Two former U.S. Forest Service leaders are discussing forest issues in Stevens Point.
Former Forestry Service Chief and UW-Stevens Point Professor Michael Dombeck and former Deputy Forest Service Chief Jim Furnish are presenters. Furnish says there are many things different than a century ago, and they're not all better.
"If you look back 100 years ago, a lot of these landscapes were really ravaged, and had been allowed to recover and restore themselves so that now, they're a tremendous asset, and I just would like to see that continue and make sure they're managing in the best spirit possible."
Furnish says there are supporters of more logging and commercialization of national forest assets, and there are others like him that would prefer to let the forest go through it's life cycles naturally with less logging....
"I'm not a big fan of commercializing a lot of the timber programs on the national forests. I think we tried that for much of the era following World War II, and I think it created a lot of problems."
Furnish says the Forest Service has been an agency in dramatic change for the last forty or fifty years, where they used to be dominated by logging. Now, they've really had to grapple with issues like climate change and forest fires, and says the agency is struggling to find it's future.
