What Are We Hiding Behind the Visual Buffer Strip? Forest Aesthetics Reconsidered

Forest aesthetics provide the public façade for forestry ethics. Current policies send a hypocritical message of citizens about the practice, intent and ethics of forestry by suggesting that foresters need to disguise the practice of forestry. Such policies imply, to an increasingly wary public, that forestry is bad for the land and that foresters cannot be trusted. We hope that the profession will discuss and negotiate an aesthetics policy that is consonant with--or part of--its Code of Ethics. We review the implications for forestry of competing aesthetic policies, and conclude that forestry should embrace an aesthetic ideal that is analogous to a gardener's work of tending a garden.