“Growing at a rate somewhere between stalagmites and
human beings, forests can serve as a kind of long-term memory bank, revealing
things about our environment, and even ourselves, that only our great great
grandparents could have told us.” – John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce.
I
am halfway through my first summer in the Sierra, which I am spending studying
forestry. I am learning to see forest as resource, as crop. I am beginning to
grasp more tangible connections between the wood that I live in and the forests
that I hike through and draw inspiration from. I have been given lenses with
which to see trees: as creatures of beauty, as timber, as wildlife habitat, as
vehicles of disease, as carbon sequesters. Every day, as my knowledge expands,
the trees around me gain depth and complexity, pulsing with life and equations, value and history.
I
feel that forest management might provide valuable lessons for handling our
other “resources,” like energy and agriculture. Trees have the potential to be
the world’s greatest renewable resource. They grow with remarkable resilience.
They keep growing. The problem is, they operate more complexly than we can
understand, and they live more slowly than we can wait. Forests have the potential
for magnificent renewal, allowing us to use them without using them up (unlike
fossil fuels, and even the materials mined for solar panels). Without
ecological eyes, however, trees turn into just another finite resource to use
up. If we want to call forests “renewable,” we have to operate within limits – picking and choosing which
trees to cut, when to plant, how to use fire, what to preserve. When done
right, timber harvest can be sustainable. Timber is natural and ancient. Yet we
have a pathological tendency to butt heads with nature. We don’t like to see
ourselves as subject to the way of the trees. Instead, we believe in the limits
of the chainsaw.
With
forests, the limits to our consumption are blatantly visible and quantifiable.
The benefits of ecological management are obvious. In other extractive resource
industries, lines are fuzzier and the rulebook isn’t as accessible. We don’t
know how much aluminum there is to find. We can’t use oil sustainably. I wonder
what it would look like to manage energy as we manage forests. If we thought
of fuel as trees and electricity as board feet, we might better conceptualize
what we’re doing on the planet and how we might sustain and renew.
A
walk in the woods is a unique opportunity for time travel. A forester navigates
through different eras, known as age classes. We can read a tree’s age by
sampling its insides, allowing us to “manage’ on time scales that surpass the
lifetime of an individual or sometimes even a generation. After a clear-cut, a
company must wait fifty to eighty years before cutting again. By then, a new
logger will be doing the work, with new equipment and new values for the new
era. Foresters operating in the present learn to substitute space for time.
They move across chains, acres, miles, traversing different vegetative
generations (known as succession stages) in order to work with a tree’s slow
and steady life pace. The implications of substituting space for time should
not be taken lightly, for how we go about it will shape the story of our
species. Even if we are gone before those implications are realized, our trees
will remain and renew. They will continue to silently preach a history and
legacy in their rings, scars, and decay. There’s a physical and philosophical
world out there to be read, for those who are curious and tree-literate.
