Aesthetics of Forest Industry and Resource Extraction

Old-growth forests have declined significantly across the world. Decisions related to old growth are often mired in challenges of value diversity, conflict, data gaps, and resource pressures. This article describes old-growth values of citizens and groups in Nova Scotia, Canada, for integration in sustainable forest management (SFM) decision-making. The study is based on data from 76 research subjects who participated in nine field trips to forest stands. Research subjects were drawn from Aboriginal groups, environmental organizations, forestry professionals, and rural and urban publics. Diaries, group discussions, and rating sheets were used to elicit information during the field trips. Findings show that different elicitation techniques can influence the articulation of intensity with which some values are held. In addition, certain values are more often associated with old-growth than with other forest-age classes. Some values associated with old-growth are considered more important than others, and some silvicultural treatments are perceived to compromise old-growth values more than others. Demographic characteristics, such as constituency group, gender, and age, are shown to influence value priorities. Ideas on how to incorporate old-growth values into SFM decision-making are highlighted.

There is substantial evidence that we are currently in a period of rapid and significant change in forest values. Some have charged that managing forests in ways that are responsive to diverse and changing forest values is the main challenge faced by public forest managers. To tackle this challenge, we need to address the following questions: (I) What is the nature of forest values? That is, can all forest values be reduced to a single dimension, as assumed in utilitarian-based traditional forestry and economics, or are these values multidimensional and incommensurate? (2) What specific values are involved? (3) What is the structure of forest values? That is, how are they related to each other in value systems? (4) How and why have forest values changed over time? and (5) What do changing forest values imply for ecosystem management approaches? This article discusses key issues related to these questions.

Due to the growth of nature-based tourism in recent decades, the value of forested areas for the tourism industry has been increasing. This is largely due to the aesthetic values that are often associated with forests. However, forests are also highly valued for timber production, an activity that can seriously compromise the visual quality of forested landscapes. Therefore, this article examines the effect that forest industry impacts have upon tourist perceptions and overall satisfaction in destinations that promote natural landscapes to attract visitors. To help understand this issue, tourists were surveyed at natural attractions in Vancouver Island, Canada and Tasmania, Australia. Results suggest that certain forest industry impacts do have the potential to negatively impact upon tourist perceptions in the two destinations included for this analysis. However, there appear to be a number of additional elements that are also important for shaping the perceptions of tourists, as overall satisfaction ratings were shown to be quite high for both Vancouver Island and Tasmania.

La géologie nous permet d’étudier les processus physiques, la structure et l’évolution de la terre et de leur donner un sens dans le temps planétaire. Pour les états et l’industrie, la géologie est également un instrument essentiel au repérage des réserves pétrolières, gazières et minières du sous-sol. L’auteure examine en quoi les films de vulgarisation scientifique et les films éducatifs portant sur les sciences de la terre et l’extraction des ressources produits par l’Office national du film du Canada entre 1950 et 1970 sont animés par le colonialisme – reflétant ainsi la logique fondatrice de déplacement des peuples autochtones et d’hégémonie blanche. Au cours de cette période d’intérêt accru des entreprises et des gouvernements pour les Territoires du Nord-Ouest (y compris l’actuel Nunavut) et le Yukon, les films de vulgarisation scientifique ont dépeint les terres arctiques et subarctiques comme de nouvelles frontières pour la recherche scientifique, l’exploration méridionale et les projets miniers. En faisant connaître les terres et les subsurfaces nordiques comme sites de développement, Know Your Resources (David A. Smith, 1950), The Face of the High Arctic (Dalton Muir, 1958), Riches of the Earth (Revised) (Colin Low, 1966), The North Has Changed (réalisation non créditée, produit par David Bairstow, 1967) et Search into White Space (James Carney, 1970) réinscrivent ces espaces dans les imaginaires colonialistes, estompant la présence des Premières Nations et des Inuits sur le territoire ou prônant leur assimilation à la société canadienne méridionale. Dans la foulée de la théorisation de la géologie comme « formation raciale » et d’études critiques de la discipline, l’auteure allègue que ces films témoignent des logiques imbriquées de la pratique scientifique, de l’extraction et de l’impérialisme à l’œuvre dans les modèles occidentaux de développement économique et de progrès – et de la propagation de ces structures comme pratique éducative populaire au cinéma.

Korea, China, Japan and Canada are all members of the Montreal Process (MP). However, there has been little comparative research on the public awareness of forest values within the framework of Sustainable Forest Management, not only between Asia and Canada, but also among these three Asian countries. This is true of aesthetic values, especially as the MP framework has no indicator for aesthetic values. We conducted surveys to identify similarities and differences in the perceptions of various forest values, including aesthetic values, between residents of the four countries: university student groups in Korea, China, Japan and Canada, as well as a more detailed assessment of the attitudes of Koreans by including two additional groups, Korean office workers, and Koreans living in Canada. A multivariate analysis of variance test across the four university student groups revealed significant differences in the rating of six forest functions out of 31. However the same test across the three Korean groups indicated no significant differences indicating higher confidence in the generalizability of our university student comparisons. For the forest aesthetic values, an analysis of variance test showed no significant differences across all groups. The forest aesthetic value was rated 6.95 to 7.98 (out of 10.0) depending on the group and rated relatively highly among ten social values across all the groups. Thurstone scale rankings and relative distances of six major forest values indicated that climate change control was ranked as the highest priority and scenic beauty was ranked the lowest by all the groups. Comparison tests of the frequencies of preferred major forest values revealed no significant differences across the groups with the exception of the Japanese group. These results suggest that public awareness of aesthetic and other forest values are not clearly correlated with the cultural backgrounds of the individuals, and the Korean university students’ awareness could potentially be representative of the Koreans general public’s opinion. We expect this research to contribute to the development of aesthetic and social indicators, and to the enhancement of balancing social with environmental and economic values within the SFM framework.

This study measures environmental values and ethics and explores their relationships to attitudes toward national forest management. The principal research methods were literature review and a survey of Vermont residents concerning management of the Green Mountain National Forest. Descriptive findings suggest respondents (1) favor nonmaterial values of national forests, (2) subscribe to a diversity of environmental ethics, including anthropocentric and bio-/ecocentric, and (3) support emerging concepts of ecosystem management. Environmental values and ethics explain approximately 60% of the variation in attitudes toward national forest management.

This paper explores relationships between visual resource management (VRM) and timber availability in the context of recent findings and current VRM policy in British Columbia. Selected North American case studies and relevant aspects of visual resource management in British Columbia are reviewed. Both research and practice indicate that public preferences for landscapes generally decrease as visible landscape alteration increases. Visual resource management requirements in visually sensitive areas are typically viewed as a major constraint on timber supply where conventional clearcutting is the main harvesting method. However, for a given level of timber removal, people may react more adversely to clearcutting than to partial cutting distributed over a larger area. This raises the possibility of increased timber availability under alternative forest practices in visually sensitive areas. Therefore, forest managers have a number of possible options for resolving perceived conflicts between visual resources and timber availability. Current policies and regulations in British Columbia provide district managers with sole discretion (unless otherwise specified in a Higher Level Plan) in the management of the province’s visual resources. This allows for potential variations in how VRM is applied from one forest district to another, and emphasizes the district manager’s central role in striking a balance between visual quality and timber availability in British Columbia’s forested landscapes.

It is critical to understand how the public prioritizes multiple forestry values when establishing objectives for sustainable forest management. While this is a complex and difficult task, a necessary step is to elicit a broad range of public opinions in forest planning to ensure that decisions serve the needs of various forest stakeholders and society at large. This study seeks to understand how six forest dependent communities in British Columbia prioritize a number of attributes associated with sustainable forest management by using a simple survey-based measurement tool, the Thurstone scale. The results suggest that ecological attributes are a higher priority for survey respondents followed by quality of life, global warming, and economic considerations. This paper explores some of the ramifications of the priorities for sustainable forest management measured in these six communities as well as implications for using the Thurstone scale in processes like Public Advisory Groups.

Pacific Northwest mountain scenes tested whether perceptions of scenic beauty correspond to those of management acceptability, and for whom. A stratified sample of 1,035 participants included those favoring resource protection, production or neither. Scenes were rated for either scenic beauty or acceptability. All participants saw very beautiful scenes as acceptable, and the two rating types were correlated but diverged in ways corresponding to environmental attitudes. Participants with opposite attitudes rendered the two ratings in reversed ways: Those favoring resource production had lower standards for both qualities, rated acceptability higher than beauty and saw ugly scenes as acceptable. Those favoring resource protection had higher standards for both qualities, rated acceptability lower than beauty, and needed beauty to see acceptable management. The nonaligned respondents were in between,judging the two qualities very similarly. Beauty can be a proxy for acceptability within homogeneous or general constituencies but only with careful interpretation across conflicting value orientations.

A mail survey was conducted of local residents of a forest-dependent region (Fraser Fort George Regional District, n=974), provincial (British Columbia, n=1208) and Canadian (n=1672) publics to compare their values for forests and preferences for forest management (overall response rate=45.2%). While the local public tended to place a significantly higher (p<0.05) emphasis on economic values and clearcutting practices relative to provincial and national publics, all publics held quite similar views on forest management overall. All publics support a multi-value/ecosystem management over a single-value/timber management approach to forest management, do not support maximisation of economic returns from timber regardless of the impacts and agree forest managers should be more responsive to local resident values than the values of more distant groups. Responses also reflected a lack of public confidence in government natural resource agencies. Results suggest residents from forest and non forest-dependent communities share similar forest values, that current forest management practices such as clearcutting do not reflect the values of local, provincial or national publics, and that forest managers should be especially responsive to the values of the local public when making forest management decisions.

Current forest certification programs may be neglecting aesthetics and related public perception and acceptance issues, concentrating on more easily quantified socioeconomic and ecological criteria. Because aesthetics is an important value for forest users, and to avoid potential conflicts between certification status and public perception, we suggest that forests should be certified for aesthetic performance. Current forest certification programs weakly address aesthetics, if at all. Those systems that do consider aesthetics tend to be procedural rather than outcomes-based and generally do not encourage solid or consistent approaches to the problem. Visual resource management approaches provide some precedents that are not as yet widely used in certification, but they also have their limitations. We recommend that more effort be put into developing more robust indicators for aesthetics as part of certification programs.

The role of forest management in mitigating climate change is a central concern for the Canadian province of British Columbia. The successful implementation of forest management activities to achieve climate change mitigation in British Columbia will be strongly influenced by public support or opposition. While we now have increasingly clear ideas of the management opportunities associated with forest mitigation and some insight into public support for climate change mitigation in the context of sustainable forest management, very little is known with respect to the levels and basis of public support for potential forest management strategies to mitigate climate change. This paper, by describing the results of a web-based survey, documents levels of public support for the implementation of eight forest carbon mitigation strategies in British Columbia’s forest sector, and examines and quantifies the influence of the factors that shape this support. Overall, respondents ascribed a high level of importance to forest carbon mitigation and supported all of the eight proposed strategies, indicating that the British Columbia public is inclined to consider alternative practices in managing forests and wood products to mitigate climate change. That said, we found differences in levels of support for the mitigation strategies. In general, we found greater levels of support for a rehabilitation strategy (e.g. reforestation of unproductive forest land), and to a lesser extent for conservation strategies (e.g. old growth conservation, reduced harvest) over enhanced forest management strategies (e.g. improved harvesting and silvicultural techniques). We also highlighted multiple variables within the British Columbia population that appear to play a role in predicting levels of support for conservation and/or enhanced forest management strategies, including environmental values, risk perception, trust in groups of actors, prioritized objectives of forest management and socio-demographic factors.