The many sides of forestry are being expounded in a series of resources produced by Discover Forestry’s National Programme Manager Lara Meyer.Part funded by the Wide Trust, Lara is carrying out a variety of case studies that highlight a range of disparate subjects.
So far there are 14 available, with more on the way, covering both the expected and the perhaps not so obvious – from planning, building and maintaining forest roads and how GPS powers modern forestry to what happens to growth and change in a forestry reliant town.
The case studies are designed to be easily digestible, with real people and real stories. Lara says they are aimed at connecting the forestry industry with education, community understanding and career awareness.
Much of the industry is hidden.
“People just think that the trees grow themselves and then they get chopped down and off they go. They don’t know where they go or anything,” she says.
Lara, however, knows different.
“When I did the cable logging study, it struck me, that’s real physics. They are setting up huge machines on the side of a cliff, on a goat track, and the physics of it and the problem solving is massive. But they just think, oh, it’s just a normal day’s work.
“The other thing that has become really obvious to me is that these people that work in forestry are incredibly intelligent and hardworking. They don’t talk about how wonderful they are, or how innovative, so I feel like it’s my job to make sure that teachers and students and community members just know what’s really going on behind the forest gates.”
But the education sector isn’t the only target of the case studies.
“I want foresters to know that they’re there so that they can also promote them within their own community, and I want families to understand what their mums and dads and brothers and sisters are doing out there when they get up at four in the morning and go to work.”
“I want our young people to recognise that there are multiple career opportunities in forestry and logging.”
Lara has had a career in education, is a former teacher, has taught educational leadership and trained other teachers. She has a Master’s in Education and has been involved in curriculum writing. Her father owned two sawmills and founded South Pacific Shingles, with factories in Murupara and Rotorua. Her husband Mark Brown is a former harvest planner/manager for multiple companies on the East Coast.
“Having taught primary to secondary, I look at forestry and I’ve used it for years myself as a context for learning; it links to geography, to geometry, to business studies.”
One example is the case study that looks at Tokoroa, its reliance on forestry and what happens when a town’s primary industry is taken away.
“It’s about data, it’s about mapping, it’s about statistics, it’s humanities, so I’m trying to make learning in the classroom more real. It’s real learning and in every case there’s a problem the subject of the case study is trying to solve....
