Winter 2024 3 Iwrite, this quarter, from the front lines of the 2024 Session of the Virginia General Assembly. The indulgence of our gracious editorial team has given me an opportunity to draft this article just days before the annual crossover deadline. I hope you have been following our progress in our biweekly e-newsletter, the VFA Voice. If you are not currently subscribed to the Voice, you can sign up at www.vaforestry.org. Yogi Berra is credited with the phrase, “It ain’t over till its over.” But with respect to the forestry community’s 2024 legislative priorities, lobbied for by more than 50 of your peers during another successful Legislative Day on the Hill in January, we are in good standing as of press time. Critical changes to the Forest Sustainability Fund have passed through both chambers unanimously. Legislation that would restore the Virginia estate tax has been defeated for the year. And a bill that will allow VDOT’s State of Good Repair program to spend its limited resources on extending bridge life has successfully made its way through the House of Delegates. Beyond the priorities we establish every year, VFA’s advocacy team spends considerable time each session working on bills introduced on behalf of other interests that affect our membership. For example, organized labor is supporting dozens of changes to Virginia’s wage and hour laws that would impact any employer in the Commonwealth. The solar industry has pushed limiting or altogether removing the authority of local governments to make land use decisions with respect to development. The list of what we are tracking and working on can be found on VFA’s Legislative Tracker (www.vaforestry.org/legislativetracking). There have also been several bills related to environmental health upon which we have engaged. Our interest in those measures should not be overly surprising. But the confused expressions we have received from the NGO community with respect to our approach towards those measures have been striking. Rather than combating them with all-out opposition, we have collaborated with those advocates to improve their proposals to the benefit of all stakeholders. From forest conservation to improper waste tire disposal to invasive species management, our positive approach has proven confounding to some. When asked why, I remind them that conservation and conservatism are naturally aligned. Often cited as the father of modern-day conservatism, Edmund Burke was a verbose chap. When restless at night in college, I needed only to crack open a Burke text to achieve a deep REM sleep in minutes. But there is a passage in Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolutions in France” that has remained with me decades later: “But one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should not think it amongst their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them, a ruin instead of an habitation.” ― Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) Indeed, it was Teddy Roosevelt who first initiated federal actions towards environmental stewardship with passage of the Antiquities Act, calling nature “the most glorious heritage a people ever received.” It was Tricky Dick, not LBJ before him or Mr. Peanut after him, who established the Environmental Protection Agency and signed both the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act into law. I am not suggesting that our community is monolithic. VFA is diverse not only by membership type, but demographically and politically as well. I am fond of saying that VFA is not on the “red” team or the “blue” team. We are instead the green team, united around the principle of “promoting the sustainable use and conservation of You Can’t Spell Conservative Without C-O-N-S-E-R-V-E FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR UPDATE Corey Connors “VFA ... is united around the principle of ‘promoting the sustainable use and conservation of forest resources to ensure their long-term benefits for Virginians.’”
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