Thanks for your thoughts Jason Metnick.
I did watch all of the Franklin video and my first thought was “Wow, wonder when and where he went to school?”, then it when it was all over I remembered that I always am baffled whenever I hear Jerry speak because we have such a different background and approaches to many things. But then we are very different, including in where we have spent our time learning and practicing forestry.
Forestry is a profession just like architecture, law and medicine. We all have to work with clients and clients all have different approaches to what they want their “woods” to be like. Our job is to listen to their desires, help them understand their choices, and develop a plan for them to get to the desired state of the “woods” given all of the things that we have been trained in and what we learn along the way. No two forests are really exactly alike either based on their history, location, climate, soils, pests, etc. That means that what we do in one forest stand may not or should not work in another.
The Private Working Forests that Dave Tenny describes are doing really well compared to a lot of forests. I also think that the forests that are currently certified are doing extremely well and are all being managed to do the many things that Jason Metnick points out. That includes FSC and Tree Farm here in the Southern USA.
I have been an Industrial forester and I was not an evil, money grubbing destroyer of the environment when I was practicing forestry for a paper industry. For the last 20 + years, I have worked with private landowners and believe most of those landowners have very high expectations and high standards for their forests. In the SE, that means that over the last 25 years as we saw changes from industry ownership to private ownership our rotations have grown longer and owner interest in recreation and wildlife are more important than “production forestry” as Jason G and Jerry F. call it. Also almost all of these forests are “restoration forests” so we have been doing that for all of my career.
Bottom line for me, Jason G, is that I feel you are painting everyone with one very drab color but there is a rainbow on the landscape that you are not recognizing and acknowledging. Can the forests of the North American do better, of course they can and that means continually improving what we do which is what certification is all about in my opinion. You asked for incentives to make forests better, let’s first fully fund the incentives that already exist but have not been fully funded in many years, like farm bill funds, cost-share funding for more that just planting and for more than 5 landowners in a county. Let’s get multiple foresters working in extension and for the state to ensure that every landowner has access to a forest plan. Let’s develop more programs between public and private forests like the Indian Creek Restoration Project where real change happened on the ground and where carbon in trees probably decreased but overall ecosystem integrity grew. This required harvesting and prescribed burning but the results have been terrific. Those forests are not huge carbon sinks now but if I could put thinned wood from that project in my building I would be very happy.
In my state, we are not seeing forest landowners causing problems. Instead, supporting these landowners with markets for their wood will be one of the incentives they would like. That is why we started our institute and why I do what I do today. Building with wood allows them to continue to pay their taxes and take care of their forests. Believe me forest management is not cheap.
By the way in our state only 25% of the 12.9 million acres are planted, Much of that was done originally with incentives and continues today because we have better yields with improved breeding of pine trees or because there are incentives to plant longleaf pine and shortleaf pine to restore those systems. The rest of the forests have naturally regenerated (old fields) or we have a significant amount of bottomland hardwood that have regenerated naturally. In a few months and if you are all vaccinated I would love to take you on a tour of our forests. The Clemson Experimental Forest (17,000 acres) is SFI certified.