The Power of Restoration Wood
Colville National Forest
In the winter of 2020, Sustainable Northwest secured a multi-year Wood Innovations Grant from the United States Forest Service. This grant, along with other funding, has been instrumental in our work to connect responsible forest management with green building projects in the Northwest.
Our goal is to see a more transparent wood supply chain. Much of the restoration wood harvested from our National Forests is not being utilized by the green building sector, nor is the story of restoration wood being told to the general public. Over the next year, we will tell those stories through this blog, along with other video and story mapping content on this website. We are excited to highlight and tell the story of forest restoration, along with the people who make it happen.
Colville National Forest
Forest restoration projects have a multitude of goals: wildfire prevention, wildlife habitat creation, old growth protection, timber sales, and job creation, to name just a few. Often these projects are selective harvests, which means specific trees are cut based on their location, species, or size, relative to both the ecosystem and economic goals of the project. Some projects will have wildfire prevention in mind, so they will feature thinning to prevent a fire from spreading rapidly through dense trees. Others will have clusters of dense trees to create wildlife habitat, and will have a harvest nearby to enhance growth of the understory.
Each harvest has a management goal, and timber can oftentimes be a by-product. One of the most important pieces to ensuring forest restoration projects, including timber harvests, meet restoration goals are through Forest Collaboratives. These are coalitions of people from a variety of of backgrounds - environmental and conservation groups; timber companies; Forest Service employees; and dedicated citizens. Their goal is to find sustainable paths forward for the benefit of the forest and the people. These collaboratives, and all the people that work to keep them alive and going, are pivotal to the success of restoration and the health of our forests.
We also have to recognize the mills, mostly located in rural parts of our region, who are purchasing the timber from restoration forest treatments and creating products that people use every day. Many of the mills we work with know the forests better than most - they count on them for their livelihood and are important places for the local community. These mills create jobs in areas where local economies often struggle, and they also enable the on-the-ground restoration work to happen. If no one shows up to pay for the logs, then the forest restoration could not happen at the scale needed.
Oregon State University - Cascade Campus - Ray Hall
Meyer Memorial Trust HQ
Lastly, we have to highlight the important project teams and architects who make the effort to know the source of the wood they use in their projects. If we want to recognize and reward good forestry, then there has to be market drive for it, and more stakeholders have to understand the additional values this restoration wood adds in comparison to business-as-usual forestry. Project teams, like SRG, ZGF, and Swinerton are at the forefront of seeing the value it adds to know that your wood is traceable back to its forest of origin, and to specific restoration projects. If we can buy wood that supports jobs, prevents megafires, creates wildlife habitat, preserves old growth, and puts more water back into our streams, that is a choice that everyone can feel good making.
