CAREERS & EDUCATION
From Issue #19
For The Love of Trees
A Career In Forest Management
by Suryatapa Bhattacharya
“The Canon Envirothon is held in a different location across
North America every year, where hundreds of the best high
school brains gather to duke it out. Last year, they met in
West Virginia to scale hills, dig into muddy rivers, sort through
animal and plant species, and sweat it through rain and shine
to prove their environmental expertise.
As I scratched my head trying to answer some Envirothon
questions (very tough) and evaluate an environment (also,
very tough), I sought help from Carla Grant, director of the
Ontario Forestry Association and asked what it takes to turn
one’s love for nature into a successful career.
A career in forestry requires expertise where you’re going to
help people rebuild a pond, increase the health of the 
forest
and offset invasive species, “and a willingness to work in
remote areas, since one of the main components of forestry in
Canada is in the boreal forests,” says Carla. Most Canadians
live around forests and are dependent on them, so
preservation is
key. This means
someone has to
look for forest
decay and
regeneration
because of
human use
around it. That
“someone” is a
forester like
Carla who thinks of long-term health care for a forest, “It’s a
balanced pressure. It’s a balance of us appreciating nature and
wanting nature around us. But human need is such that we are
surrounded by hundreds of products that arrive from the
forests, and there is no indication it is going to change. So
someone has to monitor all this,” explains Carla.
Even though the numbers of colleges and universities offering environmental studies have quadrupled in the past few years,
forestry has seen a significant drop in enrolment. “There are a
lot of choices now for someone studying the environment. And
forestry still has a stigma attached to it that it’s a clear cut
job. You are going to go out and use the forest. There is [no
true understanding?] of what the real job is. The schools that
have opened out in the past 20 years have taken that group of
interest that might want to do something for the environment
and spread it really thin,” says Carla. So even though you may
want to pursue more
sophisticated
environmental
studies, if there’s no
one preserving
forests, there might
not be an
environment to work
with at the end of
the day.
Having a bachelor of
science in forestry,
Carla says forest
management involves a lot of technical work. She especially
enjoys working with younger people and making that personal
connection between a tree and a human. “When you start
seeing an individual maple tree and know its characteristics
and are able to spot it amongst other trees, that’s when the
connection occurs,” says Carla. And her job is a lot of fun,
“People have meetings in boardrooms, but we have meetings
in parks!”
As a forest manager, you are going to look at how people are
using the forest. You will look at forest products, habitats
inside a forest and the species of trees. A forest manger then
balances these values. “You have to look at the natural
function of the ecosystem — water system, animals — and you
take out products we need and leave that forest to maintain
its functions. As a forest manager, you have to achieve human
needs and balance of the nature,” says Carla.
But more than anything, it is preventing the loss of forests
that makes the job most important, “Sometimes forestry
doesn’t look pretty. You go in and remove a tree, but it’s still a
forest, and it will be a mature forest one day. But when a
forest is cut down and turned into a housing development, it’s
never a forest again.”
Canon Envirothon: www.envirothon.org
Ontario Forestry Association: www.oforest.on.ca
Canadian Forestry Association: www.canadianforestry.com
