January 5, 2006
Good fences make good forests, book shows
“Frequencies” is the name for a fence of 2-inch diameter branches that doesn’t simply mark one’s property line, it undulates along it.
“Symphony” offers 3-inch diameter poles in a 5-foot-tall grid, much like the bars of written music.
And “Thicket,” with bundles of 7- to 8-foot-long branches in place of typical fence boards, makes for a sturdy barrier with a top that looks like, well, a thicket because the branches are left natural and not trimmed to a single height.
About half the fences pictured in the just released Innovative Fence Designs could be tackled by do-it-yourself-ers and home gardeners using basic tools and materials, although this is no typical how-to book.
The real goal of the book is to educate the public about actively managing fire-prone forests and identify ways to generate revenue from the small-diameter timber, poles and branches that fire experts say should be thinned from over-grown forests.
Currently, public agencies generally bear the cost of such thinning activities. Ideally, entrepreneurs, with the appropriate support, could make wood products or produce bio-energy using thinnings that are typically piled and burned in the forest, says Ivan Eastin, UW professor of forest resources and the editor of the fence design book.
The book contains nearly 30 innovative fence designs that use small-diameter timber, generally meaning trees and branches less than 5 inches in diameter.
“We want to increase the economic value of thinned material that generally has a negative value because removing it from the forest costs more than it can be sold for right now,” Eastin says. “By developing innovative fence designs, we hope to provide an economic incentive for thinning over-mature, overcrowded and unhealthy forests. The result will be healthier forests that are more resistant to insect attack and devastating forest fires.”
Rural communities, in turn, would benefit from new jobs if entrepreneurs can establish businesses making fence panels that could be marketed to specialty nurseries or environmental building material outlets in urban areas catering to eco-conscious consumers.
For that to happen, “Innovative Fence Design” is in a bit of the which-comes-first-the-chicken-or-the-egg puzzle because no one has tested the economics of building fence panels using thinnings from forests.
Eastin and other researchers with the UW College of Forest Resources hope to put this to the test this year by helping connect entrepreneurs from rural Washington, Montana and Oregon with funding from sources such as the Washington Technology Center to finance the manufacturing, transportation and marketing of prototype fence panels to evaluate their costs and profitability.
The colorful, picture-format book is unlike a typical how-to book because it starts by describing how fire suppression efforts during the first half of the 20th century resulted in unnaturally high fuel loads in the forests of the western United States. Today many of these forests are so overcrowded with small-diameter trees that small fires rapidly move into the forest canopy, becoming blazing infernos so hot they kill even mature, large-diameter trees, the ones that would normally survive low-intensity fires.
For each design there is full-page color illustration of how the fence might look in a landscape as well as a full-page schematic diagram of the fence and its component parts. Some fences were designed specifically for the book while others are based on designs observed in Japan, Denmark and the western United States. The back cover photo, for instance, is a naturalistic fence with uprights of 4-inch poles and a radiating pattern of 1-inch branches observed in Maui, Hawaii.
A $50,100 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service Economic Action Program supported the research for the book and covered the cost of the first printing. The book is for sale at www.cintrafor.org for $50 per copy, a price meant to help cover the expense of printing a second edition of the book.
Roger Williams, a Seattle architect, prepared the drawings and illustrations, Jesi Asagi did the layout and Watermark Integrated Print Solutions of Seattle published the book.
