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Forestry in a postmodern world or just what was John Muir doing running a sawmill in Yosemite Valley?

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Abstract

The practice of forestry evolved from the Enlightenment, an era where rational thought replaced religion as the principal guide for human action. With its claim to be a method for discovering universal truths about the natural world, scientific analysis epitomizes such rationality. Forestry depends on scientific analysis to predict the outcome of alternative management prescriptions and thereby to support recommendations about the appropriate courses of action. Instead of scientific acts, postmodernists see 'social constructions' – views of reality conditioned by the cultural, social and economic position of a particular individual or group. Understanding these social constructions of nature is particularly critical for the practice of forestry because they powerfully inform the nature of our controversies. The Muir/Pinchot preservation/conservation debate comprises only one thread in a much richer fabric of postmodernist insight into the problems that currently bedevil forestry. Environmental historians, English professors and experts in art history are now building the philosophic foundations for a new practice of forestry much more attuned to current social needs. And it probably still involves clearcutting and pine plantations.

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  1. Faculty of Forestry, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, V6N 3H1

    Clark S. Binkley

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  1. Clark S. Binkley
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Binkley, C.S. Forestry in a postmodern world or just what was John Muir doing running a sawmill in Yosemite Valley?. Policy Sciences 31, 133–144 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1004327924385

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1004327924385

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