At a recent foresters’ conference, I was discussing with a friend a report we’d heard on the future of Maine’s forest products industry. He noted that, while the volume of wood harvested in Maine has remained fairly constant over the past few years, loggers are now covering twice as much ground as they once did to obtain the same amount of wood.
“With changing forestry practices, such as constraints on clearcutting, more uneven-aged management, and the change to transporting wood by road instead of by river, we’re expending vastly more energy, and we’re lacing the forest with permanent roads that are kept open because we have to return to the same tracts more often,” he said.
His point: while most of us agree that forest practices have improved, and that a ban on scouring our rivers with an annual flood of logs is a good thing, these changes aren’t without cost. The dangling question: “Are we really doing it better?” has no simple answer.
The foresters attending this conference are a wise and experienced group. Though justly proud of their knowledge, the best of them are humble enough to admit that almost every problem solved raises new questions. Coincidentally, I overheard two foresters at this conference talking during a break. One remarked, “Gee, I look around and it seems as if this crowd is getting a little long in the tooth.”
Ah well, wisdom comes with age; at least we hope so as we grow older. But it seems that the mechanisms for passing this wisdom on are strained hard in the context of a larger culture that’s not paying much attention to what goes on deep in the woods. Who will make the complex choices that will shape our forests’ future 20 or 50 years hence?
That will fall to today’s young people, some of whom are busy learning the very basics – what’s growing in the woods, which habitats are preferred by which wildlife, and how forest management affects that habitat.
For example, Joe Smith writes in this issue about an imaginative program that introduces young, urban children to the forest. And the Center’s Northern Woodlands Goes to School program offers the collected wisdom in Northern Woodlands to 5,000 schoolchildren in the Northern Forest. Teachers say this project opens young peoples’ eyes in amazing ways. This work – sharing both knowledge and questions - is vitally important to assure that thoughtful, open-minded intelligence informs our efforts to secure a vital forest and a responsible forest industry.
On these pages and in the Center’s other work, the wise and the thoughtful share their knowledge and continue to learn from each other. And tomorrow’s forest stewards sit at their feet, if only figuratively, learning that complexity is part and parcel of the wonders of the forest they’re just beginning to discover.
Because you read and contribute to this magazine, and because you support the other work of the Center for Woodlands Education, we’re all ensuring that this wisdom – and its fundamental humility – is not lost.