Making the most of wasted wood. (Clippings).

AMERICAN FORESTS will help Baltimore develop a plan to reuse inner city wood waste while creating new jobs and reforesting the urban landscape, thanks to a grant from the U.S. Forest Service's Northeast Area. The Inner City Project grant awarded to AMERICAN FORESTS' Urban/Rural Initiative is designed to explore ways residents can use otherwise wasted wood to turn a profit.

"The program is a really new and different way to use trees that would have gone to waste," says Bryant Smith, executive director of the Urban Arts Institute in Baltimore. "It's a great way to get the community involved in their neighborhoods while cleaning up the environment."

As with any city, Baltimore's urban environment is tough place for trees to grow. Many die of old age, are plagued by disease, damaged beyond repair by storms, and removed for development. Each season, thousands of these trees are dumped in a city wood landfill called Camp Small. Creating room for the landfill and the trucks that bring in the logs has degraded some of the forestland, wetlands, and streams at Cylburn Arboretum, where Camp Small is located.

Project partners are exploring ways to help residents make a profit from the wood by turning it into furniture, landscaping materials, timber exports, or clean-burning charcoal via innovative technologies, to name a few. Project partners include Revitalizing Baltimore, the Urban Arts Institute, and the Woodberry neighborhood's Urban Forest Initiative.

"We're really lucky to have so many groups interested in the program," Smith says. "Baltimore has been plagued by these stockpiles of wood, good wood that shouldn't go to waste. I think people are beginning to understand and take the initiative to do something about it now."

The Urban/Rural Initiative's business plan is a critical step toward helping communities and policymakers create an economy that will restore and maintain their urban forest as one would sustainably manage a rural forest.

Ideally trees that were no longer viable would be removed, a government entity would contract with a business such as this to "re-use" the trees by manufacturing and selling value-added products, and government profits would be reinvested in restoring functioning urban ecosystems. As a result, Baltimore would realize the reforestation of degraded land, existing forests would be given a market value to be protected, wood-waste would be recycled, and jobs would be created.

AMERICAN FORESTS is creating two pilot projects to test and replicate community-based forestry principles that link urban and rural communities. The second project is in Seattle. For more information on the program, contact Iahn Leahy at 202/955-4500 x236 or email [e-mail].