Free Republic

Forest Service Chief Randy Moore appeared this week before a U.S. Senate committee where he was pressured by lawmakers from both sides of the aisle to speed up thinning work on federal forests. The Biden administration identified over 175,000 square miles of old growth and mature forests on government lands. The administration plans to craft a rule to protect forests from fires, insects, and other effects of climate change. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File) Moore faced pointed questioning from U.S. Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, a Republican who warned the administration's conservation efforts could "lock Americans out of the public...

Archaeologists have used wood taxa analysis to distinguish between imported, drift and native wood from five Norse farmsteads on Greenland.Historical records have long suggested that medieval Norse colonists on Greenland (AD 985–1450) relied on imported material such as iron and wood. Until now, it has not been fully recognized where these imports of wood came from...All sites were occupied between AD 1000 and 1400 and dated by radiocarbon dating and associated artifact types.A microscopic examination of the cellular structure of the wood previously found by archaeologists on these sites enabled the identification of tree genus or species, and the results...

School leaders in rural northwest Oregon are worried about big budget cuts. The Oregon Department of Forestry is working on a plan to protect habitats for endangered species across 640,000 acres of state forest. The loss of timber revenue will affect local schools. The Jewell School District expects to be the most heavily impacted because it gets almost all of its funding from timber revenue. It could see budget cuts of 40 percent. The Jewell School District has about 150 students and a budget of $5 million. District superintendent Cory Pederson estimates the cuts will bring his annual budget down...

The $100 million retrofit project – partially paid for by taxpayers as part of a resolution of litigation – was supposed to keep the building from sinking and tilting more and stabilize property values. But since work began on installing support piles in May of last year, the problems have gotten worse, not better. To stem the damage, engineers opted to cut the number of new foundation support piles from 52 to 18. ...As it stands, with the additional tilting since work on the underground wall along Fremont started in May, the tower is now leaning at least 29 inches...

The move would restrict development on roughly 9.3 million acres in North America’s largest temperate rainforest, according to those briefed on the plan, reversing Trump Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack will propose reinstating a Bill Clinton-era rule to ban logging and road building in more than half of North America’s largest temperate rainforest, the department confirmed. The restrictions had managed to stay in place for years because of a series of court battles, but the Trump administration wiped them out last fall. “Restoring the Tongass’ roadless protections supports the advancement of economic, ecologic and cultural sustainability in Southeast Alaska in a...

New data shows San Francisco’s Millennium Tower tilted an additional quarter of an inch during the week of the first test of the troubled fix -- the maximum level predicted by the designer of the $100 million project. Since work began on the plan to shore up the tower on two sides in May, the building has sunk more than an inch at the northwest corner, which translates to another 5¾ inches of lean to the west toward Fremont Street. The sudden accelerated settlement led to a work stoppage in August and a test program for new construction strategies designed...

the high-rise hotel is built up from prefabricated 3D-modules in cross laminated timber (CLT), stacked between two elevator cores entirely made of CLT. the low-rise cultural center is built with columns and beams of glued laminated timber (GLT) and cores and shear walls in CLT. integrated structural design has eliminated the need for concrete entirely from the load bearing structure, speeding up construction and drastically reducing the building’s carbon footprint. the wood is sourced from regional sustainable forests

There is a saying among some farmers in the Carolina Sandhills: “A man would have to be a fool to cut down a longleaf pine.” It’s not because the gangly-limbed tree is particularly beautiful. The pine doesn’t have a magnolia’s flowers or an oak’s shade. He could get $4,000 an acre for clear-cutting his mature longleaf pines for timber. Or, he said, he could earn $1,200 an acre collecting pine needles from the same trees — every year.

U.S. stock index futures dropped on Monday after Wall Street’s surge in the prior session as major lenders came under pressure on concerns over possible spillover effects of a hedge fund’s default on margin calls. Nomura and Credit Suisse warned of significant losses after the U.S. hedge fund, named by sources as Archegos Capital, defaulted, hitting shares in some big U.S. media and Chinese tech companies. The news has sparked fears that other lenders could be in the process of exiting these positions too. Shares in Bank of America Corp, Citigroup Inc, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo...

Hiker, 28, is killed when 200-foot redwood falls on top of him on national park dirt trail Subhradeep Dutta, 28, of Edina, Minnesota, was hiking at Muir National Woods Monument north of San Francisco with two other people Tuesday. Five giant redwood trees suddenly fell while the trio were on a marked dirt trail about 4.30pm, including a 200-foot tree that struck Dutta. He was pronounced dead at the scene. A female hiker also was injured by falling debris and treated at a nearby hospital. A second man was not hurt The trees may have fallen due to wet ground...

The state of Oregon breached its contract with 13 rural counties and 151 local taxing districts by failing to maximize timber harvests on state forests and resulting payments to those counties during the last two decades, a jury in Linn County found on Wednesday after nearly a month-long trial. The jury found that the state owed those counties $1.1 billion in damages, including $674 million the counties contend they lost since 2001 because the state didn’t cut enough trees. The verdict also includes $392 million in future damages, which assumes the state will continue to manage the state forests in...

In June of 1775, citizens acting as merchant mariners captured the British schooner HMS Margaretta around Machias, Massachusetts (present-day Maine). That same month, General George Washington, with the help of merchant ship owner Colonel John Glover of Marblehead, Massachusetts, chartered and outfitted several ships to interrupt the British supplies. The marker at the base of John Glover’s statue in Boston states: “John Glover of Marblehead – A Soldier of the Revolution. He commanded a regiment of one thousand men raised in that town known as the marine regiment, and enlisted to serve throughout the war. He joined the camp at...

River Beech Tower project, an 800-foot residential skyscraper that would be built almost entirely out of wood. Nor is it the only such effort. Similar plans are underway in London, Stockholm, and other cities. Eighteen-story buildings made of timber already exist in Vancouver and Minneapolis, while other structures have popped up in Norway and New Zealand. On the flip side, wood can sway too much, particularly in the wind — a major issue for taller buildings. For the River Beech Tower project, Snapp and his colleagues actually solved this problem by constructing the whole building out of triangle and diamond...

As timber harvesting permit fees went up and environmental challenges multiplied, the people who earned a living felling and planting trees looked for other lines of work. The combustible fuel load in the forest predictably soared. No longer were forest management professionals clearing brush and thinning trees

Sam Krop’s characterization of catastrophic wildfire on public and privately owned forest lands (guest viewpoint, Oct. 4) doesn’t match the reality of what Oregon experienced this summer. But I can see why Cascadia Wildlands and other special interest groups oppose solutions such as the Resilient Federal Forests Act. These bills untie the hands of our federal land managers, and provide them with more tools and resources to restore the health of our public forests, before and after a fire. Has “hands-off” forest management reduced the size and severity of forest fires? Are we choking on less wildfire smoke every summer?...

The House Natural Resource Committee passed the Resilient Federal Forests Act of 2017 today, mostly along party lines. The bill’s supporters claim it will help mitigate or prevent the spread of wildfire-prone areas by easing restrictions on forest-thinning. Environmentalists, however, note the bill goes too far. They claim it opens the door for the timber industry to move into protected wildlands. They also point to the bill’s delisting of the Cascade-Siskiyou forests as a national monument, potentially marking the first monument rescinded per Trump’s executive order. The bill will go before the full House for a vote, expected by August...

It's rare that a governor shows up to celebrate a new condo tower. But this one's made of wood, and that's a bigger deal than it seems. Gov. Kate Brown was on hand the day Carbon12 in North Portland reached its full eight stories and became the nation's tallest wood building. The feat was made possible by cross-laminated timber, wood engineered to have the strength of steel. The distinction won't last long. Another Portland development, an 11–story high-rise made of the same wood product, is expected to secure a building permit within weeks and start construction this summer. For Oregon,...

can’t say anything about the roots of this story and I don’t plan to dig further… I need to think about my own skin too. Understand that as you will.” —Mikhail Voitenko, editor of the Russian maritime Bulletin Sovfrakht., speaking about the “hijacking” of the Arctic Sea While it might seem like an unusual morphing of the movies Inside Man and The Hunt for Red October, the account of the cargo ship Arctic Sea is far stranger than either fictional account. Based on information developed through our extensive investigation, we can authoritatively state, without hyperbole, that the mysteries surrounding the...

“We have what we need to stay in business right here,” Jones says, pointing to the lush pine and cedar forests that surround this town of 1,800 people on the northwest slope of the Siskiyou mountain range. “But we can't get out there to cut it down because one agency won't talk to another one, or the environmentalists tie it up in court.” Then a series of environmental lawsuits in the 1980s and early 1990s brought new federal restrictions on logging from public lands. To keep timber-dependent counties afloat, the federal government offered money to replace the taxes they lost,...

Wildlife advocates want a federal judge to order faster action on a recovery plan for imperiled Canada lynx. ... Officials also say that lynx face a relatively low degree of threat compared to other protected species. The Fish and Wildlife Service was forced to come up with a timeline on the recovery document when Molloy last month expressed frustration with the government's progress. The judge said the "stutter-step" approach by federal officials necessitated court intervention. The lawsuit pending before Molloy was brought by Friends of the Wild Swan, Rocky Mountain Wild, Biodiversity Conservation Alliance and the San Juan Citizens Alliance....