On the road…again!!!
Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams
Chronicles of a Footloose Forester
By Dick Pellek
Street Smarts vs. Books Smart
(Debate with Self)
As the first person in his family to attend college, the Footloose Forester had to seek counsel from teachers and upperclassmen at Rutgers for advice about getting along, how to study effectively, even how to solve algebra problems. The counsel was coming from people with smarts in various aspects of life. It was their learning via street smarts. Not just smart in one area of college life, but smarts in the plural because college life is a lot more than football games and fraternity parties.
The usual interpretation of street smarts suggests that clever and successful people who do not sport college degrees are nonetheless highly accomplished because they use their intellectual gifts without the benefit of a college degree. In the unstated atmosphere of day-to-day competition in the business world, in trade, or in fundamental callings like fishing or farming, we all size others up and often make self-serving comparisons of status to justify our own status.
On the other hand, the usual interpretation of book smart suggests that he or she, who may have attended college, seems informed because they got it out of a book - book smart. Bad comparison, because college learning is not confined to a single book. The expression is “book smart” when it should be books smart. Unfortunately, even debating about street smart vs. book smart, or street smarts vs. books smarts paints us all into a corner of hopeless misunderstanding. Hence, the Footloose Forester is having a debate with himself. He came from a background of working with street smart people and migrated into a world where books are very important. The books were pretty smart and he knew that he was expected to learn a little something about them.
Virtually every adult goes though the phase whereby they could become street smart. Some succeed and some fail at possessing street smarts that are obvious. And a fair number of street-smart people go to college and become readers of books. The Footloose Forester will not say, nor will he ever think that they somehow become book-smart. Remember, it’s got to be books-smart, and more; it’s got to be books-smarts and coping with many other challenges. And lots of people flunk out, even if they take some acquired knowledge with them. Success in college is not guaranteed, regardless of whether you are adorned with street-smarts, or books-smarts, or both.
More than he can remember, someone has put the Footloose Forester down when he made an observation that they said he learned in a book. Are books an adversary? The books are not part of the Debate with Self The smartest people he knows are those with the most books. The street-smarts people have books, and the college crowd has books, so there should be no debate. It isn’t about the books. Books are simply sources of information, but they are not the only sources. Magazines, newspapers, trade journals, and professional newsletters are powerful sources of information that is seldom covered in depth on radio broadcasts or on TV news reports. Reading and knowing where to find the answers are part of the process of learning.
As a proud dirt forester, the curious Footloose Forester wants to share one bit of useful information that did not come from a book but concerns a worldly issue that affects us all. The fundamental issue is about water, especially freshwater and drinking water. A featured article in The Forestry Source (August 2025, Vol. 30, NO. 8) was authored by 7 contributors who together provided facts and figures that paint an alarming picture concerning water quality and distribution. The copied information below serves to point out that our shared environments are not static, and we must actively protect the resources that sustain us as a global society.
The Science and Technology article Forested Watersheds Improve Water Quality states that despite water covering 71% of the earth’s surface, freshwater is limited, so scarce that it includes only 2.5% of all the water on earth. Furthermore, only a small fraction (1.2%) of freshwater is surface water. That leaves only 0.007% of sources we rely on to provide drinking water. Because of rising demand, the potable water supplies must be protected, but also managed to preserve this resource in a sustainable way. If we are street smart, we should know that with growing populations and increasing urbanization, things will only get worse. Those thoughts are probably not stitched together in any book. And you can take that to the bank!
The profusion of information sharing is only enhanced through advances in computer technology. Maybe someday the old standoff argument of street smart vs. book smart will evaporate because now we all can become smarter as members of the same community, whether from our streetcorners populated by bright up-and-comers, or from the closeted offices of university ivory towers where idealists are composing books to share.