Issues Within the Discipline of Forestry :: Environment Conservation Growth Agriculture Paper

Issues Within the Discipline of Forestry The idea of forestry in the sense that we know it today is only about four hundred years old. Forestry developed mainly out of the need for a continual supply of wood products. There were a few forest reserves for hunting or preservation in Europe, but the idea of managing a forest for a number of resources is quite new. There are four stages that almost all societies have gone through when trying to develop this idea of forestry. The first stage has to do with the unregulated abuse of forest products to be used as energy, building supplies and also to be cleared to make way for agricultural land. This creates a kind of domino effect on forests everywhere. The overexploitation of regional forests means there will be a scarcity of products that are considered valuable, which in turn leads to the abuse of more outlying forests and the overexploitation of them and so on and so forth. In the United States this stage was seen with the colonization of America. Colonization began in the eas tern U.S. and as a result led to the destruction of forests there. People needed forest supplies to build their homes and farms, and when the regional forests were almost depleted they began taking resources from outlying forests (Kimmins, 1992). The U.S. prior to colonization had an estimated one billion acres of forested land. By the year 1900 that area had been reduced to 567 million acres (Berger, 1998, p.29). After this initial stage of carelessness is recognized there is a stage of regulation in order to make certain that the forests will be maintained for resources and other values. This is the point where the idea of forestry begins. Hamish Kimmins in his book Balancing Act: Environmental Issues in Forestry states this about the second stage, "It usually involves a centralized, authoritarian, non-ecological, administrative approach based on legislation and regulation rather than on a knowledge of how forests grow, how they respond to management, and how ecosystems function" (Kimmins, 1992, p.50). This administrative approach usually ends up failing, and there is recognition that management will only work if techniques that are in tune with the ecological characteristics of the area are taken into account. This stage was evident in the United States when the U.S. Bureau of Forestry was created in 1891 (Kimmins, 1992). The third stage is the promotion of an ecologically sound method to forestry. Issues Within the Discipline of Forestry :: Environment Conservation Growth Agriculture Paper Issues Within the Discipline of Forestry The idea of forestry in the sense that we know it today is only about four hundred years old. Forestry developed mainly out of the need for a continual supply of wood products. There were a few forest reserves for hunting or preservation in Europe, but the idea of managing a forest for a number of resources is quite new. There are four stages that almost all societies have gone through when trying to develop this idea of forestry. The first stage has to do with the unregulated abuse of forest products to be used as energy, building supplies and also to be cleared to make way for agricultural land. This creates a kind of domino effect on forests everywhere. The overexploitation of regional forests means there will be a scarcity of products that are considered valuable, which in turn leads to the abuse of more outlying forests and the overexploitation of them and so on and so forth. In the United States this stage was seen with the colonization of America. Colonization began in the eas tern U.S. and as a result led to the destruction of forests there. People needed forest supplies to build their homes and farms, and when the regional forests were almost depleted they began taking resources from outlying forests (Kimmins, 1992). The U.S. prior to colonization had an estimated one billion acres of forested land. By the year 1900 that area had been reduced to 567 million acres (Berger, 1998, p.29). After this initial stage of carelessness is recognized there is a stage of regulation in order to make certain that the forests will be maintained for resources and other values. This is the point where the idea of forestry begins. Hamish Kimmins in his book Balancing Act: Environmental Issues in Forestry states this about the second stage, "It usually involves a centralized, authoritarian, non-ecological, administrative approach based on legislation and regulation rather than on a knowledge of how forests grow, how they respond to management, and how ecosystems function" (Kimmins, 1992, p.50). This administrative approach usually ends up failing, and there is recognition that management will only work if techniques that are in tune with the ecological characteristics of the area are taken into account. This stage was evident in the United States when the U.S. Bureau of Forestry was created in 1891 (Kimmins, 1992). The third stage is the promotion of an ecologically sound method to forestry.