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Forest Journalism for a Sustainable Future

SmartLam to quadruple CLT production at new northwestern Montana site

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Montana Gov. Steve Bullock tours SmartLam with co-owner Casey Malmquist earlier this year. Photo courtesy of SmartLam.

SmartLam Technologies Group, the first U.S. manufacturer of cross-laminated timber products, intends to quadruple its production of CLT and develop new types of engineered wood products with an expansion into the former Weyerhaeuser lumber mill site in Columbia Falls, Montana.

Weyerhaeuser shuttered the mill in August 2016, seven months after merging with Plum Creek Timber Co., and put the 40-acre site up for sale this past summer. SmartLam has signed a long-term lease on part of the acreage with the new owners, Columbia Rising LLC, which plans to redevelop the remainder of the site into a rail-served industrial park.

The move, planned no later than Jan. 1, 2018, will accommodate SmartLam’s headquarters as well as its expanding manufacturing facilities. The company anticipates employing 75 workers by the end of 2019. [Read more…]

Headwaters Economics: Communities have many tools to reduce wildfire risk

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Editor’s note: A timely new report from Bozeman, Montana-based Headwaters Economics explores how communities and counties in that state can learn from one another’s land-use planning strategies – as well as best practices in other states – to reduce the risks and costs of homebuilding in the wildland-urban interface. Here is the group’s introduction to the report, with links to the executive summary and full report.

Across Montana — like most of the West — wildfires are getting bigger, lasting longer, and causing more damage to homes and property, as the severity of the severity of the 2017 wildfire season demonstrated. This trend can only be expected to continue under a warmer, drier climate and as more homes are built in at-risk locations (known as the wildland-urban interface, or WUI).

Land use planning is an important tool to reducing risk, but few Montana counties have fully integrated wildfire into their land use planning programs. [Read more…]

Will this be the year Congress fixes funding for wildland firefighting?

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The Lolo Peak fire just south and west of Missoula, Montana, caused one firefighter’s death and left two families without homes. Photo: U.S. Forest Service.

Will the 2017 fire season’s cost and calamities be enough to provoke change in how the U.S. Congress funds wildland firefighting?

Several Western senators believe it should be, as does Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue.

In a late-September briefing, Idaho Sen. Mike Crapo declared: “We have a crisis occurring now. We need to come together and say, ‘No more waiting – it needs to be on the next bill.’ ”

That could mean attaching a new national wildfire funding system to a hurricane relief bill for Puerto Rico, or incorporating it into the reauthorization bill for the federal flood insurance program. [Read more…]

Chasing flames: Does media coverage of wildfires probe deeply enough?

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Heat, low humidity and high winds sent the Lolo Peak fire on a spectacular run late on Aug. 18, filling the sky to the south of Missoula, Montana. Photo: Kelly Henkel

It is the dry season in Western states, which means that large swaths of land are burning or smoldering and are likely to remain that way until the snows arrive. The 2017 wildfire year started earlier and has scorched more acreage than normal. It is also far from over.

As wildfire trends worsen, it is increasingly important for communities in fire-prone regions to learn from past blazes and adapt to a more flammable future. Communities located in what researchers call “the wildland-urban interface” are due for tough conversations about the future.  [Read more…]

Harvard report: New England losing 24,000 acres of forest a year

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New England is one-third of the way toward the Wildlands and Woodlands forestland goal but faces many threats, including increasing rates of forest and farmland destruction. Photo: U.S. Forest Service

New England states need to triple the rate at which forest land is conserved – or risk losing a campaign to protect millions of acres from residential and commercial development, according to a new report by researchers at Harvard University and the University of Vermont.

The region is losing nearly 24,000 acres of forest a year.

In 2010, the same group of scientists established a regional goal – called Wildlands and Woodlands – to conserve 30 million acres of forest and 2.8 million acres of farmland by 2060. That’s about 70 percent of the land in New England.

But rather than an increased commitment, public funding for conservation across New England has dropped by 50 percent in recent years – to about $62 million a year, or lower than 2004 levels. The region has achieved about one-third of its long-range conservation goal. [Read more…]