aragornarts.substack.com/p/what-is…

“We are not just tree managers. We are in fact the managers of landscapes in service to the community.”

My first real job, at 16-years-old, was as a labourer on a silviculture success research project, pulling 10 to 20-year-old trees out of the ground in regen blocks around the backroads of the Cariboo. Subsequent summers found me treeplanting in those same woods, and later, alone - again, in the woods, this time mostly in Northern Alberta, this time in mature forests - walking strip lines, mapping ecotypes (in anticipation of harvesting). My first degree ended with a designation steeped in forestry. Despite all this background, I never became a registered forester. But I did - and do - resonate with the complexity and tensions of this title, this role, this profession, and its ostensible - based on the professional standards inspected in the linked post - compass and ethics.

And so I resonated also with this thoughtful reflection “What is a Forester?” by Casey Macaulay, currently (an artist and) the General Manager of the Wells Grey Community Forest.

“Our responsibilities,” as foresters, Macaulay claims, “lay in the safekeeping of natural systems such that we can subsequently apply management practices for a sustainable harvest. The legacy of our success or failure in this mission will never be measured in the board feet turned out by the mill but in the resilience of the land to sustain our ongoing presence and the demands of future generations.”

Today, the trajectory of legacy appears to be towards conflict, again, rather than sustainable co-management, undergirded by relationships with both land and across actors currently divided by systemic pressures, among other things.

Reflecting on this, Macaulay observes:

“I have often imagined the latent potential of proactively channeling the energy absorbed by land-use conflicts into outcomes that benefit more of us.”

Me too, Casey. Perhaps our shared imaginations might see themselves - and the forests at their roots - transmogrified into the people and places of those outcomes, one day.