Forests, People, & Energy: An Analysis

Introduction:

Global forest condition is a subject of continuing debate. Of course, there are many situations where some facet of forest ecology could be better served if things were done differently. This paper tries to explore the reasons behind the current forest condition. The rationale for how, why, or even whether forests should have a community supportive role is considered in detail.
As society debates whether to choose to act more sustainably, these issues may be of increasing importance. The current environmental concern of those particularly interested in water quality and endangered species seems to have missed much of human ecology. These human factors if not dealt with effectively will undermine all their efforts and make the outcomes of human induced change even more devastating. The position taken here is that excessive energy consumption combined with rising human population causes most of the environmental damage by humans.
It is possible that forests should be a significant factor in the total human energy budget. A well-maintained forest should provide an important human experience interface to the rest of the biosphere. Using a significant amount of human labor and energy derived from forest waste will enhance the learning experience for all. This suggested venue could replace the current situations where a few people, large equipment, and lots of oil do all the work.

Where Are We?

This is a time of unbridled consumption of non-renewable energy. It is a time of denial that energy use has consequences that ought to concern us. This single statement conditions everything that follows in this document.
Forests are really solar batteries. The energy stored in the structural material of trees provides a structural environment for many species, including humans. Arboreal energy also supplies, many different organisms, a myriad of different benefits. Sustenance, directly from the structure of trees, is provided to various fungi, ants, termites, browsing deer and grouse. Microclimatic environments abound which are unique to particular mixes of aspect, species, tree size, time of year, and climatic zone. Yet forest energy is nearly financially worthless to the owner, and the low grade trees that contain it frequently hamper attempts at effective forest care.
Our high energy society separates us from the sources of our sustenance. We expect the following common occurrences to happen without interruption:

Bank accounts that continue to grow at some compound rate for as long as we live.
Protection from death until there is nothing left for medical science to do.
The right to manage any amount of energy use as long as we can pay for it.
Insurance will be available to cover the effects of catastrophes.

Yet we also want to hear that forests are protected from damage by us. Most normal citizens are unwilling to understand how forests work, or how their choices of conduct affect what forest owners can do to care for their forest. Human expectations of life and human nonrenewable energy use set the stage for what is possible in the working forest. The balance of this paper will try to dissect the way we got to where we are, how this affects forest health and care, and what we can do to change the effects of humanity on forests.

Connections -- Energy, Forests, and People:

A Community Without Roots.

An inventory of sources of sustaining value for communities today rarely includes the surrounding forest in the top ten most important factors. Indeed, the industrial use of forests has progressed in the following manner:

Harvesting is done by very few people controlling machinery fueled by oil.
Processing is done by very few people at large mills. Massive amounts of non-renewable energy are used to power the processing and handling of the product.
Markets for the product are likely to be half a continent away. All transport is fueled by non-renewable energy.
The company controlling the property and processing is likely to be remote from the community where the tree is grown.
The industrial forest of today has become a green desert as far as most residents of rural communities are concerned.

The people involved with the forest have become energy managers. Forest asset values have been severely reduced through market substitution of more convenient sources of energy and materials for wood. This energy substitution has eliminated many opportunities for realizing value from the forest. This situation has deteriorated to the point that many forest owners now hold forestland primarily for non-product reasons. This high energy economy is the source of the widely proclaimed "Greenhouse Effect." Less well publicized are connections of the high energy economy with the spread of disease, the loss of jobs, the breakup of families and communities, and the failure of both families and communities to successfully rear their children.
Those who advocate training of people for new high technology skills to replace jobs lost to energy use are deluding themselves. Industrial progress will eventually allow wholesale replacement of a workforce with non-human energy in industries that have studied the jobs well. Farm operation is an example of an historically human labor dependent activity where the use of oil and equipment have led to massive displacement of labor. Today agriculture employs less than 3% of the labor force. With this energy use pollution will continue to increase, and the few in control will get very rich.

Why Are We Where We Are?

Two common human goals are responsible:

Power and wealth have motivated regular investment in basic research on energy technologies. This basic research has been very expensive, and has been done primarily by governments. The two World Wars occasioned major concentrations on the use of energy to stop enemies. Governments seek applications for these technologies to return wealth to entrepreneurs, potential users, and eventually to the government via taxes. As ones' wealth increases it becomes prudent to invest in protection. This also happens on a societal scale. A positive feed back develops between the researchers, suppliers, users, and government to promote the use of energy. Government and business become major advocates for the growth of the high energy economy. The wide spread use of high energy technologies and the lack of a national or global renewable energy policy reduces renewable energy use to the status of a hobby.

Any culture using sustainable systems is vulnerable to being out competed by products produced using cheap energy. It is a given that one of the primary reasons that governments exist is the fact that people are able to accumulate excess wealth, through the use of energy. Wealthy people are easily convinced that they must part with some of this wealth to protect themselves from those less fortunate. The regular transfer of funds for this protection enhances the maintenance of a government. Specialization of society increases the need for stable employment. Government employees also want continuous employment. The maintenance of the part of government that uses their skills becomes very important to them.

There is an interesting connection between the wealthy, advertisers, the media, and the politician. Media need the advertisers to pay for their production costs. Advertisers will not pay for ads in a publication shunned by their target market. Advertisers want media that covers all their market area. Politicians want the same kind of block coverage, and they want it to be cheap. Politicians control the possible size of an individual business, and the media contract allowed with the public. The wealthy do not buy media that casts them as bad guys. So the politicians eventually allow the consolidation of media in the hands of a few, and the concerns of those without the wealth, to purchase the media or advertisers products, go uncovered. Those issues that receive no discussion are conveniently forgotten. (Noam Chomsky, described this linkage in an Alternative Radio taped lecture.) Of course, energy suppliers and users are the most wealthy so their interests receive most of the attention. These are some of the details of the positive feed back system that accounts for the growth of both government and non-renewable energy use.

The Mandate for Sustainability and Its Vulnerability:

Mandate:

· The 7th American Forest Congress in February 1996 indicated that "sustainable systems" were a significant goal for the attendees. Forests are mentioned as one such sustainable system. Sustainability has yet to have a clear common meaning or much popular discussion.

Sources of Vulnerability:

· Sustainable systems are handicapped by lack of inputs from outside the region. They must function forever on resources located nearby. Regulations that require non-renewable energy use or unsustainable amounts of renewable energy to protect people from life are not compatible with sustainable systems. True sustainable systems require identification and certification. Certification must enable exemptions from normal governmental oversight.. Funding the government from the fruits of sustainable activities must also be balanced, or the system will no longer be sustainable. As society moves toward sustainability the size of government will have to be dramatically reduced.
Basic Questions:

Why are people here?

· (This question must be answered honestly, by each of us, if we are to move from the self centered high energy society of today.)

A basic answer might include:

To raise healthy children and thus perpetuate the race. Elbert Hubbard said, "Down in their hearts, wise men know this truth: the only way to help yourself is to help others." The quest for power and wealth beyond the level allowing a basic quality of life is eventually self defeating. You can't take it with you.

How do we develop the technologies that we now use and enjoy?

Basic and applied research is carried out by allocating funds to willing (and hopefully competent) investigators. Society has in the past vacillated concerning the willingness or lack thereof to hold the investigator responsible for the consequences of that research. The separation of the researcher and the responsibility for the implications of their research began over 500 years ago during the period of the reformation, and continues today. This separation of researcher activity and responsibility for the outcomes of that thought must end for sustainability to have a chance.
How do the answers to the above questions affect the way forests are used? That will be for you to decide!

Suggested Tenets:

Basic Tenets:

Pollution comes from energy use.
Consumption = # of consumers x rate of use of a resource per person.
Forests are, in their most basic form, stored solar energy, and as such are valued in comparison to the cost of the most convenient available energy form.
People use past experiences as a base to judge how to handle new situations.
People protected from early experience in particular areas will find it difficult to cope with situations requiring rapid response using skills developed through familiarity with such areas.
There are definite "critical periods" for acquiring or exercising particular skills. Such skills include language, bodily control, musical skill, self awareness, among others. Our current educational system deals adequately with only two or three of these areas.

Operational Tenets:

Using non-renewable energy to move anything that is obtainable locally, including renewable energy and materials, must be minimized.
Learning curves for all disciplines must be understood, and methods of exercising these skills must be available locally for use in a timely fashion by all.
Any energy market must cause all known costs to be included in the price at the point of entry of that energy in the market.

Sustainable Society Operating Guidelines:

Pollution is limited by placing personal limits on both non-renewable energy use and non-human energy use.
The number of children per generation is limited by consensus of all members of the community. Only those families who have the resources, who are able to care for children, who truly want to raise children, etc. can have children to fill the generational number of children.
The community works to maintain the long term asset base of the community. Forests are particularly sensitive to abuse. Values of the forest are always passed through more than one generation to another.
Efforts are made to maintain skills of: parents, leaders and workers.
The community familiarizes children with the rationale and details of all disciplines that are essential to the community. All members will at least be familiar with the rationale if not the whole process of needed community maintenance systems.
Rewards are provided for responsibility, both for social and environmental health.
Neither the community nor individual members may collect excess wealth.
Waste as we know it is not tolerated. Current Problems for Forest Owners:
Forests of value to humans are almost always legacies from someone else's activity one or more generations ago.
Forests are complicated and forest overstory removal or other conversion, whether natural (storm damage, disease, or fire) or human caused by harvesting, is generally less aesthetic than the previous state.
Lack of collective understanding of local forest ecology (and the range of possibilities within that ecology) results in an unwillingness to engage in needed forest maintenance activities.
Current regulations and research choices have created a society that is unable or unwilling to comprehend the effect of itself on its environment.
Child labor laws protect children from exploitation. Such laws also limit the child's potential to experience how things work. They are especially unfortunate because they apply during the critical period of the development of that skill.
Cultural expectations and insurance raise the standard of living. Limited work situations for youths reduce the chances to gain experience when it is easy. High productivity per person insures that the only jobs available will be those involving the control of non-human energy. The extravagant use of insurance adds high costs to all activities. These costs are then borne by all consumers.
US Department of Labor - OSHA, the IRS, general expectations, and the difficulties of personnel hiring, record keeping, and firing encourages the use of energy, machinery, and expensive insurance to protect workers from their own decisions. OSHA even denies that employees have a substantive (punishable) role in their own safety.
Government taxation systems and mandatory insurance push citizens and businesses to use the least expensive sources of energy. The productivity and lack of consequences now associated with such energy help guarantee the resources to hold their property or stay in business.
There is no recognition by government of how sustainable activities differ from high energy activities. Sustainable activities are therefore forced to meet the same economic and environmental standards that high energy activities do and thus they become unsustainable or vanish.
Forest product value is not related to the cost of long term investments in growing the product as a crop.
Many forest investments require costs that have no financially reclaimable value for 30 to 100 years hence. If society is functioning in such a way as to place these investments at risk, prudent investors will choose not to make them.

The Global Economy and the American view of normality have already created such an environment. The organizations that should be advocating changes in this lifestyle are not functioning appropriately. A few of the impacts of the Global Economy are listed below: Rapid global transport removes barriers to the spread of insects and disease to both trees, other flora and fauna, and humans. Trees already adversely affected by movement of agents from one region to another include:

American elm - Dutch elm disease, elm phloem necrosis;
American chestnut - chestnut blight;
Oaks and many other hardwoods and some conifers - gypsy moth;
White pine - white pine weevil, blister rust, other insects and diseases;
Butternut and walnut - butternut blight;
American beech - beech scale nectria complex;
Eastern hemlock - hemlock woolly adelgid, hemlock looper;
Black birch - nectria canker;
Red oak - strumella canker.

Other important ecological components have recently come under attack by imported pests including:

The honey bee - Asian mite;
Fresh water bodies - Zebra mussel
Humans in the US are exposed to new problems (or old ones that were under control here have been reintroduced) linked to global climate change and the global economy including:
Aids;
Fire ants;
Killer bees;
Dengue fever - carried by Asian tiger mosquito imported from Japan in 1989 in a container of used tires;
Tuberculosis;
Malaria;
Hanta Virus.

Energy use is a common component of the Global Market and normal American life. This energy use releases CO2 and other pollutants. Transportation is a sector of society that is increasingly difficult to limit, and has profound effects on all other sectors through Global Climate Change. The impact of the increase in air and ground transportation is a mixed blessing for the forest owner. The increasing energy use by the transport sector may have very serious consequences for the long run viability of all forests.

The Human -- Forest Ecology Linkage:

Social Ecology:

· Human infants and children need contact with a loving community, not just a fragment of a loving family. The recent dominance of monetary values in relations between people has negatively affected the ability of families to provide the validation and contact needed by children.
· Human communities do not normally form and reform without a change in the common energy source as a driving force. An example of cultural movements in old societies include the tropical slash and burn agriculture and tribal hunting or grazing migrations. Both villages move because the energy supplies are no longer sustainable in the present location. In our high energy culture, communities grow or die depending on their ability to compete for energy to supply the "normal" level of amenities or their distance from high-speed roads. Those communities that are not competitive in the current energy market will change.
· The Global Market is based on expenditure of energy for unsustainable purposes, from unsustainable sources, and in unsustainable ways. The power of this market makes it a strong engine for change. The direction of this change is controlled by energy competitiveness. There are no "good" solutions in a global economy based on non-renewable resources.
· Children, ages three to ten, need to have physical tasks that they can perform. These tasks develop bonds to the family and community and provide a feeling of positive self-worth. Children must make a contribution to the sustenance of the family that is repeatedly acknowledged to them by others. Practical activity required for self sufficiency is a set of learned skills that are more easily mastered by the young. If these activities are not experienced when young, they will be very difficult to learn later in life.
· High human population makes such experience difficult and contributes to the problem of connecting people with the supporting ecology around them.
· Human communities can limit their growth if they understand the limits and believe that they are real. Information, that destroys the rationale for old limits without imparting new ones, leads to runaway growth that will only stop when new limits are imposed or understood. The American lifestyle which is so widely popular has removed all of the old limits, and presented new polluting opportunities to everyone. The communication of this lifestyle does not carry any information about the tradeoffs that naturally accompany it.

Human - Forest Ecology:

· Forests supply clean renewable stored solar energy in a widely dispersed but somewhat concentrated form.
· "Cultured" - purposefully grown- forests require care and long periods of time. "Care" as given today is provided by oil powered equipment and the results must fit in with values dictated by the current energy market. Since forest energy carries more of the real costs (present extractive costs of oil Vs total cost accounting of oil) it is frequently non competitive with the current market price of oil. In many areas low value wood remains behind because the market will not pay enough to cover the costs of extraction.
· The possibility of frequently interacting with the same forest allows one to become familiar with how things work. No other educational forum can convey the information in such a useable fashion.

How Can Sustainability Be Attained?

One might hope that everyone would want sustainable solutions enough that they would be willing to do whatever was needed to encourage them to develop. That does not seem to be the case. In the USA we seem to have all demanded protection from so many things that we are either going to have to confront a true crisis, or we will have to be lured into sustainability as we are to a new movie. Lester Brown et al in State of the World 1996 says that sustainable technologies will not be accepted willingly, but must be available in working order when the market shift occurs. He does not doubt that such a shift will occur; the only doubt is when. Brown notes that the insurance and banking industries are ones that have all their resources at risk to increases in the severity of climate dependent damage. Recent activity at the Earth II summit suggests that they may be a powerful force to limit the funding to the non-renewable carbon based energy sector. It might be revealing to look for the source of the high energy society, and consider whether it would be possible to use the same vehicle as a means of generating the technology that will be needed for a sustainable society.

How did the High Energy Society Develop?

The need for protection discussed above has lead to the creation of the Department of Defense (DOD). We are told that many of the missions that are undertaken by DOD are for our collective defense. In reality they exist to protect the shipping routes for the global market place, and the acquisition and distribution of energy that is needed to fuel the current high energy society. This high energy society is the brain child of industry's basic and applied research, and DOD and earlier research. Consider the rubber on the soles of your shoes, the polyester of your clothes, the windows of your car, and the interstate highway system. These are all products of basic military research. This research was conducted because the military uses energy in many forms to carry out its mission of protecting the wealth society has acquired. The fact that a new society has resulted from the transference of this military technology seems only logical. The fact that the technology of the military was used primarily to kill people has been conveniently avoided. The fact that the transfer of this technology to normal civilian life has resulted in an unsustainable lifestyle seems to have escaped most of us. Lost along the way was the willingness to maintain the systems that would support stable sustainable communities in the midst of chaos. We have lost more communities than we now have due to shifting energy sources and competition from new ways of doing things. We all like it the way it is. So does most of the rest of the world, for we are the role model for the world.

How Can Sustainability be Recovered?

If the mission statement of DOD allows it to spend massive amounts of our money on our "defense." It would seem logical that we could expect that our defenses include the possibility that our grandchildren have a reasonable chance to have healthy grandchildren, e.g., that they live in a sustainable society. We can therefore expect that the mission statement of DOD could be broadened to include the development of sustainable systems. The sustainable technologies would not be designed to kill people, but to be sure that independent people had a reasonable chance of surviving to carryout their constitutional rights.

Steps Needed:

The subsidies that have been erected to protect the acquisition and shipping of non-renewable fuels must be gradually removed and redirected. The functions still needed to supply that fuel must be borne as a cost to the supplier of the energy. These costs will be passed on to those who still chose to consume the products made from the energy. We must relearn what we all have to know in a sustainable society. Human social research should be directed toward the things that are needed to raise healthy and productive children in a sustainable society.

The following are some hunches about what they would find.

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