Welcome to: Forestry Home

Read it today! Certified Forest Products - Where's your wood coming from?  Forest certification began as an effort to provide customers with the ability to influence forest harvesting behaviors, but the impacts were pretty minimal.  That is until environmental groups pressured Home Depot, one of the largest distributors of forest products, to buy wood from certified forests. So, what does it mean if you buy certified timber, and where can you find it?

There's a bit of history to the term "money doesn't grow on trees."  That's because the trees consumed by the lumber and paper industries are mostly grown in forest where all the trees are destined for lumber mills. The only requirement to join the ranks of forestry is to own land ... and have a bit of patience. Timber land can represent a source of recreation, a residence and possibly an income.  Its all up to you.  Find a piece of land or learn how to manage it better.

Commercial forestry impacts all of us as many of the lands used for harvest are actually from public lands.  In the United States forestry companies do own vast tracks of land, but they also harvest mature trees from national forests. While the trees usually do eventually grow back, this form of agriculture leaves larges scars on the land for years, as the habitat of wildlife is dramatically altered every year.  Despite criticisms, commercial forestry provides products used by most of us.

Forest harvesters often claim that they cut trees because the trees need to be cut and because forests need to be managed. As human impacts have spread and forest tracks have become smaller and smaller, forests have stopped functioning properly.  Natural processes like fires have been suppressed for years so that  when fires do finally start so much fuel is in the forests that they erupt into dangerous infernos.  Forestry companies claim one of the solutions is for them to harvest more trees, but as the trees they take get smaller and smaller, questions arise.  When are they taking too much?