Eco-Forestry

By David Haenke

Ecological Forestry has emerged in the last 25 years as a welcome alternative to the rampant industrial forestry that has ravaged the forests of the North America and the world with a ferocity that increases with each technological advance in cutting, skidding, and hauling logs from the woods. The level of butchery has gone nearly exponential since the 1940’s with the widespread use of internal combustion engines in the forests, particularly with regard to chainsaws, huge log skidders, feller-bunchers, de-limbers, and ever-larger log trucks, all this applied to the criminal overuse of clearcutting. The calculus of insane greed, however, does not need particularly advanced technology: men with axes, horses, and oxen had levelled the vast virgin white pine forests of lower Michigan, pretty well completing the grotesque job by 1900, and leaving us the 40 acres of the Hartwick Pines.

With our Federal and State agencies related to forestry being primarily fiber procurement agents for the forest products industry, the depredations of industrial forestry on private lands have increasingly become the norm on public forests, where the public unwittingly pays to subsidize the profits of the largest forest products companies along with the destruction of forest ecosystems.

At the same time, as with industrial agriculture, most college and university forestry departments have sold out to the forest products industry and their lavish grants to support the teaching of industrial forestry, graduating -- into both the public and private sectors -- legions of “foresters”/clearcutters schooled in the best ways to “get out the cut” no matter what the ecological or social consequences.

While industrial forestry is a wholesale assault on nature in the name of the quickest and largest profit possible, eco-forestry is just the opposite. Eco-forestry is simply ecological common sense, attempting to take out the same trees that natural selection processes would take out, albeit in a shorter time frame. Though the decisions on which trees to take out are not driven by economic considerations, eco-forestry is profitable, though the profits are not the exorbitant ones expected by the mainstream forest products industry. The criteria I use for selecting trees for harvest is a form of “low-grading”, where I look for the sick, dying, poorly formed, off-site, and overcrowded, while leaving plenty of snags and den trees for wildlife. The healthiest, well-spaced trees are always left to grow.

In my workshop I will cover some of the basics of eco-forestry, including economics, selection methods, examples of good forestry, certification for sustainability, regional considerations, and value-adding. Also, if there is enough interest and participation, I will facilitate a networking session for those who wish to move the agenda of eco-forestry forward in Michigan and the Great Lakes.