rising, and there’s a very simple reason for that. The forests have been causing almost the same amount of cooling as there has been global increase in temperatures,” he said. The film dramatically shows how, not long ago, people lost sight of their dependence on the health and extent of woodlands. In the nineteenth century, incoming settlers literally laid waste to vast swathes of the US hardwood forests to use the timber for building, railway construction and to provide fuel for the industrial revolution. A photographic plate from the 1850s shows a desolate eastern US landscape. Clearcutting has reduced what were once rich forests to an expanse of ragged trunks and stumps stretching to the horizon. The scene resembles a World War One battlefield. Pennsylvania forest owner Van Wagner, whose family emigrated to the region in the 1700s, said settlers had the ‘European mentality’ of the time towards forests. They wanted to farm, forests stood in their way and trees were regarded as weeds.


“They used the best timber to build houses, farms and perhaps a church, everything else they slashed and burned,” he said. Timber, he added, was also used to make charcoal for smelting by a fast-developing iron industry.


The consequence was once heavily forested regions of the eastern US were, by the early 20th century, 75% devoid of trees. But this was when the tide slowly began to turn and the realisation gradually dawned that the forests had a wider significance, that they were more than weeds. Their importance in water retention and regulation and soil maintenance was increasingly understood. The film relates that, ironically, the catastrophic Johnstown, Pennsylvania flood of 1889 devasted the lumber industry around Williamsport. It killed over 2,000 people and destroyed mills in its path. It also overwhelmed booms on the river holding back an estimated 300 million board feet of logs which were swept downstream in a timber tidal wave. Nancy Baker is one of today’s 738,000 family forest owners in Pennsylvania. Her holding has been in the family since 1861. Her grandfather was a logger and owned a sawmill. Her property today was one of the last enclaves of original forest surviving at the time. Walking through the trees she marvels at the forest environment and the interwoven existence of trees, animals and other flora. She talks standing beside stumps and logs deliberately left to rot naturally among the thriving trees. “We leave them here in what is in a way altruistic management,” she explained. “I’m not getting financial gain from it, but the forest itself is really gaining from the dead wood, putting carbon back into the soil and acting as habitat for many organisms; plants


Above: Nancy Baker and Daniel Swift


animals, fungi. It looks dead but it is very active, and we call the dead logs ‘nurse logs’. They nurse seedlings along. It’s a good habitat because it retains moisture and it’s rich in nutrients.”


Being a forest owner, she said, requires a non-instinctual way of thinking. “The rotation of some of these hardwoods is 120 years, so more than a human lifetime,” she said. “It’s difficult, but important to think about that – about the long-term after we’ve gone.”


Michael Williams of the US Forest Service in the Allegheny National Forest explains how American forestry today is also critically focused on adapting the forest to global climate change. “We’re working to make it more resilient to forest pests, disease and windthrow,” he said. This, he explains, includes diversifying the age range of trees. He stands in an area of the forest recently cleared of beech-bark diseased trees. He is up to his shoulders in a sea of new saplings of tulipwood, maple and a wealth of other species. These have rapidly flourished in the newly opened, newly sunlit space, underlining the capacity of the forest to regenerate where managed sensitively and effectively. Mr Williams stressed the point further. “120 years ago, there was nothing here, it was all cleared,” he said waving his arm at the mass of trees young and old. “Now look at it.” The film also follows the journey to the US hardwood forest of UK-based Alison Brooks, founder and creative director of Alison Brooks Architects and a pioneer of contemporary use of timber in construction. “Timber is such a comforting material to be in the presence of,” she said. “We try to use it in the buildings and spaces we design to bring that warmth, that beauty and memory of nature into the realm of architecture, to reconnect us.” At the same time, she emphasises, the provenance of materials is a topic of


increasing concern to architects. In the film she visits the fourth-generation family sawmill Wheeland Lumber in Liberty, Pennsylvania to further reassure herself of US hardwoods’ ethical and sustainability credentials.


Back in the Allegheny National Forest, Mr Williams exemplifies the profound engagement of those involved in ensuring maintenance of the forest. “I’m trying to make sure for my kids and my grandkids, that this place is here for them later,” he said, his voice cracking. This deeply personal commitment and involvement is expressed in Forested Future by multiple others. By sawmillers, by one of the last big furniture makers in America left using native hardwoods following the mass offshore migration of the US furniture sector, by children of the Menominee Tribe and by the logger who can recognise tree species from the smell of the sap that seeps from the holes made by his climbing spikes. Those 19th century settlers may have viewed trees as weeds and seen the forest as an obstacle to their future that had to be swept aside. Today, the film tells us, the US hardwood forestry and timber community know different. Like Chief Oshkosh over 100 years ago, they appreciate that our future has to be a forested future.


FURTHER INFORMATION


Forested Future has been screened in London, the Czech Republic and Spain and is available in German, Czech, French, Italian and


Spanish editions. For the trailer and to receive announcements on further screenings go to www.forestedfuture.film .


www.ttjonline.com | Spring 2026 | TTJ


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