Air Date: Week of January 19, 2001

Transcript

SOLOMON-GREENBAUM: Salvage logging usually happens on forested hillsides, but now there's another place to find old, forgotten timber: underwater in the reservoirs of dams. A company called Aquatic Cellulose has developed a robotic cutting machine that can harvest up to 35 trees per day from the deep. The company says underwater salvage logging could minimize cutting of trees above the water line and remove rotting wood, which releases tons of greenhouse gases per year. The company's now logging Brazil's Tucurui Lake, where a government dam inundated 450,000 acres of rainforest. The next challenge is to build markets for the tropical hardwoods. Mahogany is one species in the lake, but with names like Ipe and Massaranduba, most of the other trees aren't familiar to many U.S. and European woodworkers. That's this week's business update. I'm Anna Solomon-Greenbaum.

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It's Living on Earth. I'm Diane Toomey. Coming up: Western governors tackle the problem of western wildfires. But first...

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