What can our forests become?

Before 1776

Indigenous nations tend these forests for thousands of years, using fire on purpose to open meadows, grow food and keep the woods healthy. What early colonists called wilderness was a landscape people had been managing for generations.

1776

The country starts out with about a billion acres of forest. That is nearly half the land in what became the lower 48.

1860s

Railroads run on wood. Crossties, trestles, fuel and mine timbers pull whole forests into the tracks, and about 20 million acres of trees are cut every decade to keep the country expanding.

1891

The Forest Reserve Act creates the first federal reserves, the start of public land held in trust for everyone. The first designated land was Yellowstone National Park.

1907

Peak cut. Since 1630 the country had cleared about 260 million acres of forest, more land than Texas and Ohio put together. The Lake States pineries were gone in one generation.

1933

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) puts 3 million young Americans to work. In nine years they plant about 3 billion trees, more than half of every tree planted in the country up to then. Some of that work was windrows planted at my grandfather's farm outside Denver, still standing today.

1960s–1990s

American wood manufacturing hollows out. Thousands of small sawmills close as production moves overseas. Today we import about a third of our softwood lumber while good wood rots on the ground here.

2016

America officially becomes a net importer of wood. A country with some of the best growing forests on earth now buys more wood than it sells.

2026

America turns 250. We plant 250,000 trees with American Forests, and stop asking only what we lost.

2030s

Cambium brings the wood economy home: local mills running again, wood coming from the trees already falling in our cities and forests, and mill jobs back in the towns that grow it.

2056

Those seedlings are 30-year-old trees now: shade over a whole city block, a neighborhood several degrees cooler in August, roots holding a burned hillside in place. Mass Timber buildings have helped to dramatically lower emissions of structures across the US.

2126

A century in, the first of them are old growth. Kids climb trees that nobody alive remembers planting.

2276

America turns 500. Whoever is here inherits forests we chose to build, the way we inherited the ones the CCC left us.