Last week’s front-page story, Club, activist debate forest management, was an excellent example of why the last place we should look for informed discussion of public issues is the news media.

Members of the Forestry Club are reportedly frustrated by what they say is unscientific, dramatic and emotional criticism of Shawnee Forest management. Unfortunately, local environmentalists are frustrated that the media do a fairly lousy job of reporting our scientific, economic and legal arguments.

Not that it makes me an expert, but I’ve been a journalist myself. I’ve covered forest issues on five national forests in three states, including the Shawnee. I’ve witnessed some emotionalism, to be sure, but a lot of science as well, not to mention economics, legality and public policy.

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Before we get into all that, it’s worth remembering that emotional appeals have been a legitimate form of argumentation, at least since Aristotle wrote about it in his Rhetoric, and probably since the first cave couple decided to start harvesting their local environment.

Forestry students may not be hearing this in their classrooms, but traditional science is now being challenged not for what it says about the forest (although that is being challenged, too) but for being overly rationalistic. Too simplistic, you might say. Sort of like the public debate over the forest.

Science is too left-brain, some say, too analytical. Sort of like the doctor who reads all the data his machines spit out but never touches the patient except with another instrument, and barely listens to what she has to say.

Science isn’t wrong, but sometimes it needs a correction factor. Call it humanity, intuition, or being in touch. Single-minded scientism usually calls it emotionalism. In our left-brain society, that’s like branding IRRATIONAL, or just plain SILLY across any emotional forehead. Again, remember Aristotle, a left-brain authority who appreciated the other side on occasion.

Beyond the politically difficult defense of emotionalism, forestry students should understand that environmentalists get emotional about bad public policy for legitimate, even rational, reasons many of them scientific. Just because they haven’t read about them in a newspaper or heard about it on the radio or TV doesn’t mean there isn’t good science that says environmentalists are right on this one and the Forest Service is wrong.

While good public policy should depend on good science, the two are not synonymous. Our nation’s forest policy has more to do with the wants and desires of the timber industry than it does with science. The cutting at Cripps Bend was about politics, not science.

The DE’s recent focus page notwithstanding, the news has barely scratched the surface on forest fragmentation and the decline of songbirds. No journalist has challenged the Forest Service on why it thinks the Shawnee, perhaps the most fragmented of our central hardwood forests, needs still more edge and less interior habitat.

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To my knowledge there has been no reporting on why the Forest Service is proceeding with a new style of timbering on which there has been relatively little scientific research. And the most pertinent research has been ignored by the Forest Service even though the Forest Service performed it. Now that the service needs it, the research station here on campus that performed it and might have resurrected it is being shut down.

Seems to me forestry students would be concerned about that.

As citizens they might be concerned that a public resource is being sold off at a fraction of its value so one person can make a handsome profit. As forestry students, they might be curious how many private timber owners would sell at 18.5 cents per board foot. They might even calculate the negligible contribution of the Shawnee to the national timber supply and the local economy, and then wonder if it’s worth the environmental consequence.

They should also be curious about a federal court’s decision to VACATE and REMAND, as the judge put it, the Shawnee forest plan. To put it simply, the Forest Service had failed to do its homework and got an F. The judge, by the way, ruled on the environmentalists’ legal and scientific reasoning, not their emotionalism.

Forestry students might want to compare the environmentalists’ legal challenge on cumulative impacts to the forest Service’s plans for boundaryless ecosystem management. It is in the agency’s recent report on how it plans to reinvent itself. The reinvention report lists ecosystem protection and restoring deteriorated ecosystems as the top priorities. Forestry students might compare that to what’s happening on the Shawnee.

There’s probably a paper in it for someone. Or even a news story.

Instead, we get a steady diet of emotional environmentalists. That’s why the Forestry Club thought all environmentalists are merely emotional and not interested in science, law, economics and public policy.

Local environmentalists have proven otherwise. It’s just that we haven’t heard about it. Sort of like the tree that fell in forest when no one was around. That’s why environmentalists have to sound off.

Gary Wolf is a doctoral student in journalism.