congress: Wildfire funding needs immediate fix

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Burn scars and active fires in Ventura County, California, are visible in this false-color view created using data from @ESA’s Sentinel-2 satellite on Dec. 5. Active fires appear orange, while burn scars are brown. Photo: NASA

Six former chiefs of the Forest Service have written leaders of the U.S. House and Senate expressing the urgent need to establish a new method of funding wildland firefighting.

The Forest Service and Department of Interior, they said, are alone among federal agencies in being forced to finance catastrophic emergency operations – fighting wildfires – out of their regular operational budgets.

“Today the Forest Service spends over half of its budget on fire management activities, compared to 16 percent in 1995,” the chiefs wrote. “In a 2015 report, the Forest Service projected the fire budget would consume two-thirds of the agency’s budget by 2025.”

And here’s the rub: The more wildland firefighting consumes the Forest Service’s budget, the less money the agency has for management activities that would either lessen the fire danger or make it easier to control fires once they start.

Thus the need for an immediate fire funding fix, said former chiefs Max Peterson, Dale Robertson, Michael Dombeck, Dale Bosworth, Abigail Kimball and Thomas Tidwell. [Read more…]