Often, when working with forest land owners, I am asked if I practice good forestry and if I can apply it to the land in question. I usually describe the interactions of sowbugs and bluebirds, or canopy closure and root rot, to avoid a direct answer or a philosophical discussion of the meaning of the word "good." Recently, Hugh Williams (1) asked "What is good forestry?" While agreeing with many of his answers and insights, I found that the article raised far more questions than it answered.
This article discusses some of the general questions in forestry and economics. The question of good is addressed in general and with regards to forestry, intrinsic value, anthropocentrism, and intentionality. These things, however, can only be resolved by elucidating some of the problems that both forestry and economics face, such as logical dualisms, difficulties with scales, and inappropriate paradigms.
In fact, industrial forestry cannot address these concerns properly without a new perspective that uses a broader logic and incorporates changes in economics, ethics, and politics. There are many other kinds of forestry; few of them rest on an explicit philosophical foundation. A recent approach to ecological forestry, ecoforestry, has an explicit philosophical basis and is a proper approach to good forestry. The philosophical foundations of ecological forestry rest as much on the ideas of process and creativity ideas of Whitehead as on the egalitarianism and diversity of Arne Naess (2). Ecoforestry can be described through a series of principles and standards, from creativity to balance; and this approach differentiates it from traditional or industrial forestry.
In other tropical forests, shifting cultivation--also called slash-and-burn or Swidden agriculture--is practiced by many peoples. The Barafiri people of the Parima highlands in Brazil believe that it is impossible to plant crops on a site unless it is cleared and burned. Shifting cultivation is a cycle of clearing, burning, and cropping small areas of the forest with very long periods of fallowing, up to 300 years; this was only realized recently as biologists studied the composition of canopies from satellite data in northern Amazonia; areas of slash and burn could be located easily since the dominant trees had not fully emerged through the canopy after hundreds of years. As traditional populations get larger or are invaded by other growing populations, more of the forest is used. The demand on the forest by large corporations threatens the existence of indigenous peoples who have been using their forest home carefully for thousands of years. The practices of the Barafiri, Hmong (SE Asia), Hanunoo (Philippines), Kapauku (Indonesia), Bomagai-Angoiang (New Guinea), Yukpa (Columbia), Dyak (Sarawak) and many others are threatened by the scale of industrial forestry.
Beginning in the 1940s, it became evident that the plantation system, with single-species, even-aged trees, was susceptible to catastrophic change--wind, pollution, insects--in a way that natural forests were not. The forests began to die as forests; the Germans called this disturbing phenomenon Waldsterben (forest death). Scientists are trying to find the causes of forest death to preserve the plantation system; air pollution, operating synergistically with climate change, species simplification, diseases, and soil destruction, is considered the basic cause. Other scientists and managers, however, were starting to return to more natural forests, i.e., multiple species, uneven-aged trees, with snags and ground cover.
Mainstream forestry itself has gradually and continually learned more about forests. In the 1970s, forest scientists, such as Jerry Franklin (3), David Perry (4) and Michael Amaranthus (4), showed concern over the composition of the forest floor and its relation to productivity, echoing Ebermayer's work in Germany in the mid-1800s. The new forestry developed out of concerns about the progressive clearcutting of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as about slash removal and about fragmentation from patterns of clearcutting. The goal of new forestry, according to H. Kimmins (5), is the sustainable management of forests for old-growth conditions, diversity, and resilience, while permitting significant harvesting of "timber values." But, these structures may not be dense enough to support old growth processes. Dilution, like fragmentation, causes species loss and the ultimate collapse of the system.
Orville Camp bought over-cut land in Oregon in 1967 and nursed it back to health with selective thinning and clearing. He developed his own holistic program in forestry based on natural selection (7). Operating as a forest farm, Orville has taken logs and firewood out of the forest while improving the health of the forest.
Herb Hammond evolved his ideas of wholistic and ecologically responsible forestry in the 1970s while working as a profession forester in British Columbia (8). The staff at the Mountain Grove Center in SW Oregon, where I work now, started practicing a "radical" ecological forestry in 1982. Michael Pilarski uses Restoration Forestry to cover a movement and discipline that draws on old traditions to heal degraded forests and provide a steady yield of high-value timber (9). Jerry Franklin has modified his conception of new forestry to extend on a spectrum of "variable retention." Many others have been developing new kinds of forestry, from community forestry to excellent forestry, social forestry, and sustainable forestry. All of these kinds of forestry are part of a general movement away from industrial forestry. Industrial forestry itself is renaming its program as "adaptive," or "new," or "stewardship," or "sustainable", but without changing its basic methods or goals.
The Ecoforestry Institute arose out of a meeting between Orville Camp and Alan Drengson in 1990--both with their concerns about destructive harvesting. Since then many groups have started practicing ecological forestry; there are independent ecoforestry groups in Siberia, Papua New Guinea, and Nova Scotia, for instance.
Simple philosophical or political codes divide the world into good and evil too neatly, whether in the bible or in Reagonomic policy. The world is not simple, alas, and goodness does not grow like peanuts or tomatoes. By trying to focus on either extreme, of pure goodness or pure evil, we miss the ambiguity and uncertainty of situations characterized by the mixture of good and evil. Our ethics and ideologies are not composed to help us live in a mixture, with the inevitability of uncertainty and with the possibility of enantiodromia (evil that results from good actions or vice versa).
We do not think of physical events, such as gravity or fusion, as good or bad; they simply are. A physical movement is turned to action in the human realm by human intention, which is open to interpretation and ambiguity, when represented by signs. Signs make many connections to physical events, thus intensifying them as well as miniaturizing the events in the signs (this is how signs become dense with meaning). But, signs are arbitrary, according to Ferdinand de Saussure, that is to say, they have no necessary connection to things. The play of signs is what results in good or evil; that is, the manipulation of signs, in a field of surprise (due to other levels of meaning). Signal play without cultural structures can result in evil. Cultural restrictions provide rules that limit human play (so that it stops short of death or destruction). Games have rules. All cultures work that way. Ethics and economics are rules of behavior; politics is the practice of changing the rules as society changes. Politics, however, as its scale grows larger, tips its balance from good to evil actions; there are too many of us in each system to share discourse.
As long as our actions are related to signs, they cannot simply be neutral. Furthermore, human beings cannot know, or even think of anything, according to Robert Zajonc (13), without some involvement of emotion, that is, at least a vague feeling of good or bad. On the other hand, there are questions of what one "ought" to do, that is, morality. The use of the word "good" with forestry is problematic. Good means different things to different people. Your standards or codes, personally or culturally, might be different from mine. Therefore the meanings of the words will be different. The search for good is measured by personal criteria, personal judgment, and personal reflection.
When we set goals, as with the goodness of our forestry practices, we base those goals on the meaning of the symbols, any of which can have many more than one meaning. Words have meaning because of their shared history and context, by their place in a whole language, which adds to meaning of the word, but they are not absolute. If there is no absolute good forestry, then how can we tell the best? It may be relative, but how do we make decisions? Good is intention and action in the context of the rules of a culture, using ambiguous signs creatively.
The word "good" has an interesting and long history. The current version is derived from the old English, "god," meaning "suitable" or fitting, similar to the words meaning a "suitable time" and to be "suitable" or "pleasing" (12). In an organic world, good things are defined by a free interplay of energies. Perhaps, as a working definition, we can just use "harmony." In Chinese medical tradition, the highest good is harmony, especially social harmony or good relations. A good person is one who creates and maintains harmony. Harmony is related to wholeness (indeed, the word "whole" comes from the Indo-European root "kailo," which is also the root for the words health and holy, 16).
Williams states that good forestry is nonsense without the recognition of intrinsic value (10), but good forestry can always be practiced, at least on a small scale, independently of notions of intrinsic value or theoretical reasons. Although it is true that all beings in a forest have intrinsic value, it is also true that, as Chris Maser has pointed out (11), most interactions in a forest are neutral; nature does not assign values. No one being in a forest, from a virus to a mouse, tree, or fungus is more valuable than any other. Some beings, however, value other beings, much as a dung beetle values dung or as human beings value wood or diversity. The harmony of a healthy forest requires all.
Any example of forestry can be good, if it follows its methods, regardless if it is totally external, human-centered, or simply pragmatic. Any application of any forestry can be good, if the worker unconsciously follows certain codes or accidentally does the right thing for the forest--the right thing being an absence of interference with the dynamic systems that shape and maintain forest processes. Good forestry can happen for the most contradictory or trivial reasons: Self-limitation, true love for the forest, accident, intention, techniques, or shame--this last may be why forest management gets altered with public interest and scrutiny, a point Williams brings up, also. Some instances of all three kinds of forestry practices can be called good. Thus, industrial foresters as well as nonindustrial small land owners, Swiddeners, and ecoforesters can practice good forestry, although ecoforesters are more likely to have sustainable and healthy forests.
The elements of a forest are related psychologically, by foresters, as focus or frame, as contrast or uniformity, as dominant or recessive, or in a number of other pairs. For instance, forests can be considered by scientists as either matter systems or energy systems, but the focus on either frame permits subtle differences and limitations in interpretation. Some ecologists describe organisms as being configured by energy through time. But, organisms are material patterns in space as well.
Williams presents biocentric and ecocentric perspectives as holding that the hierarchy of value is ultimately arbitrary (20). This is not true for either perspective. No special moral significance, such as sentience, is required in either perspective. Furthermore, it is not quite right to say that ecoforestry is ecocentric, because it is actually concerned with the frame and not the focus, the periphery and not the center (perhaps it should be called "drymoperipheral," meaning forest frame.
Williams makes a good point in contrasting anthropocentric needs versus the needs of the forest itself (21). This dilemma can be answered by considering the focus/frame character of the situation. Both of the two basic views he mentions are merely aspects of one view of good forestry; that happens also to be the ecoforestry position.
Anthropocentric values that focus on commodities can only be considered in the context of the values that are contained in the whole; that is, they are derivative from the frame. Furthermore, it is not necessary to ascribe purpose to the latter view, as Williams does, other than perhaps the purpose of being itself, which is to "be."
The framework of ecoforestry is pluralistic and multi-dimensional. Balanced use, rather than unending growth, is emphasized. Massive disruption often results when a community falls out of balance with its local forest environment (industrial forestry only avoids the penalties for such disruption by trading advantageously with other communities in less powerful areas). Ecoforestry has built-in checks, in the form of an oath, to which practicing ecoforesters subscribe much like doctors are bound to the Hippocratic oath.
Some patterns in forests are scale-dependent; for instance, hemlock trees may dominate small clusters, but be scattered all across the entire forested landscape. That is, the pattern changes with the scale. This is true of processes in forests as well. Canopies shade the understory annually, but fires in a lodgepole pine forest may increase dramatically the amount of light to forest floors once every 200-300 years.
The scale of the system defined, e.g., forest or ecosystem, depends on the scale of the phenomenon being addressed. Mangrove forests are in phase with the frequency of hurricanes, although hurricanes may not influence the life histories of short-lived organisms as much as daily or seasonal cycles. Microbes, for instance, are affected by short-term cycles of precipitation and temperature.
Problems in forestry arise where applications that work on a small scale are expanded to large scales, without thought for the difference or changes in patterns. For instance, it is well-known that Douglas-fir is shade intolerant and grows best in openings that get light. Rather than simply remove single trees or small groups of trees, and release or plant the fir in the openings, industrial forestry applies the treatment to the entire landscape with large clearcuts, which alter the other conditions that fir requires; some shade, water, protection from browsing, associated species. This is the formal operation of Greek tragedy: applying a previously successful action to a new situation where it does not fit.
For the forests in which Douglas-fir grow, increasing the scale of cuts to increase the potential for the fir has the unintended effect of drying out the soil, as well as of destroying the infrastructure of plants, animals, and fungi that the forest requires to continue. Other systems of cutting, such as high-grading or thinning from below, may also have unintended effects with changes in scale. High-grading is a form of group selection, in which the best and largest trees are removed. The practice was not overly destructive on a small scale (with many of the matriarchs and patriarchs remaining), but on a large scale, all old, large heritage trees were removed. Thinning from below may be a good idea in a stand, but like high-grading it is biological selection; the gene pool is altered as the small and suppressed trees, some of which may be genetically superior to those left, are removed.
By the 1980s, scientific research had resulted in technological applications for growing, genetically "improving," harvesting, and processing woody material on an unprecedented, vast, and unconsidered scale. Industrial companies established tree breeding and fertilization programs, whose goal was usually fast growth. Pine plantations in the southern United States were rated as a success and served as a model for plantations elsewhere; Australia, New Zealand, Chile, and South Africa replaced much of their native forests with exotic pine plantations, using species like Monterey pine. Many trees in the same species normally grow in clumps within a forest. Industrial forestry changed that scale, also, planting entire forests of a single species.
For thousands of years people have taken things they valued from forests. Culture and habit have resulted in large-scale trends in forest-use: More forests are used; more of each forest is used; fewer products from each forest are used (this seems contradictory, but it is not inconsistent with the way things are done in industrial cultures). The current economic style is too great, fast and reckless for ecological systems to absorb its impacts. The scale of things is an independent problem that can ruin the best intentions of policy.
An inappropriate time scale, its shortness and urgency, is a cause of many of these problems in industrial forestry. Although forests are considered renewable resources, they are only slowly renewable, requiring hundreds or thousands of years to renew from catastrophic disturbance; this time is far longer than any economic plans (and really nonrenewable on a human life scale). This has important implications on sustainability.
The forest ecosystem is a large-scale pattern of millions of minute events. A range of elevations across areas would minimize the effects of climactic change; and the possibility of extreme change is rarely considered in wilderness design or forest management. Soils, drainage, and land-use history and ownership would also receive similar considerations. This would allow management for diversity on different scales.
On the other hand, really large scales, bioregional or global, are not considered enough. We should be measuring at larger scales: Watershed, landscape, or biome. Before satellite data analyzed by GISs, ecologists and foresters did not have tools that could address the scale of landscapes. Regional and global data was hard and expensive to collect. Forests are also larger than stands. Although forestry has incorporated some of the technical tools, such as satellite imaging and GIS, it has neglected many conceptual tools, e.g., the Gaia Hypothesis or global design.
Ecoforestry considers those conceptual tools. Ecoforestry recognizes that forests are part of a process that is unending and imperfect, without a final state, and furthermore, that the attempt to perfect it results in disharmony. Ecoforestry accepts a constructive conflict in scale with the ecosystem. There are chaotic events, plagues and random frenzies in every system; rather than deny this ecoforestry tries to account for these factors. This acceptance leads to understanding and the abandonment of stupid strategies.
The tasks of ecoforestry include the return to the natural history and knowledge of forests as the foundation for taking trees, to place forestry on a proper scale (with regards to time and species), to leave the maximum alone, and to encourage the symbiotic relationship of forest economics and wild forests.
One solution to many of the current problems is a reduction in scale for everything from forest use to management units, with local controls and local use primary. Temporal scales, however, should be expanded with long-term research and management. One principle of ecoforestry is that an ecological forestry must observe the proper scales of forests, especially in terms of size, age, and patterns (or diversity).
Williams discusses the cosmic tendencies of diversity and creativity (23) in forestry. Certainly many cosmic tendencies, such as disorder (entropy) and order (ektropy), as well as change, creativity and temporality, are relevant to forestry. But, Williams and many others tend to emphasize only those tendencies that seem positive, such as creativity, complexity (which I will identify with diversity for the moment), and order, and not those with negative connotations, such as entropy, death, and uniformity. The universe comes with the whole package and we risk serious error by choosing only the tendencies we want.
Local ecosystems are separated from one another, not only in space, but by differences. For example, Dutch elm disease is a local problem (even if it seems ubiquitous in all forests with elms), produced by local actions and requiring local solutions.
Ecosystems are unique and original. Each patch (locality) supports a segment of the total species population in a unique context, with a particular set of predators, competition, food, or physical habitat. The forest ecosystem is a large-scale pattern of millions of minute events. The environment requires an enormous amount of minuscule local adaptations between the earth and its users. Production of pine cones, for example, is adapted to the local microsites; Loblolly pine planted either 50 miles north or south of the seed source are less vigorous. DNA seems to be a local system.
Local systems, however, can affect global systems. Cutting down local forests may contribute to the discharge of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, into the local atmosphere. This may have the effect of increasing quantities in the global atmosphere, creating a global change, possibly a runaway increase in atmospheric temperature.
Some systems are truly global: Global warming or global biogeochemical cycles. Lovelock suggests that the interaction between hardwood forests and softwood forests may act as a global regulator of oxygen for the planet (24). Many things, such as human poverty and species extinctions, only seem global because they are happening in many local systems at the same time (and may effect global cycles).
Development plans for forests tend to be global, to call for the eventual development of all resources in an area; British Columbia's intention to cut all the forests in the province is a good example. A one-world planned economy is an even greater threat, being based on unlimited industrial production, unlimited commodity consumption, increased exploitation of nature, and the free flow of resources and labor across cultural borders. This kind of planning requires the abandonment of local controls on development, trade, or lifestyles. Planning is thus characterized by a utilitarian globalism that denies value to the very systems that support it.
The current civilization is attempting to be global, not local. We even have a global mythology with industrialism. A global mythology cannot afford to teach of unimportant local elsewheres. It must teach of a multiplicity of cosmologies. Particularly in agricultural societies, cosmologies are gauged closely to seasons. They are also tuned to the limits of the local ecology, within their knowledge of interactions (the long-range ecological consequences of drainage, irrigation or overexploitation contribute to the deaths of cultures).
Despite cutting and planting on local scales, a number of global trends are evident. We might call them gigatrends, since they are larger and more involving than the megatrends identified by John Naisbitt over a decade ago (25). These gigatrends, on a global scale, include: Human populations increase exponentially; the impacts of a small percentage of people (the wealthy) increase exponentially; humanity takes over the habitats and functions of other animals, eliminating them and trying to take over their functions with chemicals (unsustainable for long); and ecosystems are simplified and degraded; deforestation, desertification, and exotic take-overs occur on a scale similar to the ice-age or a comet impact, but more meaningful to humanity, since we depend on the ecosystems we are changing.
We are faced with the choice between global logic or local knowledge. Local planning currently ignores limits and carrying capacity, long-term deficits and problems, other species, and ecosystems (regional and global planning are nonexistent). We need to encourage local autonomy and decentralization (to strengthen local regions and encourage self-sufficiency). The implementation of deep changes requires global action as well as local. Every forest could become the basis of local culture rather than the source of profit or support for a global economy.
The ecological social approach (or a redistributive environmental strategy) to development makes it irrelevant to discuss global limits to growth. Local limits are far more significant to majority of population; regardless of how much food exists, people will starve unless they can get it.
Such an approach would also mean limiting humanity and its technological effects, limiting human use to local impacts, and letting other beings live without interference. It is not necessary to dominate or terraform the forest completely to save it. Ecological forestry weaves people back into the fabric that supports them and in a sense makes them subject to the constraints of ecosystem processes.
Mathematically, the concept of a limit is fairly simple: It is something that is approached, but not reached, as when fractions descend to zero. A more precise definition, according to David Berlinski (26), is that a "sequence ... has a limit at the number L if, as the sequence is extended, its terms get closer and closer to L." This could be qualified further.
A maximum is the largest value less than a limit. In applications the limit is usually a number, e.g., the rate of photosynthesis or the carrying capacity. Every finite system has limits.
In some senses, nature does try to maximize or minimize certain conditions. For instance a bubble minimizes surface tension by assuming a spherical shape that has a maximum volume. Of course, we could also say that the bubble is an optimum form for the least possible surface area for a given interior volume.
In principle, mathematicians reduce the question of maxima and minima to a geometric construct, often a three-dimensional surface with peaks and pits. In trying to apply the idea to a tree, however, the calculations become incredibly complex. A tree appears to create a maximum leaf area to collect radiation and a maximum number of seeds for reproduction, but it also tries to minimize evaporation and energy for its metabolism. A forest is even more complex. In reality, the processes of trees and forests have many local maxima and minima; these can be represented graphically as surface potentials on a catastrophe field, as Rene Thom has done (27).
Industrial forestry, based on the old agricultural model, is concerned with maximizing profits and products. Highly specialized systems are accelerating the change from "paleotechnic" to "neotechnic" agriculture. This change minimizes costs and maximizes profits in the short term, but it also narrows the ecological basis of world food production and decreases human livelihood in the long run.
Most forest plans are also development plans that are comprehensive in the sense of seeking to meet all needs of the public, agriculture, and industry. But, they fall prey to all the assumptions of the industrial culture. They tend to be multipurpose with the aim of providing maximum net benefits through management of forests and wildlife. Both uses of "multipurpose" and "maximum benefits" are based on misunderstandings. Multipurpose in practice means human use; perhaps even just one of those, e.g., logging; and the idea of maximum benefits has proven to be slippery and dangerous. Modern resource management strives for maximum sustainable yield, based on partial knowledge of species and great ignorance of ecosystems.
Even a modern, balanced exploitation, however, may destroy forests. Currently, many resource managers espouse the ideas of equilibrium maintenance and maximum sustainable yield. These ideas are poor guides to management, according to C. S. Holling (28). By trying to maintain habitats in equilibrium, we often set them up for catastrophic decline, for instance, in fire-climax pine forests, or destroy resident species, e.g., the condor.
The concept applies to people, who are concerned with having maximum freedom or producing maximum values. Williams quotes John B. Cobb, Jr. in support of differences between one ecological vision and another. While agreeing with much of what Cobb says, I am concerned about the idea of unlimited value. I agree that values may be indefinite, but would not agree that they are infinite. Like the principle of limited good, I suggest that there is a principle of limited value. Competition, as Cobb mentions, is not the ultimate principle, but neither is cooperation, as many others believe; both are necessary in ecological interactions. Even aesthetic appreciation requires limits, to avoid having our over-appreciation overwhelm the values evident in nature.
Williams also links the maximization of the moral good of creativity to the maximization of public good (29), then to forests specifically. I wonder if he is equating forest good with public good. I wonder if we should even consider maximizing the moral good of creativity, or if it is meaningless. Few mammals even try for an optimum; most strive for a satisficing amount, according to F. Varela (30). Varela analyzes the evolutionary process as satisficing rather than optimizing; that is, a suboptimal solution is adequate. Selection operates as a survival filter that passes any structure than has sufficient integrity to persist. The focus of analysis is on organic patterns in a life history rather than on individual traits. For the evolutionary process, Varela suggests the metaphor of "bricolage," which is the putting together of parts in complicated arrays because they are possible (rather than being part of an ideal design).
Williams also proposes maximal creativity as an ethical imperative. Maximizing creativity, however, would lead to chaos, both in one's self and in ecosystems. There has to be a balance between creativity and stability, between innovation and habit. We should not be trying to maximize creativity in human beings or forests, but rather seeking stability and relative harmony.
The predominant economic theory in industrial countries holds that the full utilization of resources is necessary to ensure full employment and the maximum social good. This economics depends on economic growth to avoid crisis. The major premises assume that: Population will grow, social good is related to equitable distribution of material products, and if resources are limited, technology will erase the limits. The economist Kenneth Boulding referred to this as a cowboy economy.
A community is forced to accept an upper limit, beyond which it cannot grow any further. Further growth results in destruction or disruption of itself and nature. This is an ecological law of the maximum. Production could be stabilized in a steady state economy, a mature economy, like a climax system, where processes and cycles are constant. A steady state economy is based on natural laws and ethical principles. Traditional economies have a diverse and healthy diet; deliberate underproduction, usually well below the maximum levels; deliberate control of population growth below maximum levels; and deliberate under-use of resources, resulting in a small ratio of people to resources.
Reed Noss and others have noted that maintaining a healthy forest ecosystem is more efficient in the long-run than having to duplicate the forest functions to keep it healthy (31). Industrial forestry has, without admitting it, demonstrated this in numerous ways: for instance, by providing shade cards instead of shade, deer guards in place of food diversity, or fungi plugs to replace healthy soil.
Furthermore, it is dangerous to take maximum yields out of a system unless all factors are known; it is a virtual impossibility. Therefore, we must aim for optimum or satisfactory (to our needs) yields and calculate (and hope or guess) that the forest has sufficient flexibility to recover from our "take."
To survive, an ecosystem depends on the interactions and balance of many variables, most of which are not well understood. In forestry we try to maximize one of those variables (and William Ophuls noted that nature abhors a maximum). When that happens, the balance or harmony is altered, and although it may take decades or centuries for the consequences to be known, the system is affected.
While it is meaningful to speak of an optimum diversity, as the result of limits and the interaction of many factors, a maximum diversity may never be reached. As Paul Weiss noted, the patterns of organic nature are a combination of order and diversity; order involves constraint while diversity requires freedom for difference (32). Maximum order would result in a static universe, where a maximum freedom would create a nonordering chaos.
This is why is it not a tragedy of cosmic proportions, as Williams says it is (33), when species such as sharks or sow bugs fail to respond to the lure of possibility. These species have fitted themselves to relatively unchanging environments and do not need to change for the sake of change or for the sake of diversity.
Williams considers New Brunswick forests to be an expression of an evolving unity in diversity. I wonder if that unity is at the level of the ecosystem, community, or stand, or at all levels. Williams states that diversity has been organized for the good of the forest. This is a good example of a priori reasoning, as good as, but as wrong as, the anthropocentric hypothesis. Diversity is an emergent property of forests, arising from the activities of multitudinous beings learning to use the productivity of the forests to augment their own flesh. The forest is self-organizing, but diversity is not a goal of the forest.
It is true, as Williams says (34), that diversity "by itself has no value." It is after all just a characteristic of mature ecosystems. But it is never by itself; to think so is to be guilty of misplaced concreteness, according to Whitehead (35). In fact, nothing exists by itself, that is, not in relation to other beings. Diversity only exists in relation to other properties of an ecosystem; reciprocal causal processes operating in forests increase structure, differentiation and complexity.
We may not know what is the minimum, optimum or maximum forest cover for a particular watersheds. Science might try to identify minima or maxima but philosophy can aim at optima or satisficia. We are so ignorant of the complexities of ecosystems that it is suicidal to pretend to "maximize" their use for resources. A free market has to be limited by conservative calculations of ecological balance. It is almost impossible to estimate the economic value of natural balance.
In a system of ethics, we might consider maximizing a value, but then we have to decide if it is being maximized for one species or for the system, or if it is being maximized for the present or the future, or whether it can be maximized at all. John B. Cobb Jr. suggests that we should act to maximize value in general, at least for every entity with intrinsic value, rather than maximize value for one human or all (the greatest good for the greatest number) in the present or the future (36). Perhaps though, we should aim for an optimum or satisficium here also.
Ecoforestry incorporates many dimensions missing from industrial forestry. Where industrial forestry ignores the history of forests and of forest use, ecoforestry starts there (39). Where industrial forestry assumes the truncated cosmology of the modern age and an economic system based on inequality and short-term returns, ecoforestry considers the adaptive cosmologies of other cultures and a total ecological economics. Industrial forestry bases decisions on an antiquated physics and partial ecology, and ignores the ethical and social consequences of its actions.
Ecoforestry cannot be derived from industrial forestry, however. Industrial forestry is a failing system , a small-scope, once-through, temporary process for transforming forests into commodities, plantations, or deserts; ecoforestry is a maturing stage that considers the health and continuity of forests first. Although ecoforestry sounds like a qualification of the modern, industrial forestry, it is in fact entirely different; it is based on a different metaphysics, a broader ecology, a more comprehensive economics, and it is sensitive to limits, ethics, aesthetics, and spiritual values. Ecoforestry is comprehensive in its application of ethics, for instance, it tolerates all the inhabitants and structures of a forest. The entire community is considered.
Human communities are embedded in forest communities; our cultural and spiritual achievements occur in the larger community, which supports human endeavors. The larger perspective of ecoforestry incorporates industrial forestry as a special case, much like the theory of relativity incorporated Newtonian dynamics as a special case . Under certain rare circumstances, such as plantations of exotic trees, the treatments of industrial forestry, such as clearcutting, may be entirely appropriate.
Ecoforestry has been defined as selection forestry or restoration forestry; this is partially true but incomplete. Ecoforestry has also been defined as a context-based community forestry based on traditional wisdom combined with scientific knowledge. As the management of human use of forests for necessary goods at an appropriate scale while respecting the special characteristics and limits of forests. Ecoforestry can be approached obliquely through multiple overlapping definitions.
Ecoforestry is also a crisis science, like Conservation Biology, from which it takes many ideas. Over the planet, entire forests are being removed or converted, while others are degraded or destroyed; in the U.S. alone, 6 million acres of forest are cleared annually, 5 million acres are degraded, and 3 billion cubic meters of wood are consumed. Rarely do these industrial numbers reflect whole trees, associated animals and plants, or living habitats and forests, that 3 billion cubic meters of wood came from 1-6 million trees, each of which was home to lichen, fungi, beetles, birds, and other beings. Some, such as pileated woodpeckers, are so territorial that many die with their tree (just as in Greek myth hamadryads were thought to scream and die as their trees were cut).
The agenda of ecoforestry can be presented through a number of characteristics, principles, and standards. Characteristics are qualities that distinguish unique individuals, systems, or patterns; Gregory Bateson calls them differences that make a difference (40). Principles are fundamental rules or laws, based on unique characteristics of forest systems that we can use to create models to meet stated objectives, which are goals towards which our actions are directed, e.g., a healthy forest. Standards are models or examples of quality or value established by authority or consent, that can be repeated as procedures. Good forest design means not violating any basic principles.
For example, one characteristic of a mature forest is its wildness. The corresponding principle is that forest is self-making and self-ordering without human control and management. Our objective for this forest is to allow the foresting process to continue, whether we take resources from the forest or not (forests can be influenced or interfered with by acid rain, pollution, and other industrial effects). We can set local standards that are likely to keep mature forests wild: Limit biomass removal to 2 percent of the total forest; use appropriate techniques, e.g., single tree selection, horse skidding; retain mature structure, e.g., 19 snags per hectare, 23 nurse logs per hectare (in mature Ponderosa pine forests in Eastern Washington for instance); preserve surrounding landscape patterns.
The principles of ecoforestry are based on a number of fundamental philosophical, historical, scientific, and cosmological principles that were first presented in other contexts by thinkers such as A. N. Whitehead, A. Einstein (41), J. Cobb (42), E. Odum (43), and H. Hammond (44). Principles unify our images. These principles are introduced briefly to show the depth and breadth of forestry. Very few of these principles are absolute or universal; in fact, the further one gets from physical or chemical principles, the more likely there are significant variations or exceptions. Nevertheless, they are essential to the understanding of forests and quite useful in applications in forests. Principles, combined with common sense and good judgment, are necessary as guides in the absence of definite knowledge. They give us a broad predictive ability.
I still have trouble weighing good and bad in practice. I have no doubt that when I do more good, more bad is also created. For instance, when I started trying to restore a forest in Idaho, the best knowledge at the time insisted that I should clean the trees out of the stream and remove flammable brush and woody debris from the forest floor. I started to do this in a beautiful cedar grove, but I spent too much time sitting on the ground looking at the trees; I suppose I could blame Artemis, goddess of forests, solitude, young girls, and the hunt, for possessing me, but looking was more rewarding than the limited "housekeeping." Somewhat later, scientific knowledge advanced and I was advised to drop trees into the stream and leave all the woody debris and brush on the forest floor. Had I been less contemplative (or lazy), I would now have much more work to do. Was what I did in the 1970s good? Is what I am doing now good? Do I need more training to determine what is good or bad? Is the failure to do the good of now, or then, bad? Have I failed from ignorance (conflicting knowledge) or from confusion (conflicting intentions)?
That is one problem with forestry today. Which action is good? Which is bad? Which one should we do? Unfortunately, the outcome of our exploitation or interference may not be evident for hundreds of years.
Saying that we should practice good, without knowing for sure what is good, may not be successful advice. Not many will practice denial, whether of tree-felling, sex or money, if there are no incentives. Salvation or the health of our great grand children's environment is a distant posibility. The intention of good is immediate.
In having good as a goal, we cannot calculate the result. Good is a feature of the path of actions, as is evil. We cannot aim at it and simply shoot (or stare). We must approach sideways, through a field of good and evil.
Perhaps we should aim for harmony, for the health of forest and human communities. I think that we should do good for one's harmony, for instance, or for the health of the forest, not because the action is an action or for the sake of doing something good. In doing, we choose between good and bad actions; the judgment makes us human and susceptible to error. Good forestry can do nothing more. Perhaps, as John Fowles suggests (47), all our judgments of good and bad are meaningless in the long run. All actions, good or bad, interweave so extensively as time passes that their individual goodness or badness disappears. Each becomes lost in the other. Judgments evaporate and landscapes remain. Even so, we must consider our actions and perform them, guided by notions of goodness and harmony.
As good forestry, creating good images and good goals, ecoforestry is concerned with resacralizing landscapes, with restoring them to their extents and grandeurs, by regrounding science in ethics (that is, in ways of living together), and by changing our attitudes from utilization and flat efficiency towards awe and appreciation.
That means that we, you, me, have to care for each tree, fungus, jay, sowbug, or worm. Each living being matters. We know so little about the lives of trees or of other beings; we do not know what it is like to live for over a thousand years or to stand in one place and draw everything we need into us. We do not know what it is like to live underground and browse between roots. Our detachment from trees and other beings has to end. Our participation in the life of the forest must begin.