Some people see the forest through the trees. Robert Kirmse sees the people through the forest.

For 40 years the Lakeway resident has fought to establish and preserve forests in developing countries around the world. As a senior forestry and natural resource management specialist for the World Bank from 1991-2008, Kirmse oversaw the Bank’s loans and grants to developing countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia to help promote and sustain sectors of their forests.
Upon identifying a country as a loan or grant candidate, Kirmse would form a small team of World Bank specialists that often included an economist, sociologist and forestry industry specialist to conduct a forest sector review that included visits to that country’s forests and parks. His team’s recommendations carried massive weight when it came time for the Bank to approve or deny millions of dollars in assistance over the span of what was usually a five-year project.
He arrived at the World Bank when its policy underwent a tremendous overhaul, shifting from strict protection of forests to realizing a balance between conservation and harvesting.
“That was a sea change in the World Bank, and I’m really happy it came about,” Kirmse said. “We used to get hammered by the environmental community on everything we did in forestry. Finally, the environmental community came around to our way of thinking, which was: If you can’t turn [a forest] into an economically viable resource, it’s going to be cut down and turned into agricultural land.”
The World Bank only assists a country at the request of both its forestry and finance ministries. However, Kirmse said a country’s politics, politicians and corruption could negate the best of intentions.
“The people we worked with generally were quite receptive,” he said. “[But sometimes] there were some political elements within the government that maybe didn’t want to do that for reasons of corruption. They wanted to do something with that forest other than sustainable management of it or protection.”
Russia, which contains 22 percent of the world’s forests, suffered from its abrupt decentralization of power three years ago that created too many political interests, Kirmse said.
“We thought we had things under control, and quite honestly they came up with some perverse incentives that kind of reversed most of the good work that I think we were doing under our projects and that continues today,” he said. “I can just hope things will straighten themselves out.”
In some countries such as India and Argentina, corruption is as much a threat to forests as overpopulation or warfare. When it pervades the forestry sector to the extent it’s nearly impossible to achieve positive results, not much can be done, Kirmse said.
“You almost have to throw up your hands and say we can’t do anything here,” he said. “Essentially the Bank has had to do that in India. It’s kind of walked out of the forest sector because it couldn’t deal with the corruption. It’s horrible to have to say that.”
In many countries, corruption supports illegal logging operations that net an estimated $10 billion annually worldwide.
Kirmse’s response to the illegal trade was to spearhead the World Bank’s Forest Law Enforcement and Governance operations in Eastern Europe and Central Asia that peaked in 1995 with a ministerial conference in 1995 in St. Petersburg, Russia.
More than 50 countries gathered to issue a ministerial declaration against illegal logging and draft indicative action plans to tackle their specific issues.
Kirmse said few countries have implemented their action plans, but praised Bosnia and Armenia for following through on their promises.
While trying to pull everyone together for these initiatives, Kirmse said he spent much of his time responding to complaint letters.
As the largest development organization in the world, the World Bank is a big target for protestors — a quality it shares with its sister organization, the International Monetary Fund.
“We get terrible criticism. Everybody thinks the World Bank does horrible things. At least, that’s what you get in the press. You get it from the right and the left. It’s always annoyed me so much because so much of my work has been slowed down because of criticism from environmental, non-governmental organizations, many of which have come over to our camp since then,” he said.
However, Kirmse said the Bank has improved its standing among the environmental community by inviting groups, such as the World Wildlife Fund, to review and to provide input on policy and programs.
“I remember the days when the WWF, the Nature Conservancy and others were fighting against us. They liked tying the Bank up in knots,” he said. “Now we’re working hand in hand. We’re the only ones that actually give them a place at the table.”
Kirmse said he never feared for his life until an IMF official who lived next door to his family in Bethesda, Md., was shot three times in the face and lived.
“Nobody knows exactly what it was, but it had something to do with his work,” he theorized. “I never thought that I was in danger, but after that happened I said, ‘My gosh, this can happen’ because we do go to countries and say what they are doing is wrong.”
Using remote sensing satellite imagery, Kirmse once caught a senator in Brazil deforesting an area.
“They actually prosecuted the guy. I don’t know if he was ever able to trace that one back to me, but that was our project that made that possible,” he said.
Kirmse also learned to watch what he said politically and remain on the sidelines, but large-scale violence was frequently beyond foresters’ control.
Before working at the World Bank, Kirmse served as a senior forestry officer in Rome with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations from 1987-1991 to help establish and maintain forests through investment projects.
On a trip to China’s Hunan Province in June 1989, his five-member FAO team was in the wrong country at the wrong time when student protestors and soldiers clashed in Tiananmen Square.
“I couldn’t find a way out of the country. That was scary,” he recalled of several days of turmoil.
His team had to take a train back to Beijing, one of the few cities in China with an international airport, and wait for days before hopping on a U.N. flight.
Other dangers have been more manageable but no less real.
Before venturing into some forests, Kirmse’s teams would learn where to avoid landmines in Bosnia, bandits in Albania or marijuana patches in Mexico.
“It’s like stumbling upon a grizzly bear in the forest,” he said. “You better watch out where you walk in those forests.”
Ignorance has been as much of a threat to forests as have violence and corruption.
Some countries are simply unable to manage their forests because of limited education.
When Kirmse was working as a forestry project manager for CARE from 1973-78, Liberia officials asked the humanitarian organization to manage the country’s reforestation fund because they didn’t trust themselves, he said.
Kirmse was charged with collecting taxes from logging companies, putting it in Chase Manhattan Bank and dispersing it for reforestation efforts in Liberia.
Low awareness also presented challenges in many countries.
“Indigenous people usually understand the forests very well, but unfortunately there’s a lot of pressures that have come to forests all over the world,” Kirmse explained. “I don’t think they have a structured understanding of it. They probably appreciate forests better than we do because they are out there hunting in them and using the wood for their firewood. But until it gets to a point where they lose it all, it seems to be that it’s so abundant.”
After three years in Liberia, he moved to Chad in Central Africa where he met his wife, Mirielle, as he managed a sahelian reforestation project in a semiarid belt about 500 kilometers wide south of the Sahara Desert.
The forester learned his trade through fieldwork early in his career, but after serving with the Peace Corps and CARE he went back to school to earn his master’s degree in forestry-range management and doctorate in range science at Utah State University.
The university hired him to manage a project studying the impact of goats and sheep on vegetation and woodlands in Brazil.
It was in Brazil where the Kirmses’ son was born and that Kirmse added Portuguese to his repertoire of languages that also includes fluency in French and some Italian.
After a stint with International Resources Group in Washington, D.C., and New Mexico, Kirmse signed on with FAO in Rome where he worked around the world in Nepal, Laos, India, Zimbabwe, Ethiopa, Cote d’Ivoire and Jamaica.
One might think Kirmse grew up in a forest given his attunement to wooded regions, but as a youth in Corpus Christi he had one goal in sight — getting away from the city of scrublands he would not miss.
This drive led him to enroll in the University of Texas where he graduated with a botany degree in 1969.
“When I went to the university, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I always had a knack for sciences. I enjoyed it more than business,” he said.
The degree and a smattering of Spanish helped him secure a volunteer assignment through the Peace Corps first to Nicaragua and then to Costa Rica where he served as the right-hand man to the country’s director of forest services. Under his mentor, Kirmse developed the country’s first tree nursery, established demonstration plantations and promoted tilapia production.
“This guy was a fascinating person and he got me all interested in forestry,” Kirsme said. I found all that quite exciting. That’s when I knew that forestry was my calling.”
They traveled through Costa Rica’s lush forests that many years later were decimated through poor governmental management. When Kirmse returned in 1991 with the World Bank, only 20 percent of the country’s forests remained, he said, which included trees still standing from his project.
“They finally woke up and said, ‘Hey we’re losing all our forests,’” he said. Now, 30 percent of Costa Rica’s forests are protected.
Over his 30-year career, Kirmse has witnessed a reversal in the manner in which forests are managed — when done so legally, but even after retiring last year and moving with Mirielle to Lakeway to be closer to his mother he felt he still had some unfinished work left to do.
When the World Bank knocked on his door again Kirmse couldn’t refuse.
“My intention was to seriously retire, but it’s nice to know you’re still wanted,” he said. “I love my work and I still love what I’m doing.”
He has been consulting for the same projects he was responsible for in Russia, Armenia, Romania, Albania, Kazakhstan, Bosnia, and other countries. Twice a year, he goes to these countries to supervise management of those loans and give technical input on how to carry out the forestry projects.
Kirmse is a firm believer that the World Bank’s policies have benefited countries that cooperate and follow through on the programs developed through partnerships.
“If you really look deeply, the Bank is doing the right thing,” he said. “We have incredibly strict environmental and social safeguards. All of our projects are reviewed and reviewed so we can be sure that those projects are not going to harm the environment … and they are not going to destroy people’s livelihoods. This has happened in the past, but it’s not happening today.”