Forestry is about people

I have heard that many times. I’m sure that you have heard a variant of this phrase in your own work area; simply replace ‘Forestry’ with whatever you do. Truck driving is about people or Nuclear engineering is about people. However, when one works in research rarely are people the subject of study. I work in the intersection of forestry, wood properties, quantitative genetics and a long etcetera BUT I have never seen a study of people doing this stuff. Instead, there are thousands of studies about the weirdest details of that intersection.

Last Wednesday, I was attending six presentations by undergraduate students working in their dissertations (I am coordinator for that work in our School). Remote sensing is very popular, economics and management are always there. There was even a presentation on genetics of wood properties. And then, gloriously, one of the students (Ruby Sumner) shared that she did a Bachelor of Psychology before studying forestry and that her dissertation was on the social impact of forestry workers in their communities (supervised by Trevor Best). I am the first to confess that I’m a quantitative person, a numbers wallah if you will, but I’m also willing to confess that I was very happy to hear about this not-so-quantitative study.

Dissertations are small projects and I believe the subject deserves much more attention. It will be a lot easier to say that forestry is about people when we know what is happening to their lives, particularly forestry workers.