Urban Ashes

Community-owned systems create two to four times more local jobs than outside operators. Markets move material. They do not create agency. When the system is not owned locally, markets shape outcomes instead of serving community goals. Ownership builds legacy! #WhoOwnsYourWood #CommunityOwnership #UrbanWood #LocalEconomies #CircularEconomy

Ownership is not abstract! It shows up in:  Who sets the rules? Who controls the data? Who decides where wood goes? If those answers do not live with the community, neither will the system. Who owns your wood? #WhoOwnsYourWood #UrbanWood #CommunityOwnership #UrbanForestry #CircularEconomy UrbanAshes

Most communities lose the value of their fallen trees before a system even exists. No clear flow. No shared rules. No durable ownership. Markets matter. Systems matter. Ownership decides who they work for. In five years, who owns what was built?#WhoOwnsYourWood #UrbanWood #CommunityOwnership #UrbanForestry #CircularEconomy

Super excited to be doing a collaborative workshop with long-time friend and colleague, not to mention he is the one we blame for demanding the launch of Urban Ashes back in the day, a mister, Jason Bing. Please join us if you can and even if you cannot, please share this and or reach out on how you too can help your local schools divert their trees from the chipper. If you are joining us… Awesome. Let us know in the comments. Details via a press release in the Bio. #UrbanWood #UrbanAshes #GreenSchools #pfc2025

Modern Reform? Or the Return of the Lumber Barons? Sen. Mike Lee is calling his bill a reform of the Forest Service. It is not reform. It is a swift return to the same system Theodore Roosevelt dismantled more than a century ago. It would put the Forest Service back under Interior, turn its Chief into a political appointee, and create another federal fire agency that consolidates power instead of improving management. The pending name is the Forest Service Reorganization Act of 2025. It has yet to have an assigned number. Before 1905, public forests were run by the Interior Department’s General Land Office, where land giveaways, corruption, and industrial control were standard practice. Timber syndicates and railroad barons stripped entire regions bare. Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot ended that era of The Lumber Barons by moving the forests into Agriculture and building the Forest Service around science, stewardship, and the public good. Lee’s plan would turn one of the most successful conservation reforms in American history into a political tool for extraction and influence. It replaces science with politics, professional management with lobbying, and public accountability with industry control. What makes this bill even more reckless is who it leaves out. There is no evidence Sen. Lee or staff consulted with Indigenous nations, scientists, local communities, or the people who actually live with the consequences of these policies. The Alaska Federation of Natives has already called for formal consultation, pointing out that tribes have been excluded. Indigenous forestry organizations and restoration experts have warned that bills like this erase science, silence sovereignty, and cut out those who know how to care for these ecosystems best. These are not outside observers. They are the original and most proven forest managers. They have used cultural burning, selective harvesting, and ecological restoration to maintain thriving landscapes that store carbon, support biodiversity, and survive fire, flood, and drought. Ignoring those voices is not just shortsighted. It is malpractice. Continued ... #forestry #usforestry #lumberbarons #timber #timberindustry

Real Climate Impact Starts Local and Starts Now at a Fraction of the Cost Direct Air Capture is the flashy new headline. Urban wood recovery is the proven workhorse already delivering results. Each year, in the United States, more than 40 million metric tonnes of quality urban wood go vastly underutilized. This from urban, suburban, rural and agricultural trees lost to storms, fires, pests, removals, and old age. Most of it is chipped, burned, or landfilled. When we recover that wood, it becomes lumber, mass timber, furniture, biochar and other durable wood good. This stores carbon, creates jobs, cuts disposal costs, and strengthens communities. It is not a theory. It is a model that worked for thousands of years and is ready to scale again. Cost per tonne of CO2 removed Direct Air Capture: $2000  Urban Wood Recovery: $10 to $50 Urban wood recovery delivers up to 200 times more climate impact per dollar and keeps 60 to 80 cents of every dollar local. DAC keeps only about 5 to 15 cents local and most of that only during construction. The rest flows to large corporations and investors, typically outside of the community. This is not about choosing one solution over another. We need both, in the right order. Urban wood recovery is proven, cost effective, and shovel ready. It creates jobs, builds circular economies, and stores carbon now. DAC may help later with legacy emissions, but it is not the front line. The one-billion-dollar Stratos DAC project is delayed due to EPA permitting concerns over groundwater safety and seismic risk, along with supply chain issues. These delays highlight how complex and unproven DAC remains at scale. DAC still has about 2 billion in federal support moving forward. Urban wood recovery was set to receive a record 180 to 350 million in funding but is now facing delays and clawback efforts. We must get our priorities straight! Urban Ashes can help you, your clients, or your community design and launch systems that store carbon, create jobs, and deliver real local impact. The choice is not DAC or wood. The choice is to start with what works. Tag someone who should see this. #UrbanWood #UrbanAshes #Carbon

The Opportunity Evolves! Fallen trees were being transformed into climate infrastructure. Urban wood recovery was on the rise. Cities were creating jobs, storing carbon, building circular economies, and strengthening communities, all with wood already on the ground. Now funding is being cut and priorities are shifting back to extraction over regeneration. This is not the time to step back. It is the time to double down and scale up! Share this with and Tag someone who can help drive support for urban wood recovery such as legislators, policy makers, philanthropists, entrepreneurs and investors! #UrbanWood #ClimateAction #CircularEconomy #CommunityResilience #RegenerationNotExtraction #ClimateSmartWood #UrbanAshes

There Is No Resilient Forestry Without Recovery and Salvage! If your management plan doesn’t include salvaging downed trees, it’s incomplete. Between 2001 and 2024, the United States lost nearly 49.5 million hectares of tree cover, 13.2 million to fire and 36.3 million to other causes like storms, pests, and development. That loss resulted in an estimated 19.3 gigatonnes of CO₂-equivalent emissions. In 2024 alone, U.S. wildfires burned 8.9 million acres, and global wildfire emissions surpassed those from aviation, releasing 4.1 gigatonnes of CO₂. Storms are just as damaging. Hurricane Helene devastated over 800,000 acres of forest in North Carolina. Asheville lost hundreds of thousands of trees, crippling its urban canopy and climate defenses. And in Michigan, a March 2025 ice storm damaged nearly 3 million acres of forest, including almost 1 million acres of state-managed land, snapping trees under the weight of over an inch of ice. Urban wood, or simply, wood recovery and salvaging, must be a non-negotiable part of every forestry strategy. Full Circle Forestry applies not just to cities, but also to suburbs, rural areas, state parks, and national forests. Why? Because recovering downed trees for their highest and best use supports local circular economies, significantly reduces emissions, and protects standing forests. And no, this isn’t just about chips and biofuel. We’re talking biochar, high-grade lumber, industrial wood products, composites, and community firewood programs. Policy writers and land managers, make recovery and salvage a core principle. We’ll help you embed it the right way. #forestryplan #forestrypolicy #planning #urbanwood #policy #fullcircleforestry #carbonimpact #climateaction

Tree Removal Should Never Be an Afterthought! Or an After-action! If tree removal is happening before your wood recovery plan is in place, the opportunity is already gone. Viable wood from necessary tree removals can only be recovered when planning begins in pre-construction. This includes assessing tree conditions, planning for salvage, coordinating storage, connecting with a mill, and matching materials to design intent. Tree recovery is not demolition cleanup; it’s a critical part of responsible site development that requires early engagement. Before site work begins, coordinate with professionals experienced in assessing, recovering, and integrating salvaged wood. #UrbanWood #SustainableDevelopment #TreeRecovery #CircularEconomy #GreenBuilding #ResponsibleDesign

In Honor of Memorial Day … From “The First Decoration Day” Article. By David W. Blight. 2011. The people’s history of Memorial Day in Charleston, South Carolina during Reconstruction. “… the beautiful port city of Charleston, South Carolina, where the war had begun in April, 1861, lay in ruin by the spring of 1865. The city was largely abandoned by white residents by late February. Among the first troops to enter and march up Meeting Street singing liberation songs was the Twenty First U. S. Colored Infantry; their commander accepted the formal surrender of the city. Thousands of Black Charlestonians, most former slaves, remained in the city and conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war. The largest of these events, and unknown until some extraordinary luck in my recent research, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the planters’ horse track, the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, into an outdoor prison. Union soldiers were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of exposure and disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. Some twenty-eight Black workmen went to the site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.” Then, Black Charlestonians in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders’ race course. The symbolic power of the low-country planter aristocracy’s horse track (where they had displayed their wealth, leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freedpeople. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.” #Decorationday #memorialday #origins #history #knowhistory

Climate-Fueled Disasters Are Decimating America’s Forests! What We Do With Them Defines Our Future. Fire, storms, pests, and drought are reshaping our forests. But how we treat the trees that fall says everything about what comes next. Trees coming down from climate stress, development, and age aren’t waste, they’re urban wood. Urban wood is defined as any wood sourced from any tree that came down for any reason other than its wood value. It can come from urban, suburban, rural and even our state and federal forests. All forest management plans, urban, suburban, rural, state, and national, must include clear guidelines to maximize the utilization of any viable salvaged wood. If a downed tree can be used to offset harvest, store carbon, and support local economies, it should be. When it’s more beneficial to leave it in place for habitat or soil health, that should be documented too. Either way, recovery must be part of the plan. No urban wood should EVER be waste! Legislators, policy makers, foresters, city managers, sustainability officers, land stewards, if wood recovery isn’t built into your plan, it’s time to fix that by introducing full-circle forestry. Let’s talk. #climatedisasters #climatecrisis #climatechange #urbanforestry #forestryplan

In these stacks are some 5,000 board feet of sexy quarter-sawn urban salvaged red oak, soon to become stunning slab doors for a residence less than a mile from where the trees once stood in Bird Hills Preserve, Ann Arbor. These trees were removed as part of an oak wilt remediation effort — and instead of being chipped and lost, they were recovered, milled, and repurposed through Urban Ashes’ CUT Model™. It’s local lumber, processed by local hands, returning to the local built environment. Within this reclaimed lumber sits about 9000 pounds of Carbon, that will remain sequestered as long as it remains in use as a durable wood good. That amount of Carbon is equal to planting 241 saplings and growing them for 10 years. Kudos to Ann Arbor and @a2zero2030 for being proactive with their tree removals to ensure that those viable for high-level recovery get out to local mills for local projects like this. Kudos @meadowlarkbuild for helping facilitate this happening. You can’t get much more sustainable than that. Urban wood recovery isn’t just about saving trees — it’s about rethinking how cities use their own resources. Ready to build your city’s circular wood future? Ready to specify urban wood for your next architecture or design project? Reach out. urbanashes.com #UrbanWoodRecovery #urbanashes #urbanashteam #A2Zero #carbonsequestration #reclaimedwood #sustainabledesign #birdhills #annarbor #oakwilt