Embody Ethos, Not Carbon

Research and Analysis of the Emerging Mass Timber Industry

The Paper

Welcome to a new project about the importance of investing in our climate’s future and how timber construction will be the game changer in removing carbon from our ecosystem.

In the Fall of 2022, thirty interviews were conducted with mass timber experts by the author of this paper as an independent project at Harvard Business School. These experts' experience and backgrounds range across the mass timber industry's disciplines, from carbon trading, timber harvesting, manufacturing, fabrication, development, construction, and biophilia.

This research shares key insights to educate readers on the application, strategies, co-benefits, and investment opportunities for future ventures across the mass timber industry. While the subject matter of mass timber appears to be about development and construction, deeper investigation reveals a comprehensive story about visionary leaders working together and making strategic investments to keep their competitive edge.

KEY OBSERVATIONS

The Film

Through this exploration, it became clear that we cannot separate the building from the forest if the goal is to use timber for its most sustainable qualities. This realization inspired further research to go out to the forests and follow the timber along its journey from the tree stand to the structure.

In the Spring of 2023, the building of gardens was created as a visual research and part of the MDes Open Projects at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The film documents a complete journey of timber as a commercial building material from the forest; milling, manufacturing, fabrication, construction, and replanting.

Emerging Narrative

While this journey began as an analytical categorization, narratives across history and politics emerged with an emphasis on relearning lost knowledge. Across temporal and political boundaries, these narratives are representational of native peoples, colonial extraction, the military-industrial complex, timber as agriculture, conservation, and the need to live more sustainably with nature.

Over the last four hundred years, practices of extraction, agriculture, and preservation have been competing for dominance within America’s timberlands. Yet, the local knowledge of living sustainably with nature through tending the natural ecologies of forests and lands has always existed among the Native Peoples. As timber has emerged as a low-carbon solution for our built environment, native practices for sustainable harvesting and land management have reemerged as contemporary ideas for climate change mitigation.

Production

The film is composed using historical and present-day narratives in voice and music layered with the visual representation of the contemporary industrial processes of mass timber from across multiple sites in Seattle, Portland, and Southern Oregon.

In the words of  Suzanne Simard, “We all need to get out in the forest.”

Enjoy!