Ardkinglas Woodland Garden |
So I've started a new job recently and I'm back into the arboriculture sector, this time as a consultant. I found in my previous job as a warden, doing practical forestry work, that I was getting frustrated with the lack of thought required. It seems that the jobs I wanted to do when I started out, where it involves it all - practical work, management planning, ecology, education - are slowly disappearing. Councils are a good example - more and more, there are now rangers to do community work, practical teams to do hands-on work, and ecology teams do surveying. And although I loved - and still sometimes long for - those sunny, clear, frosty mornings in the woods with a saw in my hands, more and more I wanted to be making decisions about how trees are managed. And that's not really an option when you're out doing the practical work. Perhaps I would have been content to do practical work a few more years if I'd been doing it in nicer sites (more coppicing, woodland crafts and dry-stone walling instead of litter picking, strimming and watching the very infrequent interesting jobs be contracted out), and for more of a conservation charity than a forestry organisation, but even so the wholesome fun aspect of practical hands-on work has to be balanced with the yearning to learn and apply more.
So I applied for a job as a consultant arboriculturalist, down in my home county of Yorkshire. The job looked interesting - all about trees, that's a winner; I'd get to be using my brain (one of my favourite aspects of my warden job, albeit an infrequent one, was the safety inspections I did); and a few aspects of my personal life had changed so a fresh start away from Glasgow would do me good. And, astonishingly, I got hired.
So now, two and a half years after that Basic Tree Survey & Inspection course that got me all fired up about tree surveying and the whole sector, I've ended up a consultant. A very different role to those which I've done before. It's in the private sector, as opposed to charities and public sector - so I need to think about clients, not just the trees. This will take some compromising, as I'm naturally tree-focused ("it's dangerous? Move the target. It's hollow? Keep it, good habitat") and depending on the situation, a client might have different desires to mine. But hopefully I can stick to my principles and still do a good job - after all, we're hired to inform people about decisions relating to trees. It'll be a challenge, but I'm glad to have made it to being in a position to influence how trees are managed, as opposed to being out there doing the practical work and wondering why some quite shaky decisions are being taken by those up high!
No comments:
Post a Comment