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Popular Discussions
- Clearing the Air: Outdoor Wood Boilers Face Regulation (35)
- Lumber, Chips, and Sawdust: For Sawmills, There’s No Such Thing as Waste (13)
- Autumn Olive (12)
- Tale of the Tick: How Lyme Disease is Expanding Northward (11)
- Indian Pipe (9)
- The Haitian Landscape (8)
- Wood Worse than Coal? (7)
- Forests Can’t Fight Climate Change (7)
- Wood Pellets (7)
- It’s Time to Reconsider Spring and Summer Bird Feeding (5)
- Beware of Encroaching Forests (5)
- First Snow (5)
- Bears Fattening Up for Winter’s Slumber (5)
- Opening Camp (5)
- Wet Weather Wondering (5)
Features Archive
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The Burning Question: Is Biomass Right for the Northeast?
Like a forest fire that appears to be contained before exploding into an inferno, biomass has gone from being a topic of interest primarily to foresters and energy experts to one that can draw hundreds of citizens, many with competing views, to public meetings and online forums. Massachusetts, where government officials are studying the implications of biomass before permitting any… (more)
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Transformations: Which Caterpillar Becomes Which Butterfly?
The United Nations has coined 2010 to be The International Year of Biodiversity, so it’s only fitting that insects play a starring role in the pages of our summer issue. Insects, after all, are the most abundant animals on earth. While some species can be overlooked, due to their small size or out-of-the-way lifestyles, butterflies and caterpillars cannot. These veritable… (more)
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Earning Its Keep: Finding Sources of Income from Your Land
There was a time when people who lived in rural areas and owned acreage made their living from the land. Subsistence living was neither an alternative lifestyle nor a quaint anachronism. It was what people did. Today, the reasons for living out in the boonies are different. The peace and quiet of country life, the opportunity to regularly see foxes,… (more)
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Wild Farms: Woodland Gardening in the 21st Century
In the spring of 1780, Jonathan Carpenter and his cousin set out from their home in southern Massachusetts to start a new life in Pomfret, Vermont. On May 13, they bought 100 acres of land, and two days later, Carpenter recorded in his diary, “…we began to chop and made the first stump on our land.” On May 20, he… (more)
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Bee Lining: The Oldtimers’ Way to Find Wild Beehives
Honeybees have been domesticated for millennia, but they don’t always rely on the housing beekeepers provide them in exchange for harvesting their honey. Honeybees remain wild enough to survive on their own, and they can do so miles from the orchards and other food sources with which we associate them. Often, they’ll build their hive in a hollow tree deep… (more)
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The Ballad of the Golden Maple
In December, 2009, a few days after we published a story in our winter issue about wood industry woes and low mill prices, a logger in northern New England fired up his chainsaw and cut down a nice hard maple tree. How nice? The tree, henceforth known as the “golden maple,” was sold for $1,636. We stand by our winter… (more)
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Bats on the Brink: White-nose syndrome hits home
If this story were a movie, it might best begin with a flashback. After the opening credits, perhaps backed by an ominous soundtrack, we’d be transported back two years, to a happier time before white-nose syndrome had wiped out roughly 90 percent of the local bat population. It is September 2007, and Scott Darling, the bat biologist for Vermont’s Fish… (more)
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To Tap or Not To Tap?
When visitors arrived at Ed Lanigan’s 309-acre tree farm in Alton, New Hampshire, he waved them over to a row of sugar maples he had tapped a couple of weeks earlier. The March breeze had a chill to it, but that didn’t bother him. He grinned as he lifted the cover off a sap bucket, revealing a great run from… (more)
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Flower Show in the Woods
For six wintry months, trees have appeared as woodblock reliefs or iron sculptures, their bare limbs framed against a cold horizon. But as spring unfolds, stark branches morph into soft beauty. It’s as though one night the woodland fairies that Irish poets so readily imagine came and decorated every tree branch with a bouquet of flowers. Spring foliage doesn’t usually… (more)
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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… (more)