Our first Forests of Maine Teachers’ Tour of 2022 began on July 12 at the Sugarloaf Mountain Hotel. Seventeen educators from throughout Maine joined us for an immersive four-day tour led by Maine TREE’s Executive Director Logan Johnson, Director of Education Lena Ives, and Project Learning Tree (PLT) Facilitator Lindsay Strout. We spent the first…
SANFORD – This past month, Maine TREE partnered with Sanford High School JMG (formerly known as Jobs for Maine Graduates) to support an opportunity for students to learn about Green Jobs in Maine through in-class Project Learning Tree Green Jobs activities and a field trip to a local mill. On November 16th, Maine TREE joined…
Robbins Lumber and Pleasant River Lumber Headline Growing List of Supporters Maine TREE is proud to announce that Robbins Lumber and Pleasant River Lumber, two Maine-based family-owned companies, are the lead underwriters for 2021 Forests of Maine Teachers’ Tours. The nationally acclaimed Teachers’ Tours, emulated by several other states since its creation, is entering its 24th…
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…
They produce gun stocks, flooring, cedar shingles, log homes, wooden playsets. They make cigar tips, wooden pack baskets, doors and staircases. Cutting boards and chairs, cabinets and baseball bats, grilling planks canoe paddles. Colorful wooden eggs made by Wells Wood Turning in Buckfield have been featured at the White House Easter Egg roll since 2006,…
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…
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?…
New mills, investments and products help offset losses in some sectors By JOE RANKIN Forests for Maine’s Future Writer When Verso Paper Co. executives announced in October that the Bucksport paper mill would be closing Dec. 1, it sparked a familiar round: how to cope with the loss of tax revenue and the loss of…
By Joe Rankin Forests for Maine’s Future writer Stand on almost any hill in Maine, any mountaintop, and you’ll see forest, a blanket of trees. There are rivers, yes. Roads, villages, signs of civilization. But overall it seems to be a world of trees. It is forest that created the Maine mystique. And forest…
