(Not) Counting Trees

"The second Wisconsin Poverty Report shows the rate of poverty in Wisconsin worsened in 2008, with more than 11 percent of the state's population living in need, including one in seven children and one in 10 elderly residents."

Well, this got my attention. It was the short header in Google reader for the feed from the UW-Madison news folks. The full release is here. The report is a product of the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP).

In private forestry, I/we tend to get wrapped up in landowners and timber with little thought of how those things connect to the broader community and local economy. I think I get how it is supposed to work, but I can't say I know it does work that way. (That isn't very profound, is it?) I hope to find some time to digest what is in the full report (available on the IRP website) and look more closely at the county level data for places where forests are most prevalent.