2001 – Issue 1 (April)
News Briefs
Monongahela NF Increases Cut Conservationists in West Virginia are urging the public to oppose a U.S. Forest Service amendment to the Monongahela National Forest’s management plan for threatened and endangered species. The plan outlines an increase in logging to 10 million board feet (almost double what it is now) and 100 acres of herbiciding a…
Read MoreVA’s Iron Furnaces Sparked History Of Forest Abuse
images/avcovers/callietube.gif An early spring visit to the Roaring Run area of the Newcastle Ranger District in Virginia’s George Washington-Jefferson National Forest lifts off the winter blahs. Leaf buds are swelling on some of the trees, and yellow fringe trims witch hazel branches. On the soft, moist forest floor, perennial plants are beginning their regrowth for…
Read MoreBug Buddies: Some Insects Find Power In Numbers
images/voice_uploads/monarchclustr.gif Collecting sassafras sprays to feed the hungry cecropia caterpillars I was raising a couple of summers ago, I found a contingent of tiny caterpillars clustered on the underside of a leaf. They weren’t cecropias, or any other sassafras-eating caterpillar I knew. What struck me was the way they had arranged themselves: flank to flank,…
Read MoreModern Day Mountain Midwives Help At Home
Childbirth is no longer the mystifying, women-only topic it used to be. Nowadays, fathers are allowed in the delivery room, and sometimes even “catch” the baby. That is, if the hospital allows it, and if the hospital allows men in there at all. And only if there is a baby to catch, rather than a…
Read MoreThe Basket Man
images/voice_uploads/jessebutch.gif Jesse Butcher nearly lost one of his hands before he discovered what artistry it could perform. In fact, anyone who saw the lanky Tennessean in a hospital emergency room that spring day in 1977 would have considered him lucky just to be alive. “I was sawin’ locust poles for my neighbor, Earl Woods,” says…
Read MoreCores, Cougars & Corridors
Bob DeGroot has a dream. He dreams of a day when eastern cougars can travel unimpeded by development from the mountains of Pennsylvania into the Maryland hill country and across the spine of Appalachia into Virginia and West Virginia — all without leaving the protection of forest. DeGroot, president of the Maryland Alliance for Greenway…
Read MoreJulia “Butterfly” Hill Speaks At Sweet Briar College
Julia “Butterfly” Hill became a focus of international attention as she spent 738 days on a platform suspended 180 feet up in 1,000-year-old redwood tree in California. On March 13, as the featured speaker for the 3rd annual Julia B. Waxter Environmental Studies Forum at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, she spoke to an overflow…
Read MoreSweet Briar Debates Logging
This year, in addition to Julia Butterfly’s talk, the Sweet Briar College campus was the site of a meeting of the international 500-Year Forest Foundation, which advocates restoration of the world’s forests to their natural state of maturity. Paradoxically, the college is currently involved in an internal controversy over how to manage its own forests.…
Read MoreLocust Trees Helped America Win Wars, Grow Crops
It does not have the spreading majesty of a white oak, nor the reputation of the American chestnut. Unlike the maple, its fall color is not spectacular, and few homes have furniture made from its woods. Yet the locust tree (Robinia pseudoacacia) is a very useful hardwood with its own remarkable beauty. This native mountain…
Read MoreStudy: Appalachian Forests Dying From Acid Rain
The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 were supposed to solve the acid rain problem of the 70’s and 80’s, but a new study by scientists at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire finds that the Act hasn’t gone far enough. The Hubbard Brook study, overseen by the U.S. Forest Service, found that…
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