A decade or so ago, a friend showed me his copy of a book called Make a Chair from a Tree. Now who could possibly resist a title like that? With its step-by-step procedures for making a…

Dawn, in early November: stepping outside, I hear a twittering from on high. Against the brightening sky, I glimpse a small bird with a rounded head and a long, pointed bill. On rapidly…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…