(twangy music) (Appalachian folk music) - The whole ecosystem chain needs trees.

- People think they know what trees do, but it's just like, they are vital.

Like we don't exist if they don't exist.

- Each piece tells a story if you know how to read it.

- When we live around wood, it feels good.

There's like a warmth to it, it shows the wear of the people that have lived around it.

- Timber plays a big role in our community.

Without the timber I can't build you a house, I can't make you toilet paper, and I don't know about you, but I don't like using plastic.

- In rural Virginia, timber and agriculture are our resource.

- [Alfreda] This is a profitable industry.

- Forestry, you know, it's the third leading industry in Virginia.

(Appalachian folk music continues) - The hand of humanity is on just about every forest there is, when you get right down to it.

- With the whole issue of forest and climate and forestry and climate, it's a more complicated question than people think, but it's not a question without a solution.

- The forestry community, they know how to do plantations pretty doggone well, commendably so, actually.

The idea of melding the application part with the ecology part is happening in little places.

(Appalachian folk music continues) - As long as humans are populating this earth, we're gonna continue to harvest trees to build furniture, (machinery humming) for fuel, for food, it can totally be done responsibly.

- Trees are forest creatures and they would love to have the forest soil around them.

- You're looking at sustainable forestry and I'm telling you, the forest sustains all of us.

♪ In the heartland ♪ We rely on ourselves ♪ And one another ♪ Hand in hand ♪ We must stand in the heartland ♪ - [Announcer] Production funding for "Life In The Heart Land" was provided by... (machinery humming) - There's a lotta techniques we go into in manufacturing hardwood.

This has a tiger stripe, you can see it down the side of that board, what happens is it's competin for sunlight.

When this tree's growing it's like, "I can move a little bit, hey, I can get more light, I can be really good.

I, you know, look how pretty I am", right?

What it does, it puts a twist in the grain.

(Appalachian folk music) It creates a beautiful character to this wood.

(folk music) Trees are intelligent, to be honest with you.

Poplar's the most common species in Virginia, it has been on this earth 50,000,000 years, Liriodendron tulipifera is the Latin name.

That dark green is your heartwood, okay?

It is a very intelligent species, this tree has put up a residual resistance to the gypsy moth, created its own enzyme.

It can evolve, you know, and it's, you think, "Oh, it's just a tree."

(machinery whirring) (Appalachian folk music continues) For every species there's a product or a usage for it.

- The whole world uses wood, it's a basic building block.

(walkie-talkie murmuring) - Jason, Harvey's coming over for five, can you give him the same thing you gave the last truck, please?

- These are countries we've sold to.

England is a huge market for us, Mexico is a good market for us.

We sell to Muslims, atheists, Christians, Indians, communists, we don't care.

(Appalachian folk music continues) (footsteps crunching) - I would stick a diameter tape around this tree right here, you just flip it around and measure this.

So, you step back and you say, "Okay, I got one, two and a half logs in that."

You know, the running joke is, yeah, I hug 'em every day, you know.

(laughing) - The forest sustains our industry.

I don't know of any industry that would rush to its demise.

It certainly isn't the hardwood industry.

- The first thing I look at is forest health, being able to see a future.

It's just not all thrown down on the ground and reset.

If it's done properly, we can make it look good, keep the landowner happy and get something back out of it in another 30 years.

(Appalachian folk music continues) (Appalachian folk music continues) - We believe in protecting the environment.

Now, if you think we're cutting trees to save the world, we're not, but it's the reality of what we do.

- It's real easy to look at a logger and say, "Oh man, they're cutting all the trees."

That's not what causes deforestation, it's the parking lots, it's the roadways, it's our houses.

(birds chirping) (Appalachian folk music continues) - The big trees were really untouchable up until the last couple hundred years with the advent of the crosscut saw.

- It's interesting when you think about the way forests are taken care of, you either have a ecological conservation orientation of putting a big fence around it and don't let anything happen to it and let it take care of itself.

The other thing you do with a forest is you start growing forests like a crop.

And there is a middle ground to that.

(Appalachian folk music continues) - We're blessed here in southside Virginia, man.

I mean it just grows everywhere, just grows like weeds.

You see this timber in front of us, I thinned this 15 years ago.

You know, you manage it right and you've got a good crop.

We're doing what's called a fifth row thinning.

We've cut our rows about every 50', 60'.

(backhoe beeping) All right, that's the heading machine, you see the disc turning?

(folk guitar music) She's gonna lay it down.

(trees rustling) (machinery humming) - This is the big accumulator, it's pretty much what you use to grab the first thing you want.

- Pull up a little bit.

- Brunswick County is number one in timber harvesting in the state of Virginia.

What we have are trees, and trees and then those trees have more trees.

- [Frank] We're in the pine belt, the southeastern corner of Virginia is our wood basket.

- If I remember the statistics right, last year we cut 12,000 acres of timber in Brunswick County alone.

- In this county that's what we do, we either farm or we log.

(folk guitar music continues) - My father put me on a John Deere tractor when I was nine years old and by the time I was 13 I was doing the work of a full grown man.

(machinery humming) - Hauled logs, pulpwood, practically anything come off that truck could make a dollar.

- We used to handle pulpwood by hand, they didn't have a machine.

- Used to tote the wood on your shoulder and your shoulder gonna get tough, black and hair won't come out this shoulder.

- Just like a big callous on it.

- It won't ever get back like this one here.

- I'm the oldest.

My brother started landscaping years ago and got into the mulch business and the mulch business needed wood fiber so he got into the logging business.

(mulch rustling) - So, we use pine bark from the sawmills, paper mills as the base for all of our mulches.

There are some exotic components, Peruvian seabird guano was in one product that we had.

- Our company was established in 1965 by my grandfather, so if we can make it a few more years, we'll have been in the business 60 years.

(Appalachian folk music) (machinery humming) - I got families that work for me, 35 families, not 35 people.

- They are not my bosses, but I am their mama.

(all laughing) - He always gonna be my father and then he my boss man, too, (Bobby laughing) so sometimes he don't know how to get, you know.

(chuckling) You wanted to make him proud of you, you don't want to fail him, so that's why I did everything I could.

- Curt's been here, what, 28 years?

30 years, 30.

- 30 years, I mean- - 30 years, 30 years.

- I grew up in Brunswick, Virginia, in Rawlings, all my life.

I've known him since I was two years old.

(Appalachian folk music continues) - This is where I've lived my entire life, so it's personal for me.

I wanted to be a part of the change.

More?

(all laughing) Oh, I thought I knew everything, but.

- Nice seeing you again.

- Nice seeing you, as well.

- We're excited about today, we embrace this company, they've been with us for a number of years.

- Thank you all for your business that you do here in Brunswick County.

I was born and raised here.

- You got a good zoom-in shot, Monica?

Now nothing's crawling outta this, right?

- Oh no.

- I'm a country girl, but I ain't a country girl.

- Growing up, Brunswick County was a booming place.

The homecoming parades for the college, downtown at that time was very vibrant and alive.

- [Sam] When I was a kid, you could walk down the streets of Lawrenceville and buy anything that you needed for your farm, your household or whatever.

And then the big box stores came in.

You don't have that community anymore.

- I am an alumnus of St. Paul's College and I don't think until we lost it that we really began to realize the impact that it had.

(cicadas humming) The foot traffic, you're talking about 1,000 students, faculty, staff, they supplied the town with the energy and synergy that it needed to survive.

(reflective music) - Things have gotten a little bit slow in southern Virginia with the timber market.

We have one sale this week.

With land conversion away from tracts growing, just growing timber.

As a consultant, I intend to try to get the most amount of money for a landowner and it's been hard to tell a landowner to sell stuff with the way the markets have been lately.

- You know, these families want income.

I know so many parcels and so many families and who their daddy was and the granddaddy was, (trees rustling) and the daughter comes home and got a child and you know, the bills double.

- 2012 I ventured out and got into the logging with another gentleman.

Three years later we lost everything we had.

That was the hardest day of my life, I lost $400,000 just like that.

- A lot of loggers, we put our lives, we put everything on hold and we throw ourselves at our business.

Put your heart and your soul into it and hopefully one day it all pays off, but sometimes it don't work that way.

You know, sometimes the end game, you get cut short.

You know you're gone (fingers snapping) before your objectives in life are met.

- If you get knocked down, you get back up, that's just some of the ethics that were instilled in me as a young boy and I hope I can instill them into my grandchildren.

Plain and simple.

(reflective music continues) - People talk about what oughta happen to forest in some sort of ideal way, whereas if you're making money off of something by doing things to it and somebody tells you to leave it alone, the issue is what are you doing to the land but simultaneously, what are you doing to my business?

Strongly wounded forest, like this one really is, can take a long time to recover.

Chestnut blight had come through and killed half the trees in some of these stands, so the place was hammered.

See, I'm guessing (trunk beeping) they're probably 80, 90 years old, something like that, which is not old for a tree.

(leaves shuffling) There was a question of whether you could take severely damaged land and actually turn it into something.

There was a tendency to get rid of trees, to burn up trees.

Had a lot to do with trying to tame the wilderness, you know, which has interesting implications.

(Appalachian folk music) My interest in ecology started when I was very young, I was a kind of a boy bird watcher in the swamps of Arkansas and I've spent most of the last part of my career working as a plant ecologist, particularly large scale plant ecology.

I was fascinated by statistics and I got interested in, if the forests are like this, what's the chance the next bird you're gonna see is gonna be a whatever, prothonotary warbler?

The thing that wasn't included in the question was what happens if the climate changes out from under you?

It's a little complicated.

And the problem with forests is they don't change very rapidly.

You have to kinda infer what's gonna happen, so we built these computer models of the individual trees and we tested them by seeing if they could capture the change in forest as you go up a mountain.

Climate is changing with the altitude.

We could reconstruct the trees around the lake back to the last ice age.

And it pretty much scared the pants off of me.

All those things predicted a two degree temperature change, which is what we're talking about now, what would it do to the world's forests, and the answer is it would change about 50% of 'em to something else.

(somber music) Tremendous impact on forests, which has all kinds of implications for forestry as well as forest ecology.

(music continues) (crickets chirping) (truck humming) (footsteps crunching) - There's all kinds of pressure on our lives when we intervene in a way of paving and you know, obviously, building a house takes up the footprint where wild things would be.

There's gotta be a way, right, for us to live in some homeostasis.

- Shane- - Yeah?

- When you have a second, can you just pop in.

(upbeat music) - Robert, you're gonna be with Talbot and you're gonna meet up... (Appalachian folk music continues) (air compressor hissing) The 1590 is a no-go, the fuel line's not even attached right now.

- Right, so we can't use it.

Okay.

- Yeah.

(Appalachian folk music continues) (truck rumbling) - Two things that nature does is adapt and diversify.

(Appalachian folk music continues) Good morning.

- Hello.

- Watch out, there's cameras.

- I have no pants.

(laughing) (Jason laughing) (truck rumbling) - Plan today will be prune the whole thing.

Now that I see it, you might nose up with the bucket, and it'll be a little challenging because the tree has been topped, to like do normal cutbacks.

- Yeah.

- Silviculture is the study and cultivation of trees and forests and how they work together.

- We find ourselves in kind of an empty room as far as tree workers go.

The model that I came up in, in tree work is really tied to the forestry model of you cut it down, you replant, you spray it when it's sick.

There was no holistic approach to looking at a tree and the landscape and its relationship to the other plants in the landscape and what they were all doing or trying to do or not doing, together.

There's the nuts and bolts, day-to-day of tree work and then there's the philosophy of... we just love trees.

Tuck it in a little bit and just show it off, it's a really cool tree.

All right, (hands slapping) talk to you guys later.

- All right, see ya.

- Trees have evolved to have buddies nearby.

This idea of you need to plant 'em 40 feet apart because they're competing with each other for sunlight is the forestry model of you wanna grow a tree as fast as you can in 20 years.

That would not happen in a natural environment, there would be all kinds of associated plants and trees growing together.

I think this is a good spot.

(workers murmuring) (container thumping) - Right there, okay, cool.

- You can think about all three of those trees as, like, one root system.

The maple tree, when it gets full of sugar, when it's starting to turn color, will give the Norway spruce a little jolt.

Neat, huh?

Yeah, they're friends and stronger for it.

Stronger for it.

(footsteps rustling) (folk music continues) Did you tell the lady you'll be home in the morning.

- Awesome.

- So- - I was gonna go to the white oak first.

- Yeah, kinda wanted to see how the tree would respond to the treatment- - [Talbot] Yeah.

- Before we start doing any aerial work on it.

- Yeah.

(Appalachian folk music continues) Eight hours and 15 minutes on the clock so far and I'm starting my soil injections, but sometimes it just ends up being that long of a day.

Oh!

(groaning) (truck gate clanging) (footsteps thudding) When you get trees in urban and suburban environments, they're just so outta their natural habitat.

There's no fungus or very little fungus in the soil.

My background in learning this was for an agricultural application.

Jason knows trees so well and we're kinda meeting in the middle to make this new holistic plant healthcare.

This composting method was designed to create a huge amount of fungus to help plants and trees and we took that idea, made the compost, made those microbes, took those microbes out, put 'em into this concentrate and here we are putting it into the soil.

The more fungus you can get 'em, the better.

(traffic humming) I'll be impressed if you can make good TV outta this.

(upbeat music continues) - In the beginning of starting this business, we had different things that we wanted to implement, but we didn't have those particular skills or body of knowledge yet, but through these last six years, there's been people that, like, a soil biologist, Talbot, comes along, or Shane who's really interested in milling wood.

(machinery humming) - For the last seven years I was a regenerative farmer.

We got a phone call saying that he was selling the farm and that, you know, we had a month to move out of our home and to - both of us to find new careers.

I ended up taking this job as an arborist because I was getting to work with the natural world still and kind of apply my understanding of biology.

(zipper sound) (cloth rustling) All right, so this is the finished product.

The moisture content of the tree has to dip down below 40%.

This tree is over 230 years old, it'll sell for like $6.00 to $8.00 a board foot.

Pine... pine is like $2.00 a board foot.

It has its role, its part to play in the ecosystem, not knocking the tree.

We tend to accumulate logs for about half a year and then, you know, we'll do a round of milling.

- [Barry] 4" x 4"s?

- Yeah.

(blade whirring) (Appalachian folk music) This tree's probably around 40, 45-ish?

What would you say, Barry, is that about right?

- I think it's about right.

Yep.

- Yeah.

All the lumber that we harvest are from trees that are dead or are endangering some sort of infrastructure.

(Appalachian folk music continues) (Appalachian folk music continues) - So, black walnuts and hackberries in particular are companion trees, they form a guild.

So yeah, this walnut is gonna kinda lose its buddy, but something else will grow.

(Appalachian folk music continues) If it's in the woods, there's no targets, there's no problem.

A house is a target.

- [Emma] Can you cable down just a little bit?

- We're not logging for our livelihood, but we take down trees all the time.

If we get called into a property to look at a tree, we often will sometimes start having like therapy sessions.

"Well, I'm just scared of it, I wanna take it down", and we start looking from the ground up at, is the tree safe?

Can we see cavities?

Is it uprooting?

Are there dead branches?

Things like that.

(machinery humming) - Even my own trees in my backyard when I first started, I was just like watching them.

I'm like, "I just paid to live in this house, I own it now, these are my problem", and now I know all the things that like could go wrong with them, you know, but then they're designed to hold up their own weight, you know, and things do fail, but, like, there's ways around that, yeah, and that's what we're here for.

(chuckling) - The value of trees in the urban environment really can't be overstated.

If it's a healthy live tree, you know, they just, we're not gonna be able to replace a 200 year old oak tree in our lifetime, it took three lifetimes for that tree to grow.

When we do have to take a tree down, we're finding new ways to advocate for like, let's replant.

You know, there's lots of low hanging fruit in ways that we can start to bring trees and all the associated life that happens in trees.

Like how can we work together?

(cicadas humming) (peaceful music) (peaceful music continues) -[Hank] There's a lot of beliefs and they're sometimes reinforced by sort of sideways reading of the Bible, even, that you're supposed to have dominion and show dominion over the land, so the idea is we're in charge, we can do what we want to do and things that work in the short term tend to get favored under that system.

- One of the car companies was like, "For every car you buy, we're gonna plant so many trees."

Do you know what would happen out here if we didn't keep this ground groomed like this?

It would grow trees.

You ain't gotta plant trees.

(laughing) - Until we really get rid of this frankly patriarchal idea that, "I'm in control", it wouldn't take much to just turn the corner a little bit on the way that we're looking at the land that we're living on.

- It's been a big challenge to foresters, theyre trying to understand better how to do things to produce carbon storage.

If we really charged foresters with how can you manage the forest in order to promote better climatic conditions, they will figure out how to do it and do it.

- So, a lot of this debris will definitely go back into the earth and, you know, provide for soil in the future, more insects to break down the wood, you know, it just, I think it's a better thing for the future.

- The thing we need is a generational consciousness to leave the world better for the next people that come.

(peaceful music) - Probably my best thing I've learned about life is the people and it's the people that work here, the people we do business with, they're the same.

From Vietnam to Mexico.

We're all connected.

We live here.

- A good life is to be able to take care of your family, take care of your guys that work for you and spend as much time with them as you can.

That's all that matters.

- [Jason] You wrote this song?

- Yeah.

- It's so good.

Yes!

(hands slapping) Will you play it on piano?

- No- - [Jason] Okay.

- You play it on the piano, it's your song.

(peaceful music continues) - The two root systems will all just help each other, just like a married couple.

We make a good team, I'm the muscle and she's the brains.

- That's not completely true.

(both laughing) On either side.

- Yeah, pretty much.

- Over time, this will get fuzzy again, you know, you're not gonna stop God, you're not gonna stop Mother Nature, it's gonna still grow up again.

Dealing with the earth, the soil, it's kinda like it cures you.

It makes you whole.

You know, I've been on these dirt paths and done all this stuff and planted it back and it makes me feel wealthy, it makes me feel rich.

(peaceful music continues) - "What you get, you take care, keep it looking good", I said.

He listened to what I told him and he did pretty good.

(birds singing) (peaceful music continues) - Collectively, we all just wanna see life here again.

- What do I think holds society together?

It's a common thread of hope.

Hope for a better life, a better life for our children, I wanna leave a path for them to say we did that together.

(birds singing) (peaceful music continues) - [Announcer] Production funding for "Life In The Heart Land" was provided by... (Appalachian folk music) ♪ Who belongs?

♪ Is there room enough for all ♪ Who belongs ♪ Do we stand or do we fall ♪ And is there room ♪ In our hearts for this whole land ♪ ♪ Is there room for us ♪ In the heart of the land (chime)