Ray Guries »Invasive Ideas: Thinking about Sustainability«
Raymond P. Guries is a Professor of Forestry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has 30 years of experience working in the areas of conservation and management of forest and genetic resources. He has taught courses in forest genetics, silviculture, forest policy, forest management and agroforestry. He currently teaches a freshman course titled "People, Forests and Forestry." He has received a University of Wisconsin Distinguished Teaching Award and the Society of American Foresters Carl Alwin Schenck Award for Excellence in Forestry Education.
Sustainability, especially applied something as large and long-lived as a forest, can be a very abstract idea. Most people hope/wish that forests can be sustainable, but they have difficulty conceiving of how this can be accomplished. Many ideas about 'sustainability' have entered the profession of forestry during the past 300 years, and many of these ideas persist today in paradigms of forest management. However, few of them really help us to consider all the ways that forests can be 'sustainable,' and foresters are often ill-equipped to translate abstract ideas about sustainability into images that people can understand. Art in its many forms may offer entry points for translating such abstractions into tangible examples of sustainability.
