Atmo Prasad, an analyst in the Timber Supply Branch, Victoria, describes himself as a country boy who got interested in forestry.

Nothing unusual about that, except that the country he grew up in was Guyana—a land of tropical rainforests and exotic wildlife on the remote northeast coast of South America.

Fresh out of high school, he went to work for Guyana’s Forestry Department, which at that time employed about 120 people. After a year, he received a scholarship to study forestry.

"I was supposed to go to Wales," he said. All of the department’s professional foresters had studied in Britain – a tradition left over from Guyana’s days as a British colony. But Atmo broke that pattern, coming to Canada instead to study at the University of New Brunswick. In the process, he changed the course of his life.

After five years at UNB, he returned to Guyana and was put in charge of the department’s largest division—Forest Management and Administration.

Forestry in Guyana at that time was not highly developed. "We were just trying to regulate the harvest, not manage it," he said. "We didn’t do any silviculture because that kind of research wasn’t being done."

There were other differences from forestry in Canada. For one, Guyana has 52 commercial species of trees. "There is no such thing as a pure stand," he said.

And "it’s all hardwoods. The main species is greenheart, used primarily for marine purposes. Wharves around the world are constructed with greenheart."

Atmo became acting conservator of forests, the equivalent of B.C.’s chief forester.

He returned to Canada to get a business degree at Queen’s University in Kingston. "My intent was to go back and run the timber export board," he said.

Meanwhile, though, Guyana’s social and economic situation began to deteriorate, so he returned to UNB to complete his Master of Science degree in Forest Engineering.

That done, he began working in New Brunswick, first as a forestry consultant and then in the industry.

In 1994, he heard the call of the west and moved to Victoria to work with the timber supply branch.

Now he uses computers to model timber supply forecasts. It’s a long way from his days of trekking through the rainforests of Guyana.

Tree Quotes

I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.
Henry David Thoreau, 1817 - 1862

Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come.
Chinese proverb