The world’s population has increased six times in the 200 year period since 1800, and the world’s forests are estimated to have declined by about 40% over approximately the past 1000 years.  One result has been a dramatic alteration of the world’s environment and the living community of organisms that depends on it.  Clearly we have to develop a more sustainable relationship between humans and their global environment if we wish to avoid continuing negative alterations to the environment we depend on for our survival as a species, and to reduce the loss of the world’s biological diversity.  One way to achieve this is to base the relationship on a respect for nature.

There are two main groups of definitions, or meanings, of the word respect.  The first has the connotation of paying attention to and taking due regard for the character of the objects of respect and relating to that object based upon that understanding.  It is an analytical definition of the word respect.  The second group of meanings has to do with reverence, esteem, deference towards, and honour for the object of respect.  This invokes a sort of religious, spiritual, and value-based approach.  Establishment of a sustainable relationship between humans and the forest must involve both sets of definitions.  The second definition helps in the identification of the values that we want sustained in our forests, and so is related to the objectives of management.  However, if that is the only definition we use, it is very unlikely that we will achieve sustainable forestry because it is so easy to overlook the spatial and temporal variability in the ecological character of the resource values we are trying to sustain.  Once desired values and objectives of management have been identified based on the second set of meanings, implementation of forest management must proceed based on the first group of meanings of the word respect.  This requires that we examine and identify, on a site-specific basis in the field, the ecological characteristics of the resource values that we want to sustain, and design management systems and practices that will respect these characteristics.

• Achieving sustainability is difficult due to the lack of a generally accepted definition of what we mean by sustainability of forest ecosystems, our incomplete understanding about forest ecosystems, the frequent lack of an adequate ecological classification of forested landscapes and our limited ability to predict the long-term ecological consequences of alternative ways of managing forests, and/or our failure to use our ecological knowledge.
• While the sustainability of the many values and environmental services provided by forests depends on many social, economic, and cultural factors, a sustainable forest management system must be built on a sound ecological foundation if it is to be successful.
• Sustainable forest management requires a respect for ecological diversity (the diversity of climates, soil, geology, and topography) and the ecological role of disturbance.
• Both the definition and the assessment of sustainability involves a variety of time scales and spatial scales.  Sustainability in forests involves a non-declining pattern of change, rather than a constant equilibrium condition.

• The concept of renewable and nonrenewable resources should be interpreted in socioeconomic terms and should not be based simply on the biological or non- biological nature of a resource.  Both biological and non-biological resources can be either renewable or non-renewable, depending on a variety of considerations.
• A renewable resource in a resource that can be restored to the point of reuse after a period of time that is within our current economic or social planning time scale, or which is renewed at a rate that renders investment in its renewal economically attractive.
• Most renewable resources are the result of biological processes, but some biologically-based resources may renew too slowly to be considered renewable, and some non-biological resources may renew fast enough to permits sustainable consumptive use.

TIMBER MINING VS. SUSTAINED YIELD MANAGEMENT VS. SUSTAINABLE ECOSYSTEM MANAGEMENT

• Timber mining is the consumptive use of socioeconomic values that have accumulated in standing trees over a long period of time, with no prospect of the renewal of these values to the point of reuse over the contemporary socioeconomic time scale.  Consequently, timber mining is not sustainable.
• Historically, sustained yield management in forestry has generally focused on economic timber values.  Non-timber forest values have often been compromised by this focus on economic wood products.
• Ecosystem management takes the multiple-use concept and puts it on an ecological foundation of ecological site classification, of respect for the dynamic, changing character of the forest ecosystem and forest landscape, of the historical role of disturbance in forests, and of the requirement for a balance between ecological, economic, and social considerations.
• Ecosystem management is not based on trying to sustain all values from every stand all the time, but seeks to sustain a shifting mosaic at the landscape level in which the total sum of all values from that landscape remain within the historical natural range, or within some desired new range.

• Forest crop rotations, whether for timber or non-timber products, can be calculated in a number of ways, including technical rotations, economic rotations, maximum volume rotations and ecological rotations.
• An ecological rotation is the time taken following disturbance for a particular ecosystem, or ecosystem condition or value, to return to the pre-disturbance condition, or to some desired new condition.
• The length of an ecological rotation depends upon the degree to which ecosystem condition has been altered by disturbance, and the rate at which ecosystem condition recovers from disturbance.

• In spite of recent advances in genetic engineering, the genetic constitution of a species must, for the present time, be considered to be nonrenewable.  If it is lost, it is not recoverable, therefore it is of paramount importance that we place top priority on conserving our genetic resources whenever we are planning the exploitation of biological resources.
• Soil must be conserved in order to maintain the renewability of the plant and animal crops that it produces, and species it supports.

The greatest threat to the world’s forests is people, and one of the major threats to the world’s people is the loss or degradation of the world’s forests.  People and forests are thus inextricably linked.  If we are to continue to live on this planet, we must learn to exist in harmony with our forests.  This does not imply that there will be no change in any of the world’s forests, but that the cycles of ecosystem disturbance and recovery should be such that desired ecosystem conditions and values are sustained at acceptable levels and that the long-term trends in ecosystem development conform to society’s goals.

Managers of renewable forest resources must use ecologically-based management techniques if they are to preserve or improve the renewability of the resource.  If forest management ignores the effects of management on the ecological mechanisms of forest productivity and on the functioning of the resource, it may be no different from the utilization of nonrenewable mineral deposits – an act of exploitation conducted without any thought for the future renewal of the deposit.