Museum gets
bold new plan,
clearer vision

Since its inception in 2000, the North Carolina Museum of Forestry has fulfilled its mission with limited resources.

With the unveiling of its new master plan Tuesday night, however, the museum is poised to take a quantum leap forward.

It will take patience and money, but under the leadership of museum director Harry Warren, support from the General Assembly and community involvement, one gets the feeling that the $20 million vision just might happen sooner than later.

The process of developing a master plan not only generated architectural designs for the facility, it also helped the museum further define its mission, which was needed.

For example, visitors would often wonder if the North Carolina Museum of Forestry was a museum of the forest products industry, or was it more inclined to botany, trees and forests?

We like the new vision of the museum’s mission, which is more closely identified with how humans and nature will coexist as the planet undergoes climate change and increased pressure on the environment as the world population increases. Trees and forests, of course, will play a major role in this. Part of the plan calls for renaming the museum to better reflect its mission.

About 20 groups participated in the study that led to the master plan, including the Duke University School of the Environment and Earth Sciences and the state and national forestry and forester organizations.

The current structure is set for a $2 million renovation, but the major piece of the plan is a 40,000-square foot “green” building that would be constructed on the old L.K. Fuller property.

Green buildings are not an entirely new concept, but the new design for the museum is unique. Many parts of it would be made with recyclable materials, rainwater would be reused and the treescape both around and inside it would be a model of how buildings and botany can coexist.

A state-of-the-art, surround-style theater would be a major attraction, and there are even plans for a large treehouse.

Songwriter Joni Mitchell opined 50 years ago in “Big Yellow Taxi” that paradise was being paved over to put up parking lots, and that the world’s remaining trees could be found only in tree museums. We all know that’s a stretch of the imagination, but it underlines concerns we should all have about the changing environment.

Our world truly is a Garden of Eden that’s imminently threatened by frightening changes that we’ve only yet to begin to understand.

The admirable motive of the new ideas revealed Tuesday night is that museums don’t have to be limited as monuments to the past, but rather institutions of understanding so that the day can be avoided where, as Mitchell aptly put it, “you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.”