FORESTRY COMMUNITY OR GRANFALLOON

In a popular novel of the 1960s, Cat's Cradle, author Kurt Vonnegut coined the term ''granfalloon'' for a collection of people erroneously believed to hold much in common (Vonnegut 1963). If you've ever attended a high school class reunion expecting to feel part of the old gang, but instead you feel as if you've come to the wrong party, you've been in a granfalloon. We foresters speak of the ''forestry community,'' meaning people who own, manage, work in, or in some way depend on forests. The word community comes from the Latin communis, meaning shared in common. By referring to ourselves as a community, we imply that members share certain values about forests-values that give definition to the community and differentiate members from nonmembers.