A new forestry epoch? - a new relationship between man and forests - Editorial

As we have worked with the forest-health issue over the past few years, it has become clear that a new relationship between people and forests is rapidly emerging. Just how that new relationship will be translated into specific management actions on the land is a major focal point of today's debates.

If you have followed the recent writings in this magazine, you know we are convinced that the "new forestry" that emerges--by whatever name it is called--will be based on the "constant change" or "chaos" theory of ecology. In an over-generalized explanation, this means that people will be required to manage the forests for what they want and need, rather than relying on nature or natural cycles to keep forests in a condition they find desirable. In many ways, that idea throws a heavy burden on the public, as the ultimate decisionmakers in the matter, and on scientists, who are called upon to give the public good information about the most likely outcomes from different courses of action.

The starting point, however, must be a general "viewpoint" about what forests are for, what they can do, and how people want them to look and function. From that "central organizing principle" we must then use the sciences that are most available and useful in helping us achieve our general goals. This course change will undoubtedly occur at such magnitude that it merits discussion as a new forestry epoch.

It seems logical to characterize four major epochs in western forest management: two in the past, one still in operation but phasing out, and one in the future but beginning to be seen in many places. As we consider these separately, it is important to recognize how they interrelate. The lessons learned in one epoch become integrated into succeeding periods. There are few clear boundaries, in time, technologies, or scientific understanding. The differences between public and private land-management goals further blur the picture.

For Native Americans, history suggests that subsistence was the central principle of their relationship to the land. The basic sciences they employed would today be called biology and ecology--an intimate understanding of the environment in which they lived, the ways in which living things related to that environment and to each other, and how that environment and its non-human inhabitants could be harnessed to meet human needs. It should also be recognized as culture--in the sense of agriculture and silviculture--since each of the various native cultures very clearly "tuned" to the environment in which it developed. The fact that this "ethno-science" was not written in books that Europeans could study and understand made it no less valid, but helped it remain largely a mystery to the new immigrants.

How deliberately native cultures managed the forest environments in which they lived is increasingly documented. Fire was the main tool, used for a variety of purposes. No doubt natural lightning-set fires were as prevalent then as now, but whether they burned the same way is debatable. To the extent that the forests had been burned fairly regularly by intentional human actions, the fuels may have been very different in character than they are today, and thus the fires would have been different as well. We do know that the natives burned regularly for a variety of reasons, including the attraction of game to new pastures, the creation of "edge" effect and meadows, driving game for effective hunting, and clearing areas to protect villages or prepare fields for farming.

European settlers had a hard time understanding what they found in America. The natives, instead of living in fixed locations with a focus on accumulating material goods, tended to live with few possessions and move when necessary. Some cultures moved several times a year, following food sources. Others farmed in large settlements but moved the entire settlement every few years as fertility decline and other factors made a place less habitable.

Europeans, on the other hand, wanted permanent homes, farms, villages, and cities, as they had in Europe. Thus they had to bring resources from where they were produced (field, forest, river, etc.) to where they were needed. This meant an entirely new approach to forest management, one that could be called the "pioneer epoch." The central organizing theme was development, and engineering was probably the major scientific base. Huge forests of old, large trees were available to build and fuel the development of the young nation, and great energy and ingenuity were expended to build the railroads, sluiceways, splash dams, oxen roads, and other means by which logs could be moved from the forest to where they would be used. Forestry was largely a matter of devising better ways to access, harvest, and move logs out of the woods. Little thought was given to the depletion of the forests and their topsoils, or to the damage to rivers, lakes, or air quality that these pioneer practices created.

Out of this exploitation came public concern about a national "timber famine," and the launching of the conservation movement. People began looking at ways of injecting professional management into forestry, so the forests would last indefinitely and not "run out." One major debate that raged in the dry regions of the western states was the appropriate use of fire as a scientific management tool. Should fire be excluded to the extent possible, as it was in European forests, with the excess growth removed by human harvest? Or should the excess growth and production be periodically burned, as had been the native practice? In a huge debate that was "won" but never really settled, the proponents of fire exclusion had their way, and official Forest Service policy in the West rejected the "Paiute forestry" that featured use of intentional fire. Fire, with its tendency to consume trees that could otherwise be used for development, and its frightening ability to destroy human settlements and developments, was to be eliminated if possible.