Long-term Gardening

The mountain ridge was lined with golden light as I drove southbound on Route 17 near the Catskill mountains of upstate New York. A hot cup of gas station coffee kept me company as the signal from my phone began to wane. It was just before dawn and I was on my way to meet Mike Arnold Jr, and his father Mike Arnold Sr, both of whom being stewards of the forest based in the Northeast and co-owners of MJM Forest Products LLC. I was allowed to shadow a job-site they were contracted on harvesting timber sustainably.

When it comes to understanding the forest, together they hold well over 50 years of shared knowledge and experience. Mike Jr.’s robust background includes a Bachelor’s degree in Natural Resources Management and Policy from Paul Smith’s College (with a minor in Geographical Information Systems) as well as time spent as a wildland firefighter, while Mike Sr. holds a degree in Natural Resource Conservation from Finger Lakes Community College.

With only having surface-level knowledge of the complexities within the world forestry services (and given the heightened concern for our environment in the midst of climate change), I felt it important to learn about the industry thoroughly from this father-son led team whose primary goal is to ensure healthy regrowth of the land.

When I first met Mike, he and his father were already hard at work, having prepped and sharpened their blades long before I even woke up. Covered in wood chips and dirt, we talked immediately about the forest, resource management and what it was like spend a day in their steel-toed boots.

Their business, MJM Forest Products LLC, is a service that essentially offers sustainable forest management and timber harvesting working with and for the State of New York. With the guidance of professional forestry technicians, Mike and his father harvest timber from clients (which include landowners) whose incentives include money or tax benefits for allowing certain trees to be taken for commercial processing as well as trees that are unhealthy or deemed undesirable towards the overall health of the forest. 

That entire morning I followed Mike through the woodlands as he explained which trees the forest technician had considered appropriate to take and which ones were deemed “undesirable.” These trees were usually rotting, dead or showed signs of infection. Removing these trees allowed for better natural resource allocation, giving younger healthy trees a chance to reach their full potential. An active approach to forest management allows for this renewable resource to regenerate and produce for decades to come. In fact, Mike Sr. has been able to visit land that he worked on 30 years ago thriving with tall, robust trees today.

In talking to Mike Jr., this practice of sustainable forest management is something that early Native Americans practiced for hundreds of years. In Menominee County, Wisconsin, the Menominee Tribe have pulled nearly two hundred million cubic feet of timber from their land since 1854 there are more trees on the same acreage over a century ago. It is believed that even though a forest will experience its own natural cycle, human beings have a responsibility to actively maintain the land in order to live alongside it.

Not only does the state and landowner benefit from timber harvesting, so does the wilderness itself. When a tree falls and is delimbed, not too far away are deer and other mammals waiting to get after the leaves that were too high up for them to reach. The scat they leave behind eventually gets looped into the regenerative cycle and the forest can grow once more. 

A conscious mentality to harvesting anything from nature ensures that there will still be something to come back to after you’ve walked away. Mike Jr. calls this “long-term gardening”. 

Timber harvesting under the direction of a professional forester can help you make decisions with the future in mind, promoting your goals as a landowner and ensuring the health and productivity of your forest.

Department of Environmental Conservation, New York State

In the early days of logging, timber-men in the 60’s would cut trees starting from near head-high. Any approach done hastily inadvertently results in either completely dead trees or unhealthy ones. Since then, logging practices have changed slightly due to increasing awareness of environmental conservation and the fight against climate change.

These days come with their own struggles however, as private institutions clear-cut large swaths of forest land, practicing high-grading in which they target only the highest quality timber possible, afterwards vaguely promising an effort to re-plant the land with more trees. Though it’s believed that promise is sometimes considered a form of greenwashing where “a company makes an environmental claim about something the organization is doing that is intended to promote a sense of environmental impact that doesn't exist.”

Thus, sustainable harvesting is considered the most viable solution to putting the well-being of the land before profit. In every industry we find that big operations motivated by profit leave devastation in their wake without giving nature a chance to recover. The responsible approach to timber harvesting is to have a strong sense of forest ecology where for everything you take, you allow for something to come back in its place. This also comes with the understanding of entire taxonomies of invasive species of plants and animals that create even more challenges for native growth. Having a robust understanding of forest stewardship in this case, is critical in the fight against climate change along with determination and a bit of elbow grease.