My dictionary defines forestry as "the process of establishing and managing forests" and "the science of planting and taking care of trees and forests." Taken together, these two definitions provide a clear and accurate understanding of the subject: forestry comprises both a scientific body of knowledge and the activity of applying that knowledge to real-world management. This same, correct understanding of forestry is reflected in the House Resolution that created your committee, the Forestry Task Force, and in your committee’s first report.

Unfortunately, that understanding of forestry is not necessarily shared by the news media and general public, who often confuse forestry with logging. A Lexis-Nexis search shows that the term "forestry" was mentioned some 197 times in northeastern U.S. newspapers over the past three months. Aside from references to forestry agencies and the like, in the great majority of instances the term is used synonymously with logging, timber production, or deforestation. Phrases like "destructive forestry practices" and "low-impact forestry" were common. One science reporter in the Boston Globe even referred to the "impact of forestry on global warming." In the New York Times, lumber and pulp and paper companies are "forestry" companies. Clearly, these writers do not see forestry as we see it but rather as a convenient catch-all term for a variety of timber harvesting activities.

As a professor in Penn State’s School of Forest Resources, part of my responsibility is to provide administrative oversight for our forestry curriculum, the only professional forestry curriculum in Pennsylvania. In that role, I am bothered by these misconceptions about the profession for which we educate our students. I am also concerned that these misconceptions enable timber buyers to pursue their trade under the pretense of providing forestry services. Although many timber buyers, especially those with professional training, harvest in a silviculturally acceptable manner, the practice of forestry is much more complex than simply marking trees for harvest. I regret that literally anyone has as much legal right to offer "professional forestry services" as our graduates who have accumulated 130 or more university credits in pursuit of the proper knowledge and skill. That is why I support the licensing and registration goals of the Pennsylvania Council of Professional Foresters and why I choose, as a private individual, to serve on the Board of Directors of that organization.

What do I mean by the term professional forestry education? Let me provide a brief history. Until 1898 the only way for Americans to learn forestry was to travel overseas for education in places like Oxford, Cambridge, Helsinki, Munich, Nancy, and Stockholm. Very few did so (a notable exception being Gifford Pinchot) and so there were in America at that time only a handful of persons trained in forestry. However, within a very short time around the turn of the century several universities began offering degrees in forestry under the tutelage of professors who had studied at the major European schools, people like Henry Graves (who founded the forestry school at Yale) and Bernhard Fernow (who helped found the forestry schools at Cornell and Penn State). By 1910 there were 19 college and university degree programs in forestry in the United States, some founded by graduates of the earliest curricula. Some of the early programs, notably Yale, offered only graduate degrees in forestry parallel with their other professional programs in law and medicine, but most offered forestry at the baccalaureate level in the model of programs like engineering and architecture. Subprofessional, non-baccalaureate degrees were offered at Mont Alto and Biltmore. Biltmore folded in 1913 and Mont Alto eventually became a four-year school before merging with Penn State.

The Society of American Foresters (SAF) was established in 1900 by Gifford Pinchot and six colleagues for the purpose of advancing the science and art of forestry. An early and continual goal of SAF was to encourage high educational standards in forestry schools, and during the first three decades of SAF several conferences were held and reports commissioned to establish those standards. In the words of one early committee, it was believed that "the educational requirements for training in professional forestry should be at least equal to those for the other learned professions, such as civil and mechanical engineering, law, medicine, etc."

These efforts culminated in 1935 with the establishment of accreditation standards by SAF for curricula offering degrees in forestry. Of 20 forestry schools that submitted to the initial evaluation, 14 were approved as meeting the minimum standards set by SAF. (Penn State, incidentally, was among those original 14 schools, and it has maintained continuous accreditation up to the present.) Under current procedures, forestry curricula are evaluated every five years by means of a lengthy self-evaluation report and every ten years by an out-of-state visiting team with members from SAF, other universities, and the nonacademic sector of forestry. To be accredited, programs must meet minimum standards in categories including curricula, administration, faculty, students, institutional support, and facilities. I have been on both the giving and receiving end of these reviews. They are rigorous and they are taken very seriously by the forestry schools and their parent institutions.

Accreditation is a uniquely American approach to assuring public accountability in our colleges and universities. In other countries this is done through government agencies. SAF administers accreditation for forestry programs, but it does so under the auspices of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA). Accreditation under CHEA is usually applied to entire colleges or universities, and most curricula in accredited institutions are not themselves individually accredited. However, special accreditation of individual programs is practiced in most of the professional disciplines, including engineering, medicine, law, landscape architecture, teacher education, nursing, dentistry, and veterinary medicine in addition to forestry.

The creation of this new American profession, forestry, in the first decade of this century was probably made possible only by the remarkable coincidence of great leaders, such as Gifford Pinchot, and dramatic events, such as the creation of the national forest system. The very earliest forestry schools (Cornell, Yale, and Michigan) established high educational standards, and these standards became institutionalized by SAF through the accreditation process. Because of the idealism of its founders and the importance of its mission to society, forestry emerged as a calling and not merely an occupation. A specialized body of forestry knowledge emerged, first by assimilation from Europe and later through extensive research by the U.S. Forest Service and forestry school faculties. Foresters voluntarily held themselves to high standards of behavior through the creation of a code of ethics by SAF. These are all elements of professionalism as the word has been defined by a variety of authors.

I hope you have gotten the idea that I think the term forestry is something special. Our students work hard to attain their forestry degrees and become eligible for membership in the Society of American Foresters. They have no expectations of becoming rich, but an amazingly large percentage of them would admit to lofty aspirations of managing forests, in the service of society, according to the highest ecological principles. Indeed, the first two canons of the SAF Code of Ethics require them to do exactly that. These foresters are harmed, and society is harmed, by laws that permit those without the knowledge, skills, and ethical obligations of a professional forester to pretend to be engaging in the same occupation. Forestry and logging are not the same occupation. There is a distinction, and the distinction is ultimately important to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.