30. What Your Teachers Did Over the Summer: Inside the Teacher Conservation Workshop with Chelsea York, Kim Morris-Zarneke, and Ann Marie Brezina

Having good forests is an economic thing, but it's also an environmentally healthy thing for everybody.

It is.

And I think one of the biggest misconceptions that we have out there is that our forests are just trees and they're not very important.

What they don't see, and probably have a hard time connecting, and I think we're doing a great job in trying to bridge that gap, is how vital it is to have the working forest in Georgia and what impact those have on our daily lives.

How many products we use every day that come from trees, eat really can't go a day in your life without using a tree product.

And if we don't manage them sustainably and we don't educate them on what that full cycle looks like, then we won't have future stewards of our forest or wildlife.

They see the trees and don't realize it, but when they do drive down the road and they have seen a clear cut and they've seen the trees removed, a lot of people think the negative.

They think, oh my gosh, what just happened? not necessarily realizing or understanding the process.

If we don't manage the trees, we actually can create a habitat that is a desert, not a physical desert.

The trees will grow and succession happens, but for some animals, that succession is no longer an ideal habitat.

managing the forest, which sometimes means cutting down the trees.

There's new trees being planted.

You just don't always see them until they get to be a couple years old and they're a couple feet tall.

They don't always realize.

They just see this barren land that's been disrupted when there's actually sometimes really good things happening.

There's new animals coming in.

It's creating new habitat for some things.

There's a cycle of life that's happening in our forests.

One of the things we always compare to on the first day of the foundational teacher conservation workshop when we're talking about

a full harvest or a clear cut is comparing it to when you drive

by a corn field and you see all these beautiful corn stalks.

When you drive by a few weeks later and the corn's gone, you go, oh, there's going to be fresh corn at the market.

But when you drive by a clear cut, the first thing you think is, What happened to Bambi? Where did all the trees go? Why did they cut them down? You don't drive by and go, oh, we're going to have toilet paper tomorrow.

Before I attended TCW, I spent a lot of time in the outdoors.

I'm an avid backpacker, hiker.