Understanding the Relations Among Communities, Economies and Natural Resource Management

0686-C2

Richard W. Haynes^[1]

Abstract

A recurrent theme in the development of U.S. forest policies has been the assertion of a strong positive relation among communities, economies and natural resource management. Recent bioregional assessments in the Pacific Northwest that include the social and economic systems allow a review of the nature and extent of these relations. The results offer an array of suggestions for developing forest policies that take advantage of the range of goods and services produced by the forest and valued by the local people and the societies dependent on those forests.

Introduction

There is a perennial focus on communities and economies as a part of the forest policy debate in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Proponents assert that a positive relation exists between timber production and economic well-being in those communities that depend on timber for their economic base. Some proponents argue that the forest products industry is a key part of the economic base in the sense that it converts raw material with a relatively high return to the providers of that raw material (in the form of stumpage fees) into products that are exported to other regions thereby earning net income. The forest products industry in the Pacific Northwest had those attributes as well as paying above average wages contributing to the economic well-being of the communities that grew surrounding the manufacturing facilities.

The focus on the stability of timber dependent communities has been a powerful force in determining federal timber policies. But during the last two decades the power of community stability arguments have diminished relative to those favoring habitat protection. These debates have also differed in that they involved bioregional assessments that included both the biophysical and socioeconomic components of ecosystems. The purpose of this paper is to draw lessons from these assessments about the nature and extent of the relations among communities, economies, and natural resource management in the Pacific Northwest. The lessons offer an array of suggestions for developing enduring forest policies.

Background

Some background is necessary context for this paper. This includes some definitional issues, a quick primer on the Pacific Northwest, acknowledging changes in the perceptions of the effectiveness of forestry as an agent of economic growth, and an evolution of terminology for stability and adaptability.

First, several definitions are key to this story. The term communities used here refers to communities of place. That is, communities are defined both by a sense of place and a sense of organization or structure. Economies cover broader geographic areas and are defined by commuting and shopping patterns. Our mobility, transportation and communication infrastructures enable economic activity to transcend community and other political boundaries. Finally, the economic base of an area consists of those activities that provide the core employment and income on which the rest of the local economy depends.

Figure 1 provides a brief summary of events in the Pacific Northwest. Harvests peaked in 1973 and employment peaked in 1978, both have declined steadily in the 1990s to where harvest is now 49 percent and employment 60 percent of their 1970s peak. This decline in harvest and employment lead to a loss of a third of productive capacity closing mills in numerous communities throughout the Pacific Northwest. Table 1 reveals the structure of the economy in the Pacific Northwest split into the areas east and west of the crest of the Cascade Mountains. The bolded figures represent values above the national average and which some view as defining the economic base of each region.

Table 1-Employment in economic sectors for the nation, Pacific Northwest (1994), and the Columbia River basin (1995)

Source: U.S. Department of Commerce 1997.

Figure 1 - Harvest and employment in the Pacific Northwest

There has been an evolution in how forestry and the forest products industry is perceived as an agent of economic development. Proponents of forest management have advocated that a sustained yield even-flow timber policy supports community stability and promotes economic development. Conflicting opinions about the link between sustained yield of timber and community stability have helped maintain an intense political debate that did not subside until the 1990s when proponents of community stability were unable to change the debate about the relatively modest costs associated with habitat protection for the Northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) (see FEMAT 1993).

Starting in the 1980s there has been an evolution in terms used to depict communities that have distinct connections to forest resources: community stability, forest dependence, forest-based, community capacity, community resiliency, and now with the Montréal Process, community viability and adaptability. This evolution of terms reveals increasing emphasis on the complex, dynamic, and interrelated aspects of rural communities and the natural resources that surround them. Currently, terms like community capacity and community resiliency are being used to connote the ability of a community to take advantage of opportunities and deal with change (Doak and Kusel 1996, McCool and others 1997, Horne and Haynes 1999, and Harris and others 2000). Resiliency and, arguably to a lesser extent, capacity differ from terms such as forest dependence because they represent a projected condition or ability of a community over some period of time. Levels of resiliency are dynamic, just like external factors that might induce change within a community.

Lessons from The Northwest

Six lessons emerge from the Pacific Northwest that expand our understanding of the relations among communities, economies and natural resource management.

Lesson 1

So much of the concern about community stability and community impacts has been reduced to a discussion of job losses (or gains) associated with changes in forest management strategies. The results from the Northwest suggest that jobs are a narrow measure of changes in economic well-being and that it has lost much of its power of persuasion. Part of this lesson has been the revelation that the indirect and induced job and associated economic impacts estimated as part of forest policy discussions generally cannot be verified by looking at how regional economies actually changed (for example FEMAT 1993, Robertson [in press]). In the Pacific Northwest, growth in total regional employment makes it difficult to assess the impact of job losses in a specific sector. The overall economy in the Pacific Northwest during the 1990s added 925,000 jobs while at the same time nearly 25,000 jobs were lost in the forestry sector (Warren 2001). It is difficult to argue that the loss of the 25,000 jobs was critical to the economy of the Northwest. That is not to say that the job losses were not critical in selected communities but you need to look at other factors to gauge the total impact (see the fourth lesson).

Lesson 2

There is a common misunderstanding of what is an economy. Forest policy debates tend to assume that communities and economies are the same. They are not. Economies cover broader geographic areas. There also has been a tendency to narrowly view what constitutes the economic base of forest dependent communities. The experience of the Pacific Northwest suggest that it is more productive to take a broad view of what makes up the base of an economy (see table 1). In that way we can better describe the potential impacts of management actions on the economic conditions of a community or set of individuals.

Lesson 3

Systematic community level data bases are largely nonexistent. This raises the question of the efficiency of using existing data often collected at a somewhat higher spatial scale such as counties in the United States. At best this is a compromise to gain both greater spatial resolution and to overcome the lack of community data sets. County data sets have been used to monitor well-being and to reveal geographic variation but most social scientists lament their use as proxies for communities because of the lack of data for various components of social well-being such as community leadership and infrastructure, quality of life, welfare, and social and economic health of a community.

When community data sets do exist they reveal far greater numbers of communities than generally perceived. For example, in the spotted owl region where a handful of communities garnered much of the attention a recent community typology revealed that there are more than 1,300 communities containing 4.1 million people (48 percent of the total regional population) (Donoghue [in press]).

Lesson 4

There is a need for an overarching measure like social well-being that is a composite of both economic and community indicators. Broad scale measures such as socioeconomic resiliency (see figure 2) allows us to consider two types of variables: measures of economic dependency on forests and social well-being of communities.

Horne and Haynes (1999) estimated socioeconomic resiliency using county data for the Interior Columbia Basin (figure 2). The advantage of this approach was that it was measurable in the spirit of the definition of social well-being using existing information. Socioeconomic resiliency was a composite measure of three factors: economic resiliency (as a measure of economic diversity in employment), population density (a proxy for civic infrastructure) and lifestyle diversity (a proxy for social and cultural diversity). Using this approach, counties that have high socioeconomic resiliency demonstrate quick adaptation as indicated by rebounding measures of socioeconomic well-being. Counties with low resiliency have more lingering negative impacts. The terms high or low should not be thought of as good or bad but rather as a reflection of the ability of a county to respond to changes in social or economic factors.

Figure 2 - Socieconomic

Lesson 5

The United States is committed to using the Montreal Process for assessing progress towards sustainable forest management. One indicator requires the development of a measure of community viability and adaptability to changing economic conditions. Given the lack of community level data bases, data for the 3,110 counties (and some city/county and borough combinations) in the United States was used to develop a measure of community viability and adaptability that considered civic infrastructure, economic diversity (in terms of employment), and lifestyle diversity (Haynes [in press]). In addition, each county could be assigned a rating for forest dependency based on the proportion of forestland in each county). There are 837 counties assigned a low rating representing 36 percent of the area of the United States but just less than 3 percent of the U.S. population. The rest of the population is roughly evenly divided among the 2,064 counties assigned medium ratings and the 209 counties assigned high ratings.

Lesson 6

Human systems are characterized by temporal change. For example figure 1 illustrates both the volatility of and trends in major determinants of economic and social conditions such as timber harvest and employment. There is no notion of historical range of variation or steady state that is meaningful in socioeconomic systems. This is in stark contrast to some biophysical measures (for example ecological integrity, see Quigley and others 2001) that use temporal concepts in the sense of time to return to some steady state condition. Even in discussions of stand development, significant progress is often measured in terms of decades, which may be longer than the average private owner maintains tenure and certainly longer than markets may exist for originally planned outputs.

Discussion

The experience of the Pacific Northwest suggests that the relations among communities, economies, and natural resource management are more complex than traditional notions of sustaining timber flows and community stability. If we adopt notions of social well-being as an overarching construct, than the links between natural resource management and communities includes those elements that impact both the economic well being through the provision of commodities and marketable services such as recreation and social well-being through the provision of amenities and lifestyle contributions.

While there is often ambiguity about the specific definition of social well-being, preliminary efforts to develop operational indicators have proven useful in both community assessments (Harris and others 2000), bioregional assessments (see McCool and others 1997 and Horne and Haynes 1999), and in National and State level attempts to address sustainable forest management (see Haynes [in press] and Donoghue and Haynes 2002).

The results shown in figure 3 illustrate one of the fundamental dilemmas in understanding the interaction of human and biophysical systems. That is, there are large areas where there is a concern about low viability and adaptability but the bulk of people live in areas with moderate to high viability and adaptability. Figure 4 illustrates this dilemma. The implication for policies that attempt to integrate both biophysical and socioeconomic systems is the need to reconcile land management actions that often deal with managing trees, stands, watersheds for the values and needs of human populations who are constantly shifting across those landscapes.

Figure 3 - Counties with low viability and adaptability to changing economic conditions

Figure 4 - Population and area by degree of adaptability and extent of forestland

Finally, it should not be concluded that areas of low adaptability are in some type of distress. Data from the United States, suggest that most forested areas actually have medium or high viability and adaptability. Some are actually urban areas such as Seattle, Washington, near urban areas, or contain significant residential developments including counties thought of as recreation counties (see Johnson and Beale 1995)^[2]. These counties affirm the rich connections between forests and human populations.

Where we do have community data, such as eastern Oregon, these broad scale measures provide a useful first approximation of areas where community assistance may be needed to offset the effects of changes in broad scale land management. In eastern Oregon there are 10 counties rated as having low adaptability. These counties contain 46 communities ranging in size from a population of 3 to nearly 10,000. Reyna (1998) rated 26 of these communities as being small, isolated from major population centers and lacking in economic diversity.

Summary

The forest policy debates in the Pacific Northwest of the United States has taught us lessons for developing forest policies that take advantage of the range of goods and services produced by the forest and valued by the local people and the societies dependent on those forests.

First, forest policies can influence social and economic conditions of neighboring communities. These influences can be most readily observed if we use overarching constructs such as social well-being that speak to the links between land management, the flow of goods and services, and well being of human communities. Such measures can facilitate a discussion of sustainable forest management where there are concerns about how the social and economic conditions of a community might be influenced by forest management decisions.

Second, the efficiency of forestry policies to promote regional economic growth needs careful consideration. In the Pacific Northwest the forest products industry was an early force for economic development offering numerous linkages to supporting industries and services. But as the Pacific Northwest economy has diversified, it becomes more difficult to argue the criticalness of the industry.

Third, forest policies need to consider the different temporal scales that human and natural communities change. For the human communities, multiple terms like adaptability, viability, and resiliency emphasizes the dynamics of communities and changes in their functioning. Change is consistent and forest policies either have to be temporally robust or adaptable as conditions and human values change.

Fourth, the experience in the Pacific Northwest suggests the need to consider how to mitigate the local social and economic impacts associated with broad scale land management strategies. This emphasizes the need to identify which communities may need assistance in adjusting to changes in land management approaches, outputs, or other changes. The use of broad scale measures facilitates understanding the relation between forest management, communities, and attributes of community adaptability. Coincidentally there is a need to understand how to engage community development interests in a discussion of viability and adaptability because they are often the agents of change.

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