America's Forests 2010 / Where On Earth Is Forestry Headed?
Where On Earth Is Forestry Headed?
By Jim Petersen - Evergreen Foundation
Mike McMurray showed up on my southern Oregon doorstep sometime in the spring of 1989, three years after I started Evergreen Magazine. He was looking for work. Although I didn’t need any photography at the time, he would take dozens of spectacular pictures for me in the years to come. But at the time, the best I could do for Mike was give him a list of lumbermen I wanted him to meet, so that they too could get to know this congenial young man whose portfolio had so impressed me.
I’d like to think that the contact list I gave Mike had something to do with the birth of his calendar a year later – and maybe it did – but he is the one who deserves all of the credit for bringing this wonderful calendar to life year after year for the last 20 years. It is a marvelous teaching tool and a first-rate promotional opportunity for his long list of sponsors.
When Mike asked me if I’d write the message for him this year, I wasn’t sure what I ought to say that I haven’t already said time and again on the pages of Evergreen Magazine. My views of forestry’s increasingly dismal American experience are well known. I am on record as having said the time has come of our country to give its federal lands back to Indian tribes from whom we stole them more than 100 years ago.
Why, you ask? Because our Congress has sold out to radical environmental groups who hate the capitalist system more than they love forests. They have abdicated our nation’s moral and ethical responsibility to care for these forests. By our purposeful neglect we have surrendered any right or title we held to these forests. The time has come for us to return them to their original owners, who cared for them very nicely for more than 10,000 years. My opinion on this painful subject has insulted many of my old Forest Service friends, but I tell them they aren’t the problem. Our problem is a gutless Congress that refuses to face facts.
Mike has done a fabulous job of recording the sad decline in our federal forests. And he has done a terrific job of photographing the steady march of progress in private ownership's forestry. The juxtaposition of these photographs – those which show federal neglect and those that show the caring hands of private timberland owners – has told its own disquieting story every year since 1989.
You don’t have to know the first thing about forestry to know that there is something dreadfully wrong with dead landscapes that stretch as far as the eye can see. Yet increasingly that is what we see in federal forests all over the West. The bark beetle infestation that is choking the life out of forests in the Interior West now extends from southern New Mexico into Interior British Columbia. At least our Canadian friends are attempting to salvage their losses. We aren’t – thanks to a litigious climate that says deeply troubling things about who we Americans have become and what we value most.
Thank god for private timberland owners who soldier on despite political and regulatory climates that have me wondering if they won’t soon throw in the towel. Sadly, some already have, simply because the cost of compliance in our sue-happy society is too great to bear in a global economy that demands exceptional efficiency and productivity. To compete, some companies are shipping their capital and their intellectual know how to South America and Asia, where land, labor and regulatory costs are a fraction of what they are here in the United States. Others are selling out to land developers who are putting up gates or paving over once fine forests.
How sad. How unbelievably stupid. I’d like to think our country will wake up before it’s too late, but my optimism is fading fast. We’re too busy texting and twittering and checking our facebook accounts to bother to look up and see what we’re doing to ourselves and our children’s future. Our arrogance and our ignorance horrify me.
The 20 year’s worth of images that Mike has so carefully collected constitute a remarkable visual record, originally recorded on light-sensitive film made from paper, but now etched on digital images that begin their lives deep in mines – the lesson here being that no matter how hard our country’s increasingly misguided policy makers try, America can never escape its fundamental dependence on natural resources. The only unanswered question is, will we use what we have in abundance, or will we continue to rely on other countries to keep us fed, clothed and sheltered?
Jim Petersen is a co-founder and executive director of the non-profit Evergreen Foundation, and publisher of Evergreen,
the Foundation’s periodic journal. He is a graduate of the University of Idaho, where he majored in journalism and broadcasting.
Jim is the recipient of many prestigious awards, including the 2003 Society of American Foresters National Journalism Award, for his work on
“The New Pioneers”, Best Forestry Public Relations Program in the Nation, AFPA 1991; and Communicator of the Year Award,
Montana Wood Products Association, 2004 for his leadership in the national forest health debate and many other awards.
(We wish to thank Jim for this issue and the tireless work he has done to enlighten America's public and public servants.
His insights have been a guidepost for us all. I particularly enjoy his 'never-quit' attitude, it is inspirational. - Mike)
To learn more about the Evergreen Foundation go to: http://evergreenmagazine.com/
Evergreen Magazine and the Foundation's website are perhaps the best Forestry resource information available today!