The Building Material of the Future Has Been Around for Millions of Years

What will the future look like? Movies like Blade Runner, The Matrix, and Minority Report envision environments where, when humans are not literally in spaceships, they inhabit buildings that might as well be. Concrete facades, sheet metal paneling, and exposed steel beams have become a visual shorthand for "in the not-too-distant future." However, it's time to redefine what we consider "futuristic"—for the planet's sake and our own.

The Environmental Case for Timber

Steel and concrete may be foundational to modern architecture, but they come at a heavy cost. Their production accounts for 13% of global carbon emissions, roughly five times that of air travel. Thankfully there is a climate-positive, renewable alternative emerging: wood!

Historically, wood couldn’t match the strength of steel or concrete, which limited its use in large-scale projects. In recent decades, engineered wood products have emerged that multiply its load-bearing capabilities. “Mass timber” is a general term for wood products of this nature, made by layering and bonding multiple slices of wood under high pressure. This creates composites that are strong enough to rival steel and concrete, allowing architects to design large, multi-story structures with significantly less high-emitting materials.

Exciting examples of mass timber buildings can be found all over the world. This demonstrates a growing interest in adapting building practices to prioritize sustainability. Timber provides an opportunity to build not just with less carbon emissions, but with long-term carbon storage.

The Economic Case for Timber

Forests are a powerful part of our natural carbon cycle, and are often called the “lungs of the Earth”. What many don’t realize is: working forests are a significant portion of those lungs. Of the U.S.’s 765 million acres of forestland, 514 million are categorized as “timberland” meaning that they are producing timber or capable of producing timber for harvest. These forests pull excess carbon from the atmosphere throughout their life cycle, storing it in wood. When harvested, the carbon stays in the wood, and new trees are planted to continue this process. It’s important to recognize, these forests exist because there are economic forces at work to encourage this. When timber is no longer classified as the highest and best use of the land, it is vulnerable to being sold for less sustainable uses—cattle grazing, retail developments, or parking lots. In other words, our ability to sequester carbon with forests is deeply tied to demand for wood.

Innovations like mass timber could stabilize our timber market and even increase demand. This fortifies the fates of our existing forests, and creates incentive to plant new ones. A future that uses more timber is a future with more forests.

The Community Case for Timber

The people who manage working forests are farmers. They cultivate trees for timber, like one would any other crop, on their own (often small amounts of) land. Over 50% of U.S. forestland is owned and managed by more than 10 million private (family and individual) owners, with an average parcel size of 25 acres. These forest farmers have high up-front costs and marginal returns, making them susceptible to market volatility. This affects not only the landowner, but the livelihoods of whole communities that depend on the timber industry. Timber supports 2.4 million jobs in the U.S., and 524 counties (16.7% of all U.S. counties) are considered forest-dependent.

In addition to carbon storage and sustainability, embracing more timber in our built environment fosters economic stability for the communities who rely on forests.

The Bottom Line

At Funga, we're proud to contribute to this wood-centric future by rewilding forest fungi. Healthier trees, supported by biodiverse soil, can grow more wood on the same land. Improving timber forests in this way creates a better future by every metric discussed above: it delivers a robust supply of sustainable building materials, increases the amount of carbon sequestered, and provides vital economic support to rural communities.

Now it’s just a matter of inspiring our builders, leaders, and trend-setters to embrace a forest-enabled future. Sci-fi filmmakers: maybe a bit of wood paneling in your spaceships next time? Just a thought.