The Infinite Earth

Years ago I had the great good fortune of working for and being befriended by a Forester. As executives in a multi-state forest seedling nursery operation, we enjoyed many hour drives from one nursery to another telling our stories and discussing our views.

Wally became a young forester in the 1950's, when Timber was the core of wealth, when log trucks and wig-wam burners were common sights in the Pacific Northwest. He came of age professionally under the new operational regime of "reforestation", instituted in the early Forties when decades of new chain saw technologies had made it clear to a few far sighted men that trees were being cut much faster than they grew.

So, I had the opportunity to hear the stories and experiences of a friend who had worked with men for whom the Forest was infinite. Men who had come of age in the era of the Axe, when trees were litterally chopped down by human muscle and the vast sea of forests of the Pacific Northwest would never, never be exhausted.

Today, most of us experience the atmosphere and the oceans as infinite. We have no personal experience of the limits of these planetary things. Stand on the shore of the Pacific on a bright clear day, and your body is assualted and enchanted by its insignificance within the fabric of these two masses.

Like my freind Wally, who lived through the end of the Infinite Forest, we live in a time when the Infinite Earth has already vanished (at least for those who consider the ratios of global "harvest" and global "regeneration"). We all understand without debate that reforestation is an integrated part of Forestry, even though it causes near-term ecomonic burdens. The coming ecomonic, cultural, political and biological struggles the living Generations face as the Infinite Earth gives way to a Small Planet will be similar to the changes in the practices in Forestry, except of course in scale and complexity.