Most people, myself included, make sense of the world by looking at what’s right in front of their face. We know our own lives, after all. And we know our little slice of the world. I can tell you, with absolute authority, about the forest health on my little woodlot in southern Vermont. I can tell you where the Christmas tree pine grows in dense carpets; where the bobcats go when the deep snow comes. I can take you stand by stand and tell you where the maple is regenerating nicely, or where hay-scented fern has made the understory a discouraging carpet of green. (Well, yellow this time of year.)
But the further out we expand from our own experiences and our own little slice of earth, the more unclear things become. I don’t know for sure about the forest health across town, let alone statewide or regionally. Or what animal populations are up and what’s down where you live. This uncertainty makes our magazine and our community of readers valuable, as we can talk to each other about these things, share anecdotes, broaden each other’s perspectives. But at the same time, this uncertainty can make big picture public policy discussions about environmental/conservation issues seem baffling and very far away.
I attended a public policy meeting recently in Vermont, where foresters were appalled by the deer damage they were seeing on their woodlots and hunters were appalled by the lack of deer they were seeing in the woods. One group wanted less deer, the other more, and they were letting government officials know it. That same afternoon, I had lunch with a dairy farmer, and when I told her I was worried about the declining number of dairy farms in Vermont, she responded by pointing out that where once Joe Farmer had five boys who went on to own five farms, today, one big farm supports six families, they make better money than they used to, and each family gets to take a vacation. Her feeling was that her dairy was doing just fine, thank you very much. That very same evening, I read an editorial in Northern Logger magazine where loggers in western New York were saying there’s too much competition and overcapacity was flooding the market with logs and driving down prices, while mill owners were complaining that there’s not enough loggers out there and they were being forced to pay too much for a limited supply of wood.
So who knows, right? Everything is relative to everyone’s individual reality, and often times, contradicting narratives can be equally true. The whole thing makes me empathize with the people – the politicians, the entrepreneurs, the men and women who sit on these think tanks – who are charged with steering public policy. It makes me wonder how they deal with being intellectually whiplashed everyday by opposing viewpoints that can be equally valid. Imagine being in charge of a state’s deer herd and having to perpetually find a compromise that won’t make anyone happy? Or being charged with coming up with solutions to buoy a forest products industry that doesn’t look the same from one state to the next, or one town to the next, or one person to the next.
There’s no epiphany here, just an observation.
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