Forest Conservation

By Dennis McGrath
President and CEO
Western Pennsylvania Conservancy

An old wag once remarked, “If it doesn’t matter where you are headed then any road will do.”

Such a casual, carefree approach may be well suited for a weekend drive in the country, but it won’t work for any successful enterprise, business or organization that is engaged in a long-term task or mission. In our efforts to conserve the lands and waters that define Pennsylvania’s natural landscape, it is important that we think in terms of centuries, natural legacies for the future, and conservation success.

Our challenge now is to begin designing what conservation success looks like across the Pennsylvania landscape, aligning and applying our organizational resources to fulfill our conservation goals, and measuring our progress and accomplishments against that design. Approaching our work in this fashion creates clarity, transparency and accountability, three important elements of an enterprise that takes a long-term view.

The first step we are taking (and certainly in conjunction with others who share in our conservation mission) is to develop a strategic guide or “conservation blueprint” of the significant conservation areas and needs of the region. The blueprint can be thought of as a roadmap, developed with time and space in mind. It will serve as our long-term reference for the direction of the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy in the decades to come. It becomes the basis for our strategies and actions and must be adaptable.

Since so much of our state is defined by forests, it seems both practical and prudent that our “conservation blueprint” work focus on Penn’s Woods. Forest conservation is important for nearly every kind of natural feature in the state, from migratory birds to shale barrens to the waters that feed the Chesapeake Bay, Lake Erie and the Ohio River.

In this issue of CONSERVE we cover some of the major forest regions of the commonwealth, address why forests are important and what threats they face in the near future and over the long-term. We will begin to shape our conservation strategies to address the threats to our forests, and, in a way, “cut our teeth” as we approach working at a scale on which nature operates.

This we know: Forests cover nearly 17 million acres of Pennsylvania’s landscape yet are disappearing at a rate of nearly 300 acres a day. They support more than 10,000 species of plants and animals and other important forms of life, and a forest products industry that employs nearly 100,000 people. Our forests generate $5.5 billion in measurable economic annual activity. No one has yet put a price tag on the ecological services such as clean water or climate control that our forests provide.

Please take in this special issue and join us generously in any way you can to conserve the forests that define our namesake, are part of our heritage, and will become our legacy to the future.

Go to the featured article, The Forests of Pennsylvania.