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From the Center

What’s in a name? With Northern Woodlands as the flagship program of an organization officially named the Center for Woodlands Education, there has been some confusion over the different names. Where does Northern Woodlands end and the Center for Woodlands Education begin? Are they two separate entities or two names for the same thing?

Northern Woodlands is a registered tradename both for the magazine and for the organization. The distinction we make in-house is that when we use italics, we are referring to the publication, just as you would National Geographic. When Northern Woodlands is not italicized, it’s referring to the organization.

Still, that distinction might not be readily apparent to anyone who doesn’t proofread for a living. In order to help counter some of the confusion, we have changed the organization’s name, adding the word Northern, so we are now the Center for Northern Woodlands Education. We will continue to use Northern Woodlands, italicized and not, to refer to the magazine and the organization. Incidentally, this usage does parallel the situation at the National Geographic Society, the nonprofit organization that publishes National Geographic.

The organization – The Center for Northern Woodlands Education, Inc., or Northern Woodlands for short – is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit governed by the Board of Directors you see listed in the lefthand column. It publishes Northern Woodlands magazine as well as other print publications, including weekly ecology columns syndicated in a number of newspapers, and a ongoing series of region-specific owner’s manuals called The Place You Call Home. In addition, we have an oft-visited and frequently updated website (www.northernwoodlands.org) that contains a growing volume of stewardship information. We also provide the magazine and a teacher’s guide to 300 classrooms throughout the region in our Northern Woodlands Goes to School program.

Northern Woodlands and National Geographic are not the only nonprofit magazines in the country. There are hundreds of them, many covering small special niches, others large-circulation periodicals you might not have guessed were published by nonprofits: Consumer Reports, Smithsonian, Mother Jones, Audubon, Harper’s, and Ms. The list includes AARP, which bills itself as “the world’s largest circulation magazine.” Not bad for a nonprofit. Our aims are more modest: we want to provide the best information on stewardship of our forests to the largest number of people possible.

There are other changes at Northern Woodlands besides the organization’s name. Anne Margolis, who joined our staff six years ago as an editorial assistant and who worked her way up to the position of managing editor, has left. She is pursuing an opportunity to make a difference in the world of renewable energy by working with the State of Vermont’s Department of Public Service. In her time with us, Anne has managed the mountain of paperwork that accompanies each edition and has developed into a very graceful writer. We will all miss her.

Many readers will recognize the name of the person taking over as managing editor. Dave Mance III has written a number of pieces for us in the last couple of years. His examination of Lyme disease and its spread northward, which we published in the Spring 2008 issue, received as much attention from our readers as anything we’ve published. You’ll find another introduction to him in this issue, with his story on the tradition of hunting camps. We are very pleased to welcome Dave to his new role as managing editor.

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