The Redesigned Forest by Chris Maser

The Redesigned Forest Reviews

• 
  Kate

  "About the Author:
  I spent over 25 years as a research scientist in natural history and ecology in forest, shrub steppe, subarctic, desert, coastal, and agricultural settings. Trained primarily as a vertebrate zoologist, I was a research mammalogist in Nubia, Egypt, (1963-1964) with the Yale University Peabody Museum Prehistoric Expedition and a research mammalogist in Nepal (1966-1967), where I participated in a study of tick-borne diseases for the U.S. Naval Medical Research Unit #3 based in Cairo, Egypt. I conducted a three-year (1970-1973) ecological survey of the Oregon Coast for the University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, Washington. I was a research ecologist with the U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management for thirteen years--the first seven (1974-1981) studying the biophysical relationships in rangelands in southeastern Oregon and the last six (1982-1987) studying old-growth forests in western Oregon. I also spent a year as a landscape ecologist with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (1990-1991)."
  
  This book is such a sleeper! I expected it to be relatively dry, & very factual. Part One was exactly that: Nature's Design of a Forest versus Our Design of a Forest. Part Two, As We Think So We Manage, opened the subject of looking at our preconceptions, and our ideas about what a forest is & should be.
  
  But Part Three! Wow! Change, Why Are We Afraid of It? has little to do with forests per se, but more to do with humankind's fears.
  

  The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save the way we think and thus we drift toward unparalled catastrophe.
  --Albert Einstein

  
  
  The author talks about change and why we fear it, and then brings in Buddhist philosophy:
  

  The First Noble Truth -- Truth or Suffering: the outstanding characteristic of the human situation is suffering or frustration, which comes from our difficulty in accepting that everything around us is impermanent and transitory.
  The Second Noble Truth -- Truth of the Cause of Suffering: It is futile to grasp life from a wrong point of view, from ignorance. Trying to create anything fixed or permanent in life and then trying to cling to its perceived permanence is a vicious circle, which is driven by karma, the never-ending chain of cause and effect.

  
  
  The point he's making is that seeing forests as static, economic expedients will result in the total destruction of forests -- that we must learn to perceive the forest as a whole (root systems, flora and fauna, soil, water resources, etc.). We must learn to approach forest from a Buddhist perspective, before we kill them all.
  
  I was utterly charmed by this book, with its Buddhist chapter in the middle, and would recommend it to anyone who's interested in ecology or the environment, with a good dash of Buddhism thrown into the middle.
• 
  Programystic

  Książka dosyć stara (nadal super aktualna) ale pięknie obrazująca to jak bardzo aktualna gospodarka leśna odbiega od naturalnego rytmu. Lekko filozoficzna i dająca dużo do myślenia. Mocno konkretna z przykładami tego jak nie umiemy się opiekować lasami.