5th Anniversary Outreach: Results and Challenges

Even young organizations need to use milestones as vehicles to consider and assess progress.  That’s just what the Board and staff of the Endowment did with the achievement of five years as an organization.  At its November 2011 meeting, the Board approved an intentional plan to “reach out to interested publics” to share the Endowment’s progress and to seek input as we move into the next five years.

Organizational Input
Among the primary tools the staff developed to enhance awareness and solicit input was a special program that provided an overview of the Endowment’s progress and programmatic investments over its first five years.  We used that presentation to speak to and solicit input from nearly a dozen organizations ranging from the California Board of Registered Foresters to the Professional Agricultural Workers Conference.  Each presentation was designed to provide a high-level Endowment overview followed by an open discussion/input session.

Knowing that there were significant limits to our ability to share this opportunity with anywhere near all of the groups and organizations we desired to reach, we augmented the outreach/input tool to include an on-line survey open to anyone.

Findings
Perhaps we fell prey to hearing what we wanted to hear.  We hope not.  In short, when each group better understood the Endowment’s mission – to advance healthy working forests and family-supporting jobs in rural forest-reliant communities – and that we had to do so only using interest and earnings from the endowment corpus, we found strong support and alignment with our approach.  There were strong kudos for choosing to “do what others can’t or won’t” and to “focus on a few big ideas; rather than being lured by trying to be all things to all people.”

Yes, there were some criticisms and suggestions that we weren’t focusing where the commenter thought we should.  While this list was far shorter than the accolades, we do not discount its importance.  Among the more frequent comments were:  the Endowment should focus on educating the public about the importance of forests and the need for their protection/management; target family forest owners to ensure that they are giving proper attention to long-term stewardship; and do more to address America’s forest health crisis with special attention to sustainable management of the public lands.


To everyone at each of our public sessions or who took the time to provide an online response, you have our appreciation.  We know that we – the Endowment Board and staff – have been given a rare opportunity and even bigger responsibility.  As the largest public charity in America working to advance the cause of forest sustainability and rural-forest health, the challenges are indeed large.  Our funds, while large by historical perspective, pale by any comparison with foundations working on other issues to see the billions of dollars and thousands of staff members allocated to the challenge.

We have a choice.  We can bemoan the fact that we don’t have enough funds to do all that we know we should/wish we could be doing, or, we can do the very best with what we have.  We’ve chosen the latter course.  We look forward to your continued input as we make the journey and as we adjust the tools and course headings along the way.

Written by: Carlton Owen

Wood-to-Energy: A Part of America’s Energy Future

The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection

Lexus automobile with its commercials touting its commitment to “the relentless pursuit of perfection” may lead us to believe that perfection is just a tweak or new gadget away.  Look more deeply.  See the little hedge word there?  Pursuit.  That’s the same caveat that the founding fathers’ placed in the Bill of Rights that accompanied our beloved Constitution.  Recall that American’s are not guaranteed happiness; rather, we have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” 

Happiness or the pursuit of it…that’s a big difference!  It’s this kind of deep thinking that had me considering another famous quote – “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”  Although not a student of world history and literature – thus one reason I won’t make a good Jeopardy! contestant -- I have often been drawn to the quote attributed to Francois-Marie Arouet, a French writer, dentist, and philosopher.  You might know him more commonly as Voltaire (his pen name).

Combining writing, dental, and philosophical thinking and skill would, one might expect, yield eclectic if not break-through thinking.  In Voltarie’s case it clearly resulted in magical output. 

Pursuit vs. Reality
While I’m a big believer in that we should “shoot high” and “dream big,” if perfection is our only objective, we likely will spend most of our time in bitter disappointment.  In reality, there are very few things in life where perfection is even the proper objective.  Things like ensuring that a space capsule re-enters Earth’s atmosphere at the “perfect angle” might be among them.  The difference between perfect and good enough in that instance is truly life or death.

But, most of our decisions and most of our processes aren’t that exacting.  All of this thinking has to do with the vitriolic debate going on across America as we seek to move to a “better, more perfect place” as goes our energy production.  As we look back on the all-too-fast retreat of the 20^th Century, we see the age of fossil fuels – one where oil, coal, and natural gas allowed unprecedented development and movement but as we know now, with some not insignificant downsides (movement of America’s wealth to other not-so-friendly parts of the world and climate change, among them).

Playing to Strengths
We spent more than a century developing and deploying fossil fuels.  With trillions in infrastructure investment, the shift to alternatives won’t come fast nor will it be simple.  In short, we will have to go to increasingly more complicated sources of power and fuel production that the Southern Growth Policies Board in a 2009 reports says will “be highly diversified to address energy needs and capitalize on the unique resources of different regions.  Each location needs to play to its strengths.  This means that areas will need to develop their systems somewhat autonomous from the greater whole because there is a wide diversity of circumstances that affect the efficient production of energy. For example, wind power does best where windy conditions are prevalent, like in the U.S. Northern Plains, solar power does best at southern latitudes with little cloud cover throughout the year like in the U.S. Southwest, while wood-based energy does best where there are productive and abundant forests.” 

Finding Acceptable Options
One of the conundrums in making the shift to suitable and acceptable alternatives is that no alternative is perfect.  But, we must recall that the fuels we wish to shift from are not perfect either.  The Endowment operates from a forest-centric perspective.  One-third of America’s landscape is blanketed with trees.  If we wish to keep those lands in forests, where they are privately-owned (the bulk of all forests), we need to provide markets and economic opportunity.  Where forests are publicly held (exempting statutory wilderness, where nature is allowed to take its course) we need markets that provide economically-viable tools to maintain forest health.

We believe that wood-to-energy is one tool that can help achieve multiple objectives.  It can help keep forests as forests, ensure their health, provide rural family-supporting jobs, and all the while , in the appropriate places and at the appropriate scales, do so while providing just a small sliver of the answer to America’s and the world’s future renewable energy needs.

To expect wood-to-energy to be “perfect” – to have zero emissions and impacts – is ludicrous.  Society must weigh all alternative energy options and not wait for the never-to-be-achieved perfection as we test and develop acceptable alternatives.  We need to make progress toward a brighter and healthier future for forests and for the people who steward as well as those who benefit from them.

Written by: Carlton Owen