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Lead Article
The Wood Chemical Industry in the Northeast: An Old Industry with New Possibilities
With the discovery that crude oil could be refined into a seemingly endless variety of products, petroleum became one of the most important substances on earth. Now, more than a century later, oil has lost some of its allure in the U.S., primarily due to climate change and our overdependence on unpredictable foreign sources. Today, scientists are scrambling to find alternatives to oil and another fossil fuel, coal. Their search has led back to the source that was once as dominant as oil is today: wood. Beyond being processed into pellets and chips for power and heat, wood has chemical properties that are being explored for various uses. Turning wood into ethanol (cellulosic ethanol) might seem like a new idea, but we have been extracting chemicals from wood for centuries.… (more)
Featured Articles
Which Bird Made That Nest?
The diversity of behavior among bird species is nowhere so dramatic as in their nest construction. Each species builds a specifically precise nest that differs in functional ways from those of almost all others. The variations are as endlessly diverse as the color patterns on a feather. Chimney swifts use their saliva to glue dry twigs onto vertical walls in… (more)
Anatomy of an Ice-damaged Sugar Maple
I have been managing woodlots in central Vermont since 1987, and in that time, two major ice storms have hit my area. Those two storms damaged thousands of acres across the region, and many landowners each time chose to salvage timber. Since 1987, I have managed salvage operations on 6,000 acres of sugar maple and northern hardwood stands in Windsor… (more)
The Outside Story
Look Beyond Forests to Fight Climate Change
Here’s an important point to make for those of you deeply concerned about climate change: We’re not going to solve the problem by promoting forest growth. It’s true that trees sequester carbon, a byproduct of our fossil fuel addiction and… (more)
Editor’s Blog
From the Archive
Wolves as Neighbors: A Lesson from Transylvania
While Romania is clearly not a part of the territory we normally cover, we believe that the writer’s observations in this article are relevant to the ongoing debate about the role that large carnivores could play here in the forests of the Northeast. In the accompanying story, “North Woods Predator,” that relevance is more explicit. The Editors Sitting on rigid… (more)