FOREST ECONOMY, PROTECTION GO TOGETHER

Recently, the chief of the U.S. Forest Service, Michael Dombeck, outlined his goals for our country's forestry agency during a speech in Washington. It struck me that many of the things he was trying to communicate at the national level need to be discussed and better understood in our own state and local communities.

One of the keystones for Dombeck's "Natural Resource Agenda for the 21st Century" is the goal of sustainable forest management. What does that mean? Why should it be important to the people of Missouri? If we want our forests to be sustainable, what will we have to do differently, and are we prepared to make those changes? These are just a few of the questions we need to discuss with one another as we ponder the future well-being of our state's very important forest resource. Answers can help us when concerns arise over such issues as the development of chip mills in the Missouri Ozarks, the role that forests play along our Mississippi and Missouri river floodplains, or the loss of plant and animal species that depend on forests as their place to live.

The Bruntland Commission, an international group of experts, met in 1987 and gave the world a definition of sustainability that has been widely quoted ever since. In a nutshell, they said we are sustainable when we can meet the current needs of our society without cutting short the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

At first glance it is hard to get very excited about this idea, but in recent years it has guided many agreements as to how and why we want to sustain forests. It is worth spending a bit of time to think about. One way I begin to understand it is by thinking about myself and my younger brother. He followed me through the same grade school, junior high and high school in St. Louis. We were different people with different interests, abilities and things we wanted and obtained from our education. Those differences were not important. Our having the same opportunity to achieve the education of our individual choice, though, was very important.

If I had burned down our school, I would have denied him that opportunity. If my behavior had been so bad that every teacher who had me in class had to wonder about my brother, then again, I would have short-changed the fulfillment of his own choices. As it was, I did not burn anything down. By acting sustainably, we left my brother, and all the others who followed, the full ability to pursue their own educational desires, even though they may have been different from our own.

Forestry professionals, environmentalists and government officials from around the world have taken this approach to sustainability and used it to begin defining the important elements of sustainable forest management. We have asked ourselves, and actually achieved a tremendous amount of agreement on, what should be our concerns today if we want future generations to be able to meet their own forest resource needs as they choose. The overriding theme gained its initial head of steam at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 when nearly 150 countries agreed to a statement of "Forest Principles." From that point, a half-dozen different multinational groups from around the globe have fleshed out their versions of sustainable forest management with each containing the same very important finding -- a finding that Dombeck also quoted in his speech -- that sustainable forests occur when "economic stability and environmental protection go hand in hand."

Perhaps this seems obvious to most people. But, in fact, most of the persistent controversy over forests can be traced to a belief that you cannot have stable economic development of forests and adequate environmental protection of forests at the same time. In Missouri, across the U.S. and throughout the world, we constantly hear from people who think that harvesting trees will destroy our environment on the one hand, or on the other hand that protecting the environment too vigorously will destroy the economy. The vision of sustainable forest management says not only is it possible for economic values and environmental values to both be supported through forest management, but that it is essential these two values work together if we are to be sustainable.

A good example can be found right here in our state. Private individuals own nearly all (85 percent) of Missouri's forestland. Not the government. Not forest industries. But by an estimated 300,000 different people from all walks of life. Most of those people will, at some time during their ownership, want to see some financial gain from their land. If we have a healthy, viable and diverse forest industry, then there is a good chance landowners can earn money from selling their trees. More importantly if they know they can make money selling trees, then they are more likely to maintain the land as forest, rather than clear it for pasture or sell it for a subdivision. Clearly, the economic value of that forest encourages the landowner to sustain it for the future.

On the other hand, there are ways to harvest trees and manage forests that protect environmental values and ways that do not. If trees are harvested in a manner that causes severe soil erosion or does not create the proper conditions for new trees to be promptly re-established, then the land may not produce a new component of economically valuable trees for the future. Clearly, in this case, if adequate environmental protection is not made a part of the landowner's forest management decision then, that forest will not be as attractively sustainable in the future.

Marvin D. Brown is the forestry division administrator for the Missouri Department of Conservation in Jefferson City.