By Joe Rankin Forests for Maine’s Future Writer In the mid-’60s Eric Sloane wrote “A Reverence for Wood,” a tribute to the importance of wood in early American life. It’s lovingly illustrated with Sloane’s skillfully detailed pen and ink sketches of everything wood: burl mallets, basswood berry boxes, up-and-down sawmills, timber frame barns. Butter churns…
By Joe Rankin Forests for Maine’s Future Writer Jim walked slowly up the path, as he had done ten thousand times before. Almost every day for decades. Through the woods. His woods, he thought. But . . . not really his. Just The Woods. It was a crisp, fall day. Red maples, golden beech, purple ash…
Allen Higgins and Josiah Pierce talk about caring for the land By JOE RANKIN Forests for Maine’s Future Writer Allen “Higmo” Higgins, asked what forest stewardship means to him, barely pauses. “The biggest thing is, you can’t have it all. You can’t have a quick harvest, all kinds of money in your pocket…
July 2011 By Joe RankinForests for Maine’s Future Writer On a recent summer day, while showing a visitor around the Penobscot Experimental Forest, the U.S. Forest Service’s Laura Kenefic and Robert Seymour, a University of Maine professor of silviculture, came across an old friend. Prone on the forest floor, it was slowly decaying into the…
Fresh from the Woods By Joe Rankin Forests for Maine’s Future Writer June 2011 Around the turn of the last century a serial killer sneaked into the United States. An immigrant from Asia. It likely came over with a load of lumber from Europe. Like many serial killers it specialized in a…
Fresh from the Woods Bernd Heinrich: Writer, academic, Maine forestland owner May 2011 It’s easy to see what makes Bernd Heinrich one of America’s great nature writers: curiosity. Strolling around his property near Weld on a late winter day he notices everything going on around him. Even as intimately as he knows this place he…
Fresh from the Woods The Underground Forest April 2011 By Joe Rankin Walking in the forest you are bathed in sounds, sights, smells – chirping of birds, sighing of the wind in the branches, flashes of light off the leaves, warmth of sun on your skin, the skittering of tiny creatures in the underbrush. There’s peace…
The Forest BookshelfMarch 2011 By Joe Rankin Today Henry David Thoreau is best remembered for Walden, the account of the time he lived alone in a cabin on the shores of the now famous pond. But Thoreau, who once said he had “traveled a great deal in Concord,” his home town, also ventured more widely….
February 2011 By Joe Rankin Mention maple syrup season and the image that leaps to mind for most people is straight out of a Norman Rockwell print: metal buckets, old Dobbin pulling the sleigh, a weathered sugar shack in the moonlight, and steam billowing off the old wood-fired evaporator. These days, the picture is likely…
Forest scene on Branch Lake land in Ellsworth. Photo courtesy of Jerry and Marcy Monkman, Ecophotography.org Fresh from the Woods January 2011, edited for republication January 2023 By Joe Rankin They provide timber, hiking trails, opportunities to learn, and even maple syrup. They serve to protect watersheds and provide habitat for wildlife. They’re town forests. Also…
