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FeaturesMay 7, 2000

Over the last 20 years or so a shift in forest management has emphasized words like "biodiversity". Terms like "ecosystem management" and "ecological sustainability" cropped up. This shift in terms was especially prevalent in public land management...

Joe Garvey

Over the last 20 years or so a shift in forest management has emphasized words like "biodiversity". Terms like "ecosystem management" and "ecological sustainability" cropped up.

This shift in terms was especially prevalent in public land management.

The change in thinking is in response to changes in public attitudes about how public lands are managed.

However, we, the public, are not making a similar change in our consumption of natural resources.

We still use a lot of resources. The burden has shifted from public lands to an increased demand on private forest lands of the United States, or to the forests of foreign countries.

Over the last decade or so, Federal timber harvests has dropped about 70 percent.

Not a problem if that is what the U.S. citizens want for U.S. public forests.

However, we are still consuming. Our demand for softwood consumption is showing up in the increased imports of Canadian lumber. Lumber that comes in part from native old growth Canadian boreal forests. Canadians are starting to smell a rat.

Harvesting on private lands in the southern U.S. has increased with the reduction of public land harvesting in the west.

Now the harvest of southern softwood timber exceeds the rate of growth.

Most everyone has a computer. Most every computer has a print button. Most everyone uses it. Meanwhile, there is the public debate in Southeast Missouri over hardwood chip mills.

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What type of wood is used for computer paper? Is there a connection? Southeast Missouri logs and log parts are shipped worldwide. And in some other part of the world they ship their wood products to Southeast Missouri.

The U.S. consumes more per capita than many nations. Since the first Earth Day in 1970 the average family size in the U.S. has dropped by 16 percent. The size of the average newly constructed single family house has increased by 48 percent.

The ethical or moral foundation for ecological sustainability is weak unless we focus also on the consumption side of the national resource equation.

Less than 2 percent of Americans are farmers. Even some people who live in rural areas are disconnected from working the land.

Few people are resource producers. All are resource consumers. Yet few of us relate how the two tie together.

This results in the anger and discord between producers and consumers. Loggers, farmers, ranchers and miners have all at times been subject to scorn by the very people that benefits from the goods they produce.

Rural communities that farm, mine or harvest timber are referred to as "resource dependent" communities.

Aren't St. Louis and Cape Girardeau resource dependent? The forester, wildlife biologist and author Aldo Leopold in his writings stressed the need for a land ethic. He wrote that many think "...our land is merely the place our money was made.

There is as yet no social stigma in the possession of a gullied farm, a wrecked forest, or a polluted stream..." Especially the wrecked forest part.

But he also stated that, "A public which lives in wooden houses should be careful about throwing stones at lumbermen, even wasteful ones, until it has learned how its own arbitrary demands as to kinds and qualities of lumber, help cause the waste it decries...The long and the short of the matter is that forest conservation depends in part on intelligent consumption, as well as intelligent consumption of lumber."

If public land management must have an ethical content and if private landowners are lectured to manage ethically and if the wood industry must harvest ethically, should we consumers have a consumption ethic? Will we reach in our hip pocket and pay for the extra costs of production? Who was it that Pogo said was the enemy?

Joe Garvey is a district forester with the Missouri Department of Conservation.

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