Category: Conservation & Environment

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Vicki Christiansen, new head of the U.S. Forest Service was one of the opening speakers at our Mass Timber Conference. This makes perfect sense.

Sustainable if from sustainable sources
Building with mass timber makes sense only if that timber comes from sustainably managed forests. The forests is the beginning of the good cycle.

She said all the right things and I was very impressed. Ms. Christiansen has a background in fire management, which has become the big issue.

She talked about the need to thin our national forests and to increase profitable timber harvests, while expanding the use of fire as a management tool.

It was a rare case for a speaker when I agreed with everything I heard.

At breakfast just before the general session, I sat with a couple guys who made the mistake of asking me about forestry. I gave them my usual ideas about fire and thinning. They claimed to be interested and asked questions. I ran into them after the session. They jokes that I must have been planted to prime them for the morning talk.

Anyway, I have great respect for the U.S. Forest Service and I am encouraged by the leadership, at least what I heard at the general session. Of course, it is hard to make ideas into facts on the ground, given the budget and other challenges.

Moving beyond my expertise

I doubt I will go to the next Mass Timber Conference. This is no disrespect to the conference, but it has moved beyond me.

It is a problem of success. Mass timber is becoming more mainstream, as I hoped. In doing so, however, a generalist like me is increasingly out of place.

The talks today were very interesting, but some, many, were technical. I remember stuff like this from my operations research class. I was not good at it then and I am not good at it now.

I was – and remain – an advocate for the wider use of mass timber. I think that this is the way to build in environmentally responsible ways. But as mass timber becomes more commonly accepted, the skills are different.

The other success of the mass timber conference is the numbers. Last year, there were about 600 attendees. This year there is twice as many. I figure next year they will need to raise the prices, both to raise money and to limit the numbers. I won a free admission this year, but I am unlikely to do so again. So…I think this is my last time. I am content that things are working out better than I would have anticipated.

Attended a wonderful program at the Zuni Pine Barrens, hosted by Lytton Musselman, from Old Dominion University and Cecil Frost, from University of North Carolina. It is always great to be in with experts who are passionate about what they do.

We looked at longleaf restoration, which is how and why I got the invitation and went, but I learned a lot more.

Cecil pointed to a pond pine savanna. I did not know such a thing existed. He explained that the pond pine was fire adapted but in ways different from longleaf. The pond pine is resistant to fire, like the longleaf, but the similarities end there.

Unlike other pines, pond pines can and do sprout from roots and will send out lateral branches after a fire. This means that pond pines can survive hotter fires, but less frequent ones. They burn to the roots and come back.

Pond pine savannas exist next to longleaf, but they do not overlap much. The difference is the water table. A higher water table favors pond pine, as they are more tolerant of the wet. Beyond that, the higher water table tends to make the vegetation a little less flammable. This leads to a longer time interval between fires, but they are hotter when they come, since there is more to burn.

This particular place was burned by accident Easter of last year. A prescribed fire got a little out of hand and burned hot through pond pine, burning off or turning yellow most of the needles even to the tops of the trees and burning the smaller trees to the ground.
My pictures show the pond pine savanna. Notice the sprouts from the roots of trees burned to the ground. I admit that I have trouble telling pond pines from loblolly pines. When the experts were there showing me, I could do it, but my expertise does not persist. But the experts told me these were pond pines. They showed some characteristics, such as the sucker branches in picture #3 and the ground spouting in picture #2.

Longleaf were exploited from “naval stores”. Naval stores include things used by navies, i.e. tar, pitch & turpentine. Virginia and the Carolinas became important sources for the Royal Navy after their access to supplies in the Baltic became more difficult.

Naval stores was a big industry for a couple hundred years. You can see the remnants when you find a road called “Pitch Kettle Road,” as there is in Brunswick Country. Picture #4 shows a tar kiln. It looks like just a mound now. What they did was pile pine wood, cover it with dirt and then set it on fire. It slow cooks, a lot like making charcoal. Pine tar comes out and is collected in barrels. To make pitch, you cook the tar – refine it. Turpentine is distilled from this.

Pitch, tar and turpentine was used for lubrication and sealing. Today most of this stuff is made from petroleum products.

The last photo shows Cecil and Lytton talking about their favorite stump. Lytton counted the rings and this tree was more than 300 years old when it was cut. Problem is that they do not know when it was cut, but it was at least 50 years ago. These longleaf stumps do not decay easily. They are dense, with rings close together, because the trees grew slowly, and they are infused with the precursors of naval stores, which inhibit decay. It would burn, however. They burn these woods frequently, but before each burn somebody goes out and rakes away the needles to avoid the fire. You an see that this was a big tree.

Old longleaf dense wood was called “light wood,” not because of weight but rather because it could be used as a torch, light in the pre-flashlight days. The resin burns a long time leaving the wood intact for a decent time.

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This is from a recent meeting at the National Academies of Science in Washington. I am trying to participate in public discussions I think important and deploying the tools of biotechnology to help our forest ecosystems adapt to climate change, invasive pests and rapid change in general is important. The good news is that they let you talk. I think I did okay, although I saw lots of things to work on. Unfortunately, I doubt I will improve too much. Hard to break the habit of a lifetime. I had intended to talk about the general benefits of biotechnology in forestry and even wrote short notes. I thought better of that after listening to all those scientists who knew thousands of times more than I could say. So I went with my own experience, less elegant but more from the heart. What the proceedings lacked was actual forest landowners, so I tried to share that viewpoint.

My talk starts about 2:30 into the video.