There are a lot of threats to Maine forests — fragmentation, poor forestry practices, development, imported and native pests and diseases . . . and invasive plants. Plants like “burning bush,” famous for its red color. Or the distinctive “Crimson King” Norway maple. Or the common privet. Plants that have graced Maine lawns and gardens…
This was the year the West burned. The numbers are mind-boggling: By the end of November alone more than 56,000 wildfires had burned 9.1 million acres in the west. Thousands of homes and other buildings destroyed. Scores killed. Losses in the billions. And the flames roared into December. Huge fires ripped across California, including several…
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…
Alan Hutchinson was always thinking. Thinking about ways to approach things differently, to bring people together, to untangle complicated problems. All with an overriding goal: to protect Maine’s North Woods for future generations. Karin Tilberg, his deputy director at the Forest Society of Maine, remembers how they would often work together on a particularly knotty…
The party was eating lunch on a high rimrock when they saw the mother wolf come out of the river, shake off the water, and greet her pups. They greeted the happy scene with a fusillade of rifle fire — wasn’t it always this way? — then scrambled down to view the carnage. “We reached…
By JOE RANKIN Forests for Maine’s Future writer Quickly now. This is a quiz. What is the most common tree species in Maine? You might have said pine. It is, after all the Pine Tree State. Or the iconic white birch, perhaps. But you’d be wrong. The most common tree in the state is…
Erik Carlson remembers exactly where he was when he got the idea of getting into the wood pellet manufacturing business. It was September of 2015 and he was emptying a bag of pellets into the stove at his home. He looked at the bag and noticed that the pellets were made in — Canada. Canada?…
It’s safe to say that things have changed since the 1970s and 1980s, when the spruce budworm last ravaged the northern Maine woods. The forest has changed hands, some parcels many times. The state’s woods products and paper industries have suffered severe blows — mills have closed and thousands of jobs evaporated. Then, there is…
By Joe Rankin, published August 2016 Much of the southern half of Maine is dry. Really dry. Lawns brown. Gardens struggling. Wells drying up. Things are bad on the rainfall front and in early August the forecasts weren’t looking good for rain. The U.S. Drought Monitor for Aug. 9 said the southern tip of Maine…
By JOE RANKIN, Forests for Maine’s Future Writer In 1962 Rachel Carson’s classic enviro-expose Silent Spring was published, laying out how indiscriminate pesticide use was decimating nature, particularly bird populations. The book helped shape the environmental movement and led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and some of the United States’ most enduring…
