Tales of our Times
By JOHN BARTLIT
New Mexico Citizens for Clean Air & Water
Late last October, my column dealt with engineering aspects of voting systems. Politics takes little note of news about the latest smart tools that provide new policy choices. My November column showed why big media have a mind to bring out rousing or upsetting news sooner than useful news. As the year turns anew, this column ties these themes together: I report scarce news about the evolving field of “digital forestry.”
Politics comes down to each party being dead set on its own stands on large national issues. Think how poorly this style works in dealing with, say, policing or COVID-19. The ins and outs of problems are glossed over, which makes remedies harder to spot.
Forestry problems suffer badly. Logging, forest fires, and insect invasions—all are muddled in political strife. But forests have the advantage of being generally remote from people. So instead, we now have digital tools that report back more and more details of how woodlands work. The tools are mounted on drones that easily fly around in forests. Scouting in this way yields more valuable insights than taking polls of crowds.
New instruments provide 3-D laser images of large areas and all terrains. Thermal cameras send other pictures. From these images, computers can learn critical factors in the spread of fire, which include the amounts of kindling and deadwood on the forest floor and the pathways of limbs that lead fire from the ground to the treetops. The new insights point out better ways to predict and defend against fires.
These and other new data also help to combat pest outbreaks and make logging and planting operations more efficient. Any figures that speak of the economic and ecological value of better informed forestry quickly add up to billions of dollars.
Big American politics has a propensity to take political stands even on largely technical issues. To stay focused on elections, the party-centered channels tell us little about the latest advances in engineering.
Campaigns tout “Vote for our team.” But neither side brings anymore voting systems engineers to the news, nor news of digital forestry, nor news of regulatory engineering for that matter.
News shines its light on who and what is bad rather than piecing together more of the story. The practice is both long-standing and natural.
People as a whole and voters in particular take their lead from the news. Before anyone saw it coming, society took to dwelling on who to blame more than on problems and remedies.
But enough on the craft of newsmaking. Back to forest business. Purdue University is a center of work in the field of Digital Forestry. Developments of this kind are natural at a land-grant university, such as Purdue. Land-grant colleges date back to the Morrill Land-Grant Act adopted in 1862 and expanded in 1890. The nation sought to promote resources especially needed in a young country. The Act aimed to build skills in “practical agriculture, science, military science, and engineering.”
Looking back, the Act under President Lincoln was a modern marvel. Purdue’s Institute for Digital Forestry results from a strong alliance of practical agriculture, science, and engineering of a scope no one could imagine in 1862.
New tools arrive each year to discover deeper aspects of forests. All the while, the tone of the public arena stays more flippant than professional. Flippant helps like a bad Covid.
Four weeks hence, this series on forest prospects will tell more of nature’s viewpoint, not ours.
