Aristotle says...

"If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development."

The history of forest ecosystem management is large in the American public consciousness. Throughout the history of America, people and the government have both tried to control and manage forests, often to the detriment of all. During the expansion of this country, forests were clear-cut, burned, and invariably changed due to human interference. Trees and underbrush were cleared to make room for agriculture. Logging provided valuable timber for the building of houses, furniture, boats, and other important amenities during the buildup to and takeover of the Industrial Age. During all of this expansion, old-growth forests were all but eliminated. Our ability to rapidly change the landscape took precedence to our understanding of how forest ecosystems work.

The consequences of our actions are still being realized today.

How about a little fire, Scarecrow?

Arguably the largest of these consequences has been the spread of more intense and severe wildfires in the western United States. For the most part, fire is a natural part of the disturbance regimes in that part of the country, and for a century or more we were out there repressing those fires. While we had some logical reasons to do so (fires threatened property and lives then even as they do today), we neglected to understand that we were eliminating part of the ecosystem's regulating mechanism. We had in fact drastically changed the ecosystem to the point where, when fires we could not control broke out, they ended up being that much more intense due to the presence of an unnatural buildup of underbrush, detritus, and dead trees. Fires now raged out of control, killing where they would have maimed, destroying parts of forest ecosystems instead of providing them the ability to rejuvenate.

We know now that fire regimes are an important and necessary entity in our western forests. Smokey's slogan has changed in recent years. And while we still strive to protect ourselves from the powerful fires we ourselves have caused, there is a new approach that references our scientific understanding of these ecosystems. We now use prescribed burns. We often let natural fires burn. We seek to understand more of how fires affect and in some ways protect these forests.

What caused this change in thinking? About a century ago, we were still operating on the assumption that ecosystem were static entities that we could easily control. Now we know that ecosystems do change, often and sometimes with great flexibility. These dynamic entities are so complex that most ecologists would never deign to say they understand them fully. Forest ecosystems are made up of much more than trees. They incorporate all of the life within them, the disturbances that periodically affect them (both short and long-term), and their ability to change and vary in response to these things.

Fire is merely the most relatable example I can use here. There are many other stories I could tell (and will in the future) about invasive species, disease and insect outbreaks, logging, mining, and other silvicultural practices that have altered and continue to change our forest ecosystems. What is important to learn here is this: people will invariably alter their environment. Whether that be for better or worse is up to us.

Forest Ecosystem Management

There has been a social paradigm shift in how we view forest ecosystems. Once a purely utilitarian resource, we know see forests as having both instrumental and intrinsic value. This paradigm shift is having a huge effect on how we manage forest ecosystems. We have moved away from traditional forestry practices to forest ecosystem management. Forest ecosystem management includes the ideas that we mimic nature whenever possible and that we acknowledge and respond to public values associated with forests.

This can be broken down in two ways. The scientific objective of forest ecosystem management says that we should do our best to maintain forest ecosystems as interconnected wholes. And the social objective states that we should also maintain forests' aesthetic qualities as well as achieve social and political acceptability of management practices.

These things may be easier said than done.