In New Hampshire, our renewable energy future can be seen rolling across the hills to the horizon. Our forests are the equivalent of wind farms in Texas or solar panels in California.

The use of wood in New Hampshire to replace fossil fuels for heating homes and businesses represents a potential four-fold benefit: climate-change mitigation, reduced dependence on foreign oil, improved forest management and economic growth for struggling rural areas.

But those potential benefits could be squandered if the climate legislation working its way through Congress continues to focus its biomass energy solutions on large, capital-intensive approaches. Too many new wood-fired power plants could threaten to overwhelm our wood supplies.

There is a more effective, less expensive and simpler path to take. The solution lies with networks of public and privately owned forests linked to wood-burning projects in our schools, hospitals, town halls and neighborhoods. Wood is a renewable resource, has a proven track record as a heating source and, unlike other experimental biofuels such as cellulosic ethanol, does not require expensive research and development costs. Structured properly, new climate legislation can help launch a local energy movement - town by town, woodlot by woodlot.

First, we must develop policies that reward individual forest owners for managing their land in a sustainable manner for both wood fuel and value-added products such as sawlogs, veneer logs, or structural beams (which themselves will sequester carbon over a long period). A steady, dependable market for wood based on long-term contracts between sellers composed of local forest owners and buyers will help keep working forests working. For too long, landowners have been victim to the vicissitudes of the wood marketplace - boom-and-bust cycles that make it difficult to profit from harvesting wood, which puts increasing pressure on succeeding generations of landowners to sell their forests for development. Federal assistance to create dependable wood-fuel markets can help alleviate that problem.

Second, we must recognize and support traditional forest workers - foresters, loggers, truckers, sawmill operators and equipment suppliers. These are our nation's original "green-collar workers," stewards of our northeastern forested landscape, one of our nation's largest natural storehouses of carbon. These workers know how to manage our forests in a sustainable manner, providing wood for fuel and also for long-lived wood products. They are also the backbone of a healthy rural economy.

Third, we must provide financing and guidance for communities to build "advanced wood combustion" facilities in commercial clusters, such as industrial parks, local schools, college campuses, and municipal offices and garages. Such facilities are already used to great effect throughout Scandinavia and other parts of Europe, where locally produced wood fuel provides heat, cooling and power while reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

We will need new thinking and new business models to build a 21st-century bioenergy infrastructure. Individual landowners will need mechanisms for working together - possibly in partnership with community forests or other publicly owned lands - to supply a steady stream of wood fuel to end users. Colleges and universities will need to train new generations of forestry and wood-products professionals. School board members, facilities managers and bankers must be presented with cost-effective options to invest in wood-energy technologies, while at the same time engaging with neighboring landowners to establish wood-supply networks.

National climate legislation is coming, and with it huge federal outlays for alternative energy technologies. These resources should be directed to help create community energy networks which would deliver economic, carbon and social benefits for generations to come. The result will be greatly strengthened rural economies, improved forest health and productivity and a significant contribution to regional energy independence.

(David Sleeper is executive director of the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation in Hanover.)