Forests for People: Forests & People

Yellowstone and People

Yellowstone continues to educate Americans about the natural world. The news headlines of the 1988 fire summer typically used the words, “destroyed”, and “consumed”. Well, fire will destroy a human made structure, it will consume a book or table and leave only a pile of ashes, but fire does NOT consume or destroy a forest. It burns over or through a forest, it kills trees, but they grow back from seed. The grass and shrubs grow back from their roots, the streams will run clean again. Fire is nature’s way of turning a page, the trees that come back may be different species, they certainly start out smaller than the trees that were killed, but they are green, their roots hold the soil, their crowns intercept the snow and they’re beautiful. Wild animals return, the new trees provide hiding cover and thermal cover, the new shrubs, forbs, and grasses are nutritious food for the plant eaters that are food for the meat eaters. Most fires leave unburned patches between burned areas. The forest lives, it evolves and continues being a forest, if we let it. Yellowstone has shown America that a forest is not “destroyed” by fire, it is changed, made young again. It is a matter of how time is viewed, a forest takes the long view, maybe there’s a lesson there.

Bitterrot

People - Forests - Change

Ever since that unknown visionary inserted the “Presidential Forest Reserve Authority“ into an unrelated law in 1891, America has been evolving how it treats forests and wild animals. The last 50 years changes have been coming faster, and change is difficult. Some people think change will hurt them financially and maybe emotionally so they resist. Others look further into the future and believe change is essential to have a better future, or any future.

Many who resist change have their working life or their financial investments committed to things staying the way they are, that’s huge to a working person and their family. These people will struggle with every thing they have to prevent, or at least delay, change that will take away what they have worked so hard for. You can imagine how a buggy-whip maker felt when he saw one of those “tin lizzys” going down the road instead of a horse-drawn surrey. The buggy-whip craft is a metaphor for a lot of jobs these days. Change is tough.

Those who look years - or decades - ahead and believe passionately that change must happen usually don’t have their immediate livelihood at stake, but they have commitment to an idea, and that is powerful. There is more than idealism involved here, there are jobs, and money. Professional organizers, lobbyists, lawyers, writers, fund raisers and many others involved in the “change public perception business” make their living working for “causes’ - whatever the cause may be. Their job relies on keeping a “cause” going and that makes a person committed.

Those who resist change and those who work for change, these are the actors in the drama about how we treat our forests, wild animals, streams, rivers, oceans, and plains - our Earth.

We the people are the audience, but we are an active audience. We will decide if this play will change our actions, our life, or will we choose to just rock-along and figure what-will-be-will-be, let others do the heavy lifting. Both sides in this drama, the economic side and the preserve-nature side, need some lifting, better understanding, compromise, and creative thinking. If only one side “wins,” both sides will lose. People need what nature offers, clean air, clean water, healthy soil, beauty, variety of plant and animal life, minerals, we need these elements to create a secure, comfortable (warm, well fed, healthy) life. Nature can continue to provide these resources, but not at the rate people have been taking them. People need to find ways to give back and use natural resources at a slower rate. If people don’t moderate the nature-taking, she will shut us down. On the other hand, if all we do is “preserve” nature, that doesn’t make for a very good quality of life for anyone.

There is a poem, “Two Kinds of People,” by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, it is about lifters and leaners. The forests-and-people-issue

needs more lifters.