FORESTRY EDUCATION IN AMERICA: 
IT'S TIME FOR A CHANGE

Professional forestry in the United States is dominated by the paradigm of "Modern Scientific Forestry" (MSF). Forestry schools generally teach some variation of this paradigm, and thus, graduate foresters who base decisions primarily on science, technology, and economics rather than on ethics. Similarly, modern scientific foresters tend to feel first allegiance to their employers, and to unquestioningly work to achieve their employer's objectives, provided they are not patently illegal.

In my opinion, "Modern Scientific Forestry" is a dead-end. We need foresters who are ecological practitioners rather than scientific specialists, engineers or business-people; we need foresters whose first allegiance is to the 1and rather than to individual organizations or business entities. To cultivate such foresters educators must create and teach "eco- forestry" a new approach to forestry that views the restoration and protection of ecosystems as transcendent goals, and the production. and harvest of forest produce for human uses as subordinate goals. 

THE FAILURE OF MODERN SCIENTIFIC FORESTRY 

Modern scientific forestry originated in Europe about-two centuries ago and has been practiced and taught in the United States since about 1900. Without a doubt, MSF has made important and enduring contributions to the sciences and to our lives. Many MSF practices are viable in agroforestry settings. However, influenced by the rise of materialism and industrialism, MSF began first to consider forests only in terms of their usefulness to people, and then only in terms of profitability. This is the fundamental reason for its failure: MSF lost sight of the concept of forests as natural communities of which humans are members. As a result, the age-old spiritual and ecologica1 ties to the land, which served humans well throughout their first half-million years of existence, were abandoned. Ultimately, the practice of MSF led to the present situation where, in the interest of production and profit, we decimate native biodiversity and degrade the land, hardening ourselves to our actions by convincing one another that MSF is the only practical way to manage forests in the modern world, and convincing the public that ecosystems treated in this way are still renewable and will somehow be able to recover. 

The production and profit orientation of MSF is reflected in forestry schools that promote the following addictions: 

(1) The addiction to uniformity. Ecosystems are diverse, yet MSF strives for uniformity. This expresses itself as a preference for even-aged forestry and rotation ages that maximize the rate of return by growing trees for only a fraction of their life expectancies. MSF's obsession with uniformity is best expressed in monoculture plantations of exotic species. 

(2) The addiction to quantification. Ecosystems are complex and dynamic, and understanding and managing ecosystems requires as much art and experience as science, yet MSF is based almost entirely an quantification. This obsession breeds an inherent bias towards the use of simplified models and emphasizes quantity over quality.

(3) The addiction to "big hammers." Ecosystems are intricate, often fragile, and have a natural trajectory of change, yet MSF always resorts to "bigger hammer" methods in efforts to prevent natural changes from occurring or to force unnatural changes to occur. 

(4) The addiction to profitability and compound interest. Human societies and economies are dependent subsystems of the encompassing natural ecosystem, yet MSF relies on economic profitability and calculation of profit using discounting as the "bottom line" for almost all decisions. Such thinking is a disincentive to conservation since the long-term and social value of many ecosystem components and processes simply cannot be expressed in dollars. 

(5) The addiction to selfish individualism. Ecosystems are interrelated, yet MSF conforms to a culture which favors the desires of the individual over the good of the community. Selfish individualism also tends to work within the bounds of what is legal, rather than what is ethical, and often contributes to the degradation of the "commons" air, water, soil. 

THE PROMISE OF ECOFORESTRY 

To successfully implement ecoforestry, and to counter the addictions of MSF, four aspects of forestry education must be reformed: 

(1) Management scale & land-use. Students should be taught to make management plans that are case-specific and unique, and to harmonize these local plans across political or individual ownership boundaries to form forest plans applicable to natural ecological regions. Similarly, students should be educated in methods of locating, establishing and protecting large wilderness reserves as "commons" to provide enough space for evolution and other processes to occur at rates and along trajectories determined by nature, and to serve as benchmarks for understanding ecosystems. 

(2) Educational mechanics. Forestry students can probably be most effectively educated in programs that integrate university-style class work (2-3 years? ) with journeyman-apprentice-style field training (1-2 years?). Such a curriculum would cultivate traditional and intuitive knowledge, and experience, along with rational knowledge and scientific methods. 

(3) Ethics. Students should be taught that ethical considerations transcend "more practical" considerations in decision-making. They should be guided to develop strong social, professional and land ethics. This means that foresters would learn to personally accept moral responsibility for their actions and management recommendations, and would naturally give their first allegiance to the land. 

(4) Attitudes. Students should be taught that humility rather than arrogance is the proper attitude with which to approach forest management. Humility implies an appreciation of the magnitude of our ignorance and of the complexity of ecosystems; a tendency to use light-handed rather than heavy-handed techniques; the habit of creating flexible and adaptive plans; a strong bias towards silvicultural practices that mimic processes and patterns that occur in nature.


WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?

Our management and educational paradigms must change. We need to educate foresters who recognize that forestry is not practiced in a vacuum, and that forest policies are related to issues of politics, social justice, and the Earth's carrying-capacity for healthy human populations. We need foresters who are comfortable with the basic tenets of both the biological and social sciences, and who are understanding that forestry cannot be "fixed" without concurrently "fixing" other institutions. We have two choices: business-as-usual forestry, with foresters passively functioning as servants to the forces that are now destroying forest ecosystems in the interest of commodity production; or creative ecoforestry, with foresters actively participating in the birth of a new type of forestry, one that will restore and protect ecosystems, and sustain human communities into the 21st century. We must choose. Which side are you on?