Wood

Taking a Closer Look at “Corporate Interests” and the Forest Service

by

Photo by Josh Birnbaum

This weekend, I ran across this op-ed piece in the Denver Post by JoAnne Ditmer. In it, she said:

That’s what critics call the Wilderness and Roadless Area Release Act, which would erase current protections on more than 60 million acres of America’s undeveloped public lands, including 4.6 million acres in Colorado. The act would affect 55 million acres in national forests and almost 7 million acres in Bureau of Land Management properties, “releasing” them to corporate profit-making decisions.

I don’t think that that is exactly true, as there are regulations and environmental laws that intervene between “release” and “corporate decisions.” It’s not a simple and direct relationship.

And:

The vast majority are in the West and this is an alarming signal that some powerful people think the West and its spectacular landscapes no longer deserve special protections. With protection removed, these irreplaceable lands would be open to destructive “multiple use” — oil and gas development, mining, timber harvests, off-road vehicles.

“Come help yourself to our national treasures” seems to be the motto.

I don’t think that timber harvests or off-road vehicles are best described as “corporate interests,” at least not here in the Interior West. Which is, after all, where the Denver Post is located. What I would call Urban Elk Country.

I know that corporations are unpopular these days, so therefore are good for inflammatory op-eds. And the word “corporations” comes from corpus or body- so all organizations, in a way, are “corporate.”

Nevertheless, I wonder if “corporate” really is a good term to use about the timber industry in the Interior West. In the WFLC Newsletter (here), I ran across this Photography Fellowship Blog for the International Year of Forests. Take a look, many interesting photos.

So I happened to click on one labelled “Ovando Montana” by Josh Birnbaum that showed the Pyramid Mountain Lumber mill (photo above). I wondered if the conversation would change if instead of “corporate timber interests” people substituted “local businesses that provide family-supporting-wage jobs in rural areas.”

And so back to our discussion of “corporate huckster” here. How about substituting for “corporate huckster” “supporter of local businesses that provide family-supporting wage jobs in rural areas and otherwise contribute to their communities.”

I don’t think we’ll be able to work our way out of our current economic crisis (bad for people, good for GHG reduction) without acknowledging that there is value to companies that providing goods and services to people, thereby providing jobs and taxes.

To my mind, there is a big, and important, differences between the Pyramid Valley Lumbers of the world, and, say, Conoco or Enron.

How the Forest Service Saved Baseball- From Discover Magazine

by
Pittsburgh Pirates catcher Ryan Doumit breaks his bat during a recent game. Since a 2008 study exposed a pivotal structural weakness in maple bats, the number of shattered bats has dropped 50 percent. Courtesy Major League Baseball

Another “home run” from the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin. Did you know that Aldo Leopold was the Assistant Director of the Forest Products Laboratory. If you’re interested, check out this video on FPL history, or browse their website here. If you want to know about wood you can probably find something of interest in their general interest publications here.

Link to the Discover story here.

In April 2008, a jagged projectile of maple wood hurtled into the stands at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles and struck Susan Rhodes in the face. She left the ballpark with a concussion and a broken jaw. By June, Major League Baseball (MLB) had commissioned a $500,000 investigation into the alarming number of bats that had shattered that season, including more than 750 in just three months.

Fans attending the 2011 World Series should be relatively safe from impalement, owing to some sharp scientific sleuthing that has reduced the number of pulverized bats in the league by 50 percent and shed light on one of baseball’s strangest mysteries.

In their 50-page report to MLB, the 
researchers, led by U.S. Forest Service engineer Dave Kretschmann, pinned blame squarely on two culprits: the type of wood (maple) and the cut of the grain. The conspicuous spike in shattered sticks, they discovered, coincided with a shift in preference from traditional ash bats to maple, a supposedly more durable wood that skyrocketed in popularity after Barry Bonds clobbered a record-breaking 73 home runs with maple bats in 2001. The researchers also found that in some bats the wood fibers ran along the handle at an angle, instead of straight up; parallel fibers create a solid foundation to absorb the force of the ball. Angled fibers are easy to spot in ash but are nearly invisible in maple, so manufacturers were unknowingly distributing bats that were sapped of up to three-quarters of their potential strength (although Bonds did not seem to notice). “That’s the problem you have when you make something with wood,” Kretschmann says. “There are so many variables.”

MLB has since mandated that bat manufacturers place an inkblot on the handle of every maple bat they make. The ink bleeds along the grain of the wood, allowing a third-party agency contracted by the league to ensure that the fibers run at an angle of no more than 3 degrees from vertical. As a result, the number of splintered bats plunged by 30 percent in 2009 and continued a steady descent last season. For Kretschmann, watching baseball has never been more satisfying: “On a high-definition TV I can see the little black inkblots and say, ‘Oh, I was involved in that.’ ”