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Forest Journalism for a Sustainable Future

Maine business salvages old-growth trees from North Woods lake bottom

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Quakish Lake covers 1,000 acres. For over a century, it served as a vast holding pond for the Great Northern Paper Company’s mill. Millions of logs were floated into it to await the pulping process, and many of them sank. Photo: Maine Heritage Timber

Tom Shafer’s business is mining trees. It’s not really harvesting; maybe re-harvesting.

“Recovering a forgotten forest” is his company motto. He likes to think of it as mining. And Shafer’s not just selling lumber to panel offices, restaurants and your home den or man cave. He’s selling history. He’s selling green.

Shafer, a former stock trader, and his business partner, Steve Sanders, founded Maine Heritage Timber in 2010 to exploit a vast trove of sunken logs in Quakish Lake in the economically ailing North Woods town of Millinocket, Maine.

It is a long way from Wall Street, but it’s apparent talking to Shafer that the man has a passion for his product. And, in a sense, he’s still selling, just not stocks. [Read more…]

Interagency strike teams assess hurricane damage to urban forests

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Urban Forest Strike Team Members assess and record tree damage from Hurricane Mathew in 2016. Photo Courtesy of the Southern Group State Forests Photo: SGSF

Thousands of federal, state and private agencies have been deployed to areas that were impacted by hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria and Nate. These first responders are there to help the people in the storm’s path. However, there is another group of responders that go into storm-ravaged towns to aid the trees: the Urban Forest Strike Teams (UFST).

This 10-year-old program is a nationwide collaborative effort among state forestry agencies funded and trained through the U.S. Forest Service’s Urban and Community Forestry Program. Since 2007, the Southern UFST has been activated 12 times and mobilized across the South in response to hurricanes, tornadoes, and ice storms.

The catalyst for the creation of UFST was Hurricane Katrina. Widespread tree damage prompted the International Society of Arboriculture, Davey Resource Group and USFS to deploy certified arborists into at least nine communities along the Mississippi/Louisiana Gulf Coast. [Read more…]

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…]

Brock Commons: University of British Columbia students move into world’s tallest CLT building

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Brock Commons Tallwood House is the University of British Columbia’s newest dormitory. Photo: UBC

College students at the University of British Columbia are making history this fall as the first residents of Brock Commons, an 18-story dormitory made of cross-laminated timber.

Called Tallwood House, the student residence currently holds the title as the tallest mass timber building in the world. Four-hundred UBC students are its first occupants, mostly upperclassmen and graduate students.

The building offers 33 four-bedroom suites and 272 studio apartments, renting for $924 to $1,116.51 per month.

RELATED  Going up! Watch Brock Commons rise 18 stories
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Burning question: Is woody biomass the 21st century fuel?

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Processors thin small-diameter pine on the Malheur National Forest. Photo: Marcus Kauffman

For hundreds of millennia, humans have depended on wood as a basic but reliable source of fuel. Today efforts to grow that dependence in the face of an evolving energy landscape are widespread. But they’re also contentious.

The debate over biomass, an umbrella term that encompasses a range of organic materials used for energy, rests primarily on the question of “carbon neutrality.” It’s taking place at the federal level — the House Appropriations Committee voted during the summer to designate biomass “carbon neutral” — and across the states.

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker announced in August that his administration would move to designate fuel derived from felling trees and clearing brush in forests as renewable energy. In Arizona the state’s Public Service recently ordered to research forest bioenergy as part of its power portfolio. The biomass industry’s main trade group is part of a just-hatched PR and advertising blitz planned for later in September by an umbrella renewable-energy consortium that also includes wind and solar and has dubbed itself National Clean Energy Week. [Read more…]