Practicing & Promoting Stewardship
Written by Zander Evans
The Forest Stewards Guild has a unique dual mandate: practice and promote forest stewardship. Personally, I think the combination of practicing forest management and promoting best practices is what makes the Guild a vibrant and impactful organization.
The Guild was founded by foresters who worked in the woods. For three decades, Guild members, staff, and board have worked hard to ensure that on-the-ground stewardship stays at the heart of the organization. Part of the drive to center work in the woods comes from our shared desire to be outside in nature’s beauty. The joy of being in the forest is inspiring and motivating.
Another reason to keep real-world stewardship at the center of the Guild is that logistics and day-to-day practicalities help determine what practices are possible. Guild members know that many management plans crumbled to inutility when confronted with stream crossings, price fluctuations, unavailable contractors, deer browse, or a myriad of other everyday complexities. Good ideas need to work in the woods to be effective.
This logic extends to Guild staff. Why does the Guild staff conduct prescribed burns, remove invasive plants, plan harvests, restore forest structure, and engage in other on-the-ground projects? Because it keeps the organization emersed in the realities of stewardship. Guild efforts to promote techniques and tactics are based on visceral knowledge.
Sharing stewardship insights and learning from each other is the second half of the Guild’s mission to practice and promote. Guild members and staff relish sharing successful strategies with their colleagues. Ideas and approaches can be transferred and adapted, but always need to be grounded in place, local culture, and landscape to be successful.
Members are eager to offer and use innovations whether they come from a research project, continuous forest inventory, or years of observation. This e-newsletter highlights new ideas and practices from the Guild community every month. The Guild’s Forest Steward magazine promotes the amazing work of our community and dozens of events and webinars each year bring Guild members together to share their work, ideas, questions, challenges, and success. Unfortunately, rapid ecological change makes continuous learning a necessity rather than a luxury.
Synergy, the idea that a combination is greater than the separate elements, is an overused term, but in the case of practicing and promoting stewardship, the two are more powerful when interwoven. We find out what management techniques the Guild should promote by testing them in the woods. Members’ experience often adds nuance or cautions to best management practices, which, in turn, helps other stewards implement those practices effectively. Scientists can draw on the experience or work of practitioners to guide fruitful experiments. In other cases, Guild members and staff implement new research, so early adopters can walk through a demonstration stand instead of just reading about what it might look like.
Other institutions have shown the power of combining practice and promotion. For example, nurses and doctors need both hands-on experience and the latest science to keep us healthy. Health care that neglected either practical experience or promotion of best practices would be a failure. I argue that forest stewardship is the same. I am proud to be part of the Guild community because we are anchored on the land with a long-term view and at the same time are learning from each other, innovating, and promoting what works best to forge a healthy future for people and forests. Our unique dual mandate would not be possible without the Guild community spread across the country, so thank you for being part of this positive change.