The third year in my Forest Management degree consisted of three classes I now refer to as The Holy Triangle. Forest Ecology in the Fall, then Forest Economics and Timber Management the following Spring. Everyone in the College of Natural Resource Management had to take these three classes, not just the forestry students, and that is where the fun begins.

Forest Ecology is just as it sounds. Very friendly to the modern environmentally “conscientious” person. Even taught by a professor who was hip and Hawaiian shirt casual all the time. Even so, a very dense class thick with lots of interesting and complex concepts.

The first month of the Spring semester was marked by people arguing with the Forest Economics professor about how wrong he was. To them he was contradicting things we learned in Forest Ecology. There were people standing and crying, pleading with the professor that he needed to change economics to make it fit ecology. (Yes! Even way back in… 91′.) After about a month those people gave up; resolving to see economics as evil and leaving it at that.

I once tried to explain to one of those people that it is not the professors job to teach us what we believe. It was our job to learn the basic principles, then apply them according to our own personalities and interests. It didn’t take.

For me, the real lesson came from watching people cope with Timber Management. They simply dismissed Management as the effort to maximize profit. They saw things linearly; on one side was ecology, and the other was economics. They did not grasp that Management was its own esoteric science, and true managers simply wanted to make things function efficiently regardless of cost.

For some years after school, I tried to force myself to be balanced within the three points of The Holy Triangle. I consider that center point to be “sustainability”. However, I learned that it was not who I am. I am naturally more of a manager. I see myself at the yellow start shown below.

The significance of this now is that to me, this is the hurdle our country is facing. I have no real problem with environmentalists being environmentalists, or even bankers being bankers. The problem we face is that managers are not being managers. If the managers acted like managers, the balance of the Holy Triangle would be sustainable.