Interesting take on environmentalism

Think of it as a merging of Pinchot's and Muir's feelings on environmentalism. Preservation can only take us so far.

To Preserve Forests, Supporters Suggest Cutting Some Trees

Using Local Wood, HarvestedBy 'Sustainable' Methods,Will Help Planet, They Say
Biggest Rebound in 1,000 Years

By JAMES P. STERBA Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNALMay 5, 2005; Page A1
WESTON, Mass. -- To understand the latest threat to one of the largest naturally reforested regions on the planet -- the Northeastern U.S. -- it helps to drop in on "volunteer day" in the town forest of this wealthy community outside of Boston.

A local tree surgeon gives chain-saw lessons. Brian Donahue, a college professor, offers log-splitting tips. Volunteers stack split wood to dry. The logs are from a handsome black oak, perhaps 70 years old, dismembered with a chain saw two days earlier while a class of Weston High School seniors watched. Each year, the town topples about 200 trees in its 1,700-acre forest and sells them, mostly for firewood, but occasionally for lumber.

No, this isn't the threat. Just the opposite. Weston's token logging effort was designed to teach children and their parents that it's OK, even wise, to cut down local trees and use them.

That's a tough message to sell in exurbia, the semirural areas where affluent Americans are moving in growing numbers. Most of these newcomers abhor tree-cutting, foresters say. But Mr. Donahue, a 49-year-old environmental historian at Brandeis University, has been selling this message for 25 years in Weston: The best way to save forest and farm land from developers is to get local residents to value it by using it in a hands-on way. They become part of a "working landscape" like farmers of old, he says.