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Wildland Management Essays
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Chapter Title
Chapter 23 - The Silvan Hedonist
A hedonist is a pleasure seeker, at least one who lives in pleasure (because seeking is tiring and often not very pleasant). Silva, as I learned Latin, meant forest and there are many uses of it as a prefix, such as in silviculture. This is an area of study said to be one of the lay activities or knowledge bases of foresters. For years, I used the expression "silvan hedonist" for my graduate students. Most incoming students had, even after four or five years in undergraduate programs in biology, forestry, or wildlife management, the childish notion that they could continue to do what they most liked as children or teenagers - to be in the woods. Being is used carefully, for few of these young people had worked there. Few had spent the 100 or more nights out camping required for advanced youth programs. Three nights out per summer for 10 years does not come close to 100 nights. They like being in the out-of-doors, usually the forest. Few spoke of deserts, grasslands, mosquito-swamps. Most liked nature; the better parts of outdoors, the pleasurable parts. To questions such as "why go into wildlife management?", the answers have been consistently for 30 years vague, thoughtless ramblings about huntin' and fishin', camping, scouting, hiking, outdoor things. Often there is reference to summers on the farm or being a counselor at a camp. I stopped asking "who is your hero- (heroine-) figure?" and "whose job would you most like to hold?" for they rarely produced any answers and usually led to comments about certain television personalities that appeared to do studies of wild animals. The comments were often about personal "fascination," a kind of visual stroking. I openly criticized my students, laughingly, but with little jest, calling them openly a bunch of silvan hedonists. I did not want to pay them my taxes to make them happy in the future. I had other cheaper ways of keeping them off the streets. High taxes need to go for quality service, not employee happiness. If I want personal happiness or pleasure, I expect to enter the entertainment world and pay for it, not to be paid. These people who came to me (and still do) want pleasure. They want to be paid to do what they want to do. I have always felt good about my work. I like working. I particularly like to work on wildlife- and forestry-related topics. Perhaps anyone who enjoys his or her work is blessed. I've heard such people speak of their guilt because they can hardly comprehend being paid so much or so well to do something that they enjoy so much. There is a big difference in this higher-order work spirit, this joy of work, and the superficial passage of constant salary in to a person resulting in constant trips out to the outdoors. My criticism was taken good naturedly and they seemed to learn. The rationale for a long, hard, pleasing life of service to people by means of managing well their wildland resource will not emerge from "liking trees" or "huntin'." To meet the real needs of people and their resource on which they are dependent (though largely ignorant of this dependence), a person must be "called." There must be a true sense of vocation, a calling. The work has to be done in hot summers and cold winters, with savage gnats and citizens, with little "noseeums" that bite, and big southern gentlemen that can slip in a knife in your back as smooth as if it had a Novocain sheath. The work has to go on when you are sick, when the family is worse off financially than less-well-educated neighbors. The work has to go on whether you like it or not. Most people did not anticipate that their chosen career would require their education, ability and action, to order a truck, drive a tractor, arrest a poacher, and testify in court. They did not anticipate speaking to a garden club and to a bear-hunters' club on the same day, evaluating the desirability of certain types of weapons on game kills, measuring soil erosion from a road, and evaluating the cost effectiveness of wood preservatives, especially as they may influence salamander reproduction. Where is the biology? Where is the nature? Where is the great out of doors? Why are such people called "biologists?" All of the answers to these questions are outside the office, grinning, beckoning, while we sit and work on budgets; respond to forms - equipment forms, accident forms, insurance forms; answer letters about former employees; prepare rental contracts, seed purchases, road gravel orders; replace signs for those destroyed by vandals; and assess potential impacts that certain proposed projects may have on wildlife. Out there into nature, outside the office, is where the pleasure seeker never seems to go any longer! Later, after there is no further use in chiding my student colleagues, often they jokingly call themselves silvan hedonists and become a little critical of others whose projects sound a bit more hedonistic than helpful, I suggest there are "silvan eunuchs." Perhaps all of us. Like eunuchs in the harem of the sheik, the average wildlife manager is a traffic director, a coordinator, a rare participant in the glories of the true person-land intercourse. The hunter hunts, the farmer manipulates habitat for wildlife, the home-owner feeds the birds, the citizen lobbies, the exterminator controls damage. Where is the action for the real wildlife manager? Certainly there is more than making rounds and observing. Where are the real results, the visible evidence of the actions of the professional wildlife manager? These are not rhetorical questions. Some silvan eunuchs, frustrated by their inherently passive role, seek alternative roles. They become radiotelemetry experts, agronomists, taxonomists because these areas of work seem to be where there may be some action. On the eve of their graduation to "expert" they are called upon and discover theirs is not the needed specialty or discover that they started education and gaining experience too late and cannot achieve the greatness they feel needed in their lifetime. Once again they are returned to direct traffic or to begin another state in the splendid search of humans, trying to discover "who am I?" or "who might I become?" before it is too late. The wiser students, the more comprehensively thoughtful, see early who they are. Thus, clearing the glass, they see more clearly who they may become. The potential for some is to start early to gain expertise in one among a thousand disciplines and then to wield it like some giant axe to achieve good for people with the land. Others will find their potential in seeking comprehension of the larger system, learning and naming the parts and their working relations, but never mastering any one part. The wildlife manager is doomed to an entropic existence. There is frustration for them in having grasped too large a field. The entire field of wildlife management cannot be mastered. Thus, efforts to become an expert in one part creates dissonance because all of the other parts are ignored, must be ignored. Ignorance prevents or discourages risk-taking. The expert is too ignorant of too many known, namable, key ingredients of the managerial picture. Ignorance is entropic; it solidifies. The expert is frozen, frustrated. Mastering one part or all parts a little - the effect is the same. Frustration! The wildlife manager - ecologist, sophisticated land manager, whoever bears this same heavy yoke - needs to have it lifted. The weight is too great; it is deadly. It drains away megacalories otherwise useful for human creativity, mastery of process, and for designing systems. How to lift such a weight, to scale such barriers, itself is asking too much, but no one has really limited question-asking. The answer is only partial, because I think I only know part of the answer and that others know more … but not all. The solutions include: 1. Only people with a true sense of vocation should enter the doors of graduate wildlife programs. They must be only those who know what they are getting into, the costs and risks. They must know how much they and their family will probably forego in their lives. Similarly, there needs to be a clear sense of human purpose. A life lived "for the animals," or "just because" will not suffice in the enormous struggles of will, special rewards, and alternative professional and life opportunities that are to come in normal sequence. The answer "yes" must be so preformed that: "it is worth it?" never takes on meaning. 2. There can be no narrow definition of wildlife management. It must be robust and comprehensive. It may be that an attorney in an E.P.A. office working on air pollution may ultimately have more effect on more wildlife over larger areas for more years than a hundred classical wildlife managers working on the land. The attorney is doing wildlife management if the definition is robust. Expertise, wielded well for the good of the faunal resource for people - that is the key criterion. 3. Wildlife managers cannot be generalists. Perhaps they could be, once, but the land doctor image suggested by Aldo Leopold fails. The general practitioners and specialists of the medicine field continue to serve well. In wildlife management, only specialists working in teams will ultimately solve the awful, awesome, growing problems of improving land use and management. The field is too large. The medical doctor must master one organism, the human body and mind, and must spend nine years at minimum trying to do so. The wildlife manager has a minimum of 2,000 creatures to be mastered; 500 plant species; at least 2 biomes; all of ecology, sociology and education; legal aspects of the environment; and a vast array of techniques - all with a dedication of rarely more than six years. It cannot be done. We continue the charade nationally, silly. The resource suffers, as do people dependent upon it. The option: teams of experts. Adding extra years of school will not suffice. Continuing down the present path has the same results: lost in the tall grass. Re-organizing (e.g., "conservation biology") is even sillier. 4. Emphasis in the future must be on the manager as decision-maker, goal-oriented manipulators of the environment that create places for desired animals and plants. Not physical action, but mental action must be dominant. There are plenty of people and machines to handle the physical work - the dozing, damming, draining, dredging, drilling, disking, and dusting. It's the good decision that's missing - one with plenty of data … but that shortage is not the major problem. The problem is in the process, the algorithms used, the logic. The need is not for more information or data, but better ways (or use of the good ones that are available) to put information together so that the results of action achieves objectives and don't create new problems for someone else, later. 5. Within managers, there must emerge an existential land philosophy, a now-imperative philosophy, one futuristically inclined, not historically bound. 6. Every state or agency cannot afford its own complete set of experts. Regional management teams can emerge to assure superior decisions for the future with greater cost-effectiveness than in the past. 7. Expert systems, technologically combined with knowledge-based systems, can be inordinately helpful in enhancing the manager's power in making the regional decisions. 8. Other professionals require "continuing education" for improvement. In the wildlife field, there must be perpetual study to gain an approximate and appropriate starting condition. Life-long learning becomes the demand of the profession as cruel jailer. It may be or become the greatest joy of a life of pleasure, attempting to serve people by means of the wildlife resource.