What Can You Do with a Forestry Degree?

Keeping forests robust and healthy for our social enjoyment is always a worthy pursuit, but conservation means much more than that. It means enough trees to sustain our way of life for future generations, using those trees to battle soil erosion and climate change, and preserving green spaces for the wildlife that need those trees as their habitat. Those who work in forestry tend to be conservationists at heart and will take care of forests in ways that keep them thriving.

The natural world is beautiful, welcoming, and sometimes dangerous. Forestry experts can help with everything from keeping trails safe and neat to fighting the fires that rage through woodland areas and helping ensure proper tree planting to prevent widespread erosion. Forestry professionals do everything from hands-on work that keeps individuals safe in recreational areas to enforcing strict regulations on logging and farming operations.

When it comes to how we interact with the earth, forests play a vital role. Trees remove around a quarter of the CO2 humans add to the atmosphere, provide high levels of bioenergy, cool the air around them, and lead to more rainfall. They provide valuable protections for watersheds across the world, through which billions of people find their drinking water. Forests can prevent wide-scale erosion, which protects homes and businesses. Trees can also help change the soil over time, creating something richer, more mature, and perfect for farming. Forestry experts can find all sorts of ways to dive into these issues and make science their life’s work.

Forests and the trees in them create many much-needed products, from paper products of all kinds to timber to build homes to the use of leaves in medical and personal care formulations. Forestry experts can help with all aspects of creating these items, from figuring out how to transport felled trees to keeping enough sustainable forests growing to maintain the supply chain, to looking at logistical concerns that will keep those products moving even as new seedlings begin to grow in places where the original trees were used for industry.

The world of education needs forests for the most basic elements of teaching including paper, pencils, thousands of lessons in biology, a deeper understanding of rain cycles and soil conservation, and so much more. Forestry experts bring this kind of education to the public every day, teaching the young and old how to live in harmony with the natural world around them. Working in forestry education might take a person from the classroom to the forest, where they have the opportunity to impart knowledge and hope that will trickle down through generations of nature lovers.

The natural world needs our protection. Forestry law is a type of environmental law that focuses on the regulations, rules, and sustainable activities that define the health of a forest for years to come. Experts in forestry law might fight to keep illegal things from happening, like logging or clear-cutting on protected land, seek ways to preserve forested areas, and help create the policy that protects the environment. This might include earning a degree in forestry and then going on to law school, or alternatively, working for years to gain the knowledge to become a forestry consultant for law firms and environmental think-tanks.

Forest industry companies are looking to smart manufacturing to help them create their products in ways that don’t disturb the ecosystem of a forest any more than necessary to extract the materials they need. Forestry experts who focus on these manufacturing techniques can help create a new way of looking at sustainable growth in forested areas that are used for logging and can work with companies to implement those strategies in a timely, efficient, and cost-effective manner. Those who work with manufacturers might also serve as experts who work with state or federal governments in determining the best options for everyone involved – but especially for the forests themselves.