Linked with Trees for life, with Now we are human commodities, with THE ECONOMICS OF EXTINCTION, and with THE SELF-INFLICTED COST OF ECONOMIC MYOPIA.
Chris Maser is a freelance consultant on sustainable forestry. He is the author of some 30 books, some 250 articles, he leads conferences, speeches and workshops. His career spans thirty years as a research ecologist in forest, shrub steppe, subarctic, desert, coastal, and agricultural settings. He was a member of Yale’s Peabody Museum Prehistoric Expedition to Egypt, conducted a three-year coastal survey for the University of Puget Sound, and carried out an eight-year study of old-growth forests with the U.S. Department of the Interior. He has given more than 100 talks throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia. Speaking topics include sustainable forestry, sustainable community development, and resolving environmental conflicts. (full text).
He writes: « I am but one person…. What can I do? The answer is always the same: I can do something. It doesn’t have to be much. It only needs to be done with love and it becomes great, no matter how small it may seem to the giver of the gift. Ours is not to question the size or value of our individual contributions. Our task in life is simply to give from the essence of who we are. Each gift is unique and valuable, and each adds a necessary piece to the whole ». (full long text).
Homepage of his website, and its sitemap.
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Chris Maser – USA
Land-Use Planning for sustainable development.
Trained primarily as a vertebrate zoologist, Chris Maser spent over 25 years as a research scientist in natural history and ecology in forest, shrub steppe, subarctic, desert, coastal, and agricultural settings. He was a research mammalogist in Nubia, Egypt, (1963-1964) with the Yale University Peabody Museum Prehistoric Expedition and a research mammalogist in Nepal (1966-1967) for the U. S. Naval Medical Research Unit #3 based in Cairo, Egypt, where he participated in a study of tick-borne diseases. From 1970 through 1973, he conducted an ecological survey of the Oregon Coast for the University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, Washington. Following that, he was a research ecologist with the U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management from 1974-1987 (the last eight studying old-growth forests in western Oregon) and a landscape ecologist with the Environmental Protection Agency 1990-1991). Today Chris is an author as well as an international lecturer, and facilitator in resolving environmental conflicts, vision statements, and sustainable community development. He also an international consultant in forest ecology and sustainable forestry practices. He has written over 270 publications, including more than twenty books about sustainable forestry, resolving
environmental conflict, the various aspects of sustainable community development, natural history of mammals, gardening, and the perpetual consequences of fear and violence in today’s world. He has worked and/or lectured in Canada, Egypt, France, Germany, Japan, Malaysia, Nepal, Slovakia, Switzerland, and throughout the United States. (Read text).
The Seen and Unseen World of the Fallen Tree.
He writes also: Every enterprise, be it an author writing a book, an entrepreneur building a business of ecotourism, or a community planning for its future, needs to have the organizing context of a vision toward which to strive; this is particularly true of a community, which must create and work within a shared vision. As a strong organizing context, a shared vision has some distinctive traits: (1) it tends to focus a wide range of human concerns; (2) it is strongly centered in the community; (3) it can use alternative scenarios to explore a possible futures by depicting in words and images that which a community is striving to become; (4) its creation relies on the trust, respect, and inclusivity of interpersonal relationships; (5) it is ideally suited to, and depends on, public involvement; and (6) it is ideally suited to the use of creative, graphic imagery. Although a shared vision does not replace other kinds of land-use planning, it is the organizational context within which all other planning fits, a context that is all too often is forgotten.
The greatest single agent of failure to achieve one’s desires, which I have seen over and over again, is not understanding the importance of a vision, how to create one, or a commitment to its implementation. This observation is especially true of communities. Therefore, prior to discussing the visioning process I use, it is necessary to understand something about the parts of a vision, which include: (1) understanding a vision, goals, and objectives; (2) the outcome of a vision is expressed in the negotiability of constraints; and (3) monitoring tests the effectiveness of constraints.
Understanding vision, goals and objectives: … (full long text).
From the Forest to the Sea: A Story of Fallen Trees.
… There was a time when people were valued for what they were as individuals. Although American workers have long had an enforced workweek of 40 hours, there currently is an insidious infringement into personal life due to pagers and cell phones, which allow corporations to « own » employees 24 hours a day. Businesses seem to have no moral compunctions about calling employees whenever they choose-« for the good of the company. » For those who would choose to live by the corporate proverb, « for the good of the company, » the Families and Work Institute said that in 2001 employees are more likely to: … (full text).
Unexpected Harmonies: Self-Organization in Liberal Modernity and Ecology, 1993.
And he writes: Yet, having learned little or nothing from history, our civilization is currently destroying the very environment from which it sprang and on which it relies for continuance. Society as we know it cannot, therefore, be the final evolutionary stage for human existence. But what lies beyond our current notion of civilization? What is the next frontier for people to conquer? Is it outer space as so often stated? No, it is inner space, the conquest of oneself, which many assert is life’s most difficult task. As the Buddha said: « Though he should conquer a thousand men in the battlefield a thousand times, yet he, indeed, who would conquer himself is the noblest victor. »
In the material world, self-conquest means bringing our thoughts and behaviors in line with the immutable biophysical laws governing the world in which we live, raising the level of our concisousness to be in tune with the law of cause and effect. In the spiritual realm, this means disciplining our thoughts and behaviors in accord with the highest metaphysical truths handed down throughout the ages, such as: love your neighbor as yourself, and treat others as you want them to treat you … (full long text).
Demonstration of Ecosystem Management Options.
Thirty years ago, I asked myself a question: How does one person influence the world for the better? As that question formed itself, the answer came from somewhere in the collective unconscious, where all human ideas have been archived throughout the long reach of time: « Those who have elevated humanity toward greater consciousness have excelled in the art of public speaking and/or writing. » That was the day I began my quest to excel at both. As far as speaking in public is concerned, I found it excruciating for the better part of two decades. I was terrified. I felt ignorant and foolish. I often bumbled my way through a speech with a mouth so dry it felt like the « dust bowl » of the 1930s must have felt to those who were in it. I sweated profusely, desperately wanted to go the rest room, and was absolutely positive everyone thought me an idiot. And if that was not enough, I took myself to the proverbial woodshed after every speech and proceeded to berate myself and second-guess everything I had said or thought I should have said, but didn’t. (full text).
His publications: on his own website; on UN jobs; on amazon; on play.com; on chapters indigo.ca.
According to the reductionist mechanical worldview—which is today overlain with the notion of continual economic expansion – the economic process of producing and consuming material goods and services has no deleterious effects on the ecosystem because the assumptions are that natural resources are limitless and the unintended, deleterious effects of the economic process are inconsequential. In contrast to the dominant worldview, however, the paradigm of sustainability is neither mechanical nor reversible. It is entropic, which means that the Earth’s resources and its ability to absorb and cleanse the waste produced by humanity’s economic activities are both finite. (THREE ECONOMIC PARADIGMS, full text).
A thousand years of solitude destroyed / Review of ‘Forest Primeval, The Natural History of an Ancient Forest‘.
I was thirteen about to turn fourteen in the Autumn of 1952, when I was enrolled in « Le Chataigneraie, » an all-boys, Swiss boarding school located near the small village of Coppêt between Geneva and Lausanne—an enrollment that felt more like abandonment, like being sentenced to a life term in prison. Although much detail has faded with the years, some is still clear. (the story ‘Magpie’, its full text).
links:
THE REDESIGNED FOREST, A critical review;