News for forest resource professionals published by the Society of American Foresters January 2020 • Vol. 25, No. 1 The President’s Agenda: A Conversation with Tamara Cushing By Steve Wilent T IN THIS Kodama Elected SAF VP Henry “Gene” Kodama, CF , of Summerville, South Carolina, was elected vice-president of the Society of American Foresters for 2020 in an election held in October 2019. Also, four individuals were elected to three-year terms on the SAF Board of Directors. For more in-formation, see Page 3 . ISSUE amara L. Cushing began her term as SAF’s president on January 1, af-ter serving a year as vice-president. She is no stranger to leadership positions within the Society, having been chair of the House of Society Delegates (HSD) and chair of both the Kentucky/Tennessee SAF and South Carolina SAF , among numerous other roles. Cushing is an assistant professor of practice, Extension specialist, and Stark-er Chair of Private and Family Forestry in the Department of Forest Engineering, Re-sources, and Management at Oregon State University. An SAF member for more than 20 years, she received SAF’s Young For-ester Leadership Award in 2011 and was named an SAF Fellow in 2017. I spoke with Cushing in December about her priorities for 2020 and beyond. In the vision statement you submitted as a candidate for vice-president in 2018, you wrote that “This is a critical time for SAF. Of particular concern is the failure to retain student members after they gradu-ate.” Have we made progress since then? What can we do in the future to retain more students as members? Yes, I think we’ve made progress in re-cent years in some ways, but not in oth-More on the 2019 Convention Two pages of photographs from the conven-tion in Louisville, Kentucky, pages 6–7. Pho-tos from the Mammoth Cave National Park tour, page 8, and the Berea College tour, page 9. Other convention news, page 12 . Lessons Learned A new column for SAF members to share lessons learned from their careers in natural resources. For the inaugural column, we fea-ture Mary Beth Adams, a research soil scientist with the US Forest Service. Page 15 . er ways. When I think back on my days as a student, we [students] didn’t have a seat on the SAF Council, now the Board of Directors. I served as the National Stu-dent Assembly chair, so I had a seat on the House of Society Delegates (HSD), but it was a nonvoting position. I was welcome at HSD, but I didn’t have a vote. And we had no representation whatsoever on the Board of Directors. But for four or five years now, students have had represen-tation at the Board level—a nonvoting position, but still a voice on the Board of Directors. Brittany Church, the cur-rent student representative on the Board, is at the table and she’s able to voice her opinions, coming from a student angle. That’s definitely an improvement. We are constantly talking about students now— they’re not just attending meetings; they are actively engaged with Board members, and they want to be more engaged with the Society. We have to make sure their voices are heard even more than they are now. We have to make sure they know that they do have a voice, that they know a student sits at the table with the SAF leadership at the national level. We need to make that position more visible, make it a position that students really want to get. Tamara L. Cushing, SAF’s president for 2020, with her daughter, Emma, a freshman engineering stu-dent at Oregon State University (OSU) and a mem-ber of the OSU Spirit and Sound Marching Band. Tamara Cushing is an assistant professor in OSU’s Department of Forest Engineering, Resources, and Management. Photo courtesy of Tamara Cushing. But we’re still losing too many stu-dents as members after they graduate, and that’s one area where we haven’t made much progress. We’ve taken steps to in-clude students, and maybe that means CUSHING n Page 4 Future of SAF: Griffin This month, we feature William Griffin, a grad-uate student at Mississippi State University (MSU). He was the 2017–2018 chapter presi-dent of the MSU SAF student chapter, and at the 2019 SAF National Convention, Griffin re-ceived the Student Leadership Award. Page 16 . Forestry as a Vocation and the Responsibilities of a Calling Editor’s note: This essay is a version of the powerful, thought-provoking plenary ad-dress given by Marianne Patinelli-Dubay at the SAF National Convention in Louisville, Kentucky, on October 31, 2019. By Marianne Patinelli-Dubay EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK Diversity at Auburn A group of African American alumni of Au-burn University’s School of Forestry and Wild-life Sciences is seeking new ways of reaching both prospective students, former graduates, and others in an effort to increase minority en-rollment. Page 17 . “ Call for Award Nominations SAF will present 13 national awards this year. These national awards will be presented at the 2020 SAF National Convention in Providence, Rhode Island (October 28–November 1). See page 17 for a list of the awards and informa-tion about submitting nominations. DEPARTMENTS 14 17 18 19 19 20 Commentary SAF Member News In Memoriam Continuing Education Calendar Employment Ads Forest Industry News Do your work and I shall know you.” Here, the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson is asking us to con-sider work as both a duty and a calling. He argues that we are fundamentally com-pelled towards work that is already in us to perform. It is as if our potential for certain work resides in the soul and, like desire, the drive towards this work is woven into the fabric of the individual spirit, such that we are drawn forward towards an oc-cupation as life-work. Emerson compels us to search ourselves to discover on an essential level what our work is, what we are talented for, and how to devote those qualities to a purpose. We are asked, in Emerson’s petition, to search and to know ourselves, to identify our work, and then to perform it with a dedication that is akin to a calling. Philosophers after Emerson will have much to say about a calling and the qual-ity of a hand-to-hand relationship that is implicit in the call and response. The image of handedness is not accidental, and actually, it suits our theme here to-The Forestry Source Turns 25— and Goes Digital D Plenary speaker Marianne Patinelli-Dubay at the SAF National Convention in Louisville, Kentucky, on October 31, 2019. Photo by Jolea Brown, creative-photographyllc.com. day quite nicely, because whatever else we get around to, we are here to talk about forestry, a fundamentally practical voca-tion more embodied than abstract, more earthen than ethereal. The call, however, is just an opening; your response is meant to take the form of a life. Without the re-sponse of “yes,” the call is mere vocaliza-tion—it is the word thrown over a canyon that we recognize in its return from deep PHILOSOPHER n Page 10 By Steve Wilent id you notice month and volume number of this edition of The For-estry Source ? January 2020–Vol. 25, No. 1—the first edition of the Source’ s 25th year. A quarter century of “News for forest resource professionals published by the Society of American Foresters”— that’s quite a milestone. I’m honored to have been editor more than 10 years; previously I was a features writer for four years, and before that was an occasional contributor. The Source has remained much the same throughout its 24 volumes, aside from cosmetic changes, such as a fresh-ening of the logo. Each edition includes feature articles and columns about the sci-ence, technology, and practice of forestry, with a focus on the “triple bottom line”— ecological, economic, and social values. It NOTEBOOK n Page 2
The Forestry Source January 2020: Page 1
