Conservation Maine Woods

But that was thirty years and many seventy-hour workweeks ago, and today she had come to sell ideas, not products. Her company wasn t small anymore. It had become a 60-million-dollar-a-year enterprise, the leader in natural personal care products such as shampoos, salves, and her trademark lip balm, featuring the funny little pen-and-ink drawing of a sharp-nosed, bearded fellow in a railroad cap Burt, a melding of myth, man, and marketing that took off in a way no one could have predicted. In the last few years she had cashed in and turned her formidable and iconoclastic business skills—not to mention a few hundred million dollars—in another direction, conservation. Her focus was to chart a possible future for the immense Maine Woods in which spruce, pine, and icy blue lakes prowled by moose and lynx and loon would trump the real estate investors vision of resorts, golf courses, and suburban homes on clear-cut lands. 

The winding down of the timber industry in the Maine Woods initially led to opportunities for conservation of natural areas, according to an analysis by Sara A. Clark and Peter Howell, From Diamond International to Plum Creek The Era of Large Landscape Conservation in the Northern Forest, University of Maine, Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center (2007). 

Monomers with low molecular weights will diffuse into the wood more rapidly than polymers such as PEG. In a second phase, their in situ radiation curing will form wood consolidants that are much stronger than PEG. However, this method requires very heavy irradiation equipment, which is usually available only in nuclear research centers. The irradiation cell dimensions and the 7-source geometry limit the size of the artifacts. For mainly these reasons, the radiation process was applied in very few institutions and in most cases only at the experimental level. The Nucleart Laboratory, which routinely conserves waterlogged wood by this technique, is located in the Grenoble Nuclear Research Center of the French Atomic Energy Commission. 

The data on annual wood biomass production in the main forest types have been taken from (Bazilevich, 1993). We used the value of maximum permissible level of lead in the wood equal to 0.(X)5 g/kg as an accepted in Russia (Moiseev, 1994). To estimate cadmium accumulation in the biomass, the background values equal to 0.25 mg/kg for coniferous species, 0.5 mg/kg for small leaf species and 0.6 mg/kg for broad leaf species (Uchvatov, 1995), were used. The metal accumulation in the wood biomass was not calculated for the areas without forest ecosystems, for example, tundra and steppe ecosystems. We supposed that metal conservation in the biomass of these natural ecosystems was only temporal with subsequent mineralization of organic matter and entering biogeochemical cycling. 

Recent regulations and environmental legislation have put pressure to stop the use of traditional synthetic adhesives for wood panels. Higher costs of oil from which traditional adhesives are derived have also contributed to this trend. As a consequence, the interest in natural adhesives for wood panels has intensified. This has translated in the revival of the traditional approach of partially substituting in the formulations a small proportion of the synthetic adhesive with a natural material [1]. This approach is rather old and is revived now to conserve traditional synthetic adhesives that might well not be available in the future. Its main disadvantages are... 

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