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Zhang Travels in Pinchot’s Steps for Sabbatical Gifford Pinchot holds an important place in the history of American forestry. As the first chief – and a founding force – of the U.S. Forest Service, he exerted a great deal of influence on the development of the profession in this country. Pinchot famously brought forestry to the United States after studying at the AgroParis Tech in Nancy, France – then called the French School of Forestry – which was one of the oldest forestry education institutions in the world. During the six years in the early 2000s that he served as a board member of the Pinchot Institute for Conservation, Alumni, and George W. Peake Jr. Professor, Daowei Zhang was intrigued by Pinchot’s time spent in France. During his tenure at the institute, Zhang developed the desire to see the places Pinchot studied; although the time wasn’t right then, he began to think about seeing how and where Pinchot originally learned forestry. After his textbook, Forest Economics, was published in 2011, the time seemed to be right. He reached out to Anne Stenger, the director of the Forest Economics Laboratory (LEF), which is under the auspices of the French National Institute of Agronomic Research (Institut national de la recherche agronomique, or INRA) and AgroParis Tech, and he says “they, especially Dr. Stenger, Dr. Erwin Dreyer of INRA, and Dr. Bernard ROMANAMAT of AgroParis Tech, warmly welcomed me, and, in fact, helped me get grants that helped with housing and travel expenses.” The first question was what his work would be while there. Foremost in his mind was to challenge himself and to reach into new territory in his own research. “For the forestry profession, there are essentially two services. One is timber and other forest products, and another is environmental services. Water conservation, carbon sequestration, endangered species conservation – that’s all forestry. I have worked most of my career on the timber side, so I purposefully made the decision to pay more attention to the environmental services side.” After his initial inquiries, there followed a series of communications and one exploratory visit to be sure that it would be a productive working relationship. It was indeed productive, with Zhang and Stenger producing three papers submitted for publication during his six-month sabbatical stay in Nancy, France between January and July in 2013. In addition, Zhang gave seminars at AgroParis Tech in Nancy, INRA headquarters in Champenoux, and the Swedish Agricultural University in Umea. He also served as the keynote speaker at a workshop of the Third Annual World Planted Forests Conference in Porto, Portugal. The first paper accepted for publication involved this idea of timber versus ecosystem services in the marketplace. That is, how does value get assigned to the intangible services that forests provide for the public good? Zhang stresses that it is a theoretical paper meant to explore the question of how to assign economic value to forest ecosystem services, which are obviously not traded in the marketplace. He explains that landowners face a tradeoff in getting the most out of their land. “You do not want to take too much timber out, but on the
environmental services side, how do you pay for it? If I am a private landowner and cannot harvest my timber, I’m stuck. How will society compensate landowners for those kinds of things?” “Our conclusion was that you have to be very careful,” he says. This paper was inspired by a recent article that listed the value of ecosystem services as twice the global GDP. He wanted to test this idea, and see if it really was possible to assign value to these intangibles, a conceptual development that also holds policy implications as the political ‘marketplace’ is often the entity allocating resources to produce these services. Next, Zhang and Stenger took up the question of timber insurance. Few countries have an established system of insuring timber, though agricultural crops have a long history of being insured. However, timber grows more valuable over a long period of time. What happens if a catastrophic event such as a tornado or a hurricane damages healthy timber that now represents a 20-year investment? After a thorough comparison of practices in other countries, Zhang offers some practical guidance; for example, insuring only reforestation costs ensures that the landowner receives some protection, and that the public sees green trees shortly after a disaster. The final paper was a review of planted forest development in four countries – the U.S., China, France, and Brazil. They discussed the economics and policy instruments relevant to forest plantations, then compared development in the four named countries. Zhang says they concluded that for conservation and efficient development, countries need certain things in place, such as secure property rights and efficient governance and administration. Finally, Professor Zhang participated in Nicolas Robert’s PhD defense at AgroParis Tech in January. To do so, and to learn more about his host country, he made the effort to learn French. Although not proficient in French, he says he nonetheless did daily things with his broken French. He hopes to continue studying French even now that he has returned to Auburn. Though his sabbatical has been completed, the collaboration with his colleagues in Nancy has not ended. He says that another paper comparing different countries’ approach to biodiversity in forests – endangered species conservation – is in development. Zhang also visited multiple various forests in France and select other European countries to gain insight into forest conditions and industry practices. He delivered his impressions of the French forestry industry, along with a summary of his other activities during his stay, in an address to his LEF colleagues in July 2013. He concluded the presentation with a final word on his stay: “It was Gifford Pinchot who attracted me to Nancy initially. He has left an incredible legacy in American forestry and conservation. My sixmonth stay here has made me understand better where he came up with his ideas and where he wanted to achieve in his policy prescriptions 100plus years ago. I conclude by saying that my visit is valuable, and that it was too short.”
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