Conceiving forest management as providing for current and future social value

Abstract

This paper emphasizes the role of planning and management in providing for forest social values to current and future citizens. Taking a western-world orientation, it examines how forest values originate in society and are expressed to forest managers. For most of the last 200 years, the social needs of public and private forests in the western world were predominantly utilitarian and their immediate social value was well expressed in market prices. As these countries urbanized, romantic and symbolic forest values increased. Today the social values of forest recreation, landscapes and non-game wildlife are of increased importance. These forest social values are usually expressed by social and political systems. Since utilitarian social values are often in conflict with romantic/symbolic forest values today, foresters increasingly are placed in the role of conflict managers. In what they do, and do not do, foresters can dampen or exacerbate forestry social conflict.