One might reasonably ask if the Emmy award–winning documentarian Irene Taylor’s new movie – an expansive investigation into how people and trees coexist – is most fundamentally a movie about people via trees, or about trees via people? For Taylor, the answer is typically unconventional – it’s actually neither; it’s a film that, as its title suggests, is about entanglements. …Mostly based in the Pacific north-west of the United States and Canada, the film’s central characters include George Weyerhaeuser, who transformed the family timber empire with a model of harvesting trees that has caused severe environmental damage; Ryan Neil, one of the few Americans to master the Japanese art of bonsai; Beth Moon, a photographer who has gained worldwide acclaim for her masterly large-format prints of trees; and Dirk Brinkman, a force for reforestation for over 50 years.
Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) announced its 2023 FSC-US Leadership Awards, recognizing uncommon excellence that advances responsible forest management and forest conservation. Winners of the 2023 FSC Leadership Awards are as follows:
COWICHAN VALLEY, BC …the Six Mountains— Prevost, Sicker, Richards, Maple, Tzouhalem, and Stoney Hill — make up the 5,000-hectare Municipal Forest Reserve. The coastal Douglas-fir forest’s future in North Cowichan remains an open question. The results of the final phase of a parallel public consultation released last March showed 76 percent support for conservation management options. The next step is up to North Cowichan and First Nations. …Halalt Chief James Thomas said he supports selective logging that helps store water, while the timber can be used to create local jobs rather than being shipped offshore as raw logs. Selective logging can have many definitions, from, say, thinning to improve the overall health of a forest, to the slippery slope of logging the best timber for the highest profit. How the Municipality ultimately melds the wishes of North Cowichan taxpayers with those of First Nations is the big outstanding question.
80 years is a tremendous milestone—for anyone. To make it to 80 means you have overcome life’s greatest challenges and you truly become the elder, the sage, the one who knows a thing or two and should be listened to. Being the spokes-bear, if you will, of the longest running and most successful advertising campaign in American history, at 80 years old, I think Smokey Bear would agree. And so does the USDA Forest Service. Smokey’s actual birthday is August 9. However, starting in January, the Forest Service which has, in cooperation with the Ad Council and the National Association of State Foresters, managed the image of Smokey Bear since the 1940s will launch a yearlong celebration. The kickoff will start with Smokey sharing his iconic phrase of Only You Can Prevent Wildfires in the Tournament of Roses Parade on January 1.
The Oregon Board of Forestry and members of the Forest Trust Lands Advisory Committee met on December 14 to discuss recently released modeling results and their impacts on the counties that rely on state forest revenues and the department of forestry. Members of both groups quickly homed in on excess habitat protections for the northern spotted owl as an area of concern and signaled their intention to work together to dampen the economic impacts of the new plans. …A presentation by Oregon Department of Forestry staffers on the new modeling that largely mirrored the one given the week before to the FTLAC. The presentation showed that across all state forests revenue would drop somewhere between $21 and $28 million dollars annually and that the department had taken a conservative approach to species protection, with different planned scenarios protecting between 15% and 30% excess acreage of northern spotted owl habitat. 
Perhaps no single Christmas custom is more ubiquitous than putting up the Christmas tree. …Today, that ancient tradition harvests 25 to 30 million natural Christmas trees annually. Artificial trees have drawn criticism for the chemicals used in their manufacturing. But live trees have drawbacks, too. One in particular — the agricultural chemicals and insecticides, fungicides and herbicides used in tree farming — has drawn remarkably little attention, partly owing to a lack of research on the risk to consumers or farmworkers. …Among the most common chemicals used by the industry are chlorothalonil, atrazine, glyphosate and dimethoate, all of which have known impacts on human health. …According to the Food and Drug Administration, Christmas trees are unlikely to impact the average home. In fact, assuming the tree is not ingested, the risk is considered so low that no testing is even done before trees are sold. Still, without testing, there’s really no way to be sure.
Researchers have sequenced the whitebark pine genome, presenting new opportunities to help the threatened, high-altitude tree endure environmental challenges. “Sequencing the whitebark pine reference genome is an important scientific contribution,” said project lead David Neale, professor emeritus in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of California, Davis. “It is the first step in creating genomic tools that can rapidly screen trees for disease resistance and climate adaptation. With this information, researchers can expedite the supply of resistant seedlings for cost-effective restoration.” The sequence is now accessible at TreeGenes, a Forest Tree Genome Database. A pre-print version of the scientific paper is available on bioRxiv, and it is undergoing the peer-review process. …With the whitebark pine genome sequencing completed, forest managers are now one step closer to developing cost-effective genomic screening tools that identify genetic traits important for whitebark pine survival.
Although a recently published guest column failed to offer an answer to its query “
