Forests & People - Next

Next!

The history of people and forests has mostly been; people take from the forest and don’t pay much attention after we’ve taken.  We have thought of trees as God’s way of giving us the wood - at no cost - trees have always just been there.  The only cost was to turn the tree into 2x4 s or plywood by logging, manufacturing, and marketing.  The results have often been very bad for the land, for the forest, for the critters and for the people that follow.   Those days need to be behind us.  We’d do better to put science and forest sustainability and all the benefits of a healthy forest ahead of short-term dollar profits.  Like the famous, “No free lunch,” there are “No free trees,” yet we’ve been treating our forests that way.  Of course that means money, and it will have to come from paying more for the wood products we all use and from taxes for government to do the complete job of managing America’s forests.

We need to start considering forests a living partner with us in caring for this earth - because they are!  Partners get paid for what they do, they have benefits and an expectation of a healthy future.  People need to find ways to value natural beauty like we may value a beautiful painting, or a board.  Natural beauty has value for most of us, but we don’t have a way to put a price on it like we do a painting, or a 2x4, there are no “man-hours” into natural beauty, we don’t put a price on it, so it is “worthless” and too often gets destroyed.  Even when outstanding natural beauty is protected, we don’t know how to put a price on it and often, through tourism, we may even destroy the beauty we recognized, yet, what is beauty for if not to be seen?  We could use some art and science collaboration to figure-out what to do.

A dollar value on Carbon credits is a way to value the job forests do pulling carbon out of the air where we don’t want it, and making wood out of those pesky global-warming molecules.  We need to determine what clean water is worth, adding-up what it costs to  make dirty water clean isn’t the whole story.  We need a way to value soil in place on a mountain side rather than eroded downstream to the bottom of a reservoir or in an irrigation canal.   We need to place a dollar value on lumber that reflects the cost of planting the tree, protecting and culturing the tree for 30 to 125 years before cutting it for lumber.  These and other efforts will start to give us a realistic idea of the value of a forest.  Then we can think about how to pay for caring for forests. 

There is another factor, it may sound a little weird, it’s one of those, “I don’t believe in ghosts -- but they’re there,” things.  Forests have consciousness.  They do!  We need to try to understand that consciousness and work with it.  Now there’s a challenge!  It could be done.  If we can come to understand that consciousness, “knowing” will help us live better on this great “Blue Marble.”  That kind of “knowing” is beyond science and it is short of the pure faith that religions requires.  It is an area of knowledge we haven’t developed the tools to investigate, we need to get to work on it, because this Earth is talking to us.