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24 James S. Bethel established at Yale University, and during the first ten years of the 20th century sixteen additional forestry schools came into being. Among early forestry schools were private universities such as Yale and Harvard, private colleges such as Bates and Colorado College, state universities such as the University of Michigan and the Univer sity of Washington, and a number of landgrant institutions. Instruc tion at these institutions was sometimes exclusively at the graduate level, sometimes both undergraduate and graduate. The early graduates of these institutions were concerned primarily with the conservation and use of the native forests-protection against fJ.re, insects and disease, inventory of the resource, and the development of means to convert the forest to goods and services. The strictly custodial aspect of natural resource management is now largely in the past so far as the United States is concerned. The re source manager today is more concerned with maintaining the con tinuity of the biological resource and optimizing its output in terms of quantity and quality of materials and services. He is a manipulator of biological and physical systems in which the outputs are products for commerce and industry and social services for the general popu lation. The constraints on the system fall into the domain of the physical, biological and social sciences. This, then, is the setting for renewable resource education. As the objectives change so must the education itself change; indeed it is now doing so at a very rapid pace. Trends in renewable natural resource education reflect changes in the institutional environment. Many universities give increasing atten tion to graduate education and to undergraduate preparation for graduate education, which is in tum reflected in the synthesis of cur ricula. Two-year community colleges and junior colleges are beginning to train technicians and to provide early preparation of professionals. In the future much of the routine technical work that has been per formed by junior professionals will be performed by technicians. Pro fessionals will thus be relieved of the necessity of acquiring many of the practical skills that were essential in the past. This makes it pos sible for the university to emphasize the science and mathematics base of professional education. Curricula in renewable natural resources are being revised to reflect changing professional needs. The modem professional must be pre pared to bring his task the power of the natural sciences, social sci ences and mathematics. Incoming freshmen are better prepared at the high school level than they used to be. Increasingly, schools and col-
TR EN DS I N R E N EWAB L E NATU RAL R ESO U R CES C U R R I CU LA 25 leges assume that entering students have been exposed to modem high school physics, biology, chemistry and mathematics. Where this is not so, deficiencies are commonly made up in remedial courses. The problem for the faculty, not always an easy one, is to devise ap propriate building blocks for erecting an education structure on this stronger base, but the best building blocks may not be so organized that they can be neatly assembled into a four-year package. Biology is perhaps the most important of the sciences that are basic to resource education. Thus far, the major efforts to improve basic biology courses at the college-university level have been in de veloping courses around the unifying contribution of molecular and cell biology, courses that are then commonly deferred until the sopho more year to permit prior college level preparation in chemistry and mathematics. Unquestionably, these are usually stronger courses than the more descriptive botany and zoology courses typically included in natural resource curricula in the past. But it is not at all clear that we have as yet achieved the optimum. It is still common to find that the choices available from biology departments are either the modem bi ology with molecular and cell biology as a unifying element, or classi cal biology that is largely descriptive in character. A recent analysis of several new biology core curricula* indicates that of the total time available in the introductory courses the fraction devoted to cell biology was about five times that devoted to ecology. Many resources biologists are beginning to ask whether it would not be appropriate to explore a second route into introductory college bio logy, a route that would utilize the concepts of ecosystem analysis as a unifying element. Such a course ought to be as rigorous and as quantitative as the one based on the cell. It might, indeed, require comparable preparation in mathematics and the physical sciences. As professional preparation in natural resources is increasingly moved to the junior and senior years, there is a real need to consider the motivational properties of modem introductory courses. The in creased levels of preparation in basic sciences tends to minimize a student's early contact with his professional field. What may be lost thereby is a persuasive basis for showing the relevance of the basic disciplines to long-term professional objectives. New mechanisms are needed that can underscore this relevance and motivate the resource- *"Content of Core Curricula in Biology," Publication No. 18. Commission on Undergraduate Education in the Biological Sciences; June, 1967. American Institute of Biological Sciences, Washington, D.C.
26 James S. Bethel oriented student to achieve a considerable competence in the basic disciplines as a necessary prerequisite to sound professional prepara tion. A premedical student may see himself as a manipulator of cells, tissues, and organisms and remain excited about biology and medicine while acquiring the necessary background. A prospective resource sci entist, on the other hand, is likely to think of himself as a manipulator of ecosystems and will find biology more relevant to his ultimate ca reer goal if he is introduced to it within the framework of the ec<r system. It has sometimes been argued that a systems approach to ecol ogy is too difficult for an introductory course and ought to be delayed. But it is difficult to see why Odum's biomes, Holdridge's life zones, population dynamics models or energy flow models are any more dif ficult to understand than protein synthesizing enzyme systems or the Watson-Crick model. Similar problems face the faculties as they select curriculum com ponents in mathematics, chemistry and physics. Most programs in the resource fields today require a substantially higher level of mathemat ics preparation than was the case five or ten years ago, yet all too fre quently the best mathematics sequences, taught by the best faculty members, are those devised to meet the needs of mathematics or physical science majors. Here, as in biology, the faculty must choose between poorly organized and inadequately taught service courses and the better modem courses that lack relevance to natural resources. Preliminary recommendations have been made by a committee of the Commission on Education in Agriculture and Natural Resources, but the courses described are offered by far too few mathematics depart ments. A similar situation exists in chemistry and physics. The trend in natural resource curricula is to reduce the number of courses and to improve the content, taking advantage of the higher levels of preparation in basic science. As still more appropriate basic science courses are developed and available, this trend may be ex pected to accelerate. A very real limitation on improvement is faculty obsolescence, a problem that is, of course, not unique to the natural resource field. To date there appears to have been much less effort expended in trying to solve this problem in agriculture and of natural resources than in many other fields of science and technology. It should be aggressively attacked. One cannot conclude without some reference to the increasing ef forts of natural resources faculties to contribute to general education in the universities. The provincialism of colleges and schools of for estry and natural resources is rapidly breaking down. Students from
TRENDS I N R EN EWAB LE NATU R A L R ESO U R CES CU R R I CU LA 27 other parts of the campus are getting interested in the study of natural resources as one of the liberal arts, a demand being met through a growing list of courses for nonmajors. It is important that this trend be continued and that universities increasingly recognize that re sources faculties gain strength from the university environment of which they are a part and, at the same time, feed back into that en vironment their own special interests and competencies. I JO H N F . HOSN E R I We think of natural resources in terms of the currently recognized programs-forestry, wildlife, fisheries, range management, watershed management, soil and water conservation, and recreation and park management. Except as otherwise noted, my remarks will deal with aspects common to essentially all groups. Our population is increasing rapidly and is becoming increasingly urbanized. We will soon be a nation of urban dwellers. Both these trends exert important influences on the use of renewable natural re sources. We are experiencing sharply accelerated and competing de mands upon them. For example, demand for recreation, in large measure a by-product of urbanization, is increasing at approximately I 0 percent per year with no evidence of slackening. All this makes it mandatory that we emphasize new educational dimensions in the renewable natural resource fields. It is imperative that the scientific foundations and equipment for decision-making be incorporated into the resource manager's bag of specialized training. Linear and dynamic programming, simulation, and other complex approaches made possible by computers must be come a regular part of the well-educated resource manager's education. We must, at the same time, update and modernize the basic science courses. We observe increasing competition for land uses and staggering de velopments in science and technology. We must be prepared to apply this new science and technology to our renewable natural resource problems. If resource managers do not take advantage of these op portunities, then engineers, economists, and other outside specialists will take over management of our renewable resources, while the
28 John F. H osner trained resource manager becomes relegated to the technician role. While we provide training in specialized, often sophisticated, tech niques and education in the basic physical and biological sciences, we also must provide a broader education for the resource manager of the future-an education that will permit him, in the words of Henry Vaux ( 196 1 ), "to perform the strategic function of integrating, inter preting, and linking forestry to the rest of society in a fashion most meaningful for that society." Dr. McArdle (196 1 ), former Chief of the U.S. Forest Service, succinctly stated the problem when he said, "Now, as in the past, I firmly believe that most such policy decisions [ those dealing with the use of forest land] are made not by foresters, but by legislators, executives, financiers, engineers, and men of other disciplines and orientation. If ever there is a challenge to foresters, it is to escape from narrow technocracy and to engage actively in the practice of political science and business management." We have hardly begun to analyze, much less deal with, the educa tion of natural resources specialists to the broader role of public leadership and national policy development. There is a distinct lack of breadth in the training of wildlifers, foresters, recreationists, and the like. The emphasis seems to be on technical subject matter with but limited requirements in humanities and social studies. For ex ample, only one third of the schools listed in the Dana and Johnson report ( 1 963) on forestry education in America required any work in the humanities and only one half required social studies. The need is clearly evident for truly educated potential leaders in the renewable natural resource areas-individuals who can assume a larger leadership role in the broadest sense. We must, of course, be cognizant of today's immediate needs. Foresters, for example, should be able to inventory a tract of timber being offered for sale. Wildlifers should be familiar with the common techniques of the trade, for example, animal aging techniques-the list could go on and on. I think it is obvious, however, that emphasis must be shifted from vocational training to professional education, and from instruction in current practices to teaching basic principles. It has often been asserted, that the half-life of a Ph. D. today in the scientific discipline is 5 years. I do not know what the half-life of our graduating resources managers and scientists is in today's environ ment, but I submit that it is correspondingly short. Increasingly, we see schools substituting mathematics, economics, English, political science, and similar foundation subjects for the tech nique courses. As these changes occur, educators increasingly en-
T R E N DS I N R EN EWAB LE NATU RAL R ESO U R CES C U R R I CU LA 29 counter reactions from employers, what they say, depending on the agency they represent and to some extent on the position they oc cupy. For example, if one were to generalize about forestry, it would be safe to say that the top administrator feels emphasis should be shifted to fundamental concepts, while the area forester is more inter ested in hiring a graduate proficient with field instruments and tech niques-the latter sees little need for calculus, political science, and similar courses. Consequently, we in forestry education often fmd ourselves heeding administrative personnel only to get static from the graduate's immediate supervisor because we have turned out a forester somewhat less than proficient in handling the techniques of the trade. The situation might be summarized as follows: ⢠The environment for the management of the renewable natural resources is changing. There is an increasing need to recognize and integrate in the most efficient manner all competing demands for the available resources. ⢠This increased competition will demand increasing skills in modem management decision-making that require sophisticated ap plication of computer techniques. ⢠The increasing fund of basic information to be dealt with will demand that we pare to a minimum the amount of our curricula de voted to vocational skills. Skills that can be as effectively learned on the job must be postponed to make room for the more fundamental courses. ⢠With our increasing "people" problems there is a distinct need for a broader-based training in the humanities and social studies studies that will provide the background for natural resource mana gers to integrate, interpret and link their interests to the rest of society. RE F E R E N C E S Dana, S . T. , and E . W. Jobnson. 1 963. Forestry education in America, today and tomorrow. Society of American Foresters, Washington, D.C. 402 p . McArdle, R. E. 1 96 1 . Challenges in forest land use, p. 47-54. Proc. Fiftieth Anni versary Celebration. State University, College of Forestry at Syracuse Univer sity. April l 2- 1 4, 1 96 1 . Vaux, H . I . 1 96 1 . Challenges in forestry education, Proc. Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration. State University, College of Forestry at Syracuse University. April l 2- 1 4, 1 96 l . p. l 9-29.
30 DeWitt Nelson I DeWITT N E LSON If one is to give direction to the future, one must frrst examine the present. Population, resource demands and environmental problems, present and future, are inseparable. To build for the future we must create an alert and knowledgeable society willing to bring reasonable balance among exploitation , rehabilitation, and preservation of the nation's natural resources. This will require a high degree of inter action and understanding between our educational, social, economic and political institutions. Technically and scientifically we can solve most of our problems. But can we as a people, and as a nation, suppress our personal and in stitutional ambitions to the point where we will be willing and able to work together for the common good? Can we educate enough of our people to understand the delicate balance that exists between man and his environment? What are some of the problems confronting the educational institutions? What are some approaches that may be initiated to improve public awareness and understanding so that our social and political institutions will act more promptly and responsibly? POPU L A T I O N As we look about us and examine the trends of population growth with its ever accelerating demands for more goods, services and the amenities for living, we cannot but wonder when will we reach satura tion. How long can our planet meet the demands placed upon it? Our natural resources are finite-without control the population is infin ite. Consequently we find ourselves approaching a serious imbalance between man and the resources upon which he is dependent-the soil, water, air, plants, animals and minerals. It is obvious that we are on a collision course between the reproductive capacity of man and the pro ductive capacity of nature. The best information available indicates there were about 250 mil lion people on Earth at the beginning of the Christian era . It took 1 600 years for the population to double. There are six times that number today-less than 400 years later. It is predicted that the 3 bil-
T R E N DS I N R EN EWAB LE NAT U RA L R ESO U R CES C U R R I C U LA 3 1 lion on earth now will increase to 6 billion by the year 2000. A child is born about every 9 seconds here in the United States ; every morning there are more than 9,500 new mouths to feed. To do this will place ever-increasing stress on our nation's natural resources. More than 90 percent of these people will have little or no contact with or relationship to actual farming, harvesting of forests or mining of minerals. They will not be exposed to many of the biological rela tionships between man and the resources. Most will live in urban areas. D E M A N D In the next 30 t o 35 years this nation must double its food production on our limited land base. Besides food and fiber each person needs for a lifetime of modern living more forest and mineral products, more and more parks, playgrounds and other recreation areas, increased space for travel vehicles, homes, schools, commercial establishments, and the like-all requiring land surface. Already less than 50 percent of our total land area is used for farms and ranches. Good agricultural land must be protected from encroachment by other demands that could be met on less productive land. To solve such problems will re quire the support of a public generally knowledgeable about agricul ture, natural resources and their development and use. R E S O U RC E S Our land base is fixed. Our once overwhelming abundance o f natural resources no longer exists. Our consumption outpaces our productive capacities in many areas. The increasing population confronts man kind with frighteningly difficult and complex problems. The com petition for land and water between agricultural and nonagricultural uses is keen. The managers of resources have too often ignored the long-term effects of their actions and have inadequately recognized the interlocking nature of the situations with which they deal. The traditional concepts of natural resources are changing. People are placing new values on resources for both their products and ser vices. Man is not dominant over Nature, yet he continues to ignore many of her warnings. He continues to dump an ever increasing array of
32 DeWitt Nelson garbage and pollutants on the land and into the air and water with little concern for the ultimate threat to his welfare or survival. He continues to build water impoundments without frrst controlling the erosion on the upper watersheds. Over 2,000 such reservoirs in the United States are now useless impoundments of silt, sand and gravel. Raw sewage and industrial wastes continue to hasten the eutro phication of streams and lakes. We reduce the assimilative capacity of the receiving waters, thus destroying acquatic life and degrading the water for other needed uses, including the esthetic values. M AN 'S R E LA T I O N S H IP TO H I S ENV I R O N M E N T Nature has the capacity to produce i f we work with her. But if we are insensitive to her demands, we only create new dust bowls, eroded hillsides, sewer-like rivers, and cesspool-like lakes. We can destroy the food-chains for essential living organisms, overload the atmosphere with hydrocarbons and other toxic elements, and ultimately destroy the essentials of life. It is man's choice. Man is governed by the same laws that govern all living things. He must learn to be sensitive to Nature's wamings "the handwriting on the wall. " He must learn, and learn quickly, to work with Nature if he is to continue to enjoy her abundance. These choices are within man's power. He must harness his tech nology. He must analyze the ultimate consequences of his technical and social actions. We can better predict the long-range results, good and bad, of technological programs and actions than we can the actions and reactions of people. True conservation will be recognized as sound national policy when the long-term benefits and detriments are adequately weighed against the short-term profits and costs, and when the public interest is adequately considered with the private interests. We must establish priorities of expenditures to make and keep the world fit for living. It is easier to get money for damming rivers than managing watersheds. It is easier to harness the power of technology for a moon landing than it is to coordinate hundreds of industries and units of government and millions of people to control waste and to use well the land. We can better solve our biological problems if and when we can solve our social problems. Our environmental problems require a combination of social, economic, political and technical
TRENDS I N R E N EWAB LE NATU R A L R ESO U R C ES CU R R I CU LA 33 solutions. We must marshall the strength of people in our pluralistic form of government behind programs to support environmental pr� tection and control. It has been said that "What we ought to do is now more important than what we can do. In our tradition the can ques tion must be answered by an informed and participative electorate. "* The development of an informed and participating electorate ex tends beyond the province of the scientist and technician, particularly in this age when the majority of our people live in high density areas. If we are to have a sensitive and informed public, we must teach an awareness and understanding of the environment. We must place ed ucational emphasis on the biological and sociological disciplines for all students regardless of their specialization. Public attitudes and public fmancial support carries weight at the decision-making level as to how both public and private lands and re sources are managed. Governments are responsive to public opinion. Industries are becoming more sensitive and responsive to public de mands. Therefore it is important that public opinion be based on factual information and intelligent interpretation by a knowledgeable electorate. The recent power shift has placed the resource decisions in urban hands. By integrating the principles of conservation and utilization in their broadest sense throughout the various curricula, the major re sources issues can be more properly understood and evaluated. This should lead to better policy decisions in both the public and private sectors. CON F LI C T S A N D C O N T R O V E R S I E S There are many controversies within the broad field o f conservation. Resolving these conflicts becomes more difficult as the problems be come more complex and as individuals become more specialized. A well informed lay person may be more appreciative of these problems than a specialist in a single resource area. I fear that this will become more and more the case as our population becomes more divorced from the land. I also fear it as we train our students in more narrowly oriented areas of specialization. *Dr. Chalmers Roy, Dean, College of Science and Humanities, Iowa State Uni versity.
34 DeWitt N elson Recently a student came to my office with a real concern about the lack of understanding and appreciation of environmental problems by students-in engineering, economics and industrial administration with whom he associated. From his comments I could arrive at only one conclusion-that in their course work the students were receiving no exposure to the biological sciences, to the facts of the world about them and to their dependence upon it . Yet those students will help formulate the public policies in the future . A second student, who grew up near one of our popular lake resort areas, made the statement, "I knew something was happening to our area but I didn't know what it was. Since taking your course I now begin to understand the inter relationships and interactions that are taking place." What am I teach ing? In the catalog it is titled Forestry 1 60. I can better describe it as "Resource Problems, Programs and Issues with Emphasis on Inter disciplinary Relationships." The failure to provide students with an understanding and aware ness of man's impact on the environment can only result in making more difficult a coordinated action toward solving our environment problems. Man's failure to fully evaluate the consequences of many of his scientific and technological developments will create new and more difficult problems. Piecemeal attacks to answer specific questions may be essential, but they fail to solve the total problem. They also fail to recognize the interlocking nature between many piecemeal solutions. For example , the careless use of pesticides, removal of fence rows and clean cultivation have had serious impact upon the pollinating insects so essential to many agricultural crops. F U TU RE N E E D S Until we are willing and able t o manage our resources a s a community of resources, rather than independently as individual resources we will be unable to achieve the environment we strive for. Too often we find the managers and disciplinarians of one resource competing with each other, or even worse, ignoring each other. I have spent most of my life in resource administration dealing with disciplines and their interactions as they effect both public and private points of view. As a consequence I have a strong conviction of the necessity to provide students with a frrm interdisciplinary foundation. I vigorously support the quest for specialists and research in every
TR ENDS I N R EN EWAB LE NATU R A L R ESO U R CES CU R R I CU LA 35 discipline. But in each we also need broad-gaged generalists who can effectively communicate and coordinate the interlocking relation ships. Both the specialists and the generalists are becoming increasingly important components of the total resource team. Their orientation must reach beyond the resource of their interest. They must be people oriented. They must be able to evaluate the social needs and conse quences of their every action. We need to develop comprehensive courses, seminars and other educational devices tailored to provide an essential understanding of the interrelationships among all com peting components of the resource complex. We must provide the necessary insight to deal convincingly with potential and actual con flicts in resource use. EDU C A T I O N The nature of environmental improvement programs i s interdisciplin ary. Therefore materials exposing the student to his relationship to his environment must be incorporated into a wide array of courses physics, chemistry, biology, geology, meteorology, forestry, agricul ture, humanities, economics and the social sciences. Courses in the physical sciences can well apply their principles to environmental problems. The concept of man as a part of a biological ecosystem should certainly be stressed in all biology courses. The concept of man's capability of operating with, rather than subduing, the dynamic forces of nature should be routinely included in agricul tural and allied technological courses. The record of man's experiences in solving, or failing to solve, problems of adaptation to his environ ment could be included in history courses. The dynamics of conflict ing purposes of resource utilization could be incorporated in econ omics and political science courses. The development of systems governing individual and group behavior with respect to natural re sources is appropriate in the social and behavioral sciences. Fortunately, there are many alternative routes through which man's relationship to his environment can be channeled, some of which are less costly than others, even though the end realized is not greatly different. In fact, environmental improvement must primarily be achieved by modification of activities undertaken for economic purposes. Therefore, the weighing of alternative values and costs are at the heart of the problem of environmental improvement.
36 L. C. Walker I L. c. WA LKER To the seventeenth century Englishman, the steward was the manager of the estate. He was a conservationist in the Pinchot image, the wise user of the resources. Thus, the steward was, and his counterpart today is, concerned with production of raw material for people to use. That concern must also involve the inerrelationship between those resources and those people. In a word, that interrelationship is economics, the iconaea of the Greek and the stewardship of the Angl<rSaxon. JAC K-O F -A L L-T R A D E S Only during the past half decade have I been much concerned about curricular matters in forestry education. But in this period, my posi tion has changed-1 like to think it has matured-from a feeling that every professional forester must be poured from the same mold to the conviction that diversity in curricula is essential to solving the prob lems ahead. Twenty years ago on the 1 80,()()()-acre Sabine National Forest there were but two of us professionals. It was fortunate for the Forest Service that we knew some physics, some economics, some re port writing, some law, some geography, and a whole lot of silviculture. Neither of us knew much history, accounting, sociology, game man agement, recreation management, range science, or engineering. Per haps we really did not need to. Now, the staff of that same National Forest, but with 30,000 of its acres under water, includes nine professionals. Were they all cut to the same pattern as were we two earlier foresters, little would be done about recreation management on and around that fme new fiShing water, the unmanaged cattle would still be in trespass, wildlife would yet be poached, and the ledger books would be a garbled mess. All nine of these people who now manage this forest are and should be foresters, yet among them must be the skills to manage all of the vari ous resources of the multiple-use concept. Obviously, there is not room in a forestry curriculum to equip all graduates as specialists in every branch of our profession. Hence the core curriculum, which lists the essential courses that every forester should have as basic background, has been introduced. At some schools, it's as little as 1 5 semester credit-hours of forestry. At ours, it
TRENDS IN R EN EWAB L E NATU RAL R ESO U R CES C U R R I C U LA 37 is 43 hours of forestry and another 53 hours of humanities and pure science. Thus some students elect additional studies in forest manage ment, forest recreation management, or forest game management. Others may prefer an individually tailored program that permits minors in economics, business, journalism, computer science, physical or biological sciences, or general conservation. I would not call gradu ates in these options specialists or experts-in time they may become that; rather, they are foresters with additional work in certain fields. More than jacks-of-all-trades, but not quite masters of one ! Faculty response is a recognized hazard when the curricular mold, albeit not made of fragile clay, is broken. What professor does not think his course is the course, whose omission, as some wag has said, would be like sending the graduate naked into the world. SILVIBU SINESS Agribusiness was a brand new word in agricultural schools just a few years back. With its birth, both as a term and as a livelihood, the agri cultural curriculum, along with the students in the schools, entered a period of greater sophistication. No longer need the agronomist be an educated farm boy-to sell fertilizer, to manage dairies, and to manu facture cheese requires men with business ability. Educational empha sis, then, moved from farm to marketplace. If the agricultural college was to stay in business, it needed to provide education to accomodate business, lest the schools of business do so. Forestry educators recognized the wisdom of the agricultural edu cators' movement into business. A couple of schools developed cur ricula that appear very like branches of a collegiate business depart ment. The danger, I think, is that too many students may be enticed into the business of forestry, arguing that forests can be managed from offices and by computers, at the expense of "on-the-ground" management. Others believe the emphasis on the entrepreneurial as pects of forestry-or silvibusiness-may lead to exploitation that takes into account neither the responsibility for maintaining the resources nor for serving the public. INTO T H E W O O D S Sidney Lanier, poet laureate of Georgia, wrote, in addition to the "Song of the Chattahoochee," which every Georgia schoolboy learns,
38 L. C. Walker an Easter-time verse, more lately set to music : "Into the Woods My Master Went. " Our students are not going into Judea's groves of olive trees, but they must be prepared to work in the forests and to feel comfortable there . If there is any one thing I would want of a young forester, it is an ability to observe and then to diagnose the condition of the forests and , having done this, to prescribe for their management . The crucial issue may be managerial, or it may be nutritional, pathological, or en tomological. The curricular material is obvious. The program must be well-rounded, requiring basic and applied courses in these fields. We believe a forest-oriented program begins with the freshman in the forest, not in routine subprofessional laboratory exercises but in direct exposure to management problems, mensurational data collec tion, or studies of mycorrhizae on roots of seedlings. Silviculture is not an exercise in timber marking, but applied ecol ogy in a dozen timber types-for our men both in the South and in the Rockies. The forest serves as the forestry student's laboratory, the timber type his practice cases, while the increment borer and the spade are his stethoscope and thermometer. T H E C R ITIC S Forestry curricula get, in my opinion, more than their fair share of criticism. This comes, I note , from (a) educators, who are talking about their own schools ; (b) foresters, reminiscing of their own col lege days "way back when" ; (c) employers stung by a couple of un promising appointments ; and (d) leaders in the profession who have not been on a campus in a decade . Like most school faculties, we are sensitive to criticism and anxious to mend our ways if necessary. Because we wondered if ours was one of those schools-they are never named-not providing for the needs of industry , we borrowed from one of our state's largest wood-using enterprises their Manager of Forests. This man, recognized across the South as a leader of men and a leader in resource management-and a critic of forestry education-sought out every nook and cranny of our program to learn what we were, and were not , teaching. To his sur prise , and ours, only one subject was lacking : wood procurement ! Our consultant then graciously outlined in detail a senior-graduate level course for which we are now endeavoring to locate a qualified teacher. It will join our course in forest law.
TR EN DS I N R EN EWAB L E NATU RAL R ESO U R CES C U R R I C U LA 39 To the reminiscing foresters, just a word : course titles may not change, but material covered does. Hence, radioisotopes are tools in soils and silvics, data processing centers are labs for mensuration, policy enters the curriculum at the freshman introduction course, and economic geography replaces a lot of tedious memorizing of vegetative cover types in regional silviculture. To the educators, my sympathy : It is not easy to persuade estab lished faculties-long removed from the practice of forestry-that changes are in order. It is equally difficult to dissuade the young Ph.D. who is convinced he knows precisely the proper curricular composition. TEC H N IC I A N S A N D TEC H N O L O G I S T S Short programs-one to two years-in natural resource management are designed to develop technicians, while four-year-plus programs educate technologists. The former are trained for the "how to do it," the latter learn also "why you do it." Both are concerned with tech niques that, due to the knowledge explosion, are proliferating loga rithmically. More extensive curricula are inevitable ; salaries for tech nological specialists will make a five-year program worthwhile. I predict that for foresters, in the not too distant future, the lowest professional degree will be the M.F. The program recommended by the Commission on Education in Agriculture and Natural Resources for managers and scientists in re newable natural resources errs, I think, in having too little techno logical preparation. Perhaps it assumes the material to be sub professional technician training and, therefore, not professional or just not important. Only 2 1 credits are allocated-and I assume that includes pathology, entomology, and soils. Can a man with so little technological eduation handle technological problems? If the man in this new age is to manage nature for society, he must participate in prescription as well as description, and that takes intensive techno logical preparation. In contrast to the technician who works with "things," the techno logist will work with people as well as things. While we worry about the forester needing humanities courses in order to "better get along with people, " it is, rather, to lead and influence people that he is called. For professional resource management decisions must be based more u pon technical knowledge-the objective-than upon people preferences-the subjective. The opinions of special interest
40 L. C. Walker groups-whether Sierra Oubers or lumbermen-are important subject ively, but woe unto us if foresters make too many of their judgment decisions on that basis. Humanities are important, but they are more important for understanding people than for getting along with them. The forester as resource manager needs this understanding, too. Thus he operates at the .. interface" of science and sociology. R E S O U R C E S Man is unique in his ability to alter the environment. It is his privilege to reshape it to his needs. Hopefully, any such reshaping will be clean and orderly, because the land: man ratio is rapidly falling. If we labor well, we are masters of the ecosystem upon which we depend; if not, we are its slaves. Either way, we are a part of a changing environment, with consequent alterations in the earth's resources on land and under the land, on water and in the water, and air. Some form of those re sources is universal, in walled city and unfenced wilderness. I am not emotionally impressed with propagan�a photographs in publications of the Government Printing Office, the Ford Foundation, and Life that depict the appalling conditions of city slums and, by implication, blame the captive viewer for the situation. Rather, I am depressed that people-kinsmen, if you will-should be so unconcerned or lazy-in a society that possesses so much time and know-how, as to allow such conditions to occur and continue. Because individuals living in social misery appear unwilling or un able to improve their environment, professionals will no doubt be en listed. Many of these professionals may be educated in the manage ment of renewable natural resources, and their responsibilities will likely include man, men as a community, and the environment of that community. How to utilize the waste of the community brought on by the economics of incomplete consumption, the waste of the fac tory and the waste of man himself, may be in the next few years the crucial assignment of natural resources managers. Foresters are a breed of planner, the resource engineer who under stands the biology of ecology, the human nature of ecology, the eco nomics of ecology, and the manipulation of ecology. Conceivably the manager will conclude that air pollution will eliminate plants through reduced solar radiation long before it eliminates man, or that stream and air dilution is inevitably pollution. Because production of goods is not going to be curtailed-for environmental preservationists, like
TREN DS I N R EN EWAB L E N ATU RAL R ESO U R CES C U R R I C U LA 4 1 the rest of us, must use the goods that begin as raw materials-espe cially careful management decisions must be made. The professional rene\vable resource manager will develop ecosystem capabilities and prescribe the tolerance levels of change for the components of the environment. More parks, lakes, residential areas, campgrounds, rights-of-way, factories, and farm lands are rapidly reducing land available for water shed management, timber production, and game production and con sumption. With less land on which to grow more wood for more uses for more people, management intensity must increase. The alternatives are substitutes for wood and substitutes for land. More effective management is the substitute for land. THE F U TU RE Never has the future been more uncertain and, for the resource mana ger, brighter with opportunity. The Conservation Bill of Rights intro duced into the House of Representatives calls for the "right of people to clean air, pure water . . . " It is the very uncertainty about our re sources that makes the opportunities bright. Decisions must be made, policies established, and protection provided. To do this may call for the same kind of evangelism that motivated Gifford Pinchot and other early foresters. Today's faculties of forestry, mostly educated in the 1 940's, were in college because of altruism. Timber famine was yet the cry, and many a city boy left his "ghetto dwelling" -though we did not call it that then and the front walk was scrubbed daily before school-to remedy the situation. Students in the fifties and sixties, in contrast, were the first generation of American foresters who could concentrate on managing forests for profit. For the seventies, foresters must again be motivated by an altruism that, in managing both commercial and noncommercial lands, recognizes paramount public interests. . If the key phrase in the thirties was timber famine and in the fifties multiple use, perhaps in the seventies it will be iconaea-for foresters the bonding of man and land in resource management.
3 Trends in Biology Curricula JO H N D. LATT I N On October 1 4, 1 965 , three French scientists, Fran�is Jacob, Andre Lwoff and Jacques Monod, received the Nobel prize in medicine for their work on gene regulation carried out at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. One month later, Victor McElheny ( 1 965) summarized the im pact of this event on French science and in so doing quoted some critical remarks by Monod regarding the state of science in France. These remarks created quite a furor. As it happened, I was on sab batical leave, working in the Laboratory of Entomology of the Agri cultural University in Wageningen, The Netherlands, and heard some of this discussion. The criticism itself was directed at the rigid structure of the French universities and how they interfered with interdisciplinary research. Monod himself had been discouraged from remaining at the Sorbonne, after completing his graduate studies because his work spanned two disciplines. Only the Pasteur Institute provided the proper environ ment for him to continue his research. John Walsh ( 1 968) extended this criticism to include many of the European universities, at least 42
