Protection or Profession?

In our upside down world the “normal” profession of forestry looks nearly the opposite of a life-long drive to work for greater forest protection. In today’s world a professional forester succeeds by undermining limits of what can be done, while the forest protector succeeds by strengthening these limits. A forest protector knows once elder trees are gone, in their lifetime at least, that loss can never be undone.

The tragedy of our time is that only a Registered Professional Forester (RFP) is considered a lead decision maker of how a forest is best cared for, whereas a Registered Forest Protection Forester (RFPF) is treated as a nuisance who is trying to not let the land be used exclusively for the purpose of timber production, which is an anathema of the natural sciences and the lack of which is what ensures that an ecosystem can thrive.

A professional forester’s career over time tends to eschew the long-term consequences of their harvest decisions that turned out more harmful than expected. Whereas a forest protector will belabor these decisions they have always opposed because they harm the land and unless they stop these land harming activities it causes long term cumulative damages and affirms their point of why we need more limits on logging, not less.

An RPF’s career almost always revolves around the short-term financial benefits of resource extraction, and speaks of caring for the true nature of a forest in the pejorative by calling it a working forest as if that unnatural type of forest is what needs to be restored. But these forest types are often based on a fairy tale where the natural sciences are deemed as inferior and industrial crop science is seen as an advancement/solution to most problems, primarily short term financial ones, which lack long term accountability as explained in the post: Tree Farms vs. Crop Farms.

A Registered Forest Protection Forester (RFPF) on the other hand is focused on creating long-term enduring value beyond their short lifespan. They get entered into the registry because what they do for the forest is not a career that they retire from, but a life’s purpose they continue to work on till their very last days.

An RFPF is not pursuing a career, more importantly they are directly defending the regrowing and recovery of the planet’s forest ecosystems, which is a many-century long process of protecting and nurturing life in the same way a parent wants their children and grandchildren to live on long after them.

But in our upside down world, compared to RPFs, most RFPFs are financially challenged and have far less certainty of if they’ll be successful or not. Even our victories too often are short term. As long as the trees we saved are still standing, our opponents will want to keep looking for ways to finally get them.

And an RFPF loses what we seek to protect so often that we can’t comfortably leave our work at the office or in our foresters vest like an RPF. An RFPF’s trauma from too much loss doesn’t make us give up, but drives us to work long into the night and look forward to weekends when our adversaries take time off so we can get ahead of them because so much more is at stake then just a paycheck.

It’s the difference between the personality of a 40 hour-a-week accountant and the personality of a talented artist who works every day and long into the night to inspire large numbers of people to sing along with songs like this:

Let the sun shine down and warm my bones
Let the birds and bees come and take my clothes
I’m a wild one now made of wind and rain
I’m wild and I ain’t going back again.

Let the moon shine down and warm my soul
Let the owls and the wolves come and tend my coals
I’m a wild one now made of stars and dreams
I’m wild and I’m part of everything.

Let the stars shine down and warm my heart
Let beavers and the bears teach me of their art
I’m a wild one now made of fat and fish

And the healing of the wild is my greatest wish.
The tending of the wild is my greatest wish
The thriving of the wild is my greatest wish.