I was invited to speak at the weekly luncheon of the Harrisonburg Rotary Club, one of more than 46,000 Rotary clubs around the world.  Their mission is to form a fellowship of business, professional, and community leaders to help address community problems through public service, economic growth, and promotion of education, environmental protection, and goodwill toward all.  I wasn’t very familiar with Rotary, and was impressed by the commitment I saw and heard.  Meeting weekly for lunch and a speaker is already a substantial commitment for working people!  

The speakers tend to be community leaders and others engaged in city and county institutions/organizations, so my presentation was a bit different: I gave a PPT presentation, Our Forests, Our Future (no recording), showing how the forests of the Shenandoah Valley are small and scattered, having been cut by farmers to access the famously fertile soil, and how fortunate we are to have the nearly 2 million acres of mostly contiguous woods in the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests on the mountains east and west of the Valley.  These woodlands not only provide nice views; hunting, fishing and other recreational opportunities; and habitat for the many species of wildlife that cannot survive in human landscapes but are essential for ecological functions.  Today, we also know that these forests, regrown to maturity from an abysmal history of radical deforestation circa 150 years ago, provide the critical service of carbon sequestration, the single best natural defense against climate change.  I was very happy to have several people come up afterward to talk about forests and conservation, including Vice Mayor Laura Dent.

Click here to view a PDF version of the presentation.