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Into the Woods, and Out Again

Chapter 1

Imagine being an explorer for a museum and, upon returning from an expedition, having to describe the first sighting of an elephant. Then imagine describing what it did! Such is our condition.

We've seen a thing once called forestry and we think that it is hardly recognizable. We want to describe it as we see it and as it might become. The elephantine problem is one of where to begin, what will be the appropriate scale (things to mention and things to leave out), and what it should do. There is so much controversy over so many parts of the world of forestry that straight talk can kill any market in which a book might be sold. Only books sold are read. We seek thoughtful readers. Freedom of the press extends only up to the boundary of the people who will pay to read, and that seems to shrink daily. We try to" talk straight" and therefore have chosen to put this talk on the web. We've had problems with editors (or reviewers) for years and are now too old to have time to work through such difficulties in this text. We try here to tackle the" elephant problem "and that has been our problem in the past. As an analogy for forestry, there are trunk, ear, skin, and tail experts and none as a reviewer will find any descriptions sufficiently accurate or precise enough for their small fields of interest or expertise. Failure in the part translates into failure in the whole, thus rejection. We still believe that some people can move around the elephant fast enough (see at once most ofa whole elephantup close, remember the parts, and comprehend the whole well enough to organize and communicate what they see and understand). There aren't many such people. There seem to be few who want to try. Maybe we're not a successful pair of observers and communicators, but we persist in trying. It is not unpleasant work and, best of all, it might be helpful to someone, someday, soon.

Each of us has taught in forestry and wildland related schools for over 30 years. We've not had many excellent students in classes. We've been surrounded by faculty who have become known as "reductionists." They, like us, have been victimized by knowing that the more that is known, the greater become the risks that a part will be omitted, forgotten, or not handled properly. Things become more risky. Everything is split into smaller and smaller parts. Everything is sub-something. For every category, there are a dozen or more sub-categories. Things quickly are reduced to the little "pieces-parts." The elephant is no longer of interest because there is its trunk and it is massive and complex, too complex for mastery by one mortal. The hairs, skin, and muscles become very interesting, then their genetic juices, and then, there was nothing because funds were so dispersed among competitors than no one had enough money to complete any project. The people studying elephants were separated from the real work required of elephants and even of native villages. They lost sight of survival mechanisms on display within the animals they studied. The survival of villages of good people depended upon elephants but academic folks were contemplating the primitive origins of elephants and their migrations across continents floating on rock magma. The students, teachers, and researchers of elephants, by analogy have lost their way. Likewise, people in forestry have lost their way. They have become reductionists. They no longer seem interested in the whole thing, for example in this thing once loosely called forestry.

Formerly, there was not need to be very specific. People knew what was connoted by "forestry." They may have been inaccurate, maybe even wrong, but it probably didn't matter. Now it does matter and on several levels.

Knowing what forestry now means and what it must eventually come to mean can influence the way tax funds are allocated, shape how thousands of students lured into colleges will study, influence the major federal agencies and what they do with their lands and programs in the future, and literally change the way wildlands are managed around the world. Knowing what it means can enable solutions; not knowing can result in failures, wastes, and ill-spent lives. There are massive changes underfoot. Forests are destroyed and planted; they are consumed by urban growth and highways; they play the role of a "crop" in international trade (and related war-talk). They are the only major potential source of energy for the new world that is rapidly becoming fossil-energy short. It seems to us to be critical to know forestry well and to adopt a strong, clear image of it, and go to work.

Old guys, we know our time is short, but we are compelled to make a last-ditch effort at showing how one major part of our world can be tended well. Perhaps altruism is passé and unbelievable, so perhaps some few readers at least will believe in our words here, for they are selfish, writ merely for the sake of our children and grandchildren.

We don't know where to begin. We do know that most academic course work is too highly outlined, too linear. Too much like life, one damned thing right after another, we think that there is a way to enter and surround a topic, to form paired links. We'll discuss these later. We believe the work ahead is to somehow comprehend that there is a whole entity that needs to be mastered. It has no sure I, II, III a,b,c order, even though that was the way we were taught. (It took 20 years for us to recover from the patterning!) There are commonly papers advocating a "paradigm shift", suggesting a fairly major change in a way that a field of work is perceived and work performed. We think a "shift" is no more meaningful than a poke at a log as we think about the wildlands and what needs to be done within and with them for the future. What we are discussing and describing herein is at once a return to things well known and established while engaging new practices, programs, and approaches. It requires rejecting some premises held to be "basic to the field", re-organizing, excluding some newcomers and saying goodbye to some "sects" that are becoming equivalent in scope and power to church "denominations." It requires making some very difficult decisions. (We dodge being defeated by claiming that our arguments and recommendations presented were valid but that some difficult decisions were made, perhaps poorly.We also despair that our suggestions will be accepted but not implemented in a timely way). We struggle to stay optimistic and our writing is sustained by it, but our collective history is the evidence for reasonable pessimism.

We deny the Greek and Roman roots of our education. We do not have to organize out analytical progress. We do not have to use hierarchy. We need to know it, but we are not be bound to its use when trying to comprehend things elephantine. We deny the logical linear patterns of a hundred taxonomic keys that have shaped our thought. Within the realm of forestry, it is right to start anywhere and work around, not elliptically but spherically. In the wildlands, there is more to life than area. The wildlands are changing volumes. We start, for fun (as reasonable a ground for a starting place as any), with our feet in the water. (No, editors and dear readers, there is no organization. Yes, it seem like a "flow of conscience." Yes, it deals with the whole wildland but you must engage it all. To deny regular pattern and predictable intervals and linear structures and then use them would be to deny a central premise of this effort. Organize it if you must, but do it on your own time, and realize that in doing so you admit that you fail to comprehend a central premise of the book and the potential future of comprehensive, modern wildland management.)

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Last revision: November 27, 2000