MY LIGHT
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Rechargeable, compact multi-beam headlamp
with red lighting, designed for outdoor activities.
450 lumens. http://www.petzl.com/nightlifebuilding habits haven’t changed much since
we began shifting away from wood following
the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire.
As venture capitalists like to say, the space is
ripe for disruption.
It also helps that architects are excited to
return to a beautiful material. “The aesthetics
of wood can’t be oversold,” says Craig Curtis,
chief architect with Katerra, a Silicon Valley
startup that opened a 250,000-square-foot
mass-timber manufacturing facility in Spo-
kane Valley, Washington, this summer. Stud-
ies have shown that the human sympathetic
nervous system, which controls our fight-
or-flight response, is less active when we’re
around wood, that students are less stressed
in classrooms made with lots of wood, and
that office workers are happier and more pro-
ductive in wooden buildings. Like houseplants
and windows with park views, wood elicits a
calming connection to the natural world.
So what’s holding back the revolution?
Predictably, the concrete folks aren’t happy
about mass timber. In Washington, D.C.,
lobbyists are trying to hamstring Forest Ser-
vice research, claiming that the government
is unfairly picking winners and losers in the
marketplace. Industry groups have put up
billboards disparaging wood construction and
making unfounded claims about fire risk.
Simple inertia also makes change difficult:
for a century, architects and engineers were
trained to build with concrete and steel, and
most are still taught that today. Producing
mass timber requires expensive machinery,
which is slowing the development of domes-
tic CLT mills. The U.S. has just a handful in
operation at present and is adding only a few
more every year. It will be decades before we
have enough manufacturers across the coun-
try to keep the material and shipping costs
down and the supply up.
Some environmentalists are justifiably
wary of the logging and timber industries,
having seen supposedly green efforts like
salvage logging sometimes used as a smoke
screen for what amounted to deregulation.
Last year in Oregon, backers of a 12-story
mass-timber building faced strong pushback
for sourcing wood that wasn’t Forest Stew-
ardship Council certified. So far most of the
materials going into mass-timber products
in the U.S. come from conventional lumber
sources. To get more environmentalists on
board, the industry needs to catch up to Eu-
rope and incorporate lower-quality wood
from smaller trees into CLT layers. This is
especially important in the wildfire-prone
West, where the wood cleared in thinning
operations is often burned on-site. If insteadyou can find a market for it, small trees can
“pay their way out of the woods,” says Mi-
chael Goergen, vice president of innovation
for the nonprofit Endowment for Forestry
and Communities.
Government support is also essential. Or-
egon has spent hundreds of thousands of
dollars to promote CLT in an effort to boost
its logging industry, but we need the federal
government to incentivize mass-timber con-
struction by favoring it in contracts and offer-
ing tax breaks to developers that incorporate
small-diameter wood into their projects.
Tree crops don’t always provide the kind
of habitat that supports diverse ecosystems.
For that we need to continue fighting like hell
to protect our remaining old-growth forests.
But if you take it as truth that climate change
is the greatest threat to the planet, then mass
timber offers a rare opportunity—a chance
to transform the construction and logging
industries so that we reduce emissions while
adding millions of carbon-sequestering trees
to the landscape. We’ll cut them down and
then grow more, gardening the earth as stew-
ards living in a built world made more and
more out of wood. OMarc Peruzzi writes the Out of Bounds col-
umn for Outside Online. He lives in Montana.