Labor Day brings the loss of summer while the air warns that “winter is coming” too soon. Houghton, MI awakens from a quiet slumber with the return of students and wayward faculty. The autumn mantel is beautiful with its reds, oranges, yellows, and remaining conifer greens framing the old mountains of the Keweenaw. The woods and lawns of Upper Michigan fill with mushrooms feasting on the roots and stumps of decaying trees. These fungi are nature’s recyclers and efficiently process the remaining cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin of the dead and dying wood. Good in the forest, but not so much for the wood that we use for shelter, transportation, or utilities distribution. When our “built” world collides with the fungal world, protecting wood becomes a necessity. The American Wood Protection Association (AWPA) provides guidance for protecting wood.

My thoughts turn to the AWPA Fall Technical Committee Meeting when I see these autumn fungi. This meeting brings together the best minds from the wood protection industry. They discuss the current state of the art for protecting wood from fungal decay and attack by wood destroying insects and marine organisms, but the business at hand is developing, adopting, and implementing standards to self-regulate the wood protection industry. Stakeholders from academia, chemical companies, consultancies, forest products companies, government, wood treating plants, railroads, and utilities weigh into the discussion. Somehow, all the interested parties reach consensus to promulgate standards intended to serve the end user of treated- wood products.

This year I look forward to chairing my first AWPA P9 committee meeting. P9 is responsible for standardization of non-biocidal wood protection. There are no standardization proposals on the agenda, but there should be interesting updates about efforts to standardize Thermally Modified Wood (TMW). The AWPA Fall 2023 Technical Meeting will take place September 17- 20, 2023, in Denver, CO. Find out more of what is going on during the meeting at https://awpa.com/meetings/technical/denver.