“Society-Ready” and “Fire-Ready” Forestry Education in the United States: Interdisciplinary Discussion in Forestry Course Textbooks

Changing environmental and social forestry contexts present new challenges for forestry graduates. In contrast with previous generations, forestry students today must be prepared to handle the impacts of climate change and increasing fire severity and frequency, as well as critical human dimensions, including the need to collaborate with Native American nations. To explore the extent to which social and fire science is taught in forestry programs and how it has changed over time, we conducted a content analysis of prominent forestry course textbooks used in graduate programs in the United States. We found little change between texts published before and after 2000, except for an increase in discussion of climate change. Of the currently used textbooks, we found a significant variation in whether they included discussion of traditional ecological knowledge, prescribed burning, combined economic factors, logging, and whether they recommended prescribed burning and logging. Given that not all programs offer or require courses that specialize in these topics, many forestry students may be missing relevant interdisciplinary social-fire education that is necessary to handle contemporary and changing forestry issues. Study Implications High-severity fires are a pressing concern in the United States and globally. Their frequency and intensity are affected by historical and contemporary land management practices, climate change, and forest use change—factors that are all influenced by social, political, and economic processes. However, our findings, based on an analysis of the contents of prominent textbooks used in US forestry courses, along with other research, show that the connections between fire and socioecological factors are often neglected in forestry higher-education textbooks. This suggests that future forest managers may not be properly prepared to handle changing fire regimes as climate change advances and social, political, and economic forces influence forestry practices. Thus, our research suggests that required forestry curricula course content should be revised to incorporate more coverage of fire science and socioecological factors, particularly traditional ecological knowledge and climate change, to prepare future foresters for the emerging challenges they will face.