by aleida, on November 23rd, 2009
I walked into my fifth education session, Beyond Sustainable: How LEED Buildings Can Help Restore America’s Forests, with extreme skepticism. Seriously? How buildings, LEED buildings can help? This I had to see, especially since I don’t really know of any buildings growing trees.
But, of course, the session was blatantly mis-titled. No, it had nothing to do with how LEED buildings can help restore forests. In fact, it had little to do with LEED at all. The only mention of the rating system came at the very end when one of the speakers said he was spearheading an effort to develop a certification system for wood harvested in ways that restore forests that could be recognized by the LEED rating system.
But it wasn’t an entire waste of time. Colin Donohue, from the National Network of Forest Practitioners, moderated the session. The speakers were Peter Stark with North Slope Sustainable Wood LLC, Scott Bagley, and Ian Hanna from the Northwest Certified Forestry.
Everyone on the panel seemed to hold the view that we have to get beyond the cut – don’t cut dichotomy. It’s not about that anymore; it’s about restoring what has been lost.
Current threats to forests were identified as:
- development
- fragmentation (many more smaller parcels of lands held by different owners)
- invasive species
- catastrophic fires (going beyond historical norms)
- high-grading (harvesting the best trees and leaving the worst behind)
The best general solution presented was to manage working forests. That actually sounds much easier than it actually is. It turns out that not just any wooded area is a working forest. Stark gave an example of how, when he first bought some woodland with hundreds of small trees per acre, he intended not to touch any of the trees in it at all. But then he learned that, for his land, a healthy acre should really support no more than a dozen large trees. His forest was sick; the trees were more than 100 years old but had not grown beyond 6” in diameter. Working with a restoration forester, they harvested the smaller trees, left behind the bigger, healthier ones, and thus freed up the amount of nutrition and space available to what was left behind. Stark then took the wood and milled it into flooring and trim, out of which he was able to make some money.
This approach is not only sustainable, but also restorative. The ecosystem implications of taking out the sickly, tiny trees go beyond being a benefit for just the other trees. It impacts other plants, and all manner of animals that live in or on that land.
This line of discussion brought up an important point: architecture can help by using logs of varying sizes be it as beams or even trusses.
There is much work left to do to actually restore this country’s forests. We need to think 100 years ahead, and work not only in small pieces of land, but across properties and parcels. Only a large-scale approach will help to reweave the whole forest landscape, restore the diversity, and bring back the complexity of it all. The speakers mentioned these organizations as worth checking out – I list them in no particular order:
- Gila Wood Net (New Mexico)
- Massachusetts Woodlands Cooperative, LLC (Massachusetts)
- Blue Ridge Forest Cooperative (Virginia)
- Living Forest Cooperative (Wisconsin)
- Manomet Maine (Maine)
- The Nature Conservancy (Virginia)
- Mountain Association for Community Economic Development (Kentucky)
Did you also attend this session? If so, what did you think?