Abstract

Since the USDA Forest Service began managing public lands nearly one hundred years ago the agency's mission and methods have shifted in accordance with public desires numerous times. In this dissertation I suggest that in addition to being responsive to changes in social values and economic and ecological conditions, the Forest Service must also be responsive to the shifts in our understandings of language, knowledge, power, and authority. These shifts, many of which are documented and expounded upon in the humanities, have profound implications for the praxis of forestry generally and on the discourse of forest health in particular. ;In this paper, I outline some of the dominant strains in continental philosophy and use them to "reread" the FS discourse on forest health. In addition to deconstructing the FS discourse on forest health, I also examine the medical establishment's discourse on human health. The comparison is enlightening: the medical community and the Forest Service are facing similar critiques and challenges to their knowledge and power structures, but their responses have been somewhat different. Even as the Forest Service is seeking to establish and strengthen objective, biophysical criteria for the determination of forest conditions, the medical community---or at least part of it---is slowly moving away from its exclusive commitment to a narrowly biophysical definition of health and the medicine-as-science model of health care toward a biopsychosocial model that demands the use of multiple sources of knowledge, some of which are distinctly non-scientific. ;I conclude with a suggestion that in order to be more responsive not only to the shifts in understandings of knowledge noted above, but also to those brought about by forestry's own reconceptualization of the forest as an ecosystem, forestry education might consider introducing forestry students to alternative ways of knowing. In short, I suggest that forestry become aware of its own situatedness and educate its students to the ever-changing cultural context in which the discourse and practice of forestry is carried out