Back to the Future: Lessons from Pulaskis, Peaveys,
Porcupine Sex and Maine Lupines

William R. Burch, Jr.
Hixon Prof. of Natural Resource Management
Yale School of Forestry &Environmental Studies
Reunion Weekend 2008 Keynote Address

Introduction
I admire the nice, simple theme of this meeting–“Crises, Opportunities and Politics–What Can We Really Do?” Discussing light topics such as this is exactly what one would expect from a group of mature and well settled F&ES natural resource scholars and professionals when they gather for reunion fun on a fine and bright spring weekend. What does surprise me is the choice of these three persons you have brought in to honor with awards, who you think could possibly suggest what we can do about resolving crises and opportunities of significant scale, scope and ambiguity to hold our attention. This is something more than thinking outside the box. This is more like thinking outside the box without a box. Okay, creative choice. But be forewarned that here are three persons who each in some personal and divergent pattern of their own have carried out the words, if not the music, to “I did it my way!”

We have John Gordon, who was never your ordinary forestry Dean, who created and initiated several lifetimes of ‘what to do’ solutions–from the Tropical Resources Institute, to Urban Forest Ecology in the Hixon Center, to community forestry in the Urban Resources Initiative (the first ever USAID applied project in Nepal by a Yale Department), leader of a blue ribbon Committee on National Park Research needs, an organizer and leader of revitalization of an early form of National Congress on U.S. Forests, and many other institutional contributions never expected in a forestry or natural resource department. We could go on listing his innovations but will not as our point has been established. His way has not been the usual way.

We have Bob Pyle, who as a doctoral student set out to discover the wonders of butterfly migrations passing through the city of New Haven, who led an international organization for the study, protection and enjoyment of these wondrous creatures who share their earth with us. Who wrote important scientific papers on ecology issues, then decided there was more to learning and teaching than the usual academic ways, so he did studies on Big Foot in the Pacific Northwest and essays on urban nature, and wrote poems and thoughts on the importance of nature in the daily lives of children and other growing animals. His is certainly not the usual way for those with a fancy doctorate in science and a career to puff up.

And then we have the token professor, Bill Burch, sort of a pre-industrial exchange scholar whose rant is that society is nature and nature is social. A professor at a fancy school who thinks that the most effective learning for natural resource professionals can only come through what Wendell Berry calls ‘good work,’ which means getting your hands dirty by being involved in activities useful to others and usually others who are not always friendly. A professor who does not think that success is creating leaders who circle the planet with big answers to little problems, but rather professionals who might realize that they could learn more by listening to clients than by telling them what they MUST do. He sees the norm of success to be graduates who, like Bob Pyle, believe that one’s professional practice is only as good as ones dedication to the joy of life. But mostly he thinks that the students are here to educate him and that though he is a slow learner, once ideas are embedded in his hard drive, they continue to scratch around and think up new issues. His way, confounding and irritating, thoughts dangling in incomplete sentences and pauses lost in an eternity with no interest in creating masters of the universe, is certainly not the usual approach to professing at elite institutions. So for whatever the reason that brings you and me here, I am most honored to be part of this gang of three.

Some Lessons for Environmentalists from Experiences of Conservationists
Our meeting offers a good chance to note the restarting of a cycle in professional education. Those of you who were around universities in the 1970s may remember the environmental crises discussions, the emergence of acid rain dropping on the wildlands and air pollution dropping upon the urban poor and regulatory legislation such as clean air and clean water acts, the creation of the National Environmental Policy Act and the creation of Connecticut’s Department of Environmental Protection that linked old time conservation management of forests, parks and wildlife with the regulation of air, water and transportation issues. Indeed, Bill McKibben’s new book on Deep Economy and Gus Speth’s new book, A Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability both argue that major changes in lifestyle, rather than simply fiddling with market solutions, will be needed. Interestingly, both of these books arrive at solutions similar to those that were presented in a book that Herb Bormann and I edited in 1975 from a series of lectures about what a limited growth, post-market world might look like. This book explored how we need to consider what a steady state society, its dark side and happy side, might look like. Today, a new cycle of intellectual environmental activism is emerging and our “what to do?” question seems to be a little something of the old and some groping towards whatever is of the very new. We are our own narrative of this future.

John Gordon may be the last conservation, natural resource Dean of F&ES. We have seen the environmental future, and it belongs to engineers, lawyers, economists and planners rather than to biologists, foresters, wildlife ecologists and non-economist social science. If we look around the world, we see the name forestry departing as the brand for major schools such as Duke, Oxford and Edinburgh, while a large majority of the present F&ES faculty would most happily drop forestry from the school name. We have an Associate Dean who says he and his graduate students are embarrassed by the association with forestry. He and several other faculty have chosen to reside in a virtual world called “Yale Environment School.”

Elsewhere in the actual world there are declines in students and student applications for programs in forestry, wildlife and other traditional conservation occupations. There are major declines in attendance at National and State Parks (incidently, I predicted these trends in the 1980s at the height of concern that people were “loving” the wilderness to death), and then there are nervous academics talking about something called Nature Deficit Syndrome, where people prefer to “experience” nature through the television screen rather than out in it. In this new environmental movement, carbon is king and we have a growing demand that somebody do something lest the planet collapse by 2050. In June of 2008, Congress thought some capping and trading would make things better in mid century and then decided to leave it for next year. Still, right now there is a renewed public interest in environmental matters and less interest in conservation issues. So the cycle turns and maybe locks us into less desired and optimistic futures than previous iterations of nature concern.

For this reason is may be useful, even important, to note some of the differences between conservation and environmentalism. As you may recall, the conservationists were going to use science and technology to more efficiently and effectively deliver the sustained yield of socially desired goods, benefits and services from ecosystems. Declines in productive public grazing lands or fish stocking would be met by rest-rotation systems, genetically-improved grasses, fish hatcheries and ladders around dams, and the re-introduction of debris in feeder streams. Forests were to have various strategies that ensured continuous cutting opportunities through super genetic species, use of rapid growing species, wood technology that made everything from hemp to hornbeams as commercial fiber. In short, the conservationist was a biologist with a social conscience working within public-private partnerships to meet human wishes and needs far into the future. Delivery of board feet, fish catches, visitor days, wilderness acres, ecosystem services, acre feet of water and so on rather than compliance to regulatory standards for the production of emissions was the primary goal.

Environmentalism has been very much tied to technological change in terms of more efficient means for regulating production of pollution–cap and trade systems, stack scrubbers, recycling, deposits on containers, catalytic converters, filters, alternative sources of energy and so on. It is more a legalistic, regulatory effort driven by lawsuits, environmental protection monitors, penalties, engineering innovations, superfund reclamation sites and so on. The emphasis is central control and large regional and international protocols such as the law of the seas, airsheds, watersheds, landscape viewsheds and so on to reduce actions, practices and behaviors that experts in large bureaucracies think are the “causes” of the problems. So when the cycle shifts from conservation to environmentalism, there is a very different set of educational requirements. Traditional biological science becomes more a handmaiden than a driving force. Though there is much talk about “science”- based regulation the nature of proof is more forensic than scientific. That is, one carefully selects the best information to support one’s legal case rather than trying to understand the pattern and process of a given ecosystem. The history of struggle between biologists, lawyers and economists within the EPA is instructive as to the kinds of information most sought for developing and sustaining administrative decisions.

It is worth noting that presidents of Yale University have never had high interest in their “forest” school. The alumni do not make big money; there is a lot of dirt under the fingernails stuff (more Cornell-like than Princeton-like) and certainly little of the Skull and Bones sleuthing to control worldwide communism. There are few Nobel prizes for resolving spotted owl disputes or resolving the kinds of forest cutting in the Pacific Northwest national forests. With climate change, however, the Yale graduate bestrides the earth to save the planet and all the humans upon it from a menace more frightening than a bunch of folk in the Kremlin. Furthermore, the threat is even more open-ended than the war on drugs or the war on terror. Stopping global climate change has a half-life of forever. So this is a certain winner that Karl Rove should have been able to appreciate and turn into a new moral majority.

Terms of Engagement
The question for those of us who are conservationists, warriors of the last nature-society war and about to join Marx’s ash heap of history, is this: What can we do to contribute to this new wave of advocacy and professional re-invention? Certainly we want the new generation of environmentalism to actually win so that our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren will occupy a world worth living in. I will suggest that we conservationists have learned some important lessons that may guide environmentalists better than the rant of Nordhaus and Schellenberger. I have chosen three examples of our rules of engagement that I have suggested to social ecology students in my seminars and workshops over the past years.

These are:
1. Always question authority–especially if you have now become one.
2. Always consider the unintended cascading consequences of ecosystem intervention–spatial, temporal and hierarchical–that in your enthusiasm you forgot.
3. Always remember Kenny Rogers’s philosophical guidance–you gotta’ know when to hold and when to fold.

A good example for sustaining legitimate authority is developing easily recognized utility in one’s tools for environmental management and change. Here is where those old forester standbys, the Pulaski and the Peavey, emerge as models of tools that the ordinary concerned citizen can instantly appreciate. If you have a smoke way down in the forest to get under control before it becomes a big blaze, the Pulaski is instantly your friend. If you have a large log or similar object to move out of the way, the peavey is instantly your friend. The authority of these solutions comes from the instant recognition of their utility and value for resolving specific resource problems. These tools are the kind of problem solutions that lead the worker to whack her head in exclamation and say, “Jeez, I should have thought of this! Of course that is what I need to get the job done!!”

With such tools there is no need for long and tiresome explanations. There is no need for the boss to strut and shout, “I am the boss, just get out there and make it work.” A field worker can see that the Peavey applies the laws of physics to help a single human being gain purchase on a large log to move it from a place where it is not wanted to a place where it is wanted. And that same worker can see how on the fire line the Pulaski gives one an axe to cut trees out of the fire line and a digging tool to get down to bare earth and to stop the spread of the forest fire. These are conservation tools that the ordinary citizen can use to make the environment better. Whereas my relatives in Northern Idaho cannot understand the new Forest Service “tool” of going up small watersheds and felling trees into the stream and leaving them there to ‘improve’ stream hydrology and wildlife habitat. The utility may be there but it is not easily recoverable by ordinary citizens, nor did the professionals seem to care whether it was understood or not by the local folk. In such situations the resource professional’s “authority” lacks legitimacy, no matter how right it may be. In these situations, in the long run, the ordinary citizens will win.

For the environmental professional, the lessons from these conservation examples is to get the framing of the solutions into an easily perceived and understandable form so that citizens can own the solution. For example, most environmental solutions are outside of daily human scale. They lack the authority of the reality at which most of us live, no matter how “reasonable” they may seen to climate scientists. To gain ownership for stewardship actions to reduce carbon, the citizen needs to be given a scale that can be grasped and that has the authority of daily life. A temporal scale of planetary collapse out there at 50 or 60 years that requires us to sacrifice big-time now is a time frame outside the reality of most folk. Think of the little meaningful steps we can follow now: the nine-month pregnancy, the three-month semester, the five-month football season, the three to four years of a doctoral thesis support, the five-year national plan and so on that seem to set certain temporal parameters that we can work with but that do not fit within the geologic time scales of climate change environmentalists. Though environmentalists span the globe with satellite visuals, and in order to make grand pronouncements on what ordinary people should be doing, fly jet airplanes to exotic locales like Aspen, Bali or Kyoto, the ordinary citizen does not really share these spatial dimensions. Regular folks tend to think of these as places where drug-crazed, gun-toting nuts like Hunter Thompson can get away with it, or where women go around topless on the beach, or as a Japanese religious place that the Americans did not bomb in the Second World War. They can much better relate to something near at hand like the Chesapeake Bay or the New Haven Harbor as venues that must be protected. Hence messages that say “don’t dump in this drain as it pollutes the Bay” are realistic and measurable scale venues. The whole planet does not belong to you and me–it is the problem for some exotic and probably hostile foreign nation.

Our final example of authority in conservation comes from Pulaski in his role as forest ranger. He was in charge of the National Forests near Wallace, Idaho, when the great 1910 forest fires burned thousand of acres throughout the Pacific Northwest. He and some crew members and others who joined them were moving from the east to the west towards Wallace. When he saw that the fire was in blow-out stage, he gathered the 42 men with him and commanded them to follow him so he could save them. He found a mining tunnel, but it was too shallow, so he moved them to another one that was much larger. He commanded the men to lie on the floor of the mine, and as the fire approached some of the men became frightened and in panic tried to leave. Pulaski pulled his revolver out and commanded the men to remain with the others. One person did escape and died. But all other persons made it out and went on to Wallace after the fire had passed. Pulaski suffered from burns, impaired eyesight and other misery due to his sacrifice. There were no government health plans at that time nor any support for persons injured on the job. He died blind and impoverished, and only in recent years has his sacrifice been recognized by a trail in the forest near Wallace. The message should be clear. What sacrifices will the environmentalists be making to reduce climate change? Or will they continue to fly to Bali and elsewhere and expect peasants in Bangladesh to make the sacrifices? Clearly, behavior of the “experts” will shape the legitimacy of their solutions and thus the willingness of ordinary people to accept their plans and regulations over their lives.

Our second term of engagement is to consider unintended consequences of our actions. Here our lesson comes from the old conservationist “joke.” Question: “How does the porcupine have sex?” Answer: “Very slowly and with care.” The moral for us budding forest guards and neophyte firefighters was to not rush ahead, puffed up with youthful arrogance in full certainty that we had all the necessary information. We were warned to consider all possible consequences lest we endanger our colleagues in the fire crew. There are several lessons from this conservationist mantra for the modern environmentalist.
1. Consider all elements for the system when you intervene–who will bear the burdens of the action? And who will reap the benefits from the action? What means might we use to have a sustainable equity in such matters?
2. Trial the innovative intervention in small bites and within representative situations. Don’t let panic push our actions. We have had over 150 years of warning about carbon and climate. So let us be certain that we “test” solutions we plan to impose to see if they are worse than the presently anticipated predictions.
3. Monitor all actions in a participatory manner so that all parties to the “costs” of the action have a stake in its outcome.
4. Evaluate the full range of positive and negative consequences.

A couple of examples may help to complete our porcupine lessons. In that great 1910 fire, the forests of the Pacific Northwest were scorched. Bare, blackened hills surrounded the observer from all directions. The conservationists of that time felt a demanding need to re-forest as quickly as possible. They felt that native species took exceptionally long times to grow so they decided to re-plant with exotic species–European Larch, Norway Pine, Lombardy Poplar and so on. One can see the results of this faith in biological technology in a special part of the Wind River USFS nursery across the Columbia River from Hood River, Oregon. Here the narrative is clear. The exotics took off with rapid growth and shot up with pleasing speed. However, within a decade the natural regeneration of native species–Douglas Fir, Vine Maple, Oregon Oak, Sitka Spruce, and so on began to over story the exotics until today when you visit the site the exotics are wimps in the shade of the locals. Time defeated the technical miracle trees.

Now think of one of the favorite technological soldiers in the war on carbon–the fluorescent light. Here is this somewhat more expensive bulb that many of us converted to 10 or more years ago but now standing as everyone’s solution to carbon footprints. Mine still say “lasts 5 years or more” but I have never had one that lasted that long. Never mind–the fun comes when one tries to dispose of the bulb now dead after two years service. We all know that these instruments contain mercury and other highly toxic materials, so best not to put them in the dump waste stream or in the recycle box. What have our experts prepared for us? In Branford, Connecticut, one can take the used bulbs to a place in Long Warf in New Haven on two days a week between the hours of 1 and 4:30. So this technological solution has left out interest in the toxic side effects in production and the consequences for workers, and what to do with the item that is now dangerous waste.

Think of this failure to have efficient, effective and safe management of fluorescent bulb disposal as many environmentalists begin to promote nuclear power as the carbon-free solution to other sources of energy. Have not a few collateral consequences been left out of consideration, such as: Can we assure safety in the uranium mining, processing, use, storage and transportation of waste to longterm storage? And then, of course, what of the venue for storage of waste that poses great danger to all life forms for hundreds of years? We are regularly reminded of how geologically unstable is the earth. And in the half-life of the danger of the waste, who knows what language will be operative to warn future generations of the serious mess we have left behind? The present passion for quick solutions to problems of carbon often leave out the patience and care necessary to be certain that the solution is not worse than the problem.

Our third rule of engagement suggests humility rather than arrogance in the actions of those experts who would save the planet. When we are told to “know when to hold and when to fold,” it is not just about how to win at poker. It is about realizing that you cannot control or micromanage all the dimensions of the world or your life. Indeed, the passion to so control and to so shape the behavior of all other life forms to some programmed environmental agenda held in the ideology of your profession or in the head of you and your co-true believers is a passion doomed for deadly failure. The sin of hubris is one that affects many who would make the world “better.” Meaning well or even being right seldom excuses a large failure done in public and with all the bright stage lights on.

The conservation field has many such examples: the costly attempt to remove burros from the Grand Canyon: the faith that Kudzu was the miracle plant to stop soil erosion in the South; the introduction of the mongoose to “control” rodents eating crops; the desire of garden club persons, and the landscape architects who serve them, to have a “pretty” flower for a reflecting water pond in the garden of well-to-do homes, which led to the introduction of purple loosestrife and, in turn, to the passionate and expensive war to “control” the plant; the total extirpation of all snowmobiles from Yellowstone, as if local communities dependent upon such activities were irrelevant in the grand scheme of nature; the bounties for removal of all predators from publicly owned grazing lands; the systematic slaughter of buffalo when they follow their annual migration out of Yellowstone–to name but a few dumb conservationist solutions.

However, a true classic is the war on lupines in the Acadia National Park in Maine. I had the perfect picture in my local Bangor Daily News in late June of 2006. On the front page was a story about how the park service rangers had decided to postpone their extirpation of the “exotic” flower from Acadia as the local residents were challenging them and saying not nice things about this activity. (In the interest of full disclosure, the lupine–like me and my family–originally came from the exotic Pacific Northwest.) In the very same issue of the Bangor Daily News was a lush full page-and-a-half story on the lupine as the beautiful signal of the start of summer, how it flourished all over Maine, and how people had formal drives to go out and view the flower in its most fulsome communities. There was not one negative about the plant in this article. Then I drove up to the Monson General Store, and there were packets of seeds being sold from the “Three Girls Lupine Seed Company” inviting us all to have the joy and life of these flowers in our yards. There are three girls in gingham frocks and little bonnets on the cover of the packet, 11-year old sirens with smiles and generous gestures of giving this joy from a gateway exotic plant (a kind of purpled landscaping “reefer madness” scenario). Given this kind of competition for our well armed and uniformed National Park guardians of Maine plant purity, I would suggest, “well, you have already lost, so go back to dumping rodeo or other potent herbicides on purple loosestrife and other miscreants. You will not win the war on lupine in Maine. Maybe you could claim victory and have Sylvester Stallone do a movie that so demonstrates this victory in this way that all can feel satisfied and the lupine can continue to spread and bring its joy to summer in Maine.”

The environmentalist’s carbon pairing with the conservationist’s lupine comes from a set of edicts from Yale’s Sustainability Office. They sent around a pledge for all of the faculty and staff to sign promising that we would do the things these experts have found will reduce our carbon footprint. I signed it as I would sign a petition to repeal the second law of thermodynamics–I am dead set against entropy, for me in particular, and for the world in general. I found much of what was suggested to be familiar to those of us who read the Whole Earth Catalog in the 1970s. The Yale guidelines had suggestions to replace all incandescent lights with fluorescent lights, to take shorter showers, to turn off lights and other electrical devices when not in use, to bike to work, to keep air in the tires and so on. Well, we have already talked about the problems with the light switching. As for showers and turning off things, clearly whoever wrote this has never shared a home with teenage persons to whom they are related; indeed, spouses can be a bit surly on the turning off of showers and such. I did try biking in from Branford to New Haven on route 80 but found it more terrifying than rowing through Lava Falls in the Grand Canyon. To follow many of these suggestions would greatly compromise the security of many homes–angry fights between children and parents and between partners, a maimed or killed primary breadwinner and so on. Although in some ways I found it a nice nostalgia trip to visit the Whole Earth from that more innocent time, I did not see much gain in the war on carbon in the 21st Century.

What did surprise me is that a gathering of somewhat intelligent women and men could only come up with clichés from the past. Yet right before them was the reality of the economic times of which the university is a primary producer. We are part of the post-industrial information society. We create new information and convert old information to knowledge. This economic order is not place based, it is not tied to workers being chained to the assembly line…it is words and thoughts and digits bouncing through virtual and real space. Certainly these bright women and men could analyze and quantify, hire behavioral economists, draw charts and lay out matrices and discover how over half of the work force (or more) could be product-directed and would need to commute to New Haven only twice a week or so. Those who needed to be on location every day–plumbers, janitors, police, deans–could be provided subsidized housing within walking distance of Yale. The rest of the workers would reduce by half the CO2, the congestion, the road building, the anger. Now there is a sustainability protocol worthy of a great environmental university. That is knowing when to hold.

A second example of knowing when to hold is in the Community Based Natural Resource Management Systems. Throughout the world there is a great upwelling in the creation of such systems. These are decentralized but gain legitimacy from the professional and technical help of government folk. They are decentralized but gain the legal rights underwritten by the laws and authority of the government, municipalities, corporations and so on. They are decentralized but gain capital and other necessary assets from public and private investors. The big shift is from thinking of forests and protected areas as only about trees or as biodiversity warehouses rather than the suppliers of necessary human values–sacred places, memorials, non timber resources, places to create and sustain human dignity, community revitalization, non-market economic activities and so on. The trees, woodlands, forests, marshes and other ecosystems are the means for these broader array of goods, benefits and services. Think of Walt Whitman and how he interwove plants, trees, wildlife, city, country and wildlands into a song of patriotism and self-awareness–a great marketer of services and identities not often thought of by those whose attention is narrowed to the big bucks of maximizing biomass. The irony is that often the really large, long-term wealth of nature derives from maximizing the production of biodiversity in all its human and nonhuman forms. We can see it in the 14,000 CFUGs (community forestry user groups) in Nepal. We can see it in the many accomplishments of urban resources initiatives through out the U.S. Northeast. Here local land stewardship is producing a readiness for people to be stewards of the globe from the angle of their local and regional visions. This army of aware and diligent and eager stewards for a better world is the one real and sustainable means for meeting the challenges of climate change. And we learned these strategies in the woods and vacant lots, the abused rural landscapes and the failed nationalizations of common land. We are ready. Are the experts, policy creators and intellectuals ready for us?

Bob Pyle reminds us of how we learn from our special places about our belonging in the world, and that readiness to learn is held by us all. These thoughts are from his book, The Thunder Tree–Lessons From and Urban Wildland (1993).

“Had it not been for the High Line Canal, the vacant lots I knew, the scruffy park, I am not at all certain I would have been a biologist. I might have become a lawyer, or even a Lutheran. The total immersion in nature that I found in my special spots baptized me in a faith that never wavered, but was a matter of happenstance too. It was the place that made me.”(152)

Later he says:
“In the long run, this mass estrangement from things natural bodes ill for the care of the earth. If we are to forge new links to the land, we must resist the extinction of experience. We must save not only the wilderness but the vacant lots, the ditches as well as the canyonlands, and the woodlots along with the old growth. We must become believers in the world.” (p. 152)

You challenged me to tell you “what to do about it?” I have given you some thoughts from Bob–make sure there are scruffy parks, less than elegant woodlands, vacant lots, and wandering places that re-enchant the world for adult and child alike. Help to sustain an army of stewards of the place and people they love…in time it will add up to a global vision. Keep your message (your tools of redemption) simple and obviously useful to ordinary citizens. Always give attention to the consequences and context of your actions lest your brilliant solution steal the very values you wished to sustain. Have the nerve of failure and the humility to fold, though your intelligence and education press for the arrogance of your certain rightness.

Bob Pyle’s thunder tree is the cottonwood, mine is the juniper, yours might be the black locust or the paper birch. The point is that in the life of a tree there is a whole lot more going on than we shall ever know. And that is good.