A new online course can help you enjoy and manage your woodland By Joe Rankin Forests for Maine’s Future writer Picture this: Three generations of a family huddled around a computer screen, reading, talking, and answering questions online. No, they’re not facebooking, skyping or playing the latest space aliens shoot ’em up game…
There are many forest types in the Pine Tree State By Joe Rankin Forests for Maine’s Future writer The Maine Woods. Writers use the phrase all the time. As though the entire state was covered with a blanket of spruce and fir and pine, with some maples thrown in. But as anyone who has walked…
By Joe Rankin Forests for Maine’s Future Writer In the video the young woman stops her car at a nature center, rummages around in the backseat, picks up a field guide and . . . tosses it aside. Instead, armed with her iPhone, she heads into the woods to learn about trees….
A venerable paper mill is the world leader in release papers By Joe Rankin Forests for Maine’s Future writer The names paper manufacturers give to the printing and writing papers that most people come across in their regular workday can be, well, a little boring. They’re heavy on words like premium, or gold, gloss…
By Joe Rankin Forests for Maine’s Future Writer Cathy Goslin vividly remembers a first grader visiting the re-created lumbering settlement of Leonard’s Mills on a children’s day not so long ago. The little girl parked herself by a woolly little lamb and stayed there. For hours. “She didn’t realize they were real…
Despite the down economy, landowners and the public are still eager to ensure the future of Maine’s forest By Joe Rankin Forests for Maine’s Future writer Earlier this month state conservation officials gathered in the Hall of Flags at the Maine State House to accept a land donation from Huber Resources Corp., one of the…
By Joe Rankin Forests for Maine’s Future Writer As a young boy in the 1940s Richard Nadeau frequently spent time in the remote lumber camps of northwestern Maine with his dad, who worked as a crew boss. While the men cut and limbed trees, Nadeau saw the deep woods, the towering spruce and fir, the…
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…
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…
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….
