(Not) Counting Trees

WRCO News in Richland City interviewed James Spartz (Life Science Communications PhD student) about our study of public opinion about bioenergy. The general premise of the study is "do residents see bioenergy feedstock sourced from woodlands and croplands differently?"

Listen to mp3

Late last week, I was interviewed by Aaron Joyce, News Director at WRCO in Richland Center (click logo for more on station). He was one of 600 residents in SW Wisconsin to receive a questionnaire about bioenergy and land use.

Click here to download/listen to the full interview (mp3, 3.1 MB, 3m 15s).

NewPage halts biorefinery plans for Wisconsin Rapids mill | Wausau Daily Herald | wausaudailyherald.com

This week I am attending Sustainable Bioenergy Training Program for Extension Educators in Columbia, MO, along with several extension colleagues from Wisconsin as well as the North Central region. The hope that we will develop a comprehensive extension curriculum to support the bioenergy discussion in Wisconsin.

Sustainable bioenergy derived from cellulosic biomass offers the potential to create new market and diversification opportunities for Wisconsin farmers, woodland owners, and their local communities. However, achieving sustainable biomass supply within Wisconsin’s mixed-use landscapes that include both agriculture and forest systems will require some degree of coordination across their strikingly different and traditionally isolated stakeholder networks.

We had some excellent news on Friday. The Wisconsin Institute for Sustainable Agriculture funded our project, Identifying and engaging stakeholder networks toward sustainable, multi-­sourced biomass production. The proposal summary is below. We anticipate starting the project either this summer or fall, but need additional clarification.

The Country Today had a quite interesting article last week on a loan program to help landowners enter the Managed Forest Law: The Glenwood Project. As you read the article, though, it's not just the loan program, but a more encompassing view of forests and forestry.

Many thanks to The Country Today for allowing me to reprint it here. I added a few links where appropriate.

As promised, the the videos from the Wisconsin Bioenergy Summit have been posted. I didn't see an easy way to embed them in this post, so I just post the links.

On my way to a volleyball match on Monday night, I was listening to On Point on WPR's Ideas Network. The discussion centered on the science-energy interface and whether big government investments in bio-energy are warranted and whether they'll payoff.