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Whither Forestry at Duke

by William H. Schlesinger

One frequent question during my first year as dean was, “So what are you doing with forestry in the Nicholas School?” Frankly, I was surprised. New approaches to traditional forestry education were a major tenet in the creation of the School of the Environment at Duke more than 10 years ago. Certainly, we wanted to retain the option of a Master of Forestry (MF) degree, and the Society of American Foresters reaccredited our program recently. We continue to make extensive use of the Duke Forest as an outdoor classroom for forest management. But, as for an explicit focus on production forestry, Duke was out.

Even 10 years ago, this was not to say that we thought forests were unimportant, but rather, we wanted to develop new educational programs that extend beyond traditional training in production forestry. Here, Duke could play a special role: with the creation of the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, we could see more in the forest than the trees.

Forests host the greatest fraction of the world's biotic diversity, sequester significant quantities of carbon dioxide from Earth's atmosphere, and cleanse the air and waters that pass through them on a daily basis. These are services that nature provides free of charge. As humans have reduced forest cover globally from 40 percent at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution to about 29 percent today, we have sacrificed a good deal of nature's services, usually in favor of only short-term gain.

A holistic view of forestry is needed. What this means is that for our students the traditional courses in a forestry curriculum—with names such as dendrology, mensuration and silviculture—may well be replaced by classes in forest economics, forest watershed management, conservation biology, and biogeochemistry. Our goal is to train students who can practice sustainable forest management. We will provide value{added graduate education in forest ecosystem management, recognizing that extractive management must be done in ways that minimize environmental impacts, maximize conservation benefits, and sustain the broad array of values of forested lands. The forest products industry knows how to grow trees; what it needs to know is how to manage land for the diversity of other goods and services that a healthy forest ecosystem can provide. This is a role that the Nicholas School is uniquely qualified to play—in the Southeast, across the country and around the world.

We will continue to look to forests for fuel and fiber. Indeed, somewhere recently a tree was cut to provide the paper for this magazine. As the human population grows, we will increasingly depend on the ecosystem services of forested land as much as we depend on its timber.

No, the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences has not abandoned forestry. In fact, with the help of the Sullivan and Tukman families, we have just created a new endowed chair in forest resource management and environmental economics and policy (click here). We are proud to have trained managers who are now found throughout the forest products industry in the United States and abroad. What we must do now is to provide broad training on forest ecosystem management to a large cadre of young professionals who will care for our forests of the future.

Schlesinger is Dean of the Nicholas School and James B. Duke Professor of Biogeochemistry.