The Long Way Home 8.14.26

Diversity Is Survival, Not Politics: Fragile Forests, Fragile Economies

Writing for a general-interest publication like a community newspaper, one tends to think twice about how readers will react when you step into something political, which is much like stepping in doggy doo-doo. Will advertisers take umbrage if they are strongly offended by the ideas and pull their advertising? Will readers with opposite opinions get so angry they stop reading? Without apology, I’m going to jump into the DEI arguments. DEI is the three-letter acronym for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs. The dividing line on DEI between the political left and right in the United States is about as stark as a line can get in our hyper-politicized country. 

Moving beyond simple-minded slanders, I would say that diversity is not just some fad cooked up by bleeding-heart liberals like me. Fact is, uniformity in religion and hiring, like uniformity in forests or croplands, creates a fragile system. Diversity creates strength.

In 1956, my parents used the GI Bill to buy a 900-square-foot house on a fifty-foot lot in Richfield, a first-tier suburb on the south side of Minneapolis. Richfield's poobahs at the time determined that, like the streets of south Minneapolis, the streets of their domain would be lined with Elm trees—one in the boulevard of each 50-foot lot.

Those fast-growing trees raised a comforting canopy over the streets and made the houses made of ticky-tacky feel more established and welcoming. No one seemed to think that those trees were a monoculture, destined for fragility and fracture. Dutch Elm beetles saw what they were, however, and not more than two decades later the elms were dying,  were harvested and destroyed, every single one. The aesthetic loss to those urban blocks was profound.

Spruce budworm damage in dense balsam stands.
Source: Tomasz Klejdysz / Getty Images

Finding ourselves back on the North Shore several years ago, we were introduced to the Spruce Budworm. Unlike the Dutch Elm catastrophes, the Spruce Budworm is a native caterpillar community that expands and contracts every three or four decades. The budworm’s preferred food sources are Spruce and Balsam Fir trees. Over a handful of years, the infestation leaves stands of balsam and spruce across the Superior National Forest dead or dying. Here in the Superior National Forest, stands of balsam and spruce trees have been claimed. Following the intense logging of the late 19th and early 20th century, second- and third-growth forests saw dense stands of Spruce and Balsam trees of about the same age and little diversity, which allowed outbreaks to kill hundreds of trees simultaneously.

Long before corporate consultants and political hacks coined the term DEI, farmers found out the brutal effects of monoculture during the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. When family farmers ignored the diversity offered by crop rotation and plowed up millions of acres of winter wheat, it took only a few years of drought in the 1930s to turn the exhausted, single-crop topsoil into the dust storms of the Great Depression.

Urban forestry management adapted in response to the devastation of Dutch Elm Disease and the Emerald Ash Borer. Today, it follows diversity guidelines to prevent a repeat of these disasters. 

Dust Bowl era: The cost of agricultural
 monoculture. Source: LIFE

Responding to the human and financial tragedies of the Dust Bowl in the mid 1930s, the government created the Soil Conservation Service, now the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service. The Service worked with surviving farmers to prevent massive soil erosion, which required combining crop rotation (diversity) with soil conservation techniques.

Nature does not tolerate monoculture for long. Single-crop farm fields are hit with drought. Forests with less diversity of age and species face disease, blowdown, and fire. Communities with monocultural economies struggle to adapt when markets shift. 

We see this same fragility in regional economics. Cook County, for instance, relies heavily on a tourism monoculture. While not as concentrated, Lake County also relies heavily on tourism. When markets shift, as they did recently when the BWCAW was closed by the USFS in the most productive weeks for tourism businesses, and wildfire smoke created record-setting poor air quality, the need for economic diversity was evident. Politicians are lining up to offer financial aid, but diversifying the economy is a herculean task. 

I’m not a sociologist, but it seems to me that there are definite parallels between ecological monocultures and social monocultures. Diversity isn’t a social construct, nor is it a tyrannical way to gain conformity. Nature settled this thousands of years ago. When you eliminate diversity in favor of uniform, predictable monoculture, catastrophic failure is rarely a matter of if—it is only a matter of when. 

I’ve seen it in countless businesses over the years. Owners and managers demand conformity in hiring and uniformity in adopting business policies and strategies. By stripping away different backgrounds, varied life experiences, and dissenting perspectives, a business—or any other human organization—won't get efficiency; it gets sycophants, groupthink, blind spots, and fragile systems incapable of handling a crisis. That should sound familiar to anyone paying attention to government today. 

Whether on a city street, in a forest, in a cornfield, or in a business, DEI isn't political “WOKEness.” It's how we survive.