[Note: Dr. Bill Willers is a Professor Emeritus of Biology at UW Oshkosh and the founder of the Superior Wilderness Action Network. You can E-mail Bill at Willers@uwosh.edu].
May 29, 2001
Last night (May 24, 2001), Wisconsin Public Television ran a half hour piece on Wisconsin's state forests in connection with the 100th anniversary of the profession of forestry. It was, in fact, a long commercial for the forest products industry. For anyone familiar with the history of the struggles of forest activists, the forest products industry/governmental forestry bureau/college of forestry complex, and public relations industry formats, it was positively transparent.
They interviewed Department of Natural Resources (DNR) personnel, paper company personnel, "foresters", and someone from Trees for Tomorrow (An industrial "education" campus that busses in kids to learn about how wonderful industry is for "the forest").
They showed an attractive young woman/forester in the woods and children planting seedings. The underlying message was the same that industry and the land management bureaus have pressed unrelentingly ever since the Seventh Forestry Congress, held in Washington, D.C. in the early 90s -- and that, in essence, is that every bit of "the forest" must be managed with the economy and local communities in mind (Read logging community jobs ... in support of the interest of forest products industries). It's the agenda that has turned "the forest" into what amounts to fiber production units. There was the ever-present comparison of today's woodlands with the denuded landscape of 1900 (following the famous "pine massacre" of the 19th century), with the not-so-subtle suggestion that it was via forestry methods that we now have woodlands -- rather than the fact that natural regeneration of "second growth" has been the force at work.
Nowhere was there a bona fide forest ecologist or independent botanist to argue for restoration of ancient forest conditions, for interior forest conditions free of cobwebs of road networks, for an understanding of "forest" as a rich community of plants and animals where trees, a minority of the community's species, provide substrate at ALL stages of their life cycle (including ancient trees, standing dead trees and downed logs) for the rest of the community. Nowhere an advocate for wilderness restoration. The entire orientation was nature-as-resource where trees are a commodity that have to be "harvested" for jobs and industry and the happy millions that are coming in future generations.
Oh yes, they invoked the name and face of Aldo Leopold - as always. But, as always, they overlooked the fact that Leopold, who longed for "blank spaces on the map", believed and wrote that there should be wilderness in all bioregions to serve as standards of comparison for changes that humans would be bringing about our projects. It's interesting that the industrialists love to use and manipulate the names of such people as Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, and Sigurd Olson, all the while offending everything they stood for.
In the early 90s, a Minnesotan named Gary Payne, using guidelines of Public Television, produced a one-hour piece titled "Heritage for Sale", in which the truth about Minnesota's forests was revealed (What it revealed was, and is, true for WI and MI as well). He won a Sierra Club award for his efforts. He interviewed MN DNR personnel, soil scientists, and produced an honest and balanced presentation that aired ..... once. Industry immediately got to MN Public TV and said "stop", and, sadly, the "people's public TV" caved in. Thereafter, Wisconsin Public TV was asked to run it, and...... they also refused. They seem, however, to have no problem with the industrial PR masterpiece that showed last night .... and doubtless will show again and again and........
Bill Willers Biology Dept., University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh 800 Algoma Blvd. Oshkosh, Wisconsin, U.S.A. 54901 Phone: (920)424-3074 Fax: (920)424-1101 willers@uwosh.edu Return to Commentary