[“Feeling Good About Wood” is one of the sales campaign slogans that I came up with when I was selling woodstoves for a living with Vermont Castings. In the early days of the business, which was spawned by the 1st Arab Oil Embargo in 1973, the sales pitch was straightforward. “Save lots of money and become independent of those sonsabitches who aren’t selling us their oil for cheap anymore.” By the mid-80s, however, the issues of renewable versus fossil fuels had become much more complex. Now, in what has, in my opinion has been one most positive and lasting outcomes of the “revolution” of the late 60s, the importance of wood within the overall realm of resource management is much better recognized and managed globally. We recently travelled to Portland, Oregon where their newest terminal is constructed largely of sustainable wood. SB SM]
Having our Forest and Cutting it Too
December 10, 2024| American History, Environmental Studies, Essays
Brian Donahue—
Can we cut the wood we need to build houses without destroying forests? To find out, our family engaged a group of local craftspeople to build a house from the woods on our Massachusetts farm.
A lot has been written about the majesty and magic of forests—about how mother trees talk to one another and nurture their young, about how trees and the fungi that bind their roots even form a kind of broad intelligence. Complex, diverse forests support a large part of the world’s biodiversity, and trees sequester and store carbon. We need more trees, and we need to let them grow longer and get bigger.
At the same time, we need wood. We need houses! There are 8 billion people on the planet, including 340 million Americans, and we’re in the middle of a housing crisis. Most American single-family houses are made with wood, and more multifamily housing could be. Building with wood can be better for the environment than building with concrete, steel, and plastic—but it all depends on how that wood is cut.
The traditional “whetting of the bush”
Where does our lumber come from? Throughout the postwar suburban boom, most of it came from public lands like our national forests. Now it comes mostly from plantations or simplified forests, which are owned by corporations that cut on short rotations. This lumber is a renewable resource because it can’t be cut faster than it grows, but it doesn’t provide many ecological benefits. You could call it fast wood.
There are 700 million acres of forest in the continental United States. Of that, 40 percent is owned by private individuals—so-called family forest. That’s as much as is owned by the public, and twice as much as is owned by timber corporations. But that forest is hardly ever cut. It provides big ecological benefits but very little wood.
Is there a way to harvest wood from these forests and still keep them beautiful, diverse, and resilient? Yes, there is. It is sometimes called ecological forestry. But you could also call it slow wood.
Slow wood means managing forests in careful ways that mimic how they grow naturally. It means thinning them periodically when they are young and regenerating them in small patches once they are mature. Above all, it means cutting the worst trees first.
The “worst” trees aren’t bad in an ecological sense. But as forests grow, we can periodically harvest those trees that fall behind, concentrating growth in those that will have the most value as mature timber. If we let the “best” timber trees grow for well over a century, less than 1 percent of the forest would be returned to young growth in any given year. That’s slow wood.
Take eastern hemlock for a prime example. We would never think of cutting the hemlock that shades the little river that runs by our farm. Besides being a beautiful evergreen, it benefits the brook trout and other cold-water species.
But hemlock is extremely slow growing. Because it holds its lower branches, it is full of knots. Consequently, it is much less valuable for timber than its softwood cousin, white pine. So when our forester laid out a low-grade improvement cut in the woodlot on our hill, he went easy on the more valuable oak and pine, and heavy on the hemlock.
Yet when it comes to making an old-fashioned timber frame, hemlock is stronger and prettier than pine. So we used that supposedly worthless hemlock to build our house.
Most of the hemlock beams were sawed on site with a band mill. I thinned some crooked black cherry—more low-grade wood—for our framer to make curved braces. We raised the frame with friends and a small crane, pinning it together with black locust pegs. The house was then sheathed with “structural insulated panels,” making a tight and well-insulated package that showcased the frame inside: the structure is also ornamental.
Sawing the frame generated a lot of other useful material. A beam is the “center box” of a sawlog. To get it, you saw boards and two-bys off the outside. We used the two-bys, milled tongue-and-groove, for our subflooring—that is, the ceiling if you’re looking up. I used handsome face-grain hemlock boards to make simple board and batten doors.
We used black birch, cherry, and suppressed sugar maple for flooring, trim, cabinets, and stairs. All in all, we were able to make a beautiful house from trees with little or no commercial value—mostly trees cut to improve the timber that remained.
Our house is not all local wood. For interior walls we used regular two-by-four studs that disappeared behind sheetrock. We have a conventional basement, and a conventional roof. In the end, we spent about what a conventional house would have cost, but a lot more of the money stayed in the local community with foresters, loggers, sawyers, framers, millworkers, and masons.
Can this be replicated? Yes! Obviously not many people can build straight from their own woodlot, but most rural and many suburban Americans live close to forests that could be managed in the same way. Building from local forests would be a great boon for rural communities—especially if new construction is concentrated near existing development, so that more forest and farmland can be conserved.
With new mass timber construction, we can build larger office buildings and affordable housing very efficiently with regional wood, too—replacing steel and concrete. The key is tying it all back to ecological forestry. We have enough forest across this country to supply most of our lumber needs locally and regionally yet still provide for plenty of wildlands, where nature takes care of itself.
To do this, we need environmentalists—especially those who are building houses—to stop assuming that protecting forests and cutting trees are inevitably in conflict. Instead, we need to insist on wildlands and woodlands, on ecological forestry, and on slow wood for everybody.
Brian Donahue is professor emeritus of American Environmental Studies at Brandeis University. He is a farmer, historian, and conservationist, and the author of prize-winning books about the past and future of New England farms and forests. He lives in Gill, MA.