Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell yesterday urged Congress to permanently authorize an expiring program that allows proceeds from timber sales to be used for forest restoration, arguing it enjoys broad bipartisan support.

Tidwell said a recovering housing market has generated more demand for wood products, which could allow the agency to raise more revenues to fund forest restoration projects.

At a hearing before the House Agriculture Subcommittee on Conservation, Energy and Forestry, Tidwell also discussed the effects of sequester cuts, the success of collaborative planning and the Bureau of Land Management's new hydraulic fracturing rule.

Continue reading...

Starting in March, keep your eyes peeled for Seeking the Greatest Good: The Conservation Legacy of Gifford Pinchot on your local PBS affiliate (check your local listings here). Seeking the Greatest Good is a documentary produced by the public television station WVIA that links Gifford Pinchot’s conservation philosophy with the Pinchot Institute for Conservation’s (PIC) efforts to address contemporary environmental issues.

Continue reading on the Forest History Society blog...

On climate change, the Obama administration seems to be finding its voice.

That was not always the case: because President Obama was not about to let climate change disrupt his second-term chances, during his first term he sat quietly as Republicans vociferously attacked anyone trying to construct an effective climate-change policy for the nation.

These assaults, Anthony Leiserowitz of Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies told Bill Moyers recently, were part of a larger "disinformation campaign" that the fossil-fuel industry has funded: "I mean, they're very happy, thank you very much, with the status quo," delighted with the results of their actions "to get people to believe that the experts do not agree."

Among those who deferred was the Obama administration, and that's still true to some extent. In mid-February more than 40,000 climate activists rallied around the White House as part of the nation's largest such fossil-free rally ever, but the president was a no-show. Instead, he was on a Florida golf course, shooting a sunny round with oil-and-gas executives.

This tone-deaf moment aside, off the links President Obama and the executive branch are starting to speak about the urgent need to protect life on Earth.

Continue reading on KCET.org...

The loss of certain forest ecosystems may be inevitable in a future shaped by climate change, the chief of the Forest Service said yesterday.

Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell delivered his frank assessment of the challenges posed by global warming yesterday as the guest speaker for the 2013 Pinchot Distinguished Lecture, hosted by the Pinchot Institute for Conservation at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C. He stressed that his agency, now more than a century old, will need to adjust its standards and practices quickly to keep up with the rapid pace of ecosystem change under global warming.

"I can't stress this enough: The things we learned in school -- what's right for this stand of trees, what's right for this watershed -- might not work in the future," he said.

Among the changes, the Forest Service may have to suspend its long-standing mandate of restoring ecosystems that have experienced disturbance events, he said.

"There are certain areas that we are not going to be able to maintain. There are places we've seen where aspen [trees] have been lost, and we've gone in and tried to restore them, when the reality is, we've lost the site, it's not coming back."

Read the full article on ClimateWire (paywall)

Instead of selling or logging their land to pay medical bills as they age, could family forest owners trade carbon credits for health care?

A new pilot program in Columbia County is trying to find way for small forestland owners to pay for healthcare without cutting more trees. It’s next in a series on innovative environmental ideas.

Collectively, small private landowners own a lot of the tree-covered turf in the U.S. But a lot of that forestland – an area the size of Idaho, according to the Pinchot Institute for Conservation – is at risk of being lost to development as owners age over the next 20 years.

Click here to continue reading this article from Ecotrope.

U.S. producers of wood pellets will likely need to meet or exceed sustainability standards set by the European Union for solid biofuels in order access the European export market. Two reports have recently been published that examine the economic, environmental and policy implications of the expanding wood pellet market...

Click here to continue reading this article from Biomass Magazine.

This all came to mind for me today as I viewed a new series of videos posted by The Forest Guild with the support of The Pinchot Institute.  The series is basically one story told from four perspectives; renewable energy production, forest management, conservation and environmental protection, and policy. I found it interesting to see how one basic message can be tailored to four different audiences, and I appreciate their foresight to produce the series in that manner.

Click here to continue reading this post on the Go Wood Blog.

Two dozen landowners across three states will share more than $175,000 in Common Waters Fund grants to develop forest management plans and implement sustainable management practices that protect water quality. The awards were distributed in September by the Pinchot Institute for Conservation.

Read the full article on The River Reporter's website.

VERNONIA — A cemetery may seem an unusual place to test the world’s first ground-based laser scanning forest carbon valuation system, but then again, a project that links carbon credits with health care is not the norm either.

Read the full article in The Daily Astorian or visit the Forest Health Human Health Initiative webpage to learn more.

Ecosystem Marketplace has published a two-part feature on the Pinchot Institute's Bay Bank, an innovative program to help landowners earn credit for conservation measures undertaken on their property. Part one focusses on how the Bay Bank can specifically help family farmers and small landowners; the second part profiles a landowner demonstration project featuring brook trout credits. For more information about the Bay Bank please visit the Bay Bank program page.

The Common Waters Fund, a project of the Pinchot Institute, recently awarded $250,000 in grants to forest owners in the Upper Delaware River Basin to develop forest management plans and implement sustainable management practices that protect water quality.

Visit the Pike County Courier for the full story.

Plans for woody biomass facilities and other innovative energy projects in Vernonia are moving forward with the help of a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The USDA awarded the city $25,000 from its Forest Service Woody Biomass Utilization grant, part of a $3 million package of funding doled out to renewable energy projects nationwide.

Pinchot Institute Senior Fellow Catherine Mater has worked closely on the project, the first of its kind planned in the nation.

Read the full article here or visit the Pinchot Institue's bioenergy page to learn more.

Wayne County Conservation District Watershed Specialist Jamie Knecht talks about the Common Waters Fund on Wayne Pike Now, a weekly radio show in northeastern Pennsylvania.  The Common Waters Fund is a $1 million fund to maintain and improve the forests of the Upper Delaware Valley.  The Common Water Fund is administered by the Pinchot Institute for Conservation.

For more information about the Common Waters Fund or to download a podcast of the interview, visit Wayne Pike News .

A study of the potential health impacts of gas drilling has been proposed for the Delaware River Basin.  The Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health proposed the Health Impact Assessment (HIA), believed to be only the third of its kind in the country.  The idea of an HIA came out of a December 2010 meeting of stakeholders in the Pinchot Institute’s Marcellus Shale Report, an overview of best management practices, current regulations and natural resource information.

Read the River Reporter article here .

Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell spoke to WNPR about the centennial of the Weeks Act from the Pinchot Institute's Symposium, "Forest Land Conservation in the 21st Century" at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.  Listen to the interview here or learn more about the symposium and the Weeks Act Centennial here.

On Thursday, the town of Vernonia, Oregon, broke ground for an innovative K-12 school that will double as a community center. The school will also function as a center of rural sustainability. Oregon university students will conduct research on how timber towns, like Vernonia, can use their forest resources to reinvent themselves. Please click here for the article, written by The Oregonian Editorial Board.

The Chesapeake Bay Program reports on Small Watershed Grants given by the USFS. The Pinchot Institute will use $120,000 from the USFS for eastern brook trout habitat credits. The project will purchase credits for protection and enhancement of coldwater stream eastern brook trout habitat in the Cacapon/Lost River watershed in Hardy, Hampshire and Morgan Counties. Please click here for the article.

Lou Etgen, program director of the Alliance of the Chesapeake Bay reports in the Chesapeake Bay Journal of the collaborative effort between the Pinchot Institute, Sustainable Solutions, LLC and the Alliance of the Chesapeake Bay to develop LandServer, a conservation assessment tool for landowners, producers and property managers, now available online.

In the January 3, 2010 edition of The Raleigh (NC) News and Observer, Char Miller, Senior Fellow for the Pinchot Institute and Professor of Environmental Analysis at Pomona College, and James G. Lewis explore the comparisons between the words of Gifford Pinchot in the early 1940s and Obama at the Copenhagen climate-change meetings.

Referencing the Pinchot Institute for Conservation's report entitled, "Managing Deer in the Commonwealth: A Study of Pennsylvania and other States," John Hayes of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette explores forest regeneration with reduced deer herds. Please click here for the article and click here for more information on the report.