A smiling Henry Carey was the first person to welcome me to St. John’s College when I pulled into the parking lot in 1969. I had just driven across the country in my aging Ford Fairlane; he was driving a French Peugeot, perhaps the only Peugeot in Santa Fe at the time. Having grown up in car-centric Detroit, I was duly impressed.
Henry died on April 24 following a lifetime of work in forest conservation. A few weeks before his passing we finally agreed, after decades of debate, on how we should think about forests. He summed it up quoting the eminent biologist Frank Edwin Egler “nature is not more complicated than you think, its more complicated than you CAN think.”
Knowing we are surrounded by incomprehensible darkness, our approach to nature, according to Henry, should always be with an enlightened ignorance.
Henry earned a master’s degree in forestry and by the 1980s had started Forest Trust to help large land owners manage their property. I was in the midst of a long campaign to end the routine spraying of toxic chemicals on national forests. A few years later I started the advocacy group Forest Guardians to continue the struggle.
When I left in 2001 the outfit became WildEarth Guardians, still one of our most effective advocates for protecting public lands and wildlife.
Henry and I shared office space overlooking the Plaza for several years. One spring day he told me about how the U.S. Forest Service was pressuring Taos Pueblo to spray the broad-spectrum insecticide carbaryl to control a native insect, the western spruce budworm, on forests surrounding their sacred lake.
Instead of spraying, the Taos elders just kept talking. By the time every view had been aired the budworm outbreak had run its course and the spraying advocates were silenced. Make the conversation long soon became Henry’s standard advice for countering over zealous forest managers.
During the Clinton presidency we agreed that the Forest Service remained captured by the logging industry despite promises to change course. The ancient trees were still felled for profit and hundreds of miles of old logging roads continued to bleed sediment into headwater streams. But we respectfully differed on the agricultural model of the way forests worked.
I knew his argument since my dad had also been a forester who believed that forests were healthiest when grown like a field of corn. It’s true that thinning dense stands allows the remaining trees to grow faster like crops in a field. At the same time, trees with the genes needed to survive in the warming world would likely be removed by thinning thereby harming the forest’s capacity to adapt to the changing climate.
Henry to his credit stood apart from his colleagues when the large climate-driven wildfires began occurring with increasing frequency in the 1990s. The Forest Service response was then and is still to clear trees from entire landscapes to reduce what were seen as the negative impacts of high severity fires to low-elevation forests.
Henry then co-authored an influential paper showing that weather and topography overshadowed fuels reduction in determining fire behavior. Documenting the limitations of forest management was not welcome news to his colleagues. His far-sighted advice to reduce carbon emissions instead of attempting to re-engineer forests was largely ignored.
The last time we spoke, he smiled and reminded me again that the more we know the greater the unknown becomes. The forest has truly lost a wise and great-souled friend.
