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Forest Journalism for a Sustainable Future

Gifford Pinchot’s timeless writings on forest conservation feted in new collection

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Gifford Pinchot

Gifford Pinchot knew the value of the media in spreading his message of forest conservation. The founding chief of the U.S. Forest Service frequently submitted articles to the popular press – to his considerable advantage.

Now Char Miller, Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis at Pomona College, has collected a sampling of Pinchot’s essays for modern-day readers. You’ll be surprised at how timely they seem. Their eloquence and impact is enduring.

Penn State University Press officially released “Gifford Pinchot: Selected Writings” on Friday, June 9. Miller is also author of “Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism” (2004) and “Public Lands, Public Debates: A Century of Controversy” (2012). [Read more…]

Can we talk? Trees communicate underground, and it could save their lives

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Network of mycelium deep within the soil, “pipelines through which signals and nutrients travel between trees.” Photo: Alice Harrington

Think back to a time when you were deep in the forest, surrounded by silence. The tranquility. The pop of a twig underfoot. The rustle of leaves. The sound of your own heartbeat.

Little did you know that just beneath your feet, the trees were chattering away. Long conversations, the sort that give meaning and sustenance to life.

We know that trees can talk because of a remarkable Canadian scientist named Suzanne Simard. Over the past 30-plus years, she has discovered and then studied the vast, and complex, communications network that runs underground between trees. [Read more…]

America’s trees move west, and no one knows why

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Where the center of population of tree species shifted between 1980 and 2015. Map: Fei et al. / Nature Advances

A new study of tree populations in the continental United States, published this month in Science Advances, pokes at the conventional wisdom about climate change and its effect on forests.

While ecologists have generally believed that cold-adapted species will survive the planet’s warming by moving farther north and higher in elevation, the study by scientists at Purdue and North Carolina State universities showed they’re also migrating west.

Using data from the U.S. Forest Service’s Inventory and Analysis program, reearchers mapped the distribution of 86 tree species common to eastern U.S. forests, including sugar maple, white oaks and American hollies.

Over the last 30 years, 73 percent of those species shifted their so-called “abundance centers” to the west, of which 65 percent were significantly significant. Meanwhile, 62 percent of the species migrated poleward, of which 55 percent were statistically significant. [Read more…]

Montana city learns to collaborate to reduce wildfire risk

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In a 126-acre section of the Rattlesnake National Recreation Area, crews have thinned and collected 3,000 slash piles for burning. Photo: Dave Atkins

Eight years passed while a diverse group of Missoula, Montana, residents worked their way through the controversies to find compromise. And now the 13,000-acre Marshall Woods Restoration Project is finally approved and starting to take shape.

The to-do list includes commercial harvesting, tree thinning, prescribed fire and recreational improvements in several areas just north of the Missoula city limits, in the Rattlesnake National Recreation Area.

The intent is to restore native vegetation, promote forest health and reduce the wildfire danger at the head of a narrow, heavily populated valley.

[Read more…]

Cocaine trafficking emerges as significant cause of rainforest destruction

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This forest in Guatemala was burned to make way for agricultural development. A new study suggests that drug traffickers contribute to rainforest loss by laundering money with agriculture in forest lands. (Wikimedia Commons/CC)

The relationship is unexpected, but easy to comprehend: Cocaine trafficking is a direct cause of deforestation and associated losses of biodiversity in the rainforests of Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua.

And the repercussions are global in their reach.

An Oregon State University geographer is co-author of a new study that identifies and quantifies the effects of cocaine trafficking on rainforest destruction in Central America. [Read more…]