Forest Journalism for a Sustainable Future
A rare and historic event in my hometown provided an unexpected lesson this week in the strength and soulfulness of wood.
For months now, crews have worked to deconstruct the Missoula Mercantile, one of the oldest buildings in this western Montana town, and as such, one made with locally grown and milled wood.
In fact, workers from Home ReSource pulled 200,000 board feet of lumber from the downtown icon – all of it from western Montana’s historic old-growth ponderosa pine forests. [Read more…]
Oregon is bullish on the future of high-rises built from locally sourced wood, and Portland is the proof.
At last month’s Mass Timber Conference, an all-day tour took visitors to a few of the city’s timber buildings – from a fire station made from wood, including fire-charred siding on the entranceway, to Carbon 12, a classy condominium development in North Portland that, at eight stories, is the nation’s tallest wood building.
At Albina Yards, Lever Architecture founder Thomas Robinson not only touted that four-story masterpiece – the nation’s first to use domestically produced cross-laminated timber (known as CLT) for its structural system – but also his next project: Framework, a skyscraper built of wood. [Read more…]
Paul Hessburg had studied wildfires for three decades when he saw the very scenario he dreads most unfold in his hometown of Wenatchee, Washington.
He shares the story now in hopes of stopping the seemingly endless cycle of such stories.
“In June 2015, a wildfire threatened to destroy my hometown and almost pulled it off,” Hessburg said. [Read more…]
It was risky, Paul Summerfelt concedes, to ask voters for an unprecedented $10 million bond issue for forest and watershed restoration.
But the greater risk was to do nothing – to wait for the inevitable wildfire that damaged, or destroyed, the city of Flagstaff’s drinking water supply.
So Summerfelt, the city’s wildland fire program manager, took a deep breath and joined his colleagues in local government and the firefighting community and made the request. [Read more…]
Most of us know Chuck Leavell from what he calls his “night job,” as the longtime keyboardist for the Rolling Stones.
But Leavell has another gig, and he attacks it with equal fervor: forestry.
Whether managing his 3,000-acre pine and oak plantation in southern Georgia or touring the country preaching the need for widespread forest restoration, Leavell is a passionate advocate for the use and perpetuation of America’s forests.
Now he’s taking that advocacy another step with the production of a documentary television series, “America’s Forests with Chuck Leavell,” which aired its premiere episode earlier this month on Oregon Public Broadcasting and at the International Mass Timber Conference in Portland. (You can watch it online here.)