Tree Talk

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TREE TALK BALANCE & BLEND

Happy New Year! Best wishes to everyone for a great 2002! How about if we talk about a couple of words this month. Sometimes you may hear or read, about having a “balance” in nature. I used to think that this was a good way to express it. When insects, diseases, fires, windstorms and various other things hurt and kill trees, we might talk about the forest being “out of balance”. When human beings get together to manage natural resources, we might talk about keeping everything “in balance”. Regular readers of tree talk, may think that the writer is “out of balance” at times. This is understandable. Our photo of this cool rock is to help us think of the word “balance”. To remind us of our other word, let’s picture a milkshake blender. I think our balance rock “blends” in nicely, with the overall landscape. In order to stay somewhat on track, I looked up these two words of the month, for us. Mr. Webster defines “balance” as the “equality of weight or power, a state of equilibrium”. I’m not sure I like the sound of this, when talking about nature. Too many things are always changing, to reach a state of equilibrium. Equilibrium sounds a little boring. Just my opinion. The word “blend” means to “mix or mingle, to merge; to shade gradually into each other; to harmonize”. Now this sounds more like it! I can picture mixing and mingling in the forest and you can’t go wrong with the word “harmonize”. Mingling sounds quite exciting. I like this word “blend”. I wonder how it would sound, if we exchange the word “blend”, for the word “balance”; whenever the idea comes up in natural resource management. We’ve often tried to “balance” one resource with another. Let’s trade this, for that and try to give everything equal weight. For 2002, maybe we can “blend” our resources together. Let’s mix, mingle and harmonize! I wonder if we could manage the forest with the objective of having things in a “blend”. While watching the Gator Bowl, I got to thinking that maybe resource planning is like a football field. At one goal line, may be the desire to have a thinned out forest. At the other goal line, may be the desire to have dense wildlife cover. We don’t necessarily run a play that will get us exactly to the 50 yard line to “balance” things out equally. Instead, let’s devise a play that will “blend” the two desires into something that makes sense. Sometimes, we may end up on the forests’ 20 yard line. At other times, maybe we hit the 35 yard line of wildlife. We’ll have a mix of plays; to fit various situations, at various times in the game. Our goal is to have a harmonious outcome; rather than what happened in the Gator Bowl.

-- Anonymous, March 01, 2002


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