Slow Wood: Connecting Forest History with Ecological Forestry and Green Building

“Slow Wood: Connecting Forest History with Ecological Forestry and Green Building”
Can we reconnect American housing to sustainably-managed local and regional forests? Through the colonial period, houses were mostly constructed and heated directly from local woodlands, but the sustainability of that relationship is debatable. During the nineteenth century, the lumber industry was transformed to a system of national large-scale extraction with devastating consequences. Today, although wood production in America has become a more renewable resource in the limited sense of “sustained yield,” not much of housing ties to diverse local forests that provide multiple ecological benefits. Should it?

Slow Wood describes how author Brian Donahue built a timber frame house from the woods on his farm, utilizing “low grade” trees (hemlock, black birch, suppressed sugar maple, and crooked cherry) through “worst first” ecological forestry. Join them for a conversation about the potential role of traditional methods in housing modern America where Donahue asks if this can be replicated across rural areas, and what it suggests about the greater challenge for ecological forestry and green construction in supplying homes for cities & suburbs.

Brian Donahue is Professor Emeritus of American Environmental Studies at Brandeis University, an environmental historian, and a farm and forest policy consultant. He co-owns and manages Bascom Hollow Farm in Gill, Massachusetts. Donahue is the author of Reclaiming the Commons: Community Farms and Forests in a New England Town (1999), The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord (2004), and Slow Wood: Greener Building from Local Forests (2024), and co-author of American Georgics: Writings on Farming, Culture, and the Land (2011), Wildlands and Woodlands, A New England Food Vision, and Beyond the Illusion of Preservation.

This presentation is approved for 1.0 hours of CFE credit by the Society of American Foresters.