PrairiePundit

Washington Post: The new gold rush: Loggers see money growing on millions of dead trees Workers are coming from across the country to cut California’s drought-stricken forests, offering a silver lining to what has been an ecological tragedy. I have been suggested this as a way to deal with a problem California is having and it appears others have taken up the cause.  Texas experienced a drought a few years ago and I did the same thing with trees on my property, turning the dead ones into either furniture or firewood.  California could also reduce the risk of forest fires by allowing loggers to clean out some of the overgrown tracks.

McClatchy: More than 102 million dead trees now litter California’s drought-flayed forests, according to the latest aerial survey, a finding likely to fuel a heated public-lands debate during the incoming Trump administration. The new number marks an increase of 36 million dead trees since the last Forest Service survey in May. “That’s a hell of a lot of wood,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in an interview Friday. Vilsack, whose department includes the Forest Service, cited the sobering new survey as one more reason to reform the agency’s wildlands firefighting budget. A dramatic increase in forest fires has consumed a growing share of the Forest Service’s overall spending. The majority of the dead trees are located in 10 counties in the southern and central Sierra Nevada region. The Forest Service also identified increasing mortality in Northern California, including in Siskiyou, Modoc, Plumas and Lassen counties. Millions of additional trees are weakened and expect...

LA Times: It's a sad truth of the urban landscape: Today's street tree is tomorrow's mulch. But in the foothills of Santa Barbara, a former stuntman and onetime sea-urchin diver named Rob Bjorklund turns fallen city trees into flooring, mantels, plaques and massive, irregularly shaped conference tables that appear to be suited for a wizard's laboratory. He uses oaks toppled by storms; eucalyptuses leveled by bulldozers; trees taken down for being too old, too sick, too close to foundations, too hard on sidewalks. Many would otherwise be cut for firewood or buried in a landfill. "All these awesome logs!" said Bjorklund, a rangy 52-year-old who tends to sprinkle his conversation with exclamation points when he talks about wood. Part of a growing nationwide movement to reuse urban trees, he operates a sawmill on a rugged 90-acre spread that has been in his family for four generations. On any given day, he said, about 20 trees fall to disease or development in San...