A Landscape Ecologist, a Mayor and a Sociologist Walk Into a Forestry Conference

WFCA Conference panelists, Landscape Ecologist Dr. Paul Hessburg, Quesnel Mayor Bob Simpson and Psychologist Dr. Robin Cox characterized the kinds of dimensions and scales of collaboration we will need to enlist to adapt to climate change as citizens and forestry practitioners.

It’s been an animated year so far for B.C. forestry conferences. The TLA annual convention was well attended again. The 2019 ABCFP conference was sold out weeks in advance. And the WFCA event at the end of January had our largest attendance ever. For those of us who organize these things we like to think it’s our programs that are so attractive. But there’s likely something else drawing people together lately in such strength.

It might be in part the shared feeling of pending change—a collective, Are you seeing this too? The sense of being on the cusp of something significant seems shared across a range of dimensions and scales from business relationships to the policy around climate change and its consequences.

Our WFCA conference panel that put an ecologist, a mayor and a sociologist on the stage to discuss forestry and its role in our adaption to climate change may well have caught that zeitgeist.

We need to plan and act at a landscape level. We need to understand the dynamics gaining momentum across forest ecosystems and work with them.

And we need to give our communities and citizens a sense of agency lest they become demoralized in the face of coming events. Given what history is just beginning to ask of forestry in aiding society to live with wildfire and other natural disasters it may be something for which only a collective response can answer.

It’s right and timely then that these conferences are attracting good crowds and the thinking and sharing that goes with them. We will need more of this kind of collaboration heading into the future by the looks of it.