This is Forest to Frame, where we explore how restoring forests creates beautiful spaces. A podcast dedicated to conversations with industry leaders, shaping the future of the forest industry. And now, here's your host, Russ Vaagen

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Hi everybody, Russ here from the Forest to Frame podcast. I want to talk today about forest restoration. What is forest restoration? A lot of people here that have different thoughts and why do our forests need restoring? And what does that mean for our products? Well, in particular, our federal forests have been in what I would call disrepair for some time. We have been fighting wildfires, while at the same time not doing the actions that the wildfires were. we're doing. So that matter that they're removing fuel, and they're burning the brush, they're burning the grasses, and most people don't realize it. But wildfires, a natural mechanism that happens on an annual basis in these fire dependent landscapes, where we're at here in the Intermountain West, we're in Northeast Washington, right up against the Idaho border, just south of the Canadian border. And like so many of these dry site, fire adapted landscapes, we get dry lightning every summer. And so that starts wildfires. And typically, the grasses out in the open scrub lands burn, and then it burns into the forest. Sometimes you get some catastrophic wildfires. But historically, that was the minority of the acres that were burned every year. The other acres were a mixed severity fire where some trees would die, but most would survive. In some instances, it was an understory burn, and it was a slow-moving, low-intensity kind of a grass fire, if you will, and it would burn the brush, some of the small seedling trees that were out there. And what it did is it created this ecosystem where we had a lot of large trees, wide spaces, a lot of grasses and forage for the animals and a different habitat than we have now. So now we put out these wildfires and all the brush and the trees all start to grow up and we create what's called ladder fuels. And the reason we say ladder fuels is because the flames climb the ladder up into the canopy of the tree. And, you know, why is that important or critical? It's important or critical because when the fire and the flame get into the canopy, they end up burning all the needles or the branches and the greenery of the tree. And when it does that, it kills the tree. So that, when we say catastrophic wildfire, we mean it replaces the entire stand because it burns all the trees down. And unfortunately, you can see it all over the West. So over the last 40 years, we have been putting out wildfires for a lot longer than that. Since the days of Gifford Pinchot and Teddy Roosevelt, we've been putting out wildfires. But we also managed those for us. We cut a lot of timber out there. And now with the fires growing in severity, we keep putting them out, but we're not thinning the forest and doing what the wildfire was doing. So we've got these elevated fuel loads. these forests that have way too many small trees and not enough of the big dispersed large trees that were there. And so when we talk about restoring forests, we're talking about understanding the historic range of variability of that forest, which just means how many trees, what type of trees, what type of brush and shrubbery and grasses were out there, and we can actually model what would have been there, and we can cut the trees accordingly. Leave the biggest and best trees behind, leave a forest that looks like, or maybe the trees are a little smaller because they've been overstocked, but leave a right amount of spacing and the right types of trees so now when they grow larger, Now the forest can withstand that wildfire. Or if we're around a community and we need to keep the wildfire at bay because of the risk of property and to people's livelihood and their health and safety, we may just go in there and thin that forest every 15 to 20 years and knock down the brush accordingly. There's a mix of things there. And then the backcountry the wilderness we let that be wild and if a wildfire happens there so be it, but we don't want human caused fire going into wildlands and we don't want wildland fire coming in and threatening our property or threatening the the forest itself or. The animals in the wildlife and polluting our environment with smoke so. Forest restoration is the activity of thinning these forests, creating the, in many cases, small logs for the sawmills to use. And then fortunately, for our mass timber operation here at Boggin Timbers, we can take that lumber, 2x4s, 2x6s, 2x8s, and we can turn them into cross-laminated timber and glulam beams. And so we're essentially taking the smoke from that atmosphere that would have otherwise burned that fire. We're bringing it out of the forest, we're turning it into lumber and then turning it into these beautiful products. And so that's the act of restoring forests. And so when we say forest restoration or restoration wood from forest restoration projects, that's what we're talking about. And we really encourage our federal land managers to do a lot more of that. And we try to understand that by incentivizing or asking for that product, we are now restoring more acres of our forests. We can talk more about that in a future episode, but forest restoration is the byproduct of creating healthy forests. And we think it's the best way to source mass timber products and other products out there using wood. that doesn't mean that other sources aren't sustainable, or it's, you know, some for some reason, not okay to buy products that aren't for forest restoration, or that are certified or what have you, that everything that is sourced in the US, Canada, North America, and a lot of the The countries out there that manage for us, they do it sustainably but there's different gradients of the types of management and I think forest restoration is one that people need to learn more about and that we need more demand for so we're excited to offer forest restoration and restoration would. and educating people on what needs to go on in our federal forests. And there are some other forests, state and Bureau of Land Management forests, other forests that could use some thinning and forest restoration. But that's what forest restoration is. And if there's any questions or comments, we ask that you leave those and reach out. So thank you very much.

SPEAKER_01

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