Travel the rural roads in this part of the country and you’ll see them along roadsides and driveways and in yards. Green in summer, a painter’s palette of orange, yellow, and red for a few glorious weeks in the fall. These giant sugar maples are New England’s signature trees, now that most of the old…
There’s no question that old growth forests are fairly uncommon, especially in the eastern parts of North America. In a handful of generations European settlers turned tens of millions of acres of old trees into beams and boards and a thousand other things and the land that had grown them to corn and potatoes and…
Human-caused climate change is THE environmental issue of our times. Alarming reports point out that we’re already seeing the effects of a warming planet and predict dire consequences if we don’t get a handle on our fossil fuel addiction — and soon. But before climate change, there was acid rain. Back in the 1980s and…
The Moosehead Lake area has been a destination for a long time. Native Americans came hundreds of miles to collect the rare igneous rock of Mt. Kineo, prized for arrow and spear points. Later, wealthy city slickers came for the scenery and the hunting and fishing, staying in grand hotels and rustic hunting camps. Lumbermen…
A thinned white pine stand photo courtesy of City of PortlandTwo years ago, logging crews spent the first three months thinning the woods surrounding Riverside Golf Course along the Presumpscot River. Not unusual, this is Maine, after all, the most forested state in the country. But it is noteworthy because it occurred in Maine’s largest…
Lumber, as any tree and forest lover can tell you, isn’t the only valuable thing forests produce. They buffer noise, provide habitat for other animals, filter water, create oxygen, curb erosion, cool the earth, provide beauty, allow us to reconnect with the natural world. The list goes on. But, until now, virtually the only forest…
By Joe Rankin, Forests for Maine’s Future Writer Editors Note: This story was originally published in 2018. In 2021, researchers from the University of New Hampshire identified southern pine beetle for the first time in Maine. Sometimes the name of an organism carries weighty meaning. For instance, that of the southern pine beetle, Dendroctonus frontalis….
Robert Perschel has worked in forestry for a long time. As an industrial forester, a forestry consultant, with The Wilderness Society and a chair of the Northern Forest Alliance. He’s a co-founder of the Forest Stewards Guild. Perschel has seen a lot of different types of forestry. And he’s often grappled with the question of…
People have been gluing up wood for thousands of years. Prehistoric peoples bonded spear points and ax heads to wood with glue. The ancient Egyptians 5,500 years ago figured out how to make veneer. Plywood is old hat: invented the year the American Civil War ended. After World War II chemists and engineers figured out…
Back in the day, John Sweet Jr. was an ironworker who helped build paper mills. But in 1982 he made a big career shift into a much more ancient craft: timber framing. That was in 1982, and he’s never looked back. He figures his company, Sweet Timber Frames, on Mt. Desert Island, has done 70…
