Wary Indiana Partners Join to Help Brazil Forests

By Dale Moss
The Courier - Journal

April 24, 2008

Trees were cut, way too many, for water buffalo to graze. Could the climate of Brazil recover?

Getting back to square one would be backbreaking. Except that Allen Pursell visits the area, and he knows a better approach.

Pursell knows Jerry Koetter as well.

Pursell arranged for his employer, The Nature Conservancy, to provide a tree-planting machine. Koetter’s Koetter Woodworking covered shipping costs.

“It didn’t burden anybody too much,” Koetter said.

A novelty in Brazil, the two-person apparatus plants thousands of trees per day along the Atlantic coast. A mission fairly speeds that otherwise would be all but paint-drying slow. “They were never going to get the scale that was required,” Pursell said.

Pursell’s job is to be Mother Nature’s favorite son. Koetter earns his living selling wood. By stereotype, Pursell and Koetter are unlikely partners. When Pursell arrived 14 years ago in Southern Indiana – mostly to oversee the Conservancy’s intended rescue of the Blue River -- Koetter was wary.

Like was Pursell of Koetter, whose family’s woodworking firm was big and getting bigger. “We were tentative about each other,” Pursell said. “We weren’t sure.”

The men talked, though, talked until they discovered the proverbial common ground, eventually a panorama of it. Reality indeed did not reflect perception. No conversion was necessary. “We dated a long time before we got married,” Koetter said.

Koetter Woodworking, in Starlight, needed not stew, and did not, when the Conservancy began to acquire lots of land to manage. In fact, this marriage settled in with Koetter Woodworking buying timber from the Conservancy. (Wood is not harvested from much of the group’s land, however.) The relationship also includes a prominent Conservancy display in Koetter’s Forest Discovery Center, an $8 million adjacent tourist site in which the company tells elaborately its story.

“Most the time, what’s good for the woods is good for our industry,” Koetter said.
And Conservancy-harvested wood soon may be processed at Koetter Woodworking for flooring in the Conservancy’s new state headquarters in Indianapolis. A mill must be used that is certified by a standardbearer called the Forest Stewardship Council. Around here only Koetter’s qualifies, its conscience further standing out.

“Certainly Koetter is on the forefront of these things,” Pursell said. The firm grows as many or more trees than it cuts. It uses machines like the one in Brazil to plant annually at least 40,000 trees.

The day recently that he and I talked, Koetter had met with a chain clothier intending to build new stores with wood supplied by a company with such a good-guy reputation.

Meanwhile, the Nature Conservancy has acquired about 3,500 area acres, a good bit of it along the Blue. On land thus no longer farmed, the Conservancy has planted 500,000 hardwood seedlings. Some are trees already more than 25 feet tall. Wildlife enjoys renewed pathways, the river basks in shade.

“We’ve been successful at a few things – saving habitat, creating new natural access on the land,” Pursell said.

A video of the group’s Blue River heroics is being produced and will be available on the Conservancy’s Web site later this year.

Pursell headed to Brazil both to teach and to learn. The tree plantings are part of a massive climate-change project backed not only the Conservancy but by corporations such as General Motors and Texaco. Though impressive, the push lacked, well, a push. Pursell told them about the machine, but none was so much as remotely handy. Pursell returned to Indiana and made the gift happen.

“Another building block on our relationship,” Koetter said.

For more information, go to the Conservancy’s Web site at nature.org, the Forest Discovery Center at forestcenter.com, or koetterwoodworking.com.

Dale Moss’ column appears on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at (812) 949-4026 or dmoss@courier-journal.com. Comment on this column, and read his blog and previous columns, at www.courier-journal.com/moss.