Abstract

In the twentieth century, a decades-long debate about timber conservation in America began to shift. As opposed to cutting fewer trees and planting more, conversations about sustaining the nation’s forests increasingly circled around the ideal of higher utilization. Fundamentally, higher utilization meant waste reduction, which entailed turning a greater percentage of the harvested forest into useful products. Practically, this meant finding new markets for building materials that were made from what had previously been considered waste: the tops and branches of trees, lower value tree species, sawdust, and the edges of trimmed logs and boards. This essay will trace the strange ways in which publicity for these materials evaded any association with waste reduction, focusing instead on notions of purity and naturalness. In addition, it will demonstrate how these products were assiduously positioned to retain their associations with solid timber, even while leveraging claims to scientific improvement upon and transcendence of “natural” wood’s intrinsic limitations.

摘要

在 20 世纪，美国关于木材保护的长达数十年的争论开始发生转变。与减少砍伐和种植更多的树木相反，关于维持国家森林的讨论越来越多地围绕着提高利用率的理想展开. 从根本上说，更高的利用率意味着减少浪费，这需要将更大比例的采伐森林转化为有用的产品。实际上，这意味着为以前被认为是废物的建筑材料寻找新的市场：树木的顶部和树枝、价值较低的树种、锯末以及修剪过的原木和木板的边缘。本文将追溯这些材料的宣传以何种奇怪的方式回避与减少废物的任何关联，而是专注于纯洁和自然的概念。此外，它将展示这些产品如何坚持不懈地保持其与实木的联系，即使在利用科学改进和超越“天然”木材内在局限性的主张时也是如此。