Finally, On The Ground in Vancouver

As my flight approached the Vancouver area, the lush green landscape out the window reminded me once again my purpose for being here. It seems to have happened so quickly, and now I am here on the ground in this beautiful place already!

It was only late last summer when I learned of a forestry-related vocational exchange to British Columbia designed to develop professional and leadership skills in young forestry professionals to prepare them to address the needs of their communities and of the increasingly global workplace.

By fall, I joined several people from the Upstate region of South Carolina who were selected to participate in the Rotary International Group Study Exchange. We spent the months leading to our May 8 departure preparing for the journey with team-building, information-gathering, and planning activities.

On the team, I am representing The Nature Conservancy as the South Carolina Southern Blue Ridge Project Director. Other team members include: team leader Mark Taylor, president of Synterra Environmental Consulting Company; Michelle Christensen, U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities; Tammy Cushing, a forestry professor at Clemson University; and Mary Yonce with the U.S. Forest Service. The team’s mission and objectives consist of the following:

In British Columbia, we hope to gain knowledge and firsthand experience about the state of Canada’s West Coast forest industry by exploring four relevant sub-topics of forestry: community development, conservation, healthy working forests, and industrial forest products. We’ll bring back to South Carolina lessons learned, shared through presentations, discussions, and targeted reports. The team hopes the exchange will introduce new insights, spark innovation, and broaden forestry-based networks. Our objectives include:

■ To develop a clear understanding about the connection between conservation efforts and the forest industry in British Columbia. This will be enhanced by presentations on the Conservancy’s work with partners in the Great Bear Rainforest and the boreal forests.

■ To become familiar with the process by which the B.C. Ministry of Forests conveys timber resources into the private sector. We will meet with resource managers from the Ministry to discuss multiple-use management, best practices, and harvest system selection on Ministry-managed lands. In addition, we will become familiar with the drivers of these forest practices and with related public opinion. This will better prepare me to work with Conservancy partners in forestry and related management projects.

■ To share management and policy strategies for dealing with threats to our forests, such as insects, disease, invasive species, and fragmentation. We hope to learn how, as forest managers, we can head off these threats, as well as ways to deal with them once they materialize.

■ To gain a better understanding of community development strategies in rural, forest-reliant Canadian communities to sustain vibrancy, support living-wage employment opportunities, and find new value streams for forest products. This objective ties directly to efforts in the Southern Blue Ridge and throughout South Carolina, which is focused on how to keep the state’s natural resources intact while being economically sustainable.

This experience will better inform my work with The Nature Conservancy while providing opportunities to develop and practice skills in leadership and teambuilding. I also will learn firsthand about forest management parallels between Canada’s multiple-use management and U.S. forest management.

Please join me on this journey. From B.C. to S.C., I’ll write this blog with a focus on forestry and how we all are connected to our natural resources.