OCR Text |
Show 463 But it is impossible in the nature of things to stop at preservation. The forests must be and will be not only preserved but used, and the experience of all civilized countries that have faced and solved the question shows that over and above all question of management of trained officers, the forests, like perrenial fountains, may be made to yield a sure harvest of timber, while at the same time all their far-reaching uses may be maintained unimpaired. And even to the Sierra Club, he ended his speech by declaring: "Forest management must be put on a rational permanent scientific basis, as in every other civilized country." It would be hard for him to subscribe to these policies when it came to their actual implementation. Somehow, one suspects he must have hoped that it was possible to have a productive forest as well as a wild one. Perhaps, like Aldo Leopold, Muir needed to be confronted with the actual process of managing a forest as a crop-producing field before he would realize how offensive he found the idea that "Timber is a crop." Aldo Leopold was shocked when he went to Germany and discovered what the German professional methods did to the landscape. Only after his experience in Germany would Leopold say, in "The Land Ethic," "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." Muir had always subscribed to this kind of land ethic, and he never thought of the Reserves as tree farms, mining claims, fields for regulated |