0558-C1
Carl Wilmsen and John E. Isom 1
During the last two decades of the twentieth century forest management in the United States of America was characterized by conflict and gridlock. Corporate restructuring and advances in milling technology led to mill closures, reductions in the forest workforce, and increases in poverty and its social indicators. Application of new understandings in the ecosystem sciences to forest management led to a shift in emphasis in federal forest management to recreation and biodiversity. In turn, changes in public values for non-commodity forest amenities led to lawsuits and court injunctions that brought extractive activities to a standstill, especially in the West. In response to this conflict and gridlock, forest communities throughout the nation began forming collaborative groups and otherwise building local capacity to handle the impacts of resource management decisions and practice, and the Forest Service adopted ecosystem management as the foundation of its new policy and management style.
These efforts have collectively formed the community forestry movement in the United States. While community forestry initiatives have achieved many social objectives including retraining displaced workers, providing entrepreneurial opportunities, healing divisiveness within communities, and advancing skills in ecosystem restoration, ecosystem management itself has emphasized ecological concerns and values. In this paper we argue that holding resource management accountable to ecology must be accompanied by development of processes that allow meaningful involvement of all affected parties in policy formation and implementation. Indeed, unless genuine all-party collaboration as well as local community sustainability and self-determination become as important as economic and ecological management of forestlands, gridlock and paralysis across America's forestlands, both public and private, will likely persist.
In 1992, the United States Forest Service announced that ecosystem management had become the new policy for the agency's forestlands management (FEMAT 1993). If successful, the new policy would preserve the integrity of ecosystems and their essential functions while simultaneously allowing for sustained economic benefits from harvesting forest resources. It would also enhance the well being of forest communities. In short, this new policy is intended to promote sustainable use of forest resources through balancing ecology, economy, and equity in a way that will help forest-resource users, forest-based communities and resource managers move beyond more than a decade of gridlock and paralysis in forest resource management. At the same time many forest communities in the United States have also been pursuing an end to gridlock and its associated economic and social problems through forming collaborative groups and otherwise building local capacity to handle the impacts of resource management decisions and practice.
These efforts have collectively formed the community forestry movement in the United States. While community forestry initiatives have achieved many social objectives including retraining displaced workers, providing entrepreneurial opportunities, healing divisiveness within communities, and advancing skills in ecosystem restoration, ecosystem management itself has emphasized ecological concerns and values. In this paper we argue that although community forestry offers a suite of principles, practices, and mechanisms for creating a "sustainable prosperity" of ecological, economic, and community well-being, holding resource management accountable to ecology must be accompanied by development of processes that allow meaningful involvement of all effected parties in policy formation and implementation. Indeed, unless genuine all-party collaboration as well as local community sustainability and self-determination become as important as economic and ecological management of forestlands, gridlock and paralysis across America's forestlands, both public and private, will likely persist.
We begin with a review of the historical context in which community forestry has arisen in the United States, and then describe the dominant principles and practices that constitute community forestry. We then discuss several caveats about the limits of community forestry as a solution to gridlock and paralysis on public and private forestlands in the United States.
In the post-World War II era the United States federal government pursued a policy of managing forestlands according to the principles of sustained yield. While rarely an explicit part of this policy, community stability was considered a legitimate objective of sustained-yield forest management, and was pursued at least as a complementary benefit to timber production and overall economic objectives. In addition to applying sustained yield policies to public lands, federal agencies offered various incentives to private forestland owners, both industrial and non-industrial, to achieve similar sustainable production objectives (Brunelle 1990, Lee 1990). In most cases community stability, if it occurred, was more of a supplemental bonus than the intentional result of an explicit policy.
Yet, community well-being suffered under these policies and practices. Poverty and its attendant social problems were high in forest-dependent communities under sustained yield, and remain so to this day. In 1993, the Rural Sociological Society's Task Force on Persistent Rural Poverty reported that communities dependent on natural resources tend to have higher rates of poverty, unemployment, suicide, homicide, tuberculosis, alcoholism, infant mortality, and substandard housing than other rural and non-rural communities (Humphrey 1993). Indeed, evidence from forest-dependent communities across the nation corroborates this assessment. Communities adjacent to the Vallecitos Federal Sustained Yield Unit in northern New Mexico have among the lowest per capita incomes in the United States (Wilmsen 1997). Forest-dependent communities in the Pacific Northwest also have higher than average proportions of residents living in poverty (Cook 1995, Danks 2000, Prudham 1998). In Alabama and the Southeast, forest-dependent communities are among the poorest in the nation despite the presence of modern pulp and paper mills (Joshi et al 2000). And there is a similar pattern in the Northeast (Beckley 1994). Clearly sustained-yield forest management policies have provided little material, social, or environmental well-being to the very communities in which they have been implemented (Machlis & Force 1988, Schallau & Alston 1987).
Beginning in the late 1980s, the local social and economic failures of sustained yield forest management policies were exacerbated by the emergence of new problems. Corporate restructuring and advances in milling technology led to mill closures, reductions in the forest workforce, and increases in poverty and its social indicators. Application of new understandings in the ecosystem sciences to forest management led to a shift in emphasis in federal forest management to recreation and biodiversity. In turn, changes in public values for non-commodity forest amenities led to lawsuits and court injunctions that brought extractive activities to a standstill, especially in the West. These forces came together in the so-called Timber Wars, with battles often taking place in the communities dependent on these now-contested forestlands, both public and private.
By the early 1990s, and in the midst of these conflicts over maximizing economic or environment forest values, new partnerships such as the Quincy Library Group, the Applegate Partnership, and the Ponderosa Pine Partnership began forming. In these and other cases frustrated local citizens were looking for new approaches to forest management that would end this gridlock and generate positive solutions that benefited the widest possible range of interests. Community- and agency-based groups began using all-party collaboration in their search for policies and practices that would sustain or restore forest resources, that would provide jobs for displaced forest workers, that would address unemployment, poverty, and other acute and chronic social issues in their communities, and, above all, that would permit people to remain in their communities on their own terms. These efforts constitute the origins of the community forestry movement in the United States.
That community forestry has emerged as a management alternative for creating viable and resilient community, economic and ecological sustainability illustrates how fundamental social and political factors are to forest management. Indeed, the central tenet of community forestry is that people in forest-dependent communities participate directly in decisions about forest land use and management that affect them, and that they have access to the resources (knowledge, credit, social networks of power brokers and policy makers, etc.) necessary to facilitate this participation. All-party collaboration has emerged as a means of implementing these broad goals.
Gridlock, non-cooperation, resistance, and even sabotage and violence will continue to be the outcomes of policies and practices that do not meaningfully address the concerns of all interests in local environmental and community development issues. The challenge, therefore, is to develop principles, practices, and processes in which all interested parties participate meaningfully in all stages of forest decision-making and forest policy formulation and implementation.
Community forestry can play a significant role in a new generation of management and leadership models that build such processes. Indeed, community forestry in the United States has matured into a suite of principles, practices, and mechanisms, adaptable to local and regional contexts and their unique social, economic, and ecological histories, for increasing the chances for long-term prosperity and well-being. Most significantly, these mechanisms and practices have evolved organically through much trial and error on urban, public, private, and tribal lands, and thus hold promise for sustaining local communities and the resource-based economies and ecosystems on which they depend.
Collaboration itself rests on a foundation of several principles and practices. These include creating trust among stakeholders through shared values and convictions while respecting differences; committing to long-term methods, relationships, and goals; open communication; shared responsibility and accountability; adaptive management in order to facilitate flexible strategies, processes, goals and relationships; and contextual and relational leadership, not leadership that is top-down or command-and-control (Wondolleck and Yaffee 2000).
In addition, collaboration facilitates interaction of diverse knowledge bases, which are seen to be complementary, not in competition. Local environmental knowledge traditions and scientific knowledge enhance each other as stakeholders seek to understand complex problems and to find effective solutions. Through such shared knowledge bases, participants produce better information on which to base decisions, and are more willing to work towards consensus in their deliberations. The trust and respect that result from such processes reduce the top-down, command-and-control processes and relationships of earlier management styles, and facilitate the development of networks, which distribute knowledge and decision-making more equitably. The result is a more participatory process in which stakeholders with a diverse array of values, networks, methods, and goals provide checks and balances on arbitrary or capricious decisions and actions.
But collaboration towards what end? Community forestry links all-party collaboration to the goal of long-term sustainability of local communities, their local resource economies and lifeways, and the local ecosystems on which these depend. Central to community forestry is thus the notion of community self-determination: of maintaining and enhancing the ability of community members to guide the direction of economic, social and environmental change in their region.
Yet, this is where community forestry may fall short of the ideal. While the principles and practices of community forestry can contribute greatly to achieving ecological, economic and community goals, community forestry and all-party collaboration are not infallible. Sometimes well-meaning resource managers will try to use the term collaboration to convince stakeholders to buy into a program or project the scope and substance of which have already been decided.
Sometimes key stakeholders are excluded from the dialogue and process. Groups outside of local communities, who may not be seen as traditional stakeholders, may have legitimate claims on the resource (we all have an interest in the maintenance of essential ecosystem functions) and/or may have expertise in ecological science or economics that is lacking on the community level. Excluding such voices from local level collaboration may result in a continuation of conflict as the case of the Quincy Library Group in California's Sierra Nevada illustrates (Duane 1997).
Excluding less powerful groups from local level collaborative processes may undercut community well-being as well. This has been happening with itinerant and seasonal forest workers in forest communities. Despite the contributions these workers make to the economy and social life of forest communities, they have, by and large, been excluded from participatory processes (Brown 2001).
The challenge to community forestry in the United States, therefore, is to develop processes that hold community, regional, and national institutions accountable to social equity to the same degree they are accountable to economic efficiency and ecological principles.
While not perfect, community forestry in the United States has developed processes for more meaningful public participation in forest policy formulation and implementation. Experiences on public, private, urban and tribal lands all across the nation illustrate the importance of involving community members in all stages of decision making about forest land use and management (Kusel & Adler 2001). In many cases the active involvement of community members in collaborative groups has assured mitigation of negative impacts of decisions and actions made by interests external to the community, whether such decisions involved corporate restructuring, preservation of non-commodity environmental values, or government agency mandates. While local community residents often do not have the technical expertise to assure the continued integrity of essential ecosystem functions, their participation in policy formation and implementation adds additional knowledge and information to the decision-making process, and helps assure a more equitable distribution of the costs and benefits of forestland use and management. Thus, long-term participation of local communities is a necessary condition of successful natural resource management; natural resource management must focus explicitly on local community well-being, if any other management goals, be they economically or ecologically driven, are to succeed.
True sharing of decision-making through all stages of resource management has already challenged participants in community forestry. But community forestry will especially challenge those who have traditionally seen their policy mandate and professional calling as one in which they alone exercise expert leadership. In marked contrast to out-dated models that do not facilitate all-party collaboration, community forestry's success is measured in part by its degree of participation of all stakeholders, especially local citizens, at all stages of management. That is to say, when everyone has the opportunity to define new ideas and goals, new methods and new forestlands practices, and to exercise leadership, then community sustainability becomes as important, and as likely, as economic and ecological sustainability.
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1 Director, Community Forestry Research Fellowship (CFRF) Program, College of Natural Resources, 101 Giannini Hall #3100, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-3100. [email protected]