As the markets and utilization forester for Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation, Sean Mahoney’s professional duties range from supporting community wood banks to helping develop regionally sourced hemlock cross laminated timber (CLT). A graduate of the forestry program at University of Vermont, Sean is pursuing a master’s degree from the Yale School of the Environment – as well as raising two young sons with his wife.
I was lucky to grow up in Belmont, Massachusetts, which is one of the older suburbs of Boston. It’s on the edge of the city, with woods, houses, and farms on one side, and on the other side there is a dense urban landscape that has a tremendous amount of arts and culture. As a young person, I could get on the bus or get on the subway or ride my bike and go anywhere, and I have an amazing mom who supported me doing that.
When I was in middle school, I joined a volunteer group that cared for Mass Audubon’s Habitat Wildlife Sanctuary in Belmont. Phyl Solomon is an elder in the community who understood that seniors and young people maybe had extra time on their hands and could do something to help maintain and conserve the forests at the Sanctuary. I would go up there after school every Wednesday. We would meet and introduce ourselves and talk, and then we’d go out for an hour or two and pull up buckthorn or put woodchips down on trails or any sort of project like that that came along. It was really wonderful, not only to get to know the forest in my town, but meeting retired folks who cared about the community, and who cared about us as kids and about our wellbeing – that was just so cool. That’s the early formation of my interest in the environment. There’s a pipeline of us who grew up in Belmont who are in environmental work now, largely through that early structured experience.
I was contemplating either art school or environmental school for college, and I saw the latter had a little bit steadier income and employment. I went to University of Vermont, and that’s where I first got exposed to forestry. I came in as an environmental science major. Larry Forcier, who was the dean at the time, had this wonderful way of describing all the majors that they offered, and he described forestry as kind of that balance between science and people. I thought that was a nice mix, so I transferred over to forestry. I wound up taking Intro to Forestry from Mike Snyder, who was working as Chittenden County forester at the time. If there’s anyone who can captivate you about forestry with a 3-hour lecture at night, it’s Mike Snyder. I was hooked.
While I was there, the UVM Rubenstein School was in the process of redoing The George D. Aiken Center, and as a part of that project, the building committee and faculty involved the students in sourcing wood. Wood from the Jericho Research Forest was incorporated into the green renovation of the building. In forestry school, a simplified task progression is to learn about growing trees and then go out into the woods and mark trees for a prescription, then work with the logger to get trees to the landing, and bye-bye tree. Then you start working on growing the next tree. But with this project, I got to follow the story through the processing. That was eye-opening, to see all these people who were involved in making that tree into a piece of the Aiken Center. There are a lot of fascinating stories about the people, about the history of them working with the wood, every step of the supply chain. I got to ride along and meet them. That sent me down this path of working with wood and helping people who work with wood.
What a utilization forester does depends on where you are in the world or in the country. Some are in more academic settings, while others are in government settings. Some of us are focused on research and understanding scientific properties of wood, others are in extension transferring knowledge, and others – like me – work in public policy. Each of us thinks about how people can do more with the finite amount of trees we have on earth. In Massachusetts, my work focuses on how local people can use local trees to meet basic human needs. There are 7 million people who live in Massachusetts. We use 5 billion feet of wood a year. Six percent of that wood comes from our own forests. More of it comes from around New England. But we also bring in wood from all over the world, or we’re replacing wood with plastic composites. I’m glad that we’re turning milk jugs into decks for people’s houses, but at the same time, there are trees we’re growing here, and there are people involved with the processing, and we’re just disconnected from the wood that’s around us, and from the forest.
A lot of my work is providing basic education about how to use local wood. I got to be a part of building the visitor’s center at Walden Pond, where half a million people visit every year. We used local wood for the decking, the flooring, the ceilings, and the siding of the building. Some of it is pretty high tech. There’s thermally modified ash used for the deck, red oak in the floors, all from Massachusetts. And then there’s wood from all over the country. Sometimes it’s a better choice to source wood from someplace else, but let’s make sure we’re making good decisions about how we’re sourcing that. It’s great to have those conversations.
There are often these architectural trends that put a huge drain on the resource and on the forest, because people want one specific species and one specific cut – instead of looking at the whole forest and what it can provide for everybody. So we get into these challenging conflicts that arise in human relationships with forests. If we can modify a local ash tree to meet that demand, that’s pretty cool. At DCR, we can demonstrate that. We can show you a deck that we made out of ash that comes from New England and is thermally modified to resist rot, without using chemicals. It’s heated in a low oxygen environment, which changes the cellular structure of the wood so it’s resistant to rot, and it looks like your tropical hardwood decking, but it came from here. That’s where utilization comes in handy with meeting sustainability objectives and doing right by the land and the forest and the people.
One project I’m involved with is looking at eastern hemlock and getting that to market as cross laminated timber (CLT). So, how do we take a species here in New England that is considered low value and create a higher value product that stores carbon and builds big buildings in Boston. That requires the research and development of the product. And we also need the market conditions to be correct, but we need the technical side of it done first. I work on this by having conversations in the halls of government wearing my public policy hat, and a little bit of pushing to bring together public officials, researchers, and business representatives, and raising a little bit of money to get the product through the experimental stage. It’s exciting to see the product rise. It takes years, decades to do things. That’s kind of the utilization side of the work.
I’m collaborating with MassArt, which is a publicly funded art college. They have a furniture making program. At DCR we provide wood we’ve purchased from small sawmills in Massachusetts or from our state park system – trees that need to get thinned out around the campground, that sort of thing. MassArt has furniture design students who will have, for example, a public library as a client, and they’ll produce this beautiful furniture for that library. And people get to see that, and they get to see the beautiful material that’s here. What the forest can provide us is something special. If you do it, people see it, and they like it, and we get to do more of it.
The market side of the work brings out this idea of how do you change how people take resources from the landscape? How do you do better forest conservation by understanding that? The forester making decisions in the woods, the landowner making decisions is ultimately governed somewhat by the price society wants to pay for that material that’s coming out of the forest. We think about how the current dynamic is changing the forested landscape, and then maybe think about whether there are ways that we can modify that marketplace or make improvements to that marketplace so that you get a better outcome in the woods. That’s a lofty goal, when most utilization programs around the country are pretty low budget and pretty small and struggle to fund themselves. Any projects we do are grant-based, and that’s a bit of a challenge, to win competitive grants year after year. It’s also difficult to sustain the long-term commitments you need to modify markets. Most forest products take 10, 15, 20 years to get into the marketplace. It’s difficult to do that on 3-year projects, 5-year projects. But it’s also really fun.
The other side of my work has been in wood energy. That’s been challenging. When comparing state owned buildings, DCR is the second largest heating oil consumer because of all the recreational facilities and historic buildings we steward in rural areas. The team I work on does a lot with solar power and air-source heat pumps, but there are some buildings where we don’t have the electric capacity or solar exposure to heat a building in the middle of winter – but we do have the forest, and the forest is a really good collector of solar energy, among so many other benefits. We still need to move forward on breaking oil path dependency to address climate change, and it makes a lot of sense to use wood for heat with modern boilers that are energy efficient and regulated to control fine particulate emissions. We have seven facilities heated by wood pellets so far. We’re adding four more buildings, including three the federal government is helping us with. I had no idea when I started that, as a forester, I would be managing construction contracts. But if there’s no one else to pick up the shovel, and you want to make a difference, then you figure out how to write the contracts and how to raise the money and how to make a change.
When I was in college in Vermont, we visited the Little Hogback Community Forest in Vermont. Every year they have college students come split wood. They have an extra lot that they mark every year, and if nobody needs the wood, they’ll split that and work with the local school to get that wood to a family who needs it. I thought that was one of the coolest things ever. Early in my time at DCR, I wrote my first federal grant to do a pilot project creating three wood banks. I started in Petersham, Massachusetts, with some now lifelong friends to start a wood bank. The idea was to use these trees that were falling during storms on town roads or utility rights of way to support people who couldn’t afford heat. Now, 10 years later, we are continuing to grow, with seven wood banks in Massachusetts, a summer crew that’s helping to process wood in those communities, and a firewood processor. It’s really about building connections between people and the forests. If you see a way that the forest is benefitting your neighbors or benefitting you, it’s less abstract. It creates a really strong bond between a community in a forest.
Foresters are always looking at the seedlings, the little trees. The big trees are important, but we get excited about the little trees – what’s the next crop of trees coming up, the ones that are going to be there when we’re not? I love seeing the landscape of people who work with forests change. I’m really excited to see it diversifying. There are more women involved in woodworking and people with diverse cultural connections to wood. There are entrepreneurs starting businesses and having a go at it. To see people get interested in local wood, figure out how it fits into their ability to make a living at it – that’s really exciting to me. I love getting to work with those businesses coming up and getting started – these seedlings – and see them succeed.
I always feel so fortunate that I get to look back at notes from a lot of past state foresters. I have a lot of documents and notes showing 100 years’ worth of work. I’m so thankful that so much work was done to bring the forest to where it is today. I know nature did a lot of work. But in some instances, there were a lot of people who helped that along. I’m working in forestry at a time when there’s a lot of wood out there, and that’s because people cared. That’s really inspiring and special, and I’m thankful for the opportunity that I have now, which is different than what my predecessors had in the 1920s.
When Anna and I bought our house, in Leverett, it wasn’t within our budget to have a large track of land to manage. We were really mindful about finding a small piece of land that had a lot going on with trees. It’s been phenomenal to see how a half-acre of trees will change, especially where we have a fair amount of species diversity. We have foxes living at our house right now. We have an old farm sugar maple that got hit by the remnants of a tornado in 2019 on Christmas Eve. We had emerald ash borer come through and kill eight trees. Seeing red maple snags wear out and then decline and the woodpeckers aren’t living in them anymore, so you don’t have the northern flickers there – but a couple of years later an ice storm comes and cracks off the top of a pine, and now you’ve got a new snag. To see how a forest that you’re intimately familiar with changes day after day, year after year – that’s really exciting.