The challenge of preserving Pacific Northwest natural resources
is the subject of “Sustaining Our Northwest World: When Humans
and Nature Collide,” a lecture series starting next week with a
look at the need for active forest stewardship of public
forests. Forest resources professor Jerry Franklin presents A
Fork in the Road: The Challenges of Forest Stewardship in the
21st Century, Feb. 12. Throughout North America, the need for
active stewardship of public forests is already critical and
will greatly intensify in the 21st century, he says.
Globalization of the wood products industry is creating new and
serious challenges to forest stewardship. The Pacific Northwest
faces the questions of who will purchase industrial forestlands
of departing corporations and what they will do with them. Where
will society find the will and resources to carry out forest
stewardship? The old timber-environment controversies of the
20th century are no longer relevant, Franklin says, but their
echoes obscure the very different c