Forest Futures: Will the Forest Save Us All? | Panel 3: Speculating and Acting

Planetary survival in the Anthropocene crucially depends on the stewardship of resilient forest ecosystems worldwide-at the scales of wilderness, planted forests, metropolitan tracts, and the urban forest canopy of cities and towns everywhere. The Fifth National Climate Assessment (US, 2023) repeats now familiar claims that healthy forests provide essential ecological, economic, and social benefits and services.
But our forests today face extreme risk. Disturbance agents are driving massive change-including unprecedented temperature increases, altered precipitation patterns, increasingly catastrophic weather events, uncontrollable mega-fires, and destructive land use practices. This symposium addresses risks and threats, initiatives and improved practices, and speculations on a more secure and more just future for metropolitan and urban forests and the species that inhabit them.
The symposium accompanies a concurrent gallery exhibition in the Druker Design Gallery, Gund Hall, entitled Forest Futures, curated by GSD Professor of Landscape Architecture Anita Berrizbeitia and the graduate students in her seminar, DES-3510 Forests: Histories and Future Narratives.
***
Panel 3: Speculating and Acting
Moderated by Pamela Conrad
Silvia Benedito, “Cold-Fire” Landscape Management for Warmer Climates
Amy Whitesides, An Equitable Urban Forest Plan for the City of Boston
Eric Kramer, Shared Responsibility, Empowering Action in Cambridge, MA
00:00 Panel 3 Introduction by Pamela Conrad
02:36 Presentation by Silvia Benedito
18:06 Presentation by Amy Whitesides
36:19 Presentation by Eric Kramer
52:24 Discussion and Q+A