Participants
Meet the Climate Challenge Participants
We’ve broken the mass timber value chain into three broad segments that also serve as our vision for the Forest-to-Cities Climate Challenge: Grow, Build, and Live. Mass timber stakeholders usually fit in one of these segments. “Live,” for example, includes the environmental and housing advocates who can call for change in how we design the built environment, as well as the people who will live and work in tall wood buildings.
Currently, 124 individuals and business have signed the Forest-to-Cities Pledge. View or download a PDF that lists all participants, and take a look at example participants below and read why this program matters to them.
Grow
David Foster
Harvard Forest, Harvard University
“I support this effort in order to increase recognition of the value of forests—both wildlands and woodlands—and to keep them intact across New England.”
Richard G. Carbonetti
Senior VP Timberland | LandVest, Inc.
“As a professional forester I, and our company, recognize the importance of forestry and the use of sustainably managed forest to produce forest products that will contribute to building resilience to climate change.”
David L. Kent
Consulting Forester, Vice President | New England Forestry Consultants, Inc.
“This effort will be a significant climate change mitigation program if it is implemented across the forested landscape. We must begin to apply meaningful changes to “business as usual.” This approach has the potential to do just that.”
Alexander Evans
Executive Director | Forest Stewards Guild
“Climate disruption calls for all of us to do everything we can. As forest stewards, we are ready for the challenge. We can harvest timber in a socially, economically, and ecologically responsible way and putting this timber into buildings is the next piece of the solution.”
Build
Peter Wiederspahn
Architect | Wiederspahn Architecture, LLC
“We are facing a climate crisis, and the building industries contributes a disproportionately large amount of carbon into the atmosphere when producing, operating, and demolishing buildings. Mass timber construction types are the best alternative to current building practices since wood can actually capture carbon from the atmosphere and contain it in the form of building materials. Wood is renewable, regenerative, recyclable, and eminently endearing.”
Peggi Clouston
Professor of Wood Mechanics and Timber Engineering | University of Massachusetts, Amherst
“Building with wood, especially local wood, is a smart and clear way to mitigate climate change. I am joining the challenge because I want to lend my 30+ years of engineering, researching and teaching wood structures, to affect change in a way that it really counts.”
Live
Rick Weyerhaeuser
Senior Natural Resource Strategist | Sonen Capital
“Climate is the key issue of our generation. Natural solutions are the low hanging fruit. Forests are the most cost effective way to make progress in the short-term.”
Marianne Jorgensen
Manager, ALPINE | Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
“Our dependency on concrete and steel to build homes and offices, stadiums, etc., has a large environmental cost—concrete is responsible for 4-8% of the world’s carbon emissions, 85% of mining emissions globally. Building with wood from sustainably managed forests could mitigate carbon emissions—wood stores carbon.”