We believe in educational programs to acquaint all Americans with the scope of environmental and ecological problems, with their personal and collective dependency upon solution of those problems, and with the inter-relationships which must be developed among education, science, technology, and communications if we are to make meaningful progress.

The legislation being considered here today represents a basis for responsible approaches to citizen understanding of and citizen participation in these complex matters. With appropriate amendments to marshal highly qualified advisory direction, we are confident that this proposed legislation will make substantial contributions to the national welfare.

The forest products industries are pleased that we have been given the opportunity to share our information and ideas with you here today.

Thank you.

(Complete statement follows:)

STATEMENT OF DR. CASEY E. WESTELL, JR., GENERAL WOODLANDS MANAGER, PACKAGING CORPORATION OF AMERICA, FILER CITY, MICH.

Mr. Chairman, members of the subcommittee, it is a distinct pleasure to be with you today to testify on H.R. 14753, the Environmental Quality Education Act.

My name is Casey E. Westell, Jr. I am General Woodlands Manager for Packaging Corporation of America, and my headquarters is in Filer City, Michigan. I am appearing on behalf of the Forest Industries Council which is a policy coordinating organization on resource matters for the American Forest Institute, the American Paper Institute, the American Plywood Association, the American Pulpwood Association, and the National Forest Products Association. Together these organizations represent the various facets of industrial forest management and forest products manufacture in this country. As an element of their resource responsibilities, they are directly concerned with the environmental aspects of timber growing, cultivation, harvesting and conversion into more than five thousand useful products.

My qualifications as spokesman for these groups rest upon my longtime participation in the activities of the American Pulpwood Association and the American Forest Institute, my professional activities, and my educational training. Since leaving the military service at the end of World War II, I have been directly concerned with matters of forest ecology and environment. I hold the degrees of Bachelor of Science in Forestry, Master of Wildlife Management, and Doctor of Philosophy in Forest and Wildlife Ecology, all from the University of Michigan.

Currently, I am a member of Governor Milliken's cabinet-level Council on Environmental Quality of the State of Michigan, a third-term member of the McIntire-Stennis Cooperative Forestry Research Advisory Committee, and a member of the Michigan Natural Resources Council. I am a director of the Michigan Association of Conservation Ecologists and of Trout, Unlimited, which I served as its first president for four years. I am also a member of the Society of American Foresters and the Wildlife Society. In 1963, I was appointed by Governor Romney as a member of the Conservation Study Committee which resulted in the reorganization of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. I have written and lectured extensively in my fields of interest.

From 1951 to 1954, I held research and teaching posts in forest and wildlife ecology at the University of Michigan. The following year I conducted research in forest ecology for the U. S. Forest Service and then joined Packaging Corporation of America in 1955 as a research forester. In 1956, I began five years as the corporation's forest and wildlife ecologist, then served as chief forest ecologist until 1965 when I became general woodlands manager, the post I now hold.

In detailing my background, it has not been my intention to parade personal accomplishments. Rather, I had hoped to establish for this committee that industrial personnel, by reason of training, responsibilities and citizen participation,

devote themselves to the public interest on a broad base as well as to the immediate benefits of their employers.

The forest products industries, more than most, are dedicated in principle as well as for sound woodland management reasons, to quote the language of the bill, "to enhancement of environmental quality and ecological balance."

It is our earnest hope that the fundamentally sound purposes of H.R. 14753 will convey these facts to all the people through effective educational programs and prompt citizen support of modern forest management activities on all commercial timber lands, both public and private.

H.R. 14753 can be an effective means of advancing public understanding of environmental problems, and what can be done about them. Federal support for development of curricula and course materials is a different approach than Congress has commonly taken in the past, when it has enacted programs designed to strengthened instruction in given subjects through grants to state education agencies. Nonetheless, the approach is not unknown.

The McIntire-Stennis Act (P.L. 87-788, 87th Congress, October 10, 1962) is a classic example of effective coordination of federal educational objectives, funding, and advisory management. I shall speak to its application to H.R. 14753 at a later point. This precedent establishes the important fact that the parties who hold the key to environmental quality should be part and parcel of the development of such curricula. Otherwise, we will wind up teaching theories in the classroom that bear little relationship to what is happening, and to what is possible. Representatives of industry, trade associations, municipal water and waste disposal agencies, regulatory bodies, and the Public Health Service should be among those who take part in any realistic appraisal of environment, and its enhancement. Moreover, they are the source of enormous knowledge of what the problems are, technically and economically.

There is scarcely a manufacturing industry, or extractive industry, that is not affected by the national concern for resources and environmental quality. Some in industry are far more concerned than the public is about diminishing resources, their conservation, and their replenishment. Industry bears a major responsibility for the quality of environment. It would seem logical, therefore, that industry be a participant, not only in finding the means of controlling pollution and ecological imbalance, but in educating the public to the issues.

Essentially, my testimony embraces four major points:

First, a challenge-or admonition, if you will-to set and maintain from the outset only the highest and best of professional standards for teaching and disseminating information about environmental quality and ecology.

Second, a brief presentation of some of our industry's experiences and efforts in environmental education over the years.

Third, some recommendations with respect to the legislation itself.

Fourth, some specific offers and suggestions as to how the American forest products industries can be helpful in assisting and advancing the worthwhile aims of this legislation.

Gentlemen, logging is one of the oldest industries in North America. It is believed that Indians logged the Southwest 4,000 years ago and that Norsemen cut timber in the Northeast several hundred years before Columbus arrived here.

Forests are basic to our environment, and, happily, they are a renewable natural resource. They are at once the home of wildlife and watersheds, living factories consuming carbon dioxide and producing oxygen, scenes of beauty and sites for recreation, as well as the source of timber for building and renewing man's own habitats-his homes and his cities--and for supplying him with thousands of wood products.

The art of silviculture (producing and caring for a forest) today has infinitely more basis in scientific method and technology-and its practitioners more professionalism-than ever before. Where once Indians set fire to dense, old growth forests to aid their regeneration and provide browse for animals, we prune, thin, harvest and employ other proven timber improvement praetices. Where once the early settlers and our forefathers depleted forests in the East and Midwest as they moved westward settling the country, we are reforesting our private industrial timber lands at a higher rate than we are harvesting. In the South, the same pattern has occurred. Intensive timber management has enabled the South to regrow timber at a rate which permits harvesting of its second forest now and, at the same time, provides for planting the third forest.

Today, thousands of industry foresters plant, thin, fertilize, harvest and regenerate their tree crops for the present and future use and enjoyment of man in accord with conservation values and other multiple factors of the environment. Foresters have to be professionally trained experts in ecology and are among the most sensitive to changes in environment. We foresters, directly and indirectly, are the ones closest to and most careful about the proper management of our timber lands. For we are the stewards of most of the government and industrial forest lands in this country.

The "Paul Bunyan Syndrome" of irresponsible loggers and raped forests is a part of history, repugnant to our ideals and contradictory to our contemporary practices. In fact, a primary reason for our industry's support of the principles of this Act is an overriding desire to dispel with facts and truth the confused tangle of myth, ignorance and misunderstanding about forest resources which dominates the attitudes of millions of Americans.

Potential progress in forestry, particularly in our publicly owned timber lands and in the application of new scientific methods of forest management in this country, we believe, has been handicapped because of lack of understanding and knowledge on the part of many of our citizens. Not a few of those opposed to more progressive forest management are Members of Congress, and, therefore, obliged to make decisions on laws affecting our forest resources.

Allow me to illustrate how the task of our industry functioning in a setting of environmental illiteracy can be extremely difficult, and on occasion, impossible. Perhaps, nowhere has public misunderstanding been greater than in connection with the redwood trees. Many believe they grow only in Northern California, but they actually thrive on five continents. Many believe redwoods are in danger of disappearing, but foresters calculate there may be more redwoods now than when man began to utilize them. Many believe they are the oldest living thing on earth, but they are the fourth oldest known species of tree in California. Many believe that redwoods living today were here "when Christ walked the earth," but the greatest age so far determined by an actual count of the growth rings is just over 2.200, the conclusion of a half century of sampling and studies shows less than three percent of the old growth trees are over one thousand years old, and the lifespan maximum is normally from five hundred to eight hundred years. Many believe the forest products industry cares only about cutting down trees, but many of the majestic groves of superlative redwoods in 29 State parks and the new Redwood National Park in California were either donated by private redwood companies or were set aside from cutting in cooperation with the Savethe-Redwoods League and the State of California while the companies continued to pay the taxes on the land for decades. Many believe that natural growth trees are somehow special, but under the scientific management practices of privately owned producing forests, new young-growth redwoods may equal the height of the mature giants in less than a man's lifetime.

I would submit, gentlemen, that if the foregoing opinions were put in the form of a quiz, hardly one person in one hundred could come up with the right answers. Yes, our industry welcomes and unhesitatingly supports environmental education programs that will provide our citizens with the environmental facts of life. Some of us believe that in our present society and educational system our youth know all about sex before they get to the birds and bees and too many never do get to the flowers and trees.

Exceptionally few graduates of our public, and private schools today have even a minimum appreciation or understanding of the basic facts of the ecological web of life and man's place in it. So long as man does not possess these facts, he will continue to defy and to destroy nature. He will not even have sufficient knowledge to enact appropriate laws to protect himself from himself.

Equally disturbing is that many of these environmentally illiterate people, while honestly concerned about pollution and other environmental problems, will strike out at superficial symptoms while ignoring the disease itself. In the longterm, our environmental problems can only be solved by those with competence and training in environmental studies.

The challenge our industry makes to you who are writing the legislative history of this bill and to those who will administer it is to maintain the integrity of ecological science so it will be well prepared to serve and guide our actions in this area. Emotional responses to real problems can be wholly destructive.

In a prophetic introduction to a book entitled "Ecology" by Peter Farb and the editors of Life Magazine published in 1963, Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands,

then president of the World Wildlife Fund, said, "Ecology, in the next 10 or 20 years, may well become the most popular of sciences-a household word to those masses who today are ignorant of both the word and its meaning." Significantly, we think, he added, "It is much to be hoped, however, that such an aroused interest will not affect pure ecology as a science by diluting it to an amateurish half-science that appeals to the masses."

In a recent lecture at the Smithsonian Institution, Dr. Rene Jules DuBois, a microbiologist, experimental pathologist and Pulitzer Prize winning author, contrasted differing attitudes toward nature in these words: "On the one hand, passive worship; on the other, creative intervention."

Obviously, an eroded farm or hillside could not be an object of passive worship to anyone. But, a forest not only could be, but is, an object of passive worship to a number of rational Americans.

Naturally, we have very definite ideas as to which of these conflicting philosophies-passive worship or creative intervention can result in greater benefit to a greater number of people as well as being an environmentally sound concept. We are willing to take our chances in an ideological arena open to inquiry and unrestricted to new ideas and information in the truest sense of academic freedom.

In other words, we are convinced that, in the long-term, environmental education will mean a triumph for rational discourse and treatment of our national problems of pollution and protection of our natural resources.

Forests, we believe, occupy a particular environmental niche because they are a renewable resource. Wise use of forests, not preservation, means that man is able to consume timber for the benefits it provides even as he increases the total supply of that natural resource.

We cannot help but believe that the environmental literacy of our citizenry is the key to the successful solution of the problems largely created by man, not always because he did not care, but because he did not anticipate the full consequences of his honestly motivated actions. While we do not look upon education as a magical cure for all of our ills environmental or ecological, without it. we believe, we cannot hope to succeed in this national obligation.

Our own industry's efforts over the years in a wide variety of environmental education programs is proof of our confidence that the best interests of our country and our industry are best served by an informed public. A better understanding of the fantastic possibilities and opportunities in modern, scientific management of our forest resources will benefit all of us. It is this premise which underlies the educational and informational programs currently being undertaken by our industry.

Hundreds of forest products companies and associations are engaged in a wide range of projects and activities initiated and administered by themselves or in conjunction with local schools, school districts, state education systems. colleges, universities, local units of government, conservation groups and women's organizations.

In the Northwest, for example, each year about 40,000 Oregon and Washington sixth-graders are taken into the forests for full-day conservation field trips. Manpower for the program is largely provided by the forest industry in cooperation with several governmental agencies.

In Oregon, a current survey reveals a wide range of activities benefitting both students and teachers. Several companies have agreements with local schools and school districts for field study trips to private industrial forests. One company is developing a teacher training center in conservation education on an island in the Puget Sound area; another hosts an annual teachers workship at its experimental seed orchard. A number of companies sponsor tree planting days for school children, one of these programs dating back to 1945. Many companies provide conservation education packets for teachers and students, answer student information requests, and make available films and speakers upon request. One company provides teaching aids for school use in connection with woods-andplants tours at all its operating branches. Several companies and associations provide resource specialists who teach in as many as ten conservation education workshops in the Northwest.

In California, 60 underprivileged high school children participate in a 10week environmental study course held during the mornings at various conservation clubs and in the afternoons at a forest products corporation's logging camp. A paper company recently completed a 12-day environmental seminar for children of its employees, including a tour of its mill and water pollution control facilities. A three-day annual redwood region Junior Logging Congress involves 100

high school forestry students. Also in redwood country are six redwood demonstration forests, sponsored by various companies, which are visited by some 100,000 persons each year. Just next week, another demonstration forest on a portion of a privately-owned tree farm will be dedicated with the planting of seedlings and it will eventually become public.

In Illinois, a tree farm well-known to Illinois youngsters and adults is operated under multiple use management and features a demonstration forest, identification of trees, a saw mill and other learning experiences which can be seen in person or read about in an explanatory booklet.

In Wisconsin, a paper firm cooperates with a state university in sponsoring a twice-a-year conservation program and field trip for prospective biology teachers and a seminar for faculty members. Another paper company has developed two do-it-yourself tours-one by auto, the other walking-used by thousands of students and teachers as well as Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and conservation groups. A colored slide presentation, based on the tours, is available to schools. Several companies produce educational materials for various grade levels.

Many similar programs are conducted in other states in the West, Midwest and South. For obvious reasons, the preponderance of the individual company sponsored educational activities has thus far occurred in forest areas. We have other programs for introducing these activities to urban areas. Most are sponsored by the major forest industry associations which generally have at least one executive skilled in working with the schools. The American Forest Institute sponsors the TREE FARM Program, KEEP GREEN Program and promotes forestry in every state through schools, Boy Scouts, 4-H Clubs, Future Farmers of America and through garden and women's clubs. This organization is 25 years old and has spent many millions of dollars in educational work.

The so-called demonstration forest idea is a project which can be transplanted anywhere in the country where there are existing tree farms, a few acres of timberland or even a large available field where a producing forest could be developed, provided suitable sponsors and technological assistance were secured. Another demonstration forest on a tree farm in the West defines the scope of education possibilities in such a project. There, thousands of teacher-escorted school children have followed well-marked trails to areas which identify different species of trees, show how thinning improves a timber stand, and instruct about wildlife prevalent in the area with actual stuffed animals and birds. The visitors can see a weather station where they learn aspects of meteorology and an artificial lake stocked with fish. They can observe small trees growing in a nursery, and they learn about diseases that affect trees in a special "hospital.” Such living education experiences need only be adapted to available land in or near urban and metropolitan centers. Recently, Los Angeles primary graders planted 100 pine seedlings on a steep slope bordering the Hollywood Freeway to launch the second session of a unique urban demonstration forest project jointly sponsored by Universal Studios, the forest products industry, Los Angeles City and County schools and the Los Angeles County Forestry Department. During the 1968-69 school year, about 1,000 seedlings were planted in four studio lot areas, with an excellent survival rate reported. The school children are enjoying an outdoor educational environmental experience of growing their own forest and learning the multiple use benefits of wood production, watershed protection and wildlife improvement. Long-range plans call for development of nature trails and more sophisticated ecological and environmental study experiences.

The Southern Forest Institute helps sponsor forestry summer camps for high school students on demonstration forests in most states from Texas to Virginia. Trees for Tomorrow, Inc., sponsored by pulp and paper companies in Wisconsin and neighboring states sponsor summer training for high school teachers in forestry, game management and conservation.

Right here in the District of Columbia's Rock Creek Park is a federally sponsored nature study center and marked nature trail which might easily be upgraded and expanded.

In brief, our forest products industries have pioneered in environmental and ecological education and will surely cooperate in programs to extend the scope of public understanding of the relationship between vigorous forests and dependent man.

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