Wood gives acoustical as well as visual warmth to concert halls around the world, like Koerner Hall in the TELUS Centre for Performance and Learning in Toronto, designed by Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects. Photo: Eduard Hueber

Trees are fundamental to urban landscapes and natural ecosystems. Wood from trees is a fundamental material for architecture.

The tension between wood in living trees, and wood in buildings and other products, is arguably at an all-time-high on planet Earth.

This is especially true in North America, where primary harvest of irreplaceable primeval forest, having swept across the continent during the last 300 years, is still underway.

In the Pacific Northwest of the United States and Canada, even as fierce political battles rage over the logging or conservation of the last few percent of older forests on public lands, vast acreages of once-vibrant forest in private industrial ownership is being stripped and scoured rapidly.

Wood is beautiful, used well in our homes, shops, and offices. Where it comes from, and the destruction wrought in its taking, can be very ugly.

What would it take to use wood from the Pacific Northwest, the world's largest softwood lumber-producing region, in a truly sustainable, green way?

Sustainable Timber

Most basically, to use wood sustainably, we have to collect what we need from the forest while keeping the overall forest intact.   >>>

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