The Long View

If you’ve ever walked in your woods with a logger or a forester, I bet you’ve heard some version of this speech:

“You should think of your forest as a garden. The trees are like your vegetables. If you don’t get rid of the weeds, your lettuce will be overgrown, and you’ll not have any to eat. And think of your carrots. When they come up, you have to thin them out, take out the weaker ones so that the stronger ones have more room to grow. If you don’t, you’re not going to have much of a crop because they’ll all be stunted. It’s the same thing with a forest. You have to get rid of the weeds, you have to thin it out.”

I first heard the garden talk more than 15 years ago and have heard many versions of it since, so now when I hear someone launch into it, I find myself silently pondering the many ways in which it’s not like a garden:

• A garden requires that you add fertilizer of one sort or another. Whether it’s a green manure, a cover crop of nitrogen-fixing plants, a load of manure, or a bag of 10-10-10, a garden that isn’t replenished is a garden whose soil will become depleted. Forest soils can be likewise depleted, and soil nutrients need to be replenished, but that happens naturally: each year, trees grow a new set of leaves, and when they’ve completed their work in fall, each year’s drop of leaves, twigs, and branches brings nutrients to the soil. Unlike a garden, a forest is a natural system, and one that is incredibly complex, from below the ground to the crowns of the tallest pines.
• If you thin your carrots without discussing it beforehand with your spouse, chances are your marriage will not be in jeopardy. Try that with the stand of pine closest to the house, the area where the dog gets walked and the guests go for a pre-dinner stroll, and it might not go over too well. Your woods provide a visual setting and a context whose importance can’t be underestimated.
• If you decide to take a year off from tending the garden, what you will have at the end of it is not a garden but a nightmarish patch of witchgrass, gill o’er the ground, raspberries, or oregano, to name the menaces that would rule our personal garden if we took a year off – you probably have a different collection of dreadful weeds. With a forest, if you do nothing for a year, nobody will notice. In fact, if you do nothing for your entire tenure as the forest’s steward, it won’t be any less a forest. It won’t produce like it could, and you will have missed out on one of the great pleasures in life, tending a forest. You probably won’t know your woods as intimately as you would if you regularly took your pruning saw for a walk, nor will you experience the satisfaction of being paid real money for trees you’ve tended. But it won’t devolve into something less than a forest.

There are more differences, but you get the point. Regardless of the speaker, the garden talk tends to be pretty similar from one presentation to another, but one of the more clever variations adds this gem: “And when you weed the forest, you can even sell the weeds! How could it get any better than that?” That tickled me. Still, I have some difficulty when the logger or forester turns the garden analogy into his own version of a seventeenth century carpe diem poem:

It’s not necessary to manage every acre or utilize every shred of fiber. Some woods deserve to be set aside, and not just those on the tops of mountains. And it’s a big mistake to try to talk a reluctant landowner into cutting trees without making it abundantly clear that logging entails dramatic changes to the look of the land. There’s no doubt that the woods are going to look very different afterwards.

I am as gung-ho about managing my woods as any born-again woodsman. I take great pride in my stands of sugar maple and have committed many hours to thinning and weeding in order to improve their form and their value. By doing so, I’ve added some variety in the forest’s structure, which has made it more hospitable to all sorts of small animals and the predators that seek them. I love the one-acre clearcut we did six years ago that is now full of 10-foot-tall white ash saplings, on whose branches are perched songbirds that don’t appear any place else in our more mature woods. But I didn’t come to this understanding overnight, and I would have resisted any pressure to move along any faster.

Don’t get me wrong: most of those using the garden analogy are not trying to take you down the garden path. It’s generally done with the best intentions, impelled by a need to explain something that is very complex to an audience with no background in the subject. I once heard a forester say, “Forestry is not rocket science. It’s much harder than that.” And as someone thirsty for as much knowledge as I can get short of enrolling in forestry school, I wouldn’t argue with that assessment.

A forest is a natural system, and while it has its own governing principles, they’re not so readily discerned. Forestry is a mix of biology, chemistry, geology, physics, and economics, combined with an appreciation for beauty and – when there’s a client involved whose daily life is intertwined with what happens in those woods – a healthy dose of psychology.

Given such complexity, how else to get across the principles of good forestry than through a simple, down-to-earth analogy? And when the listener is someone who has grown up believing in the moral imperative inherent in the slogan “Save a tree,” he or she needs to have a good rationale for cutting one down. The garden analogy seems to serve the purpose.

So in the game of communication, one well-meaning oversimplification is employed to overturn another one. Just like the garden explanation, “Save a tree” was born with the best of intentions. At the heart of this saying is the exhortation to re-use and recycle. If we humans are going to have a future on this planet, we are indeed going to have to make the most of our increasingly limited resources. We need to make sure that goods have run their course before they are discarded. With the changes brought on by billions of people in other lands wanting to live with the plentiful goods that we Americans do, our notion of scarcity will someday become less an abstraction than a daily reality. Learning to live with less is the only way to forestall that day.

When “Save a tree” leads people to reuse and recycle, it has served its purpose well. When it fosters a philosophy that cutting trees is wrong, that using wood is a problem, the slogan has backfired. Cutting trees is not wrong. Saving trees is not right if it means that our paper is therefore made from fiber grown in a monoculture under a mist of pesticides and our furniture is made from plastic or steel, neither of which has anything renewable about it.

It’s not just that these materials are poor substitutes for natural and renewable wood. In the Northeast, all but a tiny proportion of the trees that go to paper mills and to sawmills and veneer mills are grown not in plantations but in natural forests like yours and mine. The trees are cut by neighbors you see at the grocery store or at town meeting and turned into finished products by others in the community.

That process helps put food on the table for many in rural communities, including the person who owns the forest. Providing income that offsets the cost of owning land helps people to keep that forest intact and reduces their need to subdivide the forest for development. Cutting trees provides the means to keep the forest a forest. This will seem like irony only to people who have lost their connection to the land as a source of the goods we use everyday.

The trees out your window are living, breathing organisms that are part of a self-regenerating system. They are the essence of renewable. The forests they come from are resilient and self-sustaining if – yes, that’s a big if – our intrusions into them are done with care and respect for the entire system. And this biological system in turn feeds an economic system and a culture that spells the best answer to the question of how to live in harmony with our environment.

I’m in the business of trying to bring clarity to complex subjects and complicated debates. So I know full well the pleasure of finding the image, the analogy, the comparison that precisely gets across what I’m trying to say. But the analogy or slogan has to be more of an invitation to further thought than a definitive explanation. Yes, a forest is like a garden. Yes, it’s truly a virtue to save a tree. But it’s more complicated than that.