FRONT AND CENTER

This is an article that Jim Petersen recently wrote for RANGE Magazine

The Agriculture Secretary oversees a $146 billion annual budget. Most of it – 65 percent - is allocated to food and nutrition programs that target the needy. Five percent goes to “forestry,” mainly the U.S. Forest Service and mostly – about 55 percent – to battle forest fires.

Now that Tom Vilsack is back in the driver's seat at the Department of Agriculture, it’s time for him to stroll over to the White House and have a heart-to-heart chat with President Biden about the West’s wildfire pandemic. Here’s how it might go:

Tom Vilsack is back in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He is almost a cult hero among midwestern farm, ethanol and biotech lobbies.

Why do those who purport to care so much about western Oregon's forests continue to ignore and/or deny such a vast storehouse of history – information that sheds an illuminating light on the past, to say nothing of the future?

Now DeLuca has immersed himself – and the College of Forestry he leads – in an eyebrow-raising proposal that could cost the forestry school dearly. At issue is the political fate of the Elliott State Forest, an enormously valuable natural asset...

I got a telephone call one morning in April 1987 that was to change my professional life.The caller was a man I'd never met: Carl Stoltenberg

A timely reminder that the Biden Administration's climate initiative could benefit mightily from encouraging the world to use more wood, not less.

A new way to visualize the alarming increase in atmospheric CO2 emissions.

The Biden Administration lost no time implementing the big pieces of its promised climate change initiative. It's much too early to know what impact these policies will have on the West’s wildfire pandemic but the early news suggests that the anti-forestry crowd has the ear of policy makers who believe that logging is to blame for our pandemic.

An approach to the wildfire crisis that applies more thinning and more prescribed fire in western national forests that are exposed to extreme wildfire risk. Active management. Triage in forestry.

Nature also doesn't give a damn about human need.Trees aren’t Republicans or Democrats. We think nature doesn’t give a damn.

On snowy nights back in the Forties my father often took me for sleigh rides after dinner. He seemed ten feet tall back then, trudging out ahead of me in the darkness, his gloved hand reaching back to grip my sled's towrope.

Jim Petersen's eulogy for Bob Freres.

Wesley Moss Rickard is remembered. His contributions to forestry were groundbreaking in the work of building resilient forests.

Remembering Thanksgiving

John Marker, a much admired U.S. Forest Service retiree, recently passed away at his home in Hood River, Oregon following a brief illness.

Obituary for lumberman, Milt Herbert, who one admirer once called "our industry's prince". Milt died December 10 in Roseburg, Oregon.

Obituary for forester William "Bill" D. Hagenstein