Tag: logging

  • Mining the Soil for Biomass Energy

    Min­ing the Soil for Bio­mass Ener­gy — Thurs­day, April 16 at 1 pm PT / 4 ET Jon Rhodes, water­shed hydrol­o­gist, has more than thir­ty years of pro­fes­sion­al expe­ri­ence eval­u­at­ing the impacts of log­ging and road build­ing on for­est ecosys­tems and water­sheds. Jon runs Plan­e­to Azul Hydrol­o­gy, which pro­vides afford­able water­shed exper­tise for a wide vari­ety of con­ser­va­tion…

  • Save America’s Forests and Wild Lands from Anti-Environmental Congress

    The log­ging, graz­ing, min­ing and oth­er extrac­tive indus­tries are mount­ing an intense attack on our nation’s pub­lic lands.  The Decem­ber 2014 lame duck ses­sion of Con­gress saw an ugly brew of anti-con­ser­va­tion ini­tia­tives remov­ing legal con­ser­va­tion pro­tec­tion from mil­lions of acres of pub­lic lands. But this was just the tip of the oncom­ing extrac­tive indus­tries iceberg.…

  • Soil is Not Renewable

    - by Friends of the Wild Swan and Swan View Coalition Soils are the foun­da­tion of ter­res­tri­al life. For­est pro­duc­tiv­i­ty is direct­ly tied to soil con­di­tions. Soil takes thou­sands of years to devel­op and is not “renewable“on a human time scale. Soil is an ecosys­tem in itself that must be healthy in order to pro­vide…

  • Hardwood Trees Chipped for Nova Scotia Biomass

    - by Roger Tay­lor, Feb­ru­ary 26, 2015, Her­ald Business Hard­wood trees are being allowed to go up in smoke, and with them a num­ber of rur­al man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs that are hard to replace. It is easy to reach that con­clu­sion after read­ing sto­ries about sev­er­al com­pa­nies in rur­al Nova Sco­tia that have been mak­ing prod­ucts from…

  • Study: Logging Destabilizes Forest Soil Carbon

    - by John Cramer, Decem­ber 2, 2014, Dart­mouth College Log­ging does­n’t imme­di­ate­ly jet­ti­son car­bon stored in a forest’s min­er­al soils into the atmos­phere but trig­gers a grad­ual release that may con­tribute to cli­mate change over decades, a Dart­mouth Col­lege study finds. The results are the first evi­dence of a region­al trend of low­er car­bon pools in soils…

  • Is Biomass All It’s Cut Up to Be?

    - by Howard Brown, Octo­ber 17, 2014, Sum­mit Daily One pos­si­ble rea­son for stick­ing to the ill-advised Ophir Moun­tain and oth­er clear-cut­ting plans is that the clear-cut trees would go to the bio­mass pow­er plant in Gyp­sum. Bio­mass pow­er is renew­able ener­gy. It wouldn’t jus­ti­fy destroy­ing Sum­mit County’s won­der­ful forests and trails, but bio­mass is green ener­gy…

  • Thanks to NY Biomass Incinerator, Firewood More Difficult to Find

    - by Pete Cree­don, Octo­ber 6, 2014, Water­town Dai­ly Times Always nice to see a com­pa­ny come in an offer jobs and oth­er things that will ben­e­fit the area it serves (“ReEn­er­gy wins huge con­tract at Drum,” Sept. 30). The ques­tion is, at what cost? The peo­ple this will affect in a neg­a­tive way are a small group…

  • From Beetle Kill to Biomass

    [More indus­try pro­pa­gan­da than a news arti­cle, but it demon­strates the bio­mass indus­try’s  lust for Nation­al Forests to feed their dirty incin­er­a­tors. ‑Ed.] - by Ruth Hei­de, July 22, 2014, Val­ley Courier There’s a dif­fer­ent kind of “gold” in “them thar hills.” It’s in the trees themselves. Cor­rect­ly har­vest­ed, the bee­tle kill tim­ber that exists on pub­lic…

  • USDA Splurges Millions on Biomass Power Incinerators

    [More tax­pay­er mon­ey fund­ing pri­vate cor­po­ra­tions to log Nation­al Forests under the unsci­en­tif­ic guise of “wild­fire pre­ven­tion.” ‑Ed.] -  US Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture, July 23, 2014, Office of Communications Agri­cul­ture Sec­re­tary Tom Vil­sack today announced that the U.S. Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture (USDA) has select­ed 36 ener­gy facil­i­ties in 14 states to accept bio­mass deliv­er­ies sup­port­ed by…

  • Forest Thinning Will Increase Wildfire Risk

    - by Charles Thomas, The Ore­gon­ian As fires again rage across the West, sen­a­tors from John McCain, R‑Ariz., to Ron Wyden, D‑Ore., echo the refrain “thin the forests” to pre­vent wild­fires. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, most of the advo­cat­ed thin­ning will actu­al­ly stoke the wild­fires of the future rather than lessen their occur­rence and impacts. Thin­ning pre­scrip­tions pro­posed in…