Forest Conservation

Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to visit our country's first National Park, at a time when only 10% of their yearly visitors make the trip to Yellowstone.  Our adventure started on the west entrance of the park where we entered by snowcoach (a vehicle uniquely suited to driving on packed snow with tractor-like treads and skis serving as front tires).  The first thing to come into view was the beautiful Madison Valley with the Madison River on one side and great volcanic slopes on the other.  Before you see any of the wildlife along the river you notice that there ar

Last week a colleague from the lead Forestry school in France came to visit me in Olympia. Yves told me a story he read in the Smithsonian (2004) about forest decline following drought-years in Morocco, where Barbary macaques were found stripping the bark of Atlas cedars to eat the moist and nutritious tissues underneath. Authorities want to get rid of the monkeys but they are endangered.

In the US, we have a long history of preserving places commonly special to us through the National Park System. Recently I have been thinking about the usefulness of the designation of National Park and questioning whether it is always the best prescription.

In the entryway to the Conservation Biology Institute offices is a map we printed in 2004 of the Late Seral Forest of the Pacific Northwest, that was displayed in the American Museum of Natural History.

In September 2000 147 heads of State met at the United Nations to discuss the question of pervasive poverty and lack of development.  This summit produced the United Nations Millennium Declaration, laying out eight goals to free the human race from want.  Not surprisingly, among these eight is the goal of environmental sustainability, and one of the key targets listed is to reverse the loss of environmental resources, measured by areas protected to maintain biological diversity.

On April 21st, CBI and The Nature Conservancy hosted a meeting in Duluth, MN to discuss climate change in northeastern MN and to begin developing scenarios that could be used with a forest simulation model to estimate the effects of climate change on the extensive forests of northeastern MN.