About the time Matt agreed to our thinning job, in 2002, I happened to receive some book royalties. Amy, meanwhile, was struggling to juggle two young children, a full-time teaching load at the university, and running the modern-dance company she had founded.

"If we suddenly had some money," I asked her, "what could we do to relieve stress in your life?"

"Build a dance studio in the backyard," she responded instantly.

As the estimates came in for our "simple but elegant" 30-by-45-foot backyard structure, which included a second-floor writing suite for me, they all seemed reasonable except for the $12,000 "floating" dance floor, nearly half of which came from the cost of the oak floorboards.

"Why should we pay for all that wood," I said, "when we have all those skinny trees up on our land that we're trying to get rid of?"

Here, at last, were my violin necks and chopsticks: larch flooring. Before the last truckloads of larch left our land, I purchased one of them from Krueger, then I located, in southwestern Montana, a one-man, 1940s-vintage sawmill called Hellferstout Lumber Company that milled tongue-and-groove flooring and was operated by a rancher named Sandy James. Two months later, James hefted onto my rented trailer two neatly wrapped bundles holding 2,400 board feet of one-by-four-inch larch flooring.

Driving home, I worked out the numbers. Our larch logs had cost me $1,400 to buy from Krueger. James had taken half the logs as payment for his sawing into rough boards, and charged me $800 for kiln-drying and planing into tongue-and-groove. This meant I'd paid $2,200 for around 2,400 square feet, or roughly $1 per square foot. This compared with $3.50 per square foot to buy tongue-and-groove oak flooring retail. I felt good: I'd saved six grand in wood costs, and the dance floor—the only thing the backyard studio now lacked—was on its way.

One hot July afternoon, about 30 friends and the dancers from Amy's company helped us lay the studio's plywood subfloor over 1,200 hand-stapled rubber pads (our invitation had read, "Help us get laid"). Then we celebrated our labors with a barbecue. We left for a vacation while a Missoula installer named Shannon O'Keefe hammered the larch into place. Returning home on an August evening, we jumped around on the silky-smooth expanse.

Word quickly spread of our small-diameter larch dance floor made from a restored forest. People wanted tours. Architects heard about it. I received invitations to speak at timber-industry conferences. Photos appeared in wood-products magazines. I became part of the blossoming "small-diameter," or "smallwood," movement: conferences, product fairs, research laboratories, doctoral theses, entrepreneurs, even a "smallwood-enterprise agent" in our own town. Tremendous energy was being poured into discovering high-value ways to use the billions of skinny trees out there—not only from the 73 million acres of national forest judged to need thinning but also from millions of acres in public and private forestlands.

The National Fire Plan, passed by Congress after the massive fires of summer 2000, helped stimulate activity with three years of grants through its Economic Action Program. Small-diameter wood was used to build Navajo hogans, pedestrian footbridges, and, in Darby, Montana, a 5,000-square-foot library that incorporates small-diameter logs for everything from roof trusses to furniture.

Encouraged by our local smallwood-enterprise agent, Craig Rawlings, the three of us who had created our dance floor—Matt Arno, Shannon O'Keefe, and me—started thinking that maybe we had stumbled onto a marketable commodity. Missoula-based forester and environmental lawyer Mike Wood, trained in "green certification" procedures, joined us, and we forged a partnership. Our product, both "green" and beautiful yet competitively priced, would be tight-grained tamarack (a species of larch) flooring milled from small-diameter trees harvested only from "sustainable" forest-restoration projects. Kicking around names, we settled on North Slope Sustainable Wood LLC; we coined a motto, "Beautiful Floors from Restored Forests," constructed a Web site, printed brochures, and milled a small inventory.

First Shannon sold a tamarack floor. Then I sold one. Then he sold another, and I another. Early this year, as part of the Healthy Forests Initiative, the Forest Service announced a "Woody Biomass Utilization" grant program to encourage the use and marketing of small-diameter wood, with the idea that it would ultimately reduce the cost of thinning federal forests. We applied for funds, nearly $120,000, to launch a three-year marketing campaign for our North Slope flooring, and made the short list.

I never remotely imagined that I'd one day be in the business of cutting trees and selling flooring. But so much has shifted in the ecological landscape in recent years—and I believe that to care about the environment means shifting, too. The smooth, hundred-year-old larch under my stockinged feet where I now sit in my study represents only a tiny fraction of a very complex solution for what ails our forests. But it is one solution. I am excited, even passionate, about the way it is possible—or at least appears possible—to make money and restore the forest at the same time.

So, for many reasons, not all of them selfish, I hope our little eco-wood company thrives. Go ahead, call me an eco-capitalist. I kind of like the sound of it.