So, sugaring season ended very abruptly and I'm letting myself off the hook for petering out on my maple blog by concentrating on the reflective nature of that act. Sugaring ended. I stopped writing. We ended up with 500 gallons and change – about 75% of a normal crop. It's simultaneously disappointing and, considering the weird weather and the fact that many did worse, rewarding. I don't know what to make of it. And now that the Summer issue of Northern Woodlands is bearing down on us, I don't have time to know what to make of it.
I am, at the moment, in Amherst, Massachusetts, at the New England Society of American Foresters’ conference that's being held on the UMASS campus. If you've never been here – and I hadn't been before Tuesday – it's really quite a place. It's sort of its own little city, or maybe, it's own little organism. You drive up through a relatively rural area that features flat farm fields and down-homey small businesses, then suddenly high-rises sprout up out of nowhere and you drive onto an island of life where everything's fast paced and frenetic. Cars whizzing by in every direction. More signs than the eye can comprehend. The metropolis features architectural styles that range from cute and quaint to soviet Russia. The marching band has its own building.
The hotel where I'm staying is 11 floors tall and sits above the student center, which is also where the conference is being held. You park in a parking garage and then walk into the belly of an enormous concrete building – circa 1970 – with big, precast, rib-like cement trusses on the ceiling and exposed factory style ductwork. The doorway leading into the restroom is 4 feet wide and 8 inches thick. There's so much concrete you feel like you're in a bunker or a tomb.
And I know I'm going on way too long about the architecture, but it's surreal to be attending a forestry conference in a building where the only thing made of wood is the paper the schedule is printed on and it seems worth setting the scene. Especially because the juxtaposition is poignant. Here we are, a whole basement full of people whose lives revolve around the woods and nature, talking about how to better communicate with the public about forest health issues, and land conservation issues, and the buy local wood movement, while upstairs the general public is buzzing around the urban-styled campus center, buying pizza, and signing Occupy petitions, and discussing fashion and sports and all matter of things that don't involve nature or the woods. The moment seems ripe with opportunity and at the same time a touch overwhelming and daunting.
There is a whole host of things to report on here, but I'm on a hotel lobby computer and I have 9:13 seconds before my time expires; plus I'm late for a presentation on foliar diseases in white pine. I will say, though, that as a writer/editor it's very refreshing to be around so many science-minded people. Nobody here will give you a straight answer about anything, which I love. Bring up a problem – say the miserable economic climate for forest products – and someone might point out that a silver lining in all this is that the poor markets in his/her area have led to less high grading, and because the junk wood is nearly as valuable as the good stuff, it's finally being cut. Bring up the extensive damage caused by an insect pest like the hemlock woolley adelgid and someone might point out that dead hemlocks in his/her area are accelerating forest succession, leading to old growth characteristics in young forest (and a host of complementary new animals). When the hemlock snags burn, as some are now, the forest is reverting to the original oak forest. And it's too early to say how everything will play out: on sites that are perfectly suited to growing hemlock, there are residual populations of healthy trees that seem to be fighting the adelgid and winning.
I've found that pretty much any forester will argue the opposite side of any observation you want to make about the woods, any trend you want to report as truth. And it's great in my business to have people constantly reminding you that ecology is fluid. The woods are constantly changing. When it comes to forest health there's a back story to consider, and a future to consider, and there's really never an “a-ha” moment anywhere, just a bunch of little hunches, some things that seem to work, some things that don’t, lots of "this is what the research shows, but . . ."
The computer's flashing and saying that I have less than :30 to logoff. More on this soon.
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