Necessary Forests: What Is a Forest?

Our sense of what a thing is is invariably shaped by our experiences, including those so early and intimate, so subtle and subconscious, that we may not even be able to summon them up from memory. Our internal definitions form in the way a seedling grows, shaped and inclined by everything that surrounds it as well as by its own inner directions, pointed both toward Earth and toward the light.

When we think of family, for example, we know what a family is from the one that nurtured us, educated us, and patterned how to live. Friends and neighbors contributed as well. That is our subliminal base when we begin to create a definition of a family. Such a process is natural and inevitable. It can also be a kind of mental trap, moving easily and invisibly from description to prescription.

As with family, so it is with forests--with some of the same emotional charge. Just as arguments over what constitutes a family can be bitter and divisive, the partisans filled with a sense of their own righteousness, so too arguments can arise over what makes a forest. In fact, definitions of a forest vary from country to country, from profession to profession. The definitions often sound very different from each other, reflect vastly different focuses and perspectives, are aimed at different audiences, have different goals, and grow out of different experiences.

That being the case, it seems only fair to give a sense of the ways I’ve known forests, so you have a perspective in which to place my comments. These are the kinds of moments I remember, in no particular order.

Scrambling up steep slopes and sliding down rocky hollows in West Virginia in late fall, the thick layer of shifting oak leaves underfoot as slick and treacherous as ice.

Prowling as a boy through bottomlands along the Ohio River, the growth rank and damp, collecting all manner of fungi for no other reason than that they are marvelous and strange.

Hiking through the bush in Sierra Leone and coming to a small, charred clearing, with smoke still rising from blackened stumps and branches where a farmer is preparing to plant cassava.

Staring, dazzled by the mosses and lichen draping Sitka Spruce, Big Leaf Maples, and Vine Maples in the rain forest of the Olympic Peninsula, on a rare day of full and glorious sun.

Driving to a sawmill along the Little Kanawha River to pick up a truckload of rough-cut hardwood lumber--mostly oak and poplar-- for use in adding a bathroom to our farmhouse.

Rounding up our work horses in the meadow of our farm in West Virginia, cutting down through the woods to their watering pond.

Standing beside a small Loblolly Pine plantation with a group of schoolchildren, discussing “working forests.”

Slowly scanning an entire mountainside of stumps at a clearcut in the Cascades, trying to fend off the impact of the muddy, churned-up soil.

Hiking the Appalachian Trail near the Blue Ridge Parkway, searching both sides of the trail as I pick my way along, looking for the jagged leaves of American Chestnut, borne on sprouts still springing up from the roots of trees whose tops died eighty years ago.

Wading through swampy bottomland in Alabama in rubber boots, crossing small creeks on fallen logs.

Finding stumps from timbering, stump sprouts, open-grown trees, agricultural gullies, and human artifacts in what people had hoped was a primary or old-growth forest.

Focusing my camera on a hillside in Virginia, awed by sunlight passing through leaves one autumn afternoon, their color as brilliant and intense as panels in a stained glass window.

A mid-summer night in Kentucky, searching for an opening in the understory to locate the eye of a raccoon gleaming out of a cluster of leaves in the top of the tallest tree in the woods.

Glancing up a mountain trail in Virginia to see a huge black bear crossing the trail no more than twenty yards ahead, as it plunges into a thicket to feed.

Standing by Tanner Creek, watching morning mists lift up through wooded hillsides as the day begins to warm.

Leading neighborhood children on hikes, introducing them to the scents of Sweet Birch and Sassafras and Spicebush, the taste of Autumn Olive and Hackberries.

Stepping hastily aside as a column of driver ants cuts through the African bush.

Scanning branches of Pawpaws for ripening fruit in the Rivanna’s bottomlands.

Farmer, hunter, teacher, hiker, amateur carpenter, naturalist, photographer--that is my experience. Each time I enter a forest the experience seems fresh. Even entering the same area over and over, I feel each visit as if I’ve stepped out of time and into a place that whispers of timeless things.

You remember your own places, your own times, your own roles; you hear your own whisperings The variety of forests is near-infinite in their complexity, in their response to even the most subtle differences in aspect, soil type, rainfall, altitude, wind, length of growing season, and on and on. That is one of the problems of definition: how to capture the essential qualities of forests without violating the richness and wonder of different forests and the ways they have threaded themselves through our lives--if we are lucky.

We’re often urged to “think outside the box,” meaning that we should open our minds to new possibilities, make an effort to free our imaginations from whatever confines them. Definitions are prototypical boxes. They control perceptions, set limits and boundaries, restrict possibilities. No matter how neutral their language, they emerge from the events of our lives, from values, from priorities and goals. No matter how carefully and painstakingly arrived at, they represent one choice among many.

Let me step away from forests for a few minutes to illustrate my point.

What is a citizen? That seems simple enough. Yet at the very onset of constitutional government in the U.S., the definition of the numbers of “citizens” to be counted in apportioning representation in the House of Representatives took the form of a compromise between Northern and Southern states. Slaves were counted at three-fifths of their actual number. This definition of “citizens” significantly enlarged the power of Southern states in Congress relative to the number of people in those states who could actually vote. As a result, southerners dominated all three branches of government (with the exception of the Senate) until the Civil War. That peculiar twist on definition had enormous consequences.

Take another example. Consider the decision reached by Nazi officials at Wansee in January of 1942 to undertake a “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem.” What is a Jew? In order to keep Aryan blood “pure” and free from Jewish contamination, a Jew was defined as anyone having one or more Jewish grandparents. So hundreds of thousands of Christians were among the Jews slaughtered in concentration camps.

Or, in more recent history, who can forget the ugliness surrounding the Bush administration’s attempt to help CIA interrogators evade prosecution by narrowing the definition of torture to acts that cause “organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death”? That act of definition drew international condemnation and, with the emergence of photos from Abu Ghraib, may have undercut once and for all the U.S. claim to moral high ground.

Ongoing battles in the U.S. over what constitutes a marriage are another example of a definition that enflames political passions, with lifelong consequences for those who are denied marriage under some definitions, including the demeaning of their most intimate relationship, denial of financial and legal benefits, and an implicit condemnation of their morals.

The definition used to measure “poverty” in the U.S. has been outmoded for decades. It was created in an economy where food took up a third of the household budget and many fathers went off to work while mothers stayed home to care for children. But the same definition is still used in a radically different economy, since correcting for new realities would significantly raise the official number of people living in poverty. This would not only embarrass the government but would increase eligibility for various assistance programs--thus exposing the failure of government to meet basic needs of more and more people--while also hiking the cost of those programs.

The giant flowering eucalyptus trees of Southern and Eastern Australia rank with Redwoods and Sequoias among the largest trees on Earth. Like those trees of the U.S.’s West Coast, they are also highly-prized targets for the timber industry. (“Yes, they’re magnificent; yes, they are rare and beautiful; yes, they form remarkable and endangered ecosystems; yes, their towering presence strikes awe in many a person’s heart. But damn it, man, there’s money to be made from those things--big money!”)

The continued existence of these giant eucalypts is at risk in part because of a definition. Because they are fire-dependent, they’re not considered rainforest species, and thus fail to qualify for protection under government rainforest preservation programs. David Bowman, from the University of Tasmania, has led a study which categorizes the eucalypts as in fact rainforest beings, with their particular niche happening to fall on the edges, where they benefit from fires that are essential to their reproduction. Will that be enough to rescue these trees from the sawmill?

Definitions are human constructs, often clumsy, never quite fully adequate. And how could they be? How can a sentence or even a paragraph capture the variety, adaptability, mystery, and sheer cussedness of living things and the elaborate systems of their lives together?

So definitions reflect a choice, represent a situation to us in a particular way, and can have far-reaching consequences. Official definitions can side with one value against another, can decide who prospers and who doesn’t, even who lives and who dies. They promote, endorse, and sanction one particular way of looking at an issue. At the same time, they also direct resources and build a bureaucratic structure committed to that vision, creating a host of champions for it that can be extremely difficult to dislodge.

In many ways, I’m hesitant to even plunge into the matter of definition, since the very essence of definition is to divide, to make distinctions, to emphasize differences. Although the division is intellectual, it can also create or intensify divisions between people. I hope that isn’t the case here. I’ve known many people from different backgrounds--naturalists, ecologists, landowners, and professional foresters--who were involved with forests, and have found in most cases that our shared deep connection with trees and forests has led to mutual respect and friendship.

Keeping all that in mind, let’s circle back to the definition of a forest. Most of us, if we were to try to come up with a definition of a forest on our own, would probably begin with something as simple as “a large area with a lot of trees.” And it’s likely that’s where many definitions of a forest have begun, with details added that suit the needs or image of the definer. The result is an assortment of definitions, offered by everyone from economists to ecologists, from bureaucrats to biologists. H. Gyde Lund reports finding 1,500 definitions of a forest, and once provided a huge list of them, along with links to the sources. His downloaded list of definitions for forests and related terms ran 496 pages.

Despite the abundance of definitions, however, two override all the others, both in the breadth of their application and in the force of their impact. The first is the definition developed by the US Forest Service for its Forest Inventory and Analysis program and subsequently adopted by forestry departments here in Virginia and other states across the country. Although this definition and the one that follows may seem dry and jargon-intense, please stay with it. Their implications and ramifications are anything but dull.

The USFS definition says a forest is “land at least 37 meters wide (40+ yards) and 0.4 hectare in size (almost an acre) with at least 10 percent tree cover (or equivalent stocking) by live trees of any size, including land that formerly had such tree cover and that will be naturally or artificially regenerated and is not subject to nonforest use(s) such as extensive livestock or human activity that prevent normal tree regeneration and succession.” (Although not mentioned in that definition, the FIA also excludes apple orchards and Christmas tree plantations from its classification as Forestland, shifting them instead to an Agricultural Lands category.)

The definition sounds forbiddingly technical. Let me see if I can boil it down to more easily understood language. A “forest” is:

1) land an acre or more in size and at least 40 yards wide;

2a) with at least 10% tree cover (trees of any size) OR...

2b) land that doesn’t have such tree cover now, but did previously, and is not currently developed for any non-forest use.

The second major definition has global rather than national significance. It was adopted back in 2001 by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, with the intent of encouraging nations to save forests because they store vast amounts of carbon, thus helping reduce global warming. The UN definition is very similar to the one created by the USFS. It identifies a “forest” as:

land half a hectare or larger (a hectare is equal to 2.471 acres, so half a hectare is similar in size to the acre in the USFS definition);
with 10% or more cover by plants at least 2 meters tall at maturity. (This phrasing essentially combines 2a and 2b from the USFS.)

The USFS and UN definitions serve official purposes. A precise, fixed definition is essential for purposes of inventory. If you don’t know what you’re counting, you can’t count it. The definitions have had to address an extremely complex reality as well; it’s hard to craft a definition that accommodates and distinguishes between an enormous variety of wooded land. And no definition is going to satisfy everyone.

Still, when we go to apply that USFS definition, for example, gnarly questions pop up. All of the land parcels described below meet the USFS definition. How many of them would you consider forests?

A 300-acre woodland was clearcut three months ago and will be allowed to regenerate itself. Nothing is currently visible but stumps, some sprouts, fallen treetops, ruts, blackberries, and bare ground.
Two thousand acres of mixed hardwoods were clearcut. The land was then sprayed with an herbicide, replanted solely with Loblolly Pines, and carefully managed. The pine stand is now ten years old.
A mixed hardwood stand has been “selectively harvested” (“take the best and leave the rest”) three times in the last century. The soil is badly eroded, trees often misshapen and diseased, and undesirable species over-represented.
A belt of steep hillside between a highway and a housing development has been left to grow unchecked. Now it is filling in, with the stand dominated by Ailanthus, Paulownia, Siberian Elm, Bradford Pear, Red Maple, and Box Elder.
Twelve-hundred acres of what was formerly mixed hardwoods and pine forest in Georgia are planted with multi-national genetically engineered cold-tolerant Eucalyptus trees.
On a huge, barren valley-fill from a strip mining operation, coal operators have discharged their obligation to reclaim the land by planting Autumn Olive, Black Locust, and Black Alder along with the traditional Kentucky-31 tall fescue. The Autumn Olive and Black Alder are considered shrubs by FIA, but if the Black Locust (alone or in combination with another species considered a tree by FIA) amounts to a 10% canopy cover, the area is considered forestland.
A 160-acre abandoned farm has sprung up in Eastern Red Cedar and Virginia Pine.

I’ll be straightforward about my own position. None of the examples, for reasons, I’ll be talking about in more detail a little later, are things I would consider forests. “Every vocabulary shapes the world to fit a paradigm,” wrote Jack Turner, and personally, I prefer not to see the world shaped by a definition in which the name “forest” is applied to areas that have no trees. Or to a 40-yard-wide belt of trees, no matter how far it extends. Or to an unnatural monoculture. Or to the collection of species people in a city choose to adorn their yards and public places.

I say that realizing it’s highly unlikely that anything I write will have the slightest impact on these official definitions. Yet in my own use, and for consideration by others, I am trying to draw a distinction that seems critical. When I use the word “forest,” I am excluding tree plantations because they are so severely controlled and monocultural. I’m omitting currently-unregenerated clearcuts because, well, there are no trees there.

To the saying “You can’t see the forest for the trees,” I would add “You can’t see the forest without the trees.” I would like to exclude the kinds of land I’ve just listed because they overextend the idea of a forest to the point that they cause us to lose sight of the unique value of wild forests. The prevalent definition makes possible a kind of bureaucratic shell game, in which the world appears more forested statistically than our naked eyes might believe.

Which--as it happens--is precisely what is occurring with the UN definition. Here we see major real-life consequences being played out--just as they were for “citizen,” “Jew,” “torture,” “marriage,” and “poverty.”

The UN definition of a forest is the lynchpin for an international program almost always referred to as REDD or UN-REDD, in which the letters stand for “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation.” Since deforestation accounts for up to 20% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, an effective program to halt or slow down the loss of forests is critical. The hope with REDD is to not only to reduce greenhouse gases by saving forests in developing countries from being degraded or permanently lost, but to produce additional benefits such as preserving biodiversity and saving the homes of native people. REDD activities have been funded by the World Bank, the UNN-REDD Program, Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative, and other governments and NGOs.

All to the good, you might think. Who could be against reducing greenhouse gases, halting deforestation and forest degradation, preserving biodiversity, and safeguarding the homelands of indigenous people?

As it turns out, that’s not a rhetorical question. It’s a real question, and one answer is that investment and development corporations could. So it’s probably not a coincidence that the definition of a forest contains loopholes large enough to drive fleets of skidders, trimmers, dozers, loaders, and logging trucks through. Under that definition, countries can clear massive amounts of forest and still claim that no deforestation has occurred. If the lost rainforest is replaced by eucalyptus or oil palm plantations, for example, or if the clearcut area still remains under the control of a forest agency or institution, then they still meet the definition.

“Forest,” according to Robert Pogue Harrison [ in Forests: The Shadow of Civilization ] was originally a legal category in which a king placed woodlands to reserve them for his personal hunting pleasure. When land was “afforested,” that is, placed off limits by royal decree, everyone else was denied use of any kind. I’d like to provide forests the same level of protection once more, not out of deference to the prerogatives of the lords among us, but out of respect--even reverence--for the forests themselves.

I believe that we need to conserve wild, unmanaged or minimally managed woodlands--as much as possible, wherever possible, whenever possible--and I would save the word “forests” for such places. I’ll explain why in a minute. At the same time, I recognize the obvious need for other woodlands that can produce the wood people need for building materials, furniture, paper, tools, and much else.

Beyond that need, however, is an even more powerful factor, one we seldom consider. Humans are planners. Designers. Constructors. We’re like beavers, with a seeming-compulsion to rework our surroundings. We have an innate bias toward altering the landscape, and give almost automatic deference and respect to those who are building or growing something. In places throughout this book I assail human greed as an underlying cause of much deforestation, but this common bent of mankind--one which is in many respects so admirable, and so central to what we think of as civilization--may be even more destructive to the natural world.

A person advocating a distinction between managed woodlands and forests is automatically setting himself up to be labeled a “tree hugger” by some sources. I hope readers will reject such stereotyping and give this discussion--and any other serious consideration of forest issues--a fair hearing.

Dividing people into “tree huggers” and “tree killers” is the kind of extremist positioning that has been deliberately employed to poison public debate in this country, and I’m heartily sick of it. For me, the ideal would be a world in which the human landscape and the natural landscape co-exist in a healthy balance. We’re very far from that, but we’ll never draw any closer unless we accord each other basic respect. I value people who manage woodlands with extensive knowledge and loving care. Good managers of woodlands show the same concern as good farmers for treating land with the wisdom and kindness it deserves as a fundamental part of our community. I hope that respect is reciprocated.

In the context of our culture, managed woodlands are necessary, desirable, and inevitable. Wood production on tree plantations and well-managed timber stands is considerably greater than production from wild or unmanaged woodlands, thus reducing pressure to cut wild woodlands. Managed woodlands also generate income that allows a landowner to hold on to property, thus preventing it from being lost to development. And they sequester significant amounts of carbon, thus helping moderate global warming.

Not all managed woodlands are well managed, of course. Far from it. And badly managed woodlands drive conscientious foresters batty. Whether it’s from ignorance, indolence, or greed, a significant share of “managed woodlands” are neglected or abused. A public forester’s power to do well by them is often severely limited by agency policy, by legislative fiat, or by a political atmosphere bent on enabling a landowner to do what he or she damn well pleases. Too many foresters find themselves frustrated by their inability to do what they were trained to do--what they felt a vocation for--and end up leaving public service to set up a private forestry consulting business, or turn to other work altogether.

My concern is twofold. One is that, well cared for or not, these managed woodlands are not wild forests. The second is that our current structure places many wild forests under the jurisdiction of a management agency. Humans design for their ends; nature for its own. Humans are aware of only a minute fraction of the processes and interactions taking place in an ecosystem. Yet we make major changes in nature with our focus on a few desired outcomes, oblivious to a vast array of consequences, many of them invisible. Using the same word, “forests,” to designate these two broad types of wooded land--types with very different reasons for being--is both confusing and, in my opinion, ultimately destructive to the basic concept of wild forests.

I’m especially concerned about that ever-growing percentage of people who have only modest or even no contact with forests. These are the people who are growing up after “the last child in the woods.” They have no firsthand experience of forests. Such experience as they have is through television screens, computer monitors, or from behind the window of a speeding automobile. They are in danger of being unable to even imagine a true forest. They scarce see nature at all. I believe that if you reverse the closing sentence in the following passage by William Blake, that reversal might be as true as the original:

“To the eyes of a miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the sun.... The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity, and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees.” [Letter to Revd Dr Trusler, 23 August 1799]

Let’s think about the Forest Service definition in the context of the seven problematic examples I posed earlier. What are the effects of employing this particular definition in the agencies that manage virtually every national and state forest in the country? What kinds of choices does it represent? What values does it promote and sanction, and what are the consequences from operating out of that definition?

One of the major effects is that it grossly overestimates the amount of forest that remains, in the way many of us think of forests. This spring I was standing in a pasture that had been set out with rows of Loblolly seedlings, now two or three years old, emerging above the grass and a little above waist high. The forester I was with made a sweeping gesture over the pasture and said, “This is a forest.” By the terms of the definition employed by the Forest Service, that was absolutely correct. But my stomach was twisting. I could not accept that claim. “This isn’t a forest,” my mind and spirit cried out, though I held my tongue.

It is easy enough to see why such claims matter. Statistics lead us to believe that our state or nation is rich with wild and wonderful places, while in fact significant portions of those “forests” are reclaimed strip-mines or current clear-cuts or monocultural tree plantations or woodlands somewhere in a cut-and-regenerate cycle. That blurs our perception, minimizing vital differences. Such an inclusive definition has no place for a belief that the integrity and marvelous diversity of natural forests endows them with a value that sets them above and apart from woodlands that have been extensively managed.

The Forest Service definition has its roots in silviculture. At its worst, silviculture hearkens back to a time when logging was forestry, and traces of that mentality can still crop up. At its best, silviculture involves close, intensive study of tree growth and development as well as a host of environmental interactions, with the goal of nurturing healthy trees and woodlands.

The understandings gained from that study have enormous and broad-ranging value. They can be applied to naturally-occurring forests, woods, orchards, tree plantations, and any considered planting and management of trees. Throughout, however, silviculture remains anthropocentric, emphasizing human management and a set of human goals. That’s implicit in the “culture” portion of its name, which means “to cultivate.” Agriculture concerns itself with the cultivation or management of an “ager,” which is the Latin word for a field or a farm; silviculture concerns itself with the cultivation or management of “silvae,” which is the Latin word for woods or forests.

As I said earlier, we need wood, and we need managed forests. We need silviculture. We also need wilderness and wild forests. In a perfect world, both managed and wild woodlands would be priorities, and the need to care for and preserve both would be in balance. But the world is out of balance. It is unbalanced by the sheer weight of human numbers, by the weight of constantly growing consumption, and by greed and shortsightedness. All of those factors push for the ongoing destruction and consumption of wild forests.

The path to industrial silviculture was blazed by industrial agriculture. The traditional family farms that my grandparents in Illinois and my older neighbors in West Virginia grew up on were operated with intimate knowledge of the land, were diversified with hay and cattle and orchard and garden, and were so connected to family history and values that each was referred to by those who lived there as “the homeplace.”

With the industrialization of our culture, those farms have largely disappeared. People no longer have a “homeplace.” I don’t; my children don’t. My own sense of what has been lost is captured in Louise Glück’s lines “The world / was whole because / it shattered. When it shattered / then we knew what it was.” [The opening of her poem “For Maggio,” from Vita Nova.]

That loss of home and wholeness both reflects and exacerbates a shift in culture. Families are geographically fragmented. My children live in Florida, Connecticut, North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia; they left home and went off to school in New Mexico, California, New Jersey, West Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan. Talking with other people, I find this kind of acentric (to coin a word) life prevalent in our nation now. Another way to put it is that most of us are “homeless” now. The likelihood is that your own family has had a similar experience.

Instead of the small, largely self-sufficient farms of my grandparents’ day, much of the farming being done now in West Virginia involves huge poultry houses, operated under arrangements with chicken processors and marketers who call all the shots. Or hay and cattle operations where the husband and wife both work off the farm to be able to hold onto their land. In other states, packing houses have bought up small farms, merged them, and converted them into huge feed lots. Or independent farmers have had to buy more and more land, purchase more and more expensive equipment, and operate on an industrial scale.

The same sort of pressures that have altered agriculture come to bear on forests. People who go into forestry generally do so because they love being outdoors and active. They feel connected to nature and want to spend their working lives managing forests with respect for their native worth as well as their productivity. Many foresters spend their personal time hiking and exploring the woods they love. They recognize that their work helps preserve water quality, provide wildlife habitat, sequester carbon, and supply wood that humans need. They take pride in the parts of their job that allow them to act as good stewards.

Like good farmers, they operate with intimate knowledge of the land, recognize the importance of diversity, and value a personal connection with the history and wholeness of that for which they are responsible. Or to use a different comparison, like good teachers, they set off to work each day and give the best they have, trying to find a way to meet needs that they often see as starkly different from those they’re officially charged with meeting. They genuinely love their charges, they feel a sense of vocation, they understand that they are shaping the future of individuals and society, they believe the work they do is of foundational importance, and they have a passion for doing it well,

Yet both teachers and foresters work within bureaucratic frameworks that answer to other masters. Both resent having, too often, to act in ways that they see as damaging and simply wrong. They feel themselves, their work, and the children or forests in their care as being devalued and demeaned. Some days they can return home tired but satisfied that they have been able to do the work their heart wants to do, and that they have helped nudge the world one step more toward being a better place. Other days they come home weary, frustrated, even disgusted.

Foresters face the same unresolvable dilemma that teachers face with No Child Left Behind: management’s goals and preferred roads to them too often ignore, violate, and trivialize the intimate, mysterious, precious, extraordinarily complex reality they live with in their jobs each day. Wilderness no more exists to satisfy human needs for condominiums, comic strips, and well-accoutered campsites than education exists to satisfy the military-industrial complex’s needs for soldiers, secretaries, and systems analysts.

The problem isn’t the hearts of these people, it’s civilization and the management system itself. Good people in the service of a culture that is systemically devoted to using and managing nature are themselves being used and managed to the culture’s ends--what Stephanie Mills called “the insidious conversion of the wild to the civilized.” No matter what worthy goals and rhetoric are incorporated into a management plan, the final intent is both manipulative and exploitative.

The reality of their jobs, foresters discover, is that political and financial pressures to harvest more timber, build more roads, invite gas and oil drilling, and open up more areas to snowmobiles and four-wheelers and gift shops and drive-in camping are simply unrelenting. Growth is an overpowering command. States boast of their fast-growing cities and counties, their new industries, their booming economies. The truth is that nature’s scales always balance. Growth of one thing always comes at the expense of another. Bigger cities mean fewer farms and less forest. A bigger population means dirtier air and fouler water. More machinery means fewer farmers and coal miners.

Bureaucracies respond to the growth imperative, to legislatures and budgets and production goals, more than to the voiceless demands of forests. No one builds a career in state or national forestry departments by reducing logging, protecting pristine areas, or excluding mining and drilling operations. A forester is unlikely to win promotion by valuing long-term good over short-term gain.

To the extent that the love of money subverts other values, silviculture is no more tarnished than any other enterprise--whether it’s art and music or physics and chemistry; farming or shoemaking. A production-orientation constantly slips its thumb onto the scale, encouraging us to do what generates the most income rather than what results in a common good. Nowadays, with their lobbyists and campaign contributions and the revolving door between government and the corporate world, industries more and more often treat public lands as if they were their private possessions.

All of those pressures--from politicians and industry and just ordinary people hungry for work--have a way of bending forestry departments, as well as the way silviculture is sometimes viewed and taught. Just two quick examples:

I pulled a PowerPoint presentation on “Forest Management Systems” from the Internet, bearing a Michigan State University Extension imprint. Its second slide lists “Five Erroneous Beliefs About Forests & Forest Management,” and attributes them to “L. Fins, 1993, Forest Geneticist.” Here are the five “erroneous beliefs”:

1. Ecosystems are inherently stable if people would simply leave them alone.

2. Diversity and stability are closely linked.

3. Evolution has finely tuned ecosystems, with genotypes perfectly matched to their site of origin. Therefore, all genetic diversity is important and should be preserved.

4. Any manipulation of the forest results in a severe loss of diversity.

5. “Natural” is always “best”. [sic]

The underlying messages of these five points are insidious. Taken altogether they show a remarkable disdain for natural systems and their diversity. Here is what is implied by labeling each of the points “myths”:

Ecosystems are unstable, and human intervention is necessary and desirable.
Diversity is unrelated to ecosystem stability.
The matching of genotypes to sites is a mishmash; genetic diversity is overrated, and losing some of it is inconsequential.
Manipulation of forests can be done without a significant impact on diversity--which point #2 and #3 have already shown is overrated anyway.
Managed can be better than natural.

A couple of things stand out in the original “myths.” One is that the emphasis on “all,” “always,” “perfectly,” and “any” puts simplistic, sweeping generalizations in the mouths of some implied debating partner--presumably a misguided, uninformed environmentalist--, setting up strawmen that can then be knocked down.

This strategy showcases the presumed superior understanding of the forest manager and discredits people who prefer their forests wild. It is propaganda, not science, and it is certainly slanted and unfair in its representation of the beliefs it implies are held by those who put more long term trust in nature than in a human manager.

A second is that its own implicit positions--that diversity and ecosystem stability are not linked, and that some genetic diversity is unimportant--are both questionable. (More on biodiversity can be found later in this chapter, as well as in Chapter 10.)

A different tone is taken in my second example, which comes from closer to home. It may be too tied to the industrial agriculture model for my taste, but at least it is intellectually honest. It’s a publication from The West Virginia Extension Service with the stated goal of promoting “proper forestry practices, forestry education, and forestry extension.” It is titled “Silvics & Silviculture--The Agriculture of Trees,” and its definition of the discipline says, “Silviculture is the agriculture of trees--how to grow them, how to maximize growth and return, and how to manipulate tree species compositions to meet landowner objectives” [emphasis mine].

“Manipulate.” “Maximizing return.” For a person trying to hold on to the sense of the Earth as a sacred creation, these are hard words to swallow. The West Virginia material, unfortunately, represents the attitude of too much of the field. Yes, many trees have to be cut. Yes, many wooded areas have to be managed. And we have the capacity to manage such areas responsibly and manage them well--if our economic drivers would allow such management to take place.

But where in the definition is there any room for the barest acknowledgement that forests might be something grander and more valuable than simply raw material for one industry or another, or getaway destinations, or inexpensive water filtering systems? For the realization that we are genetically, historically, and inseparably linked with every other living being on a planet that--Surprise!--is a miracle?

How do we even begin to make room for this miracle in our talk about forests? Right now we seem to be, as Thomas Berry described it, “so hypnotized by our concern for the human that we just can’t do anything else.” We are winning the Third World War--Raymond Dasmann’s name for the war on the planet--, and when it comes to forests, we aren’t even aware we’re in combat.

I think part of the answer is to carve out space for awareness in our working vocabulary, to make a distinction between woodlands viewed, from the management perspective, as human resources, on the one hand, and woodlands viewed, from a holistic ecological perspective, as unique autonomous realities, on the other. That shift is one small step in what Berry termed “the great work” of altering our conceptual framework and ”moving from a devastating presence on the planet to a benign presence.”

Thus the first broad heading, in my approach, would be “managed woodlands,” with all the human planning and control already cited. The amount of terrain falling within this category is enormous. Here in the U.S., just the national forests and grasslands managed by the Forest Service cover an area of 193 million acres--almost double the size of the state of California. Federal, state, and private timberlands; tree plantations; parks; and woodlots would be subgroups of “managed woodlands.”

Some of the contributions of these managed woodlands--providing food and shelter for wildlife, and storing carbon, for example--overlap with values inherent in wild woodlands. Despite that overlap, however, differences between the two are significant. My own preference would be to see wooded land talked about in categories that clarify vital distinctions, not blur them. This seems honest and straightforward. Why should it offend anyone?

Managed areas used primarily for lumber and pulp would be referred to as “timberland” rather than forests. “Timber” is a synonym for lumber--wood to be used in carpentry and building material, although the term “timber” is also applied to stands used for wood pulp and cellulose as well. The official requirement for a timberland designation is that the woodland must be capable of producing 20 cubic feet of industrial wood per acre each year and not be withdrawn from timber utilization.

The obvious analogy is with faming. Both “timberland” and “cropland” are terms reflecting a viewpoint of the world in which land is what humans use it for. Thus cropland is still cropland when the field is fallow. It is cropland at every stage of the plants’ growth, and at harvest, and when the harvest goes off to market. In the same way, “timberland” is timberland after it is clearcut, and it is timberland when the pines or Sweet Gum or eucalyptus are seedlings and at every other stage of growth. That was the concept behind my forester friend’s designation of a pasture spotted with Loblolly seedlings as a forest.

Silviculture practices, as I mentioned, can be applied to any type of woodland, including everything from managing national forests to improving a farmer’s woodlot. They can be worthwhile and valuable, keeping managed woodlands healthy, sustainable, and productive.

At its most extreme form--tree plantations--however, silviculture closely resembles industrial agriculture. In those instances, there are numerous similarities between the way a tree crop is dealt with and the way big agriculture deals with its fields. Clear the land; select for fast-growing, early-maturing plants; plant a single species in rows; spray to eliminate competitors and pests if that is economically feasible; fertilize (also if it’s economically feasible); perhaps conduct one or more prescribed burns; harvest; market; repeat the cycle.

Like good farms, managed woodlands can be treated sensitively, with intelligence, respect, and care. The problem isn’t so much with an individual woodlot, or woodland, or even tree plantation for that matter. The problem lies with the totality of the conversion in which they are enmeshed, as civilization devours the wild.

The other broad heading I’m proposing--“wild woodlands”--would include all autonomous wooded land--that is, land that manages itself with minimal or no human interference. By “autonomous” I mean these woodland are, ideally, self-sufficient, self-governed, self-decisive, self-nurturing, self-healing, self-sustaining, self-regenerating, and self-fulfilling. The fruits of their autonomy are diversity, complexity, resilience, and integrity.

I’ve used the qualifier “ideally” because the reality is that we have tampered so much with nature that woodlands (and all other ecosystems) are seriously impacted on an ongoing basis by humans, whether the woodlands are managed or not.

Global warming alters the climate for forests even if no human sets foot in them. Invasive plants and insects, once they are introduced into new territory, spread on their own, into managed and wild woodlands alike. Fire suppression policies change the successional process by which forest naturally renew themselves, tipping the balance in favor of some species and against others. New diseases introduced by humans sweep outward from the area of their introduction, killing millions of American Chestnuts or American Elms or ashes, for example, with no regard for property lines and park boundaries. Pollution from smokestacks in Appalachia murders Sugar Maples in New England. Tropospheric ozone damages plant cells, slows photosynthesis, and reduces plant growth. High levels of pesticides drift miles from the sites where they were sprayed into supposedly protected areas. There is no such thing as full protection from forces we have set in motion.

So, ironically, human efforts may be necessary to offset, minimize, and repair damage to natural ecosystems resulting from other human activity. We may have to develop an entirely new set of carefully-tailored interventions in wild forests simply to ameliorate or undo some of the systemic damage we are causing. And I write that with an awareness that what I’ve just called “interventions” could also be called management practices. The difference would be that instead of timber production, mineral extraction, and vehicular recreation, management goals would be exclusively focused on ameliorating systemic human damage and on restoring and preserving wild ecosystem health.

Why not call all of these wild woodlands “forests”? The simple answer is that to have a sweeping range of species, a forest has to exist on a certain scale. That scale may vary, dependent on climate and soil and species abundance, but clearly, to preserve the full range of species, including top predators, a forest must be conceived of in terms of miles, not yards.

Part of what I am calling a wild forest would be, so far as I can tell, what the Convention on Biological Diversity, following the lead of the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) , refers to as “primary forests.” Here is their definition: “A primary forest is a forest that has never been logged and has developed following natural disturbances and under natural processes, regardless of its age.... Also included as primary are forests that are used inconsequentially by indigenous and local communities living traditional lifestyles relevant for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity.”

I’m not a primary forest purist, however. Partly that is out of practicality (almost no primary forest survives in the U.S., for starters), and partly out of faith in the ability of nature to recuperate from non-fatal wounds. I would add to wild forests those extensive areas of secondary forest--that is, forests that have regenerated after being cut--which have regenerated largely on their own, and have succeeded, over the course of a hundred years or more, in reclaiming a good portion of their historic flora and fauna while reassembling a diverse and complex ecosystem.

That’s not to say that you can put Humpty Dumpty back together again, because it’s impossible to completely recreate what we destroyed. There’s loss, and it is real. But that is no reason not to try to enable a forest to return to the wild. If you suffer a debilitating stroke, once the initial depression and anger have had their day, it’s time to focus on rehabilitation.

Biological diversity is crucial here, because it is an unreproducible core value of wild unmanaged forests. The famous “island biogeography” study by Robert MacArthur and E. O. Wilson was an attempt to understand the relationship between an isolated location and its species richness.

Although the field work was arduous and complex, their conclusions are simply stated. What they found was, first, that there is an area effect, and second, that there is a distance effect. Moving from one “island” to another a tenth its size, we see the number of species drop by 50%; that is the area effect. And the farther one “island” is from another, the fewer species it contains; that is the distance effect. Put these together and the conclusion is that as “islands” become smaller and farther apart, species vanish at an accelerating rate.

I have placed the word “island” in quotation marks here because the effects hold true not just for islands in the literal sense, but for islands in the figurative sense--patches of habitat that are isolated from other patches of the same type. And we are seeing these two effects occur with forest types around the globe as forests shrink and are chopped up into separate, smaller chunks. [I’ll be talking more about this later on, in the chapter on deforestation and parcelization.]

In stressing the need for large-scale woodlands to qualify as forests, in the sense that I’ve chosen to define them above, I’ve simply reversed the direction of MacArthur and Wilson’s logic: to increase the number of species and reduce the threat of extinctions, it is necessary to increase the size of forest “islands” and reduce the distance between them.

The line of reasoning I just developed to support the preservation of large, intact woodlands has a particular importance for me right now because I live only a couple of hours from George Washington National Forest. At more than a million acres, it is the biggest national forest in the eastern United States, and contains large patches of relatively undisturbed and unfragmented forest--just the kind of large-scale wild woodland needed to maintain diversity. As I’m writing this, in July, 2011, the US Forest Service has a draft forest management plan for the George Washington out for public comment. And as it happens, the George Washington contains 85 wildlife species that fall within the threatened, endangered, or sensitive categories.

When a final plan is approved, it will guide the management of the forest for the next ten to fifteen years. This draft plan would permit full-scale logging of about half of the forest, and much of the rest could be logged to some degree. Only ten percent of the forest is protected altogether from logging, and only two percent of the forest is slated for “wilderness study.” In short, the draft plan violates the exact principles needed to preserve the forest’s integrity and support continued diversity. It would lead to the very conditions MacArthur and Wilson warned us about--much smaller “islands” of intact forest, farther and farther apart.

The advantage of managed woodlands is the obvious one: they produce a greater amount of usable and desired wood in a shorter time than a wild woodland. The values built into them are primarily the industrial values of utility, maximum production, short turnaround time, cost-effective procedures, and a quality product.

The values and advantages of wild woodlands and forests are harder to build a case for, although plenty of people have made a stab at it. I have a small collection of their efforts on the top shelf of the bookcase behind me--a series of books with titles like Return to Wild America, Called by the Wild, Wild Comfort, The Abstract Wild, The Practice of the Wild, Wild, Forest Primeval, and Unmanaged Landscapes. The most famous and most often quoted is Thoreau’s essay “Walking,” with its stark declaration that “..in Wildness is the preservation of the world.” I’ve often wondered what kind of corollary Thoreau might have implied in his remark. If in wildness is the preservation of the world, what is there in tameness, in domestication, in cultivation? In managed woodlands?

There is a wonderful suggestiveness to Thoreau’s words, later abetted by Eliot Porter’s 1962 collection of nature photographs in a book using the quote as its title. Awe evoked by Porter’s photos may have done more to persuade people of the value of wilderness than a library of abstract discussion. Emotional persuasion of the sort generated by Eliot Porter’s photos, or those by other great nature photographers such as Ansel Adams or David Muench or William Henry Jackson, is a valuable thing. If you follow the argument in John Livingston’s The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, emotion is not only valuable but essential.

Livingston examines, one by one, the points in favor of conserving the wild--and finds them all lacking. Conviction, he argues, ultimately depends not on reasons but on emotions such as empathy and compassion and wonder. He describes the birth of his own commitment to wild nature--an indelible moment he had as a ten-year-old, watching frogs and toads and newts in a marshy flat located in a city ravine behind his family’s home. The hypnotic sunlight, the sense of epiphany. Experience of wild nature, he says, is “entirely qualitative, not measurable, not rational.”

Another, related approach is an aesthetic one which draws on nature’s forms, splendor, intricacy, and infinite variation as inspiration. Nature becomes a fount of unending delight and creativity. Whether we are talking about painting, sculpture, music, or poetry, wild nature has served as both a theme and a model for organic form. That holds true for creative spirits as diverse as Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Biederman, Walt Whitman, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Gary Snyder, Theodore Roethke, and Mary Oliver. Their work, expressly or implicitly, is a vindication of the wild.

Not everyone reaches the same conclusion as Livingston, of course, and various arguments continue to be made for the necessity of wild places. One approach has been to play the self-interest card that we tend to assume business-oriented people respond to. As a result, it is commonplace to see arguments that wild forests--particularly tropical rainforests--contain thousands of species that have never been studied. Who knows what medicines they might contain, forest advocates ask, or what new foods might be developed from them? Do we just throw away all of these potential gold mines?

I sympathize with the effort to find some line of argument that bottom-line thinkers will listen to, but this attempt to appeal to them, while accurate enough, has always struck me as both disingenuous and largely a waste of time. A thousand bucks in the hand in the present is likely to be far more persuasive to a pragmatist than an uncertain buck in the bush at some indeterminate future date.

Yet another approach is built on the necessity of preserving biodiversity. Because it provides resilience to ecosystems. Because we don’t know all the consequences of simplifying environments and killing off species, but we already have indications that the results are not good. Because when environments become degraded, they are not only less resilient but less pleasant. Because less diverse woodlands provide fewer “ecosystem services.

A fourth approach is religious/spiritual. This has taken a variety of forms, and I’ll sample only a few, beginning with Wendell Berry’s heartfelt condemnation of “certified Christians” for being “just as likely as anyone else to join the military-industrial conspiracy to murder Creation.” In “Christianity and the Survival of Creation,” Berry explores the “virtually catastrophic discrepancies between biblical instruction and Christian behavior,” trying to call Christian’s back to their own scriptures, where they will find that the earth is the Lord’s, not the person’s whose name is recorded on a deed in the county courthouse.

Gary Snyder, a Buddhist, has an entire book of essays titled The Practice of the Wild, and he, perhaps even more than the others I’ve mentioned, is attuned to the rightness, the priority, the legitimacy of the wild. The wild is the world, he writes.

So there we have it. It would be so much simpler if there were a single, compelling, unanswerable justification for wilderness, in the same way that managed woodlands proponents can point to timber production and their balance sheet. The values and advantages of wild woodlands--forests--range from their beautiful organic forms to their cosmological significance. They’re rooted in things as disparate as the memory of a moment experienced by a ten-year-old boy, a return to biblical scripture, and field studies of biodiversity. At times it almost seems as if justifications for the wild could serve as an index to personality types; tell me what you believe of wilderness, and I can guess your number on the Enneagram.

The most telling way to evaluate wild and managed woodlands may simply be this. Take a long, leisurely walk in each. Look. Listen. Smell. Touch. Feel. Reflect on what you’ve experienced. Which speaks richly to your senses? Which seems somehow to comfort you? Which offers delicious surprises? Which, ultimately, feels like home?

If I were to dream, the changes I’ve proposed in the way woodlands and forests are talked about would help shift a paradigm within the culture. When my dreams become more greedy, I see the paradigm shift accompanied by a restructuring in universities and government agencies.

Right now “departments of forestry” are, to a substantial degree, devoted to managing woodlands, and assisting others to do the same. Valuable service, unquestionably. It would clarify responsibilities and approaches enormously, however, if managed woodlands were the duty of “Departments of Silviculture,” and new and separate “Departments of Forestry” would monitor, research, and educate on behalf of wild woodlands. This might help eliminate the painful situation we have now, in which the bureaucratic bias toward managed woodlands continually contributes to the destruction and loss of wild forests.

Or maybe it wouldn’t. One of the most painful lessons of politics, for me, in the past forty years or so is the ability of administrations to pervert the intent of an agency or department, standing it on its head. Administrators are appointed with the unacknowledged charge to not do their job. Heads of mine safety departments are there to see that mine owners can flout safety regulations and workplace regulations, civil rights administrators to see that civil rights violators go uninvestigated and unprosecuted, EPA officials to insure that industry can violate environmental standards and write their own regulatory policies. Agencies’ funds are targeted for cuts specifically to keep them from doing their work.

If we’re going to have anything like current population levels, if we’re going to have satisfactory homes and furnishings and books and boxes, we’re going to need well-managed woodlands. The big picture, though, is that not only is the human population booming but global consumption levels are continuing to rise, primary forests are being cut at a rapid rate, and the world is being deforested in general.

The loss is insidious. Wild forests are being displaced, in the same way that common chickweed and Japanese stilt grass and garlic mustard are displacing bloodroot and trout lily and Dutchman’s breeches and lily of the valley and Solomon’s seal. In the same way that Tree of Heaven and White Mulberry and Siberian Elm and Mimosa and Paulownia and Autumn Olive and Multiflora Rose are displacing a variety of native trees and shrubs.

Tree of Heaven at dawn

Yet none of these invasive plants is evil in itself. The individual plants often have useful and attractive qualities. They may offer food for wildlife, stabilize soils, host silkworms, fix nitrogen, serve as “living fences,” provide shelter belts, reclaim strip mined sites, ornament our yards and gardens. In fact, their obvious virtues were the reasons why many of them were deliberately introduced into the landscape. We succumbed to the temptation of usefulness.

These “useful” plants take up a space here, a space there, form small colonies here, larger colonies there, and those spaces add up. Eventually they have substituted themselves for an enormous number and variety of native plants, sometimes crowding them out of an area altogether.

The same kind of “useful displacement,” with the same devastating cumulative effect, occurs when wild woodlands are converted to farms, to ranches, to housing developments, to plantations and other managed woodlands. We are destroying wild woodlands, and we can count ourselves lucky if they are replaced with managed woodlands rather than farms or developments.

I talked above about what it meant, as a family and as a culture, to lose the sense of a “homeplace” and its wholeness. Substitute the word “homeplace” each time you encounter the word “habitat,” and you can get a better understanding of what is lost when the habitat of thousands of species is dismantled, written over, or erased.

Someone with little experience in the woods might ask, “If one kind of woodland is replaced by another, what’s the difference?” I can think of at least two compelling answers for that question.

The first kind of difference is in function. Trees on plantations or other managed woodlands may look like forests. They are large stretches of land filled with trees, they are home to birds and insects, they have a canopy that closes overhead and filters the light that falls on us as we walk through them. But the resemblance is misleading. It may look like a duck, and quack like a duck, but it doesn’t act like a duck.

These woodlands don’t have the ecological richness of forests, and they perform fewer of their vital ecological services. We’ll explore this more thoroughly in the next chapter, “Why Forests Matter,” but to put it succinctly, these managed woodlands too often are completely devoid of the late succession stages of forest development, and lack variety in structure. Those are critical deficiencies, and they result in reduced carbon sequestration, a serious loss of habitat diversity, a corresponding drop in biodiversity, loss of pollinators and top predators, and changes to water flow.

I’d like to suggest an analogy for you to play with: consider what a large human community would be like if it consisted exclusively of boys and girls of high school age. An even-aged group. Fast-growing. They would do many of the same things a real human community does--eats, plays, sleeps, works, fights, learns.... But what is lost?

The second difference is that by replacement we have violated sacred ground. I believe that each wild site is a spiritual homeplace, to be entered with wonder and remembered with awe. It has its own presence, its own voice, and is capable of speaking to our depths, if we are awake. Managed woodlands are secondhand realities, bereft of the freshness, the vibrancy, the intact living fabric of the real thing. With each loss of the wild, the world becomes a tamer, less interesting, less adventuresome, less diverse, less exquisite, less awe-inspiring place. We have moved from chant and dance to statistics, from myth to history. It’s a sign of the times that so many can’t tell the difference. Eden doesn’t disappear with a single decision; choice after choice, it fades away.

Necessary Forests

What Is a Forest?

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