Friends Helping Friends Choose Good Wood

While considering embodied carbon is critical to making climate-smart buildings, it can also distance and abstract the impact of our choices. We’ll study how our wood selection and specifying shapes local forests – for better and worse.

The Pacific Northwest is the nation’s ‘wood basket’ with 28 percent of the nation’s softwood lumber supplied from Oregon and Washington. So – whether you specify FSC, leave the choice to the lumberyard, or somewhere in-between – you directly impact our local forests. These choices inform forest management, which influences climate resiliency of the forests, the health of the soil, watershed, wildlife, and more. And perhaps most timely, forest management can be one of the most significant factors that affect the frequency and severity of wildfires.

By choosing climate-smart wood, we can help scale the market for responsibly-produced forest products, while helping increase carbon sequestration, improve the resiliency of our forest ecosystems, enhance water quality and quantity, and ensure a robust forest products industry for our region at the same time.

Join Brent Davies, vice-president of forest and ecosystem services at Ecotrust, and Corey Omey, architect and owner of EMA Architecture LLC, for a nuanced look at the confluence of forest management and climate-smart wood selection and specification, and the connection between people and our forests.

Co-hosted by Ecotrust and the Build Local Alliance, with support from Solar Oregon.

Part of Sustainable Building Week 2020.

Register here