John Melvin, CAL FIRE
About this episode
In this episode, Jennifer Alger interviews John Melvin about the urban wood movement and CAL FIRE's role in promoting wood utilization and sustainability.
Every tree tells a story. The question is whether we treat it like a resource or throw it away like waste. In this episode of the Woodpreneur Podcast, host Jennifer Alger welcomes John Melvin, Assistant Deputy Director of Resource Protection and Improvement at CAL FIRE. The two have worked together in the urban wood movement for over 15 years, and this conversation traces the journey from its earliest days to a program now granting hundreds of millions of dollars. A central theme is language. John makes the case that calling removed urban trees "waste" teaches the public to see them as garbage. Reframing the conversation around resource and value opens doors for municipalities to build wood utilization into their arborist service contracts, saving disposal costs while keeping material out of landfills. He walks through CAL FIRE's role in building the urban wood industry from the ground up, starting in the late nineties with five mobile sawmills and four dehumidification kilns made from converted shipping containers. Those early investments seeded real businesses and put a sawmill at Palomar College that still runs today. As the program grew, CAL FIRE funded urban wood utilization…
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