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The Boreal Forest Needs Sound Science

I do my best to be objective. However, like you, I have experience-basedbiases, and you should know what mine are and how I acquired them.

I initially chose to work for the forest industry because I believed that industry was best positioned to advance forest management; all that was required were positive incentives, and strong legislation that was enforced on companies that failed to otherwise respond favourably. The Anglo (Nfld.) Development Company Ltd. (AND) had extensive private land, and on the Crown land it managed, it had ninety-nine-yearrenewable leases and licences. The timber leases and licences came with no stumpage fees (fees per volume of wood harvested); rather, they were associated with area-based, land-rentalfees. The combination of secure long-termtenure and area-basedfees prompted them to search for ways to maximize yield from the land.

At Price (Nfld.) Pulp & Paper Limited, I came under the direction of a highly respected forester, Frank R. Hayward, who took an intense interest in my training. He was open to hearing my perceptions of what good forest management looked like and at no time told me I was wrong about anything. He was, however, skilled at getting me to question my objectivity.

He was unfazed by my assertion that clear-cuttingwas wrong and didn’t ask me to explain why I believed that was so. The fact was, from my earliest childhood experiences on logging operations with Dad, the sight of dense piles of drying treetops, dead and dying herbs and mosses on the extensive cut areas revolted me. I thought of all the wildlife that, as a result, were displaced and the baby birds that probably died when the trees were harvested.

It never occurred to me that the forest fires that frequently burned in our area did the same thing, and more, by often killing all life above ground in their paths. All through forestry training, despite what I was learning in silviculture and forest management courses, and even through my first four to five years of forestry work, I continued to be revolted at clear-cuts.

I hadn’t been working under Frank long before he outlined what he saw me doing over the next several years. He told me about the company’s long history of harvesting and stand-managementresearch and suggested I spend some time getting familiar with the records. In their fire-proofvault, I discovered file cabinets full of field data and interim reports. Some of the data and reports went back as far as 1921 and had been authored by John D. Gilmore. John was an early graduate of the University of Toronto’s Forestry School and had joined AND in 1918, later becoming woods manager and starting the various “trials.”

The trials covered a variety of stand-managementmethods and logged-areatreatments, including different prescribed burning techniques over different establishment years. Logging slash (discarded branches and tops of harvested trees) treatments and prescribed burning of harvested areas were company practices through the 1920s.

The records revealed to me that in its early years AND had been operated according to the values of its owners who were familiar with current European forest management methods. They wanted to ensure that their harvesting encouraged healthy regrowth and they intended to periodically thin the new stands as they developed. The company had for decades been trying to determine the best silvicultural (forest farming) practices for the forest under its control.

That effort continued following the Second World War, when AND in Grand Falls, Newfoundland, and Bowater Pulp & Paper Ltd. (Bowater) in Corner Brook, Newfoundland (the original Bowater paper mill and at that time also British-owned), jointly formed the Anglo-BowaterForestry Research Organization. In 1946 they hired W.M. Robertson, the newly retired director of the Canadian Forestry Service, to manage the organization. He added additional stand-managementtrials across AND’s land holdings and established 999 permanent growth-and-yieldsample plots (PSPs), which were measured four times over three decades.

Scheduled re-measurementsweren’t due for any of the trials for another three to five years when I joined the company, so I had time to see them in the field and plan my schedule. Over a two-yearperiod, I cruised timber (collected tree and stand data), surveyed and mapped stand depletions, and completed a survey of tree regeneration on over five hundred square kilometres of former cutovers in the Noel Paul River watershed. The survey showed that the cutovers had regenerated to the species harvested, but moose, which had been introduced, were eliminating balsam fir, birch, aspen, ground hemlock, and most hardwood shrubs from approximately 20 percent of the watershed and the most fertile soils. Most of those areas were converting to grassland with scattered white spruce.1

I was now even more skeptical of clear-cutting. After two years with Price (Nfld.) Pulp & Paper Limited I was becoming disillusioned and skeptical of the possibility of the chances of my goal to make positive changes and began looking for other opportunities. I resigned from Price (Nfld.) and was hired by Forestry Canada as a forest research officer. With them I hoped to study tree and stand growth relative to tree location and spacing within a stand and various stand-managementtechniques to vary that spacing and improve growth. I quickly began to feel that I had made a mistake, however, as I became disappointed and impatient with the slow pace and what I felt were inefficient civil service policies and practices.

At this time, I had, with Forestry Canada’s encouragement, applied to a number of Canadian and American universities for post-graduatestudies, and Yale University chose to accept my application and offer me financial assistance. That was during the Vietnam War and I was advised to register for the military draft immediately upon arriving in New Haven. Enquiry showed that as a Canadian citizen residing in the United States I would not be drafted if my “number came up.” However, America was going through a period of intense self-examinationand I feared that the military draft could be broadened. I didn’t like even a slim possibility of being drafted, and that, combined with my disappointment with the slow progress of my research proposal through the civil service hierarchy, and limited ability to access the bush except in summer, was enough for me to consider other options.

Price (Nfld.) Pulp & Paper Limited had been giving signals that they wanted me back to direct their forestry program and to serve as an understudy to chief forester, Frank Hayward, who was due to retire. The offer was certainly an improvement over the situation I had left when I was last with them. I felt that if I were to become chief forester, I would be better able to implement some of the forest management change that I felt at the time was essential for forest health. I took their offer and remained there for twelve enjoyable years, directing their forest management and forestry research.

During that period, I oversaw the re-measurementof all of the long-termtrials and wrote, or supervised the writing of, final reports. Some draft reports were reviewed by selected external experts and they were revised accordingly, but none were subjected to the rigour of official peer review and publication in accredited scientific journals.

Based on the results of trials initiated in 1921, which showed significant merchantable-yieldimprovement,2we initiated several small pre-commercialthinnings of dense young stands. The thinning removed excess tree saplings, while selected desirable saplings were left standing at as near as practical to two-metrespacing. The thinning recovered no merchantable wood and therefore yielded no immediate cash return. That type of thinning is today called “spacing,” or “cleaning.” In 1970, after improving labour productivity and thus the cost of the thinning, we began expanding the program, with both federal and provincial help, to over a thousand hectares per year.

As part of my responsibilities, and as an interested tourist, I travelled widely in Canada, parts of the United States, and New Zealand, familiarizing myself with other companies’ and various governments’ policies and practices. I visited the forestry operations of numerous companies in various provinces and states, including, among others, the clear-cutmountain terrain of MacMillan Bloedel’s business in the Vancouver Island rain forests; Proctor & Gamble’s operations at Grande Prairie, Alberta, and its clear-cuttingin the lodgepole pine forest of the Rockies’ foothills; Weyerhaeuser‘s Douglas fir plantations near Mount St. Helen’s in Washington State; California’s redwoods; New Zealand Forest Products (NZFP)’s intensively managed radiata pine plantations on North Island, New Zealand; J.D. Irving’s operations in New Brunswick, with its extensive black spruce plantations situated on former clear-cutsthat had been prepared for planting with heavy vegetation crushers; and Spruce Falls Power and Paper’s fill-inplantations on the clay belt forests of northeastern Ontario.

In almost every case, to the best of my knowledge, the forests were being managed according to the current laws of each jurisdiction that, compared to today’s laws, were rather lax. Except for Spruce Falls Power and Paper, companies that were practising the more intensive forest management, at that time, put their greatest effort into their private land.

Throughout my career, I was sometimes assigned to lead bush tours for Canadian and foreign politicians, stock analysts, buyers, and executives of international newspapers who were our current or potential customers. Conversations during those tours exposed me to the politics of world trade and investment and gave me some insight into the complexity of satisfying customer demands. To my surprise, puzzlement, and gratitude, one newspaper executive wrote our CEO giving me credit for his paper’s large newsprint order.

In 1974, Abitibi Paper Company acquired Price Brothers Limited, and the combined companies were later renamed Abitibi-PriceInc. Philip Mathias’s book, Takeover, provides a detailed and intriguing replay of events leading up to and during the high-stakesboardroom, stock market, and financial manoeuvring that occurred at the time.3In 1978, I was tempor­arily transferred to head office to work with Duncan Naysmith and Frank Robinson of Abitibi-Priceas they negotiated Forest Management Agreements (FMA), first with Manitoba and then with Ontario. The first FMA negotiated in Ontario, for Abitibi’s Iroquois Falls Division, became the trend-setterfor two additional agreements for Abitibi, and subsequent FMAs that followed with all other companies in Ontario. FMAs transferred responsibility for stand renewal after disturbance and follow-upstand management from the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry (MNRF) to the industry. That exhilarating experience culminated with Bill Johnston, the vice president of woodlands for the company, challenging me, “You have helped negotiate FMAs, now make one work.”

I was made accountable for forest management of the Spruce River FMA, miscellaneous licences, and Abitibi-Price’s developing forestry program on its two thousand square kilometres of private land northwest of Thunder Bay, Ontario.

With the exception of approximately one year working for Forestry Canada and a summer job with Parks Canada, all of my employment between 1956 and 1997 was with Canadian forest-industrycompanies. I left Abitibi-Pricein 1997 to become an independent forestry consultant. For the next eight years, under short-termcontracts, I supervised forest renewal, advised on forest silvicultural and urban forestry projects, was lead auditor on two independent forest-managementaudits,4 and assisted the successful bidder when what had since become Abitibi-Consolidatedsold its private land.

During my career, various persons provocatively challenged me with, “How can you, a professional forester, promote industrial forestry and not be ashamed?”

My answer was always the same. “I am proud of what I am doing with the forest industry.” And then I’d proceed to explain why to anyone willing to listen. The remainder of this book is my expanded answer to the question.

The Forest Is More than Its Trees

As a teenager, I often travelled along the numerous fens, muskegs, and barrens of my Newfoundland home, where less than 50 percent of the landscape is closed forest. The fens at valley bottoms, muskegs, and rock barrens on the ridge tops and some slopes, support few trees.

During my work there, I used those open spaces as travel corridors, particularly in winter when they offered unimpeded snowshoe, ski, and snowmobile travel on the wind-packedsnow. I would stand gazing up from the side of a fen or down from a ridge top at the opposite hillside, studying the layout of the tree cover, its species content, and relative tree sizes and stand volumes.

Over the years, those images converged in my mind with numeric cruise data collected along parallel lines through the forest and I could give increasingly accurate ocular estimates for portions of a stand. By examining aerial photographs, I could then extend the estimate to a whole watershed. I was unaware that a mix of forest and open spaces was being burned forever into my psyche.

When I was transferred at middle age to Ontario, I initially felt uncomfortable in the boreal forest of this new place, and that bothered and puzzled me. More than ever, I was enjoying being on large clear-cuts, and one day, during my second year in my new job, while kneeling and examining some newly planted spruce seedlings, a sudden realization came that I was missing the open spaces that I so enjoyed.

I, a forester, was embarrassingly claustrophobic in Ontario’s relatively unbroken forest, where even the fens and some of the muskegs tend to be treed. I realized that the clear-cutand burned areas had become surrogate fens, muskegs, and rock barrens, and views from them were now adding to my understanding of the local standing forest. I was also appreciating clear-cutsfor their open space and I could now even see their beauty.

Clear-cutsand burns, which in my youth had offended me as eyesores, had evolved in my mind into places of wonder and what was initially stark beauty, into increasingly appealing panoramic scenes and smaller scenes of vivid colour and form.

Clear-cutsand burns became subjects of my expanding visual-artshobby and small business. I admit that it takes a stretch to see beauty during the first couple of years after any forest disturbance, but by the third year, the new growth of the remaining trees is accompanied by flowering herbs and shrubs, and a wider variety of mushrooms begins to appear.

As a student, I worked one summer with a scientist who developed one of Canada’s earliest ecological forest-siteclassifications, and with him examined several hundred small sample plots of the forest floor.5Throughout my career, I used similar plots from which to gather information that enabled objective analysis of various forest dynamics. Forest ecology didn’t become my life vocation but I did learn that the forest is more than just its trees.

The number of species of trees in a stand is a small fraction of the total number of plant species. During much of my time in the forest, I have been on my knees and even lying face-downwhile examining the diversity of life on a few square centimetres of forest floor. Photographing or drawing, collecting, and identifying as many plant species as I could find was an early hobby, and as a forester I often recorded and collected for my learning and research, and research by others.

I have accumulated a large library of photographs of fascinating rock patterns and colours, lichens on rocks and wood, mosses, ferns and grasses, dew-coveredspider webs, intriguing arrangements of rotting wood, bark, and fungus, and, yes, wildlife, including insects, birds, frogs, snakes, turtles, hares, grouse, porcupines, foxes, lynx, wolves, coyotes, bears, moose, and caribou — practically all in clear-cutsand burns of differing ages. Yes, beauty can be found anywhere but it takes the right attitude and focus on the here and now — and it helps to forget our biases.

Plants are the base of all other boreal forest life, providing food and shelter to wildlife, and food, medicine, tools, shelter material, industrial raw material, and spiritual comfort to humans. Additionally, each species performs various functions within its immediate environment as it integrates and competes with its neighbours. Simply put, without plants we can’t continue to exist but they can do quite well without us. Provided we use plants responsibly and work with natural processes when harvesting them, they will continue to sustain our species and our way of life.

We Are Living in an Ever-Changing Forest

I hope to stimulate examination of the forest around us and objective questioning of much of what we currently hold as fact. Please critically question everything that I and others are telling you. I hope that you will seek other sources of information and weigh the “facts” as presented by each of us. We all see the world through the clouded lens of our own experience and too often assume we know best. The deteriorating condition of our world is proof that approach has not been good enough.

The internet has numerous scientific articles that are easily accessed. Do an online search for “black spruce” to see what information is available about that species. You will discover in your reading that our knowledge of trees and the forest is limited, but as with other subjects, we are rapidly adding to what we already understand, and in some cases altering and even rejecting what we previously thought to be fact. That is how objective science works.

We don’t know everything about the human body, even though for centuries it has been scientifically studied. Consider all of the forest-tree, other-plant, animal, and insect species that together have received only a fraction as much scientific examination and you will understand the vast amount of knowledge that is waiting to be discovered about the boreal forest.

We know that the boreal forest is constantly changing and that sometimes alteration is slow and unnoticed by the casual observer. At other times change is rapid, with hundreds of hectares harvested or even a thousand square kilometres transformed from mature forest into a large, wildfire-blackenedlandscape.

If you own a summer cottage in the bush, think back to when you first saw it or cleared the site for building. Check the photographs that you have taken over the years and observe the change in the forest. I expect it will surprise you that new trees have appeared, some have disappeared, and most have grown without your notice.

Some of us return again and again to our favourite locations in the forest and they always appear the same, but are they? Think of your favourite blueberry patch. It wasn’t always such. Probably only eight to ten years ago it was a mature forest that was burned or harvested. Two to three years after the disturbance, the blueberry plants matured, and since then crops have been variable, with one or two bumper years. Then, last summer, you realized that the developing young trees are shading out the blueberry bushes. Next year, it will be time for you to find another location.

Between high school and forestry graduation, I gained experience at most jobs involved with circa 1950s’ pulpwood harvesting and extraction. I was interested, but skeptical, when some of the oldest loggers said that they were harvesting the same ground for their second time.

In 1949, while accompanying my father as he scaled stump-piledpulpwood (wood cut up and piled where the trees were felled), I was overwhelmed by black flies. He sat me on top of a pile of logs where a breeze kept the pests at bay while he carried out his work within sight of me. In 2000 I returned to the same location with my adult son. The site had again been recently clear-cutand my son obliged me by standing beside a pile of logs near where I had sat on another pile fifty-oneyears earlier.

As a logger for a brief period in 1958, I helped clear-cuta portion of a stand that had been harvested circa 1908. During a visit to the same location in 2011, I was pleased, but no longer surprised, to see that it was ready to be harvested a third time at high commercial volume — and that on Newfoundland’s supposedly poor soils.

Since moving to Ontario, I have examined ground on the former Abitibi-Price’s private and public licensed land, where second clear-cutharvests have occurred. In 2011, I returned to a 1983 black spruce plantation on a former clear-cutwithin the Spruce River FMA. I was so impressed that I surveyed a part of the stand and determined that at only twenty-eightyears since planting it already had as much pulpwood volume per hectare as the average tract that Abitibi-Pricehad harvested in its early clear-cuts.6 For black spruce that is remarkable, especially when one realizes that we have traditionally regarded that species as taking one hundred years to mature in Ontario.

That particular stand was the subject of considerable public and professional criticism as we began taking responsibility for stand renewal. Many viewed our efforts as failures from the start and our credibility was on the line. Then and now, we all had and still have a lot to learn!

A bright and satisfying future awaits anyone interested in studying trees, their growth, their interaction with the envir­onment, and their chemical and physical structures. Lakehead University, in Thunder Bay, and several other universities across Canada offer tremendous opportunity to anyone with the academic credentials for and an interest in such studies.

Forestry Practices Governed by Law

From the early 1960s, Canadian citizens began to take a more active interest in the way we manage our forests. It was discovered that not all was as we wanted and we became more proactive.

As a practising industrial forester, I took the brunt of many citizens’ disgust with what was perceived as the irresponsible behaviour the forestry industry had displayed in its forest-managementpractices. Gradually, through the 1970s and 1980s, that disgust fed the creation of powerful citizen lobbies led by passionate activists and it found its way into our schools and other public institutions.

I remember loggers emotionally appealing to me to do something on their behalf to “get the truth out there.” Their children were being bullied by their classmates and many were ashamed of their parents’ jobs. Those were frustrating, maddening times, and it was difficult for forest workers to keep their cool and remain objective.

Until recently, industrial foresters have had an almost impossible job getting our perspective into the public arena. Those of us who attempted to get our story out were often not skilled at working with the media and consequently often looked incompetent, antagonistic, and even deceitful. Let me try to explain how things stand today.

Since 2010, some of the best known and progressive environmental action and lobby groups have taken a different approach. Groups such as the David Suzuki Foundation, the Canadian Boreal Initiative, Forest Ethics, and the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS), among others, decided to look for common ground and work with the forest industry on agreed objectives. Together they have formed the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement, which currently includes a total of six environmental groups and eighteen forest industry companies as members.7

Greenpeace remains a notable exception and has chosen to continue its confrontational methods. Significantly absent as partners to the agreement are the First Nations, who say their treaty rights are being ignored.8Hopefully, in the not too distant future, all parties will come together to work on the common cause of sustaining the boreal forest. It’s time to face up to the reality that there will never be total agreement on all issues, and the best way to realize improvement is to work together on those issues that we can agree on.

Forest management in Ontario and across Canada is guided by policy developed under the collective wishes of citizens expressed through our elected representatives and the legislation and regulations passed by provincial parliaments. All foresters practising in Ontario are accountable for their professional actions.

When I arrived in Ontario, my employer required that I join the Ontario Professional Foresters Association (OPFA) and become a registered professional forester (RPF). In order to become a member, I had to pass an exam as evidence of my knowledge of past and current Ontario forest policy.

The OPFA was created by the Professional Foresters Association Acton April 3, 1957.9 That act, requested by a core of dedicated foresters, gave them a rallying base from which to collectively increase their forestry competency and standards of practice. Since October 16, 2000, the practice of forestry has been subject to the Professional Foresters Act, 2000, which recognizes professional forestry as an independent self-regulatingprofession.10All RPFs are governed by the requirements of that act and our code of ethics that can be accessed through an online search of the OPFA website.

Now that I am retired and inactive, I have chosen to focus on the concluding words of “A Commitment to Learning,” the last value in that code, which states, “A member shall … use their knowledge and skills to aid public awareness of forestry in Ontario.”11I am doing that through direct communication via one-on-oneconversations, public speaking, leading forestry tours, and with my visual art and writing.

The forests that exist today in Ontario are a reflection of past citizens’ demands (or lack of) on politicians, the politicians who were elected, their willingness to enforce legislation once enacted, and, to a large extent, natural events that were beyond human control. As proactive citizens in a democracy, such as Canada, we have the power to require our politicians to pass the legislation we want and to hold them accountable for implementing that legislation. However, the onus is on us to be well informed of the consequences of filling our demands because many of the demands we are making will not give us the forest we want or will need in the future.

Just How Dynamic Is the Boreal Forest?

No individual or group has complete knowledge of the forest, so sharing what knowledge we have is essential to achieving responsible management. Sitting as we “northerners” do in the middle of the boreal forest, we have a responsibility to ensure its continuing health.

I spent most of my boyhood roaming the bush where I developed a life-longlove for things natural — the scenery, rocks, water, flora, and fauna, the whole kit and caboodle. That doesn’t mean that I was a tree hugger or an animal-rightsactivist, no, not at all. Instead, I made use of what I loved because at an early age I realized that I was a legitimate part of the natural world in which my species, like all others, had evolved through competition for living space and food.

As I observed the relationships among the different parts of the forest, I discovered that each individual living part of it was dependent on utilizing some other part, sometimes to the benefit of the one being utilized, but sometimes not. Sometimes the use of a species by another affected a third species — sometimes negatively and sometimes positively. An example of the latter scenario would be how dragonflies prey on other insects, such as black flies, deerflies, and mosquitoes, which in turn prey on moose and humans. The moose and we benefit from the dragonfly’s predation.

Through my observations, I also learned that there is no single “balance of nature.” Nature is in constant flux. What today appears to be in balance may tomorrow be thrown off balance by some intervention, be it from another species, including man, or some weather, atmospheric or, potentially, celestial event. No patch of forest that one sees today will ever again be exactly the same, because as we observe the woods some plants are growing while others are declining and, with that change, mammal, bird, and insect populations also modify. Even the soil may be changing. The interaction of so many variables becomes so complex that the chances of a repeat occurrence are infinitesimal.

After moving to Ontario, I familiarized myself and fell in love with this area of the boreal forest. As a practising forester in Newfoundland and Ontario, I prescribed clear-cuttimber harvesting. Since my youthful opposition to clear-cutting, my training and personal observations have taught me that, if we are to utilize the trees of the boreal forest, and return similar species without too dramatic a change occurring, even-agedforest management is essential. Boreal tree species have evolved for millennia, accommodating disturbances by insects, disease, wind, fire, and, yes, man. This has resulted in a forest that is made up of large areas that contain trees that are all the same age. Adjacent areas similarly have trees of a single age — the age being dependent on the time of disturbance from which that area of the forest originated. We call that an even-agedforest.

Here in northwestern Ontario, forms of harvesting other than clear-cuttingwill more likely result in “uneven-aged” (multi-aged) stands, with a different mixture of tree species. For example, we will probably witness a transition from the current preponderance of jack pine and black spruce to more balsam fir and white spruce. What will then happen to any other plant or animal species that may rely on even-agedstands of jack pine and black spruce? I offer a partial answer to that question in the following chapters of this book. Please read on with an open mind.

Sustain Forests with Wants in Mind, but Be Willing to Listen to Reason

Humans have been a part of the fauna of the North American boreal forest since what may have been the first group of immigrants to the Americas crossed “Beringia” (the Siberia-Alaskaland bridge) during the most recent ice age. While living here, we have extensively changed the forest structure that will prevail well into the future.

Some believe that the boreal forest has increased in area since we stopped burning the prairie grasslands. Frequent fires are believed to have maintained the grass cover by burning trees that advanced into the prairie. Areas in the vicinity of the voyageurs’ Dog River/Prairie Portage north of Thunder Bay, Ontario, are today forested with tree stands of various ages. However, after repeated fire or timber harvesting activities, tall grass quickly becomes the predominant vegetation at some locations as far north as Graham. As recently as 1856, approximately sixteen square kilometres of grassland survived near what is now the community of Stanley west of Thunder Bay.12

A century ago, because of catastrophic losses of life and property, we began controlling fire in the forest. As we improved our success at fire control, the forest gradually began changing — with light-demandingspecies being replaced by shade-tolerantspecies, and associated wildlife. The change was enhanced by expanding timber harvesting that used horses, particularly in winter, which caused little soil disturbance, enabling the shade-tolerantspecies, such as balsam fir and white spruce, to thrive.

A few decades ago, we got serious about managing our forest and began attempting to sustain former “natural” cycles and species. More sophisticated legislation and regulations passed responsibility to natural resource managers, primar­ily foresters, to manage the forest according to science-basedguidelines while, where possible, accommodating changing diverse and conflicting public desires.

Our limited individual experiences and knowledge ensure that we tend to see our personal wants as being most important. How often do we ask ourselves, “If I get what I want, who must sacrifice what they want?” Sadly, some of us don’t even care what the other person wants or needs. Natural resource managers can act only after weighing the perceived benefits of those actions against the impact they will have on what others want or need, and, of course, ultimately on the impact that they will have on the forest. Inevitably, some people are never pleased with whatever decision they make.

Today we hike, pick berries and mushrooms, fish, hunt, trap, sight-see, photograph, paint, canoe, camp, cut Christmas trees, mine, log, and carry on many other activities. Disgustingly, some of us carelessly dump our household and even small-businessgarbage in the forest. We live and move about in the forest in numbers never seen before. It behoves us to consider what kind of future forest we want.