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Community Forestry In The United States: Learning From The Past, Craftinc The Future

Posted on: Tuesday, 9 March 2004, 06:00 CST

COMMUNITY FORESTRY IN THE UNITED STATES: LEARNING FROM THE PAST, CRAFTING THE FUTURE by Mark Baker and Jonathan Kusel; Island Press, Washington, D.C., 2003; 296 pp.. $25.00 paper (ISBN 1-55963-984-9)

Few environmental debates seem as polarized as those that surround issues of forest management. These debates often pit proponents of forest protection against rural communities and workers dependent on the forest industry for jobs. Community Forestry in the United States demonstrates the futility of such an approach by challenging the dominant paradigm of forest management that diminishes the role of local communities in decisionmaking and the interest group-driven politics that has come to dominate the debate over the future of forest resources.

Authors Mark Baker and Jonathan Kusel, both with the nonprofit organization Forest Community Research, advocate instead the "radical center" approach of community forestry. Community forestry seeks to fulfill the twin objectives of healthy forests and healthy communities and represents a radical reorientation away from the current state of affairs.

The book first reviews a number of historical antecedents to the contemporary community forestry movement-including early examples of Native American forest management and community forestry in New England. The book then shows how the subsequent rise in the twentieth century of a top-down, nonlocal, expert-dominated approach to forest management marginalized these earlier forms of community- based management. The emergence of contemporary community forestry efforts is portrayed as a social movement responding to forest degradation and the economic turmoil experienced in forest- dependent communities as a result of boom-bust cycles of exploitation.

While community forestry activities take many forms-such as forest landowner cooperatives and loggers' guilds-they share a number of common features. These include: a reordering of relations between people and between people and the forests; a greater emphasis on collaboration, collaborative decisionmaking and resource management: and greater investment in the natural capital of the forest and in community economic and social health.

Ultimately, the goals of community forestry are centered on the triad of environment, equity, and economy. Baker and Kusel adopt the concepts of natural and community capital to examine the potential benefits of community forestry as well as the political and scientific barriers that need to be overcome. To their credit, the authors recognize the limitations of the concept of "community" as it applies to groups often divided along racial or socioeconomic lines. In addition, they anticipate and respond to the primary concern of environmental groups regarding community forestry: that devolution of resource management to the local level could be hijacked by corporate interests and result in the weakening of hard- won forest protection efforts at the national level.

Finally, Baker and Kusel suggest ways forward through the adoption of a "civic science" for community forestry and a reinvestment in forest ecosystems and forest dependent communities. Given the array of challenges facing American forests-forest fragmentation, urban sprawl, disease, and climate change-community forestry will have an increasingly important role to play in achieving consensus on approaches to sustaining both the forest ecosystem and the communities that depend on forests for jobs, recreation and ecosystem services. Community Forestry in the United States offers a thorough and compelling blueprint for this approach, and it is worthwhile reading for all those fed up with the usual politics in debates over forest management.

Terrence Bensel

Department of Environmental Science

Allegheny College

Meadville, PA

Copyright HELDREF PUBLICATIONS Mar 2004

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