After the Fire: Part 3 on Sustainable Forestry
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Read parts one and two of Michael's Canadian forestry journal here
As our tour continued, we visited an area just outside the small town where Nordic Engineered Wood is based. We drove around a hill, seeing the charred remains of a forest that stretches well into the distance. If you’ve ever walked through a burned forest, you know the difficulty of finding the words to convey the sense of awesome destruction that has taken place. Walking through the blackened landscape felt strange and a little wrong.
Our guides took us a short walk into the area and explained what we were seeing. The land is not flat here. In fact, it looks like someone came through and deep-plowed the field, creating an almost agricultural look. After a fire, the forest can struggle to re-establish itself, explained Sebastian. If it burns too hot, the ground can be damaged (this appears to be a big concern for the areas farther out, where the fires cannot be controlled).
But most often, new trees take root in the top layer of thick moss-like material, and their roots don’t make it into the soil to take anchor. To encourage healthy growth, the foresters use a technique called scarification.
New trees are then planted in the edges of the troughs. They receive nutrients from the top as the water runs down. They don’t get waterlogged in the bottoms, and they take firm root in the soil. This both prevents erosion and helps keep the tree from blowing down.
We also visited the site of a Quebec-style clear cut. As with the site we saw from the plane (see earlier blogs on this subject), there were machine tracks and tree carnage on either side. They weren't pretty to look at, but you could see that the majority of the soils had not been compressed.
On the other side of the road, we gained a better appreciation for what the ground in this area is really like. Walking through the forest is like walking on a 10”-thick foam pad; you never really hit solid ground. Sebastian reached down and ripped a hole in the mossy-lichen covered ground and showed us the sandy soils below. Sure enough, just 20 feet away, at the edge of the road, we saw the rapid transition from lush green to fine dusty sand: a clear reason of the importance of keeping as much of the ground as possible from being destabilized.
I also shot some footage of a soccer stadium being constructed out of those cool, curved glulams made from 1x2 spruce (I wrote about these in my last post). Enjoy.
Michael Anschel is the owner and principal of Otogawa-Anschel Design Build, a nationally recognized and award-winning design and build firm and a committed leader to the Green building movement in Minnesota. He blogs for REMODELING on Tuesdays and the occasional Friday. Michael also serves on the board of Minnesota GreenStar and is CEO of Verified Green, Inc., which consults with builders, remodelers, architects, and state and city officials on Green building. To read Michael's other posts on Green remodeling, click on the link to the right, at the bottom of "about the blogger."
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