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The change will allow contractors to invest in gear and train workers [Oregon] A top Bush administration forestry official announced Wednesday that the Forest Service will try a new business model for contract work in federal forests to help prevent worker abuse and encourage investment in rural communities. The goal is to make forest management…

[North Carolina] About 15 women learned about timber management during a seminar put on Monday by N.C. Cooperative Extension and NCWoodlands, a nonprofit agency that represents the interests of private timber owners. Whitfield drove home the importance of choosing a qualified timber consultant or registered forester to handle management and harvesting of trees. He urged…

Buffalo Creek – a disaster waiting to repeat itself… What happens when sludge ponds attack?! …Within minutes, 125 people were dead, 1,100 were injured and more than 4,000 were homeless. The flood demolished 546 homes and damaged 943 more. A thousand cars and trucks were destroyed. Property damage was estimated at $50 million. By 11…

Preservation efforts focus on private land [New York] A new program being launched by the New York state Department of Environmental Conservation is designed to preserve imperiled habitat on private land like this, although Morgan, who’s coordinating the program, says it’s unlikely to help when a landowner is intent on selling to developers, as this…

[ Virginia ] The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service …has started reviewing scientific and anecdotal information to determine the status of the eastern cougar and not as a prelude to reintroducing the region’s top predator. The eastern cougar has been presumed extinct in the wild for more than a century… If the eastern cougar is…

The objective of this standard is to provide a framework for the procedures to be followed by certification bodies when auditing forest managers and FMUs for compliance with FSC Controlled Wood standards for forest management enterprises FSC-STD-30-010, and integrating the observations to come to a reliable certification decision. News notes are courtesy of Southern Forests…

[New Hampshire] Maintaining and improving the world’s working forests is key to slowing global warming, but climate change will accelerate if the current rate of forest loss continues, according to scientists and policy experts who will speak at a conference in Concord this week. ”Development is really outpacing forestry as the highest and best use…

A great editorial in the Raleigh News-Observer no less! An excerpt… Coal combustion in the United States is also a huge contributor to global warming that releases over 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) a year into the atmosphere. China’s coal use releases 4 billion tons. It does not take a meteorologist to figure…

This is from an email I got from Brent Summerville. One of the biggest challenges about bringing new people into this movement is convincing them that they can actually make a difference. Brent has been doing great work for the high country and recruiting people to this movement for a long time, and he will…