Word: forester
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Most people see either the forest or the trees. Michael Dombeck sees logging roads and mining pits--and as head of the U.S. Forest Service, he's in a position to do something about them. Last week Dombeck called for a moratorium on new mining claims on hundreds of thousands of acres of Rocky Mountain forest, and this week he is expected to halt road building on millions more acres of federal land. "Our performance should be based on the long-term health of the land," Dombeck says, "rather than the number of board feet produced...
...would be hard to find someone better qualified for the job than Dombeck. Born in the lake country of northern Wisconsin in 1948, he grew up in the Chequamegon National Forest--hunting, fishing and climbing fire towers. He was a fishing guide, taught high school science classes and earned a doctorate in fisheries biology before working his way up the ranks of the Forest Service. He became the science adviser for the Bureau of Land Management and in 1994 was selected to head the bureau--where he caught the eye of the White House...
...your hands to scoop up sleep as you would draw a grain of water and the forest will come: a green cloud a birch trunk like a chord of light and a thousand eyelids fluttering with forgotten leafy speech then you will recall the white morning when you waited for the opening of the gates...
Herbert is underlining the spotty yet rewarding nature of human perception, in which you must drink sleep that the forest may come. The confidence that the "forest will come" is reminiscent of both ancient prophecy and that language of television commercials which somehow capture the religiosity of modern times: this ancient is modern trick is common in Herbert. Note also his lack of punctuation, typical of all the poems in Elegy for the Departure, as well as his readiness to disregard physical categories (e.g. "a grain of water," "a chord of light"). Through such inverted interest in the elements, Herbert...
...Ardennes Forest" goes on to explicitlyaddress this problem. It contrasts the thousandmagical fluttering eyelids with "a thousand lidspressed/ tightly on motionless eyebrows,"presenting the ancient Ardennes along with itsidentity as the setting for the Battle of theBulge, and in the end Herbert asserts that even"the dead also ask for fairy tales," eschewing thepost-World War II idea that fanciful poetry is nolonger appropriate, associating fairy tales forthe dead with "a handful of herbs," "needles byrustling / and the faint threads of fragrances":concrete instances of the sleepy and fantastic innature that persists in spite of human history.Herbert would honor...