Excellent solution to deforestation, sprawl, water retention,
CO2 sequestration, adding cool shade, etc, etc, etc...!
There are some challenges that need to be addressed, too:
* Urban lumber is often peppered with metal objects, such as screws, bolts, cables, etc... While these can sometimes create beautiful changes to the wood, they also damage saw blades and can create a real safety issue for people sawing the
trees or working with the wood. We would need a campaign to raise awareness about how we use these trees during their active growing years to avoid this problem;
* We'd need to develop a network of small businesses to handle small volume, scattered wood lots, and more awareness of urban forestry
* We'd need to develop a system for dealing with sudden windfalls -- literally -- from storm-damaged trees, especially as our warming climate causes more frequent and more violent storm events
* We could develop community/city/county connections to
local wood crafters to encourage the use of urban lumber from both planned harvests as well as storm-damaged trees.
* We need to raise awareness that planting trees, maintaining them, and harvesting them does NOT have to follow the current big-business paradigm (large company with huge, very expensive equipment only deals with large tracts of
land in non-sustainable ways), and encourage the use of even the smaller trees and trimmings -- mulch and piles of free material for hugelkulture are both good, too!
* Dead and damaged wood can be made available for hugelkulture (or allowed to
compost in place), instead of an energy-intensive process to use stump grinders to turn everything into chips and mulch.
* Some wood lots can be managed to supply raw materials for district heating plants, biomass heating of public buildings, pain mounds, hugelkulture, landscaping, etc...
* Many communities are so worried about liability that access to logs is severely limited -- where it exists at all. These are very real concerns -- walking around and selecting logs from a large pile is intensely dangerous. We may need to change the status quo and develop a position for qualified persons (arborists, loggers, etc...) to assist in getting these resources to people who can use them. This could save lots of money as opposed to the stump grinder and/or burn pile methods currently used in many places.
* Education needed: Awareness seminars, as well as tree planting, pruning, and maintenance workshops are probably needed in small and large communities across the land, and I suspect these would be very popular events.
* Photo galleries,
art shows in galleries and public works projects to showcase products made from local, "found" wood could be a powerful way to raise awareness!
Those are a few ideas off the top of my head, but as a person who gets almost all the wood I use for turning bowls, vases, hollow forms and other wooden objects from local "stump dumps" or from leftovers at logging sites -- for free -- I know these systems can be developed, and we can plant and harvest millions of trees if we decide it must be done.
Keep up the good work -- well done!