Raul’s Blog

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It finally rained on Valentines Day! We had to wait a few more days until the ground was saturated with moisture to make sure each of the 2,200 baby Redwoods we are planting this winter have a good chance to grow to Old-Growth Again. They are between 15 and 20 inches tall when planted, after being nursed a couple years to make sure that no child is left behind! The planting will be done in early March. We’ve now planted over 300 acres the past 5 years. Our baby trees are the pride and joy of our business. Some of our young ones are now taller than the parents that planted them. Oh, how time flies.

With the current economy, we don’t take your support for granted. Your purchases over the years are the engine that makes the forest work happen. Thank you.

To grow our forestry work in  coming years, we continue to add new items to the site regularly. We’ve added several dozen in the past few months: Hall Trees, birdfeeders, bookcases, conference tables, privacy screens, hallway tables, a wishing well, dressers, a bunk bed, new benches, new swings, even a monkey bar set for the kids. 

To see some of the new items, please go to: 

http://www.foreverredwood.com/indoor-furniture.html

http://www.foreverredwood.com/specialty-items.html 

If you can’t find something, just type it in the site’s Google search bar and it will come right up. Also, to make our product line more affordable, we have added a less expensive, fourth grade of wood option for our entire line. You can now buy any item in Douglas-fir for 20% less than our least expensive Redwood grade. The Douglas-fir is a fine alternative in many cases.  It comes with an 8 year decay warranty and all the construction features and dimensions are exactly the same as in our Redwood line.   

To read about the Douglas-fir, please go to:

http://www.foreverredwood.com/wood.html      

To learn more about our forestry practices, please visit:

http://www.foreverredwood.com/restoration-forestry.html  

If you have questions or comments, please feel free to contact us we’ll get right back to you.

For the forest, from the forest,
Raul F. Hernandez
Old-Growth Again Restoration Forestry, Inc.
33800 Annapolis Rd.  Annapolis, CA  95412
866-332-2403  Fax:  619-374-2462

Restoring logged forests back to Old-Growth Again.  Forever Redwood furniture sales fund the restoration.

www.foreverredwood.com

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Background Story

I was invited last fall to do a call-in radio show by my old dear friend Edwin Nieves. The radio station was KZYX in Philo, CA. www.kzyx.org Ph: 707-895-2324. The show is called Earth Matters. It was recorded Oct 28th, 2008.

Edwin and I met in the 1980’s when we worked in low income housing projects in Oakland, CA. He was a real estate broker connecting investors to old buildings needing work and a lot of energy to manage them. In the early years I was the property manager for a firm called Urban Renaissance. We were active during the 1989 World Series earthquake and wound up spending several years focusing on rebuilding and managing a 9 building city block project near downtown that was condemned by the earthquake. We rebuilt the buildings and added 120 housing units back to the area. Eventually I focused on putting together documentation packages for Urban Renaissance and other local entrepreneurs/social activists to help finance these projects via a successful low-income housing tax credit program. As the low-income housing tax credit programs expired and wound down, I began to spend more time in the woods on the forest restoration work and eventually moved to Annapolis, CA full time in 1995. Edwin would spend his spare time helping in the woods and helped me design and build the little cabin that is still my private sanctuary.

Edwin has been active in local environmental issues in Mendocino County since the early 1990’s. He has 2 brilliant daughters in graduate school now. We’ve had countless into-the-night conversations about forestry issues locally. One of these conversations this past summer led to an invitation to the show. Edwin has been one of the hosts of the Earth Matters show for many years and asked that I share the Old-Growth Again story with his listeners. It was a surprisingly thorough interview covering all the basics of our work. Edwin was very professional but he also managed to crack me up a few times. Its about 55 minutes long and the second half is call in questions from the audience. The questions were excellent. 

If anyone wants to contact Edwin, he can be reached at Edwin@pacific.net.

Throughout recorded history, forestry has usually been practiced in extremes.  Rarely is it a level-headed conservative approach.  Through the first 6,000 years of recorded history, humans mostly just mowed down forests around them to create living and agricultural grounds.  In the past couple hundred years, some level headedness has been introduced.  First in the mountains of Switzerland to avoid landslides from over cutting hillsides above towns. And in the U.S., the Forest Service was formed over 100 years ago under Gifford Pinchot as a middle of the road, “wise use” management philosophy service.  Over the decades, politics has taken the U.S. Forest Service from very conservative to semi-exploitative and back again.  Today, all timber companies talk green and are certified “sustainable” by various agencies, but with few exceptions, they are still over-harvesting their lands.