Articles tagged with: J B LAL

Mar 2007 | Comments Off on The ignored dimension
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Sustainability is the key issue in forest management, be it India, or any other part of the globe. Unfortunately, so far, no scientifi cally sound and operational defi nition of Sustainability has been evolved for universal application in forest management. Nevertheless, it may be said on an empirical basis that sustainable forest management lies in attaining three basic goals: fi rst, maintaining the stability of the physical environment, secondly, maintaining, and if necessary increasing, the biological productivity of the resource, and thirdly, establishing equity in distribution of qualitative and quantitative benefi ts generated by the resource in the society dependent on it. The goals are to be attained not at any chosen point of time, but in perpetuity. Sustainable forest management is a multidimensional process. The major dimensions of the process are: ecological, silvicultural, technical (including the disciplines of genetics and biotechnology), socio-economic, and institutional. All the dimensions are equally important and neglect of any can mar the Sustainability of the process.