ABSTRACT
Forest health, sustainability, and ecosystem management are of interest to many people. The ambiguity of these terms encourages people to engage in forest policy discussions because their own ideas have not been predefined out of the debate. If foresters can’t define forest health, or if their definition is unacceptably narrow, people will likely seek opinions about forest management elsewhere. Thus the forest health analogy is a powerful, but imperfect, metaphor for communicating with the public. (O’Laughlin, 1996).
