Academic Programs

Forestry from the ground up

Wildlife, wildfire, soil, timber, people — managing our woodlands looks anything but simple from UC Berkeley’s venerable classroom in the Sierra

By Cathy Cockrell

Cathy Cockrell photo

Fall 2007 | It was 90 years ago, in the summer of 1917, that four University of California students set out to learn forest science from a tent encampment in the northeastern Sierra, eight miles outside the town of Quincy. Only half the class finished the program. A war was on, and two students left at midsummer to join the Army.

Despite the initial attrition, the idea of learning forestry in a forest, from soil to canopy, was an idea with legs, as 48 students who spent this summer at UC Berkeley’s Forestry Field Camp can attest. For generations the camp has been a touchstone experience for many working in forestry, says Keith Gilless, interim dean of Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources (CNR) and director of the field program.

“The list of its former grad-student teaching assistants reads like a who’s who of forestry in California,” he says. Alums have gone on to prominence in the timber industry, as well as to state and federal
land-management agencies, environmental organizations, and academia.

For the eight-week program in the Plumas National Forest students earn 10 undergraduate units; forestry majors (for whom it’s required) typically attend between their sophomore and junior years. “It makes upper-division classes more tangible,” and abstract concepts easier to retain, says Gilless. Where the program once served forestry majors exclusively, its 2007 student roster included more than 30 undergrads (and a few grad students) from other departments under CNR’s big tent.

Classroom and field

Handy labels help students grok the age of this tree. Cathy Cockrell photo

The camp facility features a large dining hall, faculty cabins, and a rudimentary communications infrastructure (wooden phone booth, mess-hall Wi-Fi, a computer lab under construction). Students room in wooden bunkhouses or more primitive two-person “shanties.” Instruction is given in a rustic classroom built in 1921. “We got up in the morning, had breakfast together, went to class in a one-room schoolhouse with an iron stove. I loved that,” recalls camp alumna Gina Lopez.

Then, typically, students travel in vans to field sites — to look for flora and fauna, collect data, meet working foresters, and observe the results of varied forest-management schemes and the aftermath of catastrophic wildfires. Three weeks are devoted to Sierra Nevada ecology, adding a handful of new species each day to students’ knowledge base.

“Everything else would have been impossible without that,” says CNR student Theo Slomoff, a San Francisco native to whom “every tree looked the same” when he first landed at camp. Learning to tell a Jeffrey pine from a Ponderosa is empowering, and sets the stage for five weeks on forest management (a.k.a. silviculture), forest measurement, and forest operations.

By design, it’s hard to leave camp with a simplistic view of forests or forestry. “One of the exciting things about CNR is that there are these wildly divergent views,” notes Louise Fortmann, professor of natural-resource sociology in the college. It has molecular biologists jazzed about bioengineering, as well as students dead set against GMO “Frankenfoods,” students who aspire to careers in the timber industry and those who categorically reject commercial tree harvesting, particularly on public land.

At camp they meet, shed stereo-types of each other, and together learn first-hand about the complex demands on our fiercely contested forests. This summer CNR added the human dimension to the equation, with a week of field trips to meet local leaders and stakeholders — a timber-company owner, a county supervisor, U.S. foresters, and local Maidu tribal members, among others — to better understand economic and social pressures facing rural communities and their residents.

‘A big family’

Those who have been to camp tend to maintain strong connections through the Cal Forestry Club, as students, and later as California Alumni Foresters. “It’s sort of a big family,” says Al Stangenberger, the alumni group’s executive secretary for nearly 25 years.
What makes the place so memorable for so many is its mix of academic instruction, hands-on field experience, and social bonding in the woods at a formative time in students’ lives. “Here you’re learning even when you’re not trying. You’re immersed in it,” says 2007 participant Sarah Heard.

“What struck me most, and what stays with me, is the camaraderie,” says Lopez, “the sense of community among the students and professors, even the staff, like the cooks.”

The summer 2007 campers have now moved on — a few to life after Berkeley, most to fall semester. “Life in civilization is more of an adjustment than I’d thought,” Slomoff reported. “The weirdest part by far is seeing former campers in fancy clothes, showered and clean-shaven.”

Learn more about Forestry Field Camp and its students at newscenter.berkeley.edu/goto/forestrycamp.