Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
able and nonsalable material. This policy gap was addressed in the 1990s when the
U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management received congressional au-
thorization to experiment with stewardship contracting mechanisms on a limited ba-
sis (Ringgold 1998), allowing the agencies to integrate commercial and noncom-
mercial activities into a single contract and to include local community development
into overall project goals. In 1999, the Forest Service was given authority to pilot
twenty-eight stewardship contracts nationwide. In 2003, Congress expanded these
authorities to allow for an unlimited number of stewardship contracts and increased
the maximum contract duration from five to ten years.
The White Mountain Stewardship Contract
The White Mountain Stewardship Contract (WMSC), a plan to restore 150,000 acres
of overstocked forest in wildland-urban interface areas of the Apache-Sitgreaves Na-
tional Forests, was announced on August 10, 2004, just two years after the last flames
of the Rodeo-Chediski Fire had been extinguished. The ten-year project was envi-
sioned as a shift of focus from commercial timber sales, the traditional emphasis on
the Apache-Sitgreaves and most other national forests, to the removal of smaller-
diameter trees in unnaturally dense stands as a means of altering fire behavior and
leaving treated forests in a more resilient condition. This kind of activity is widely con-
sidered a necessary, if not entirely sufficient, component of an overall restoration pro-
gram for southwestern ponderosa pine forests (Moore, Covington, and Fulé 1999;
Allen et al. 2002).
The model of federal land management prevalent since the 1970s assumes that
land managers periodically seek public input into a largely internal planning process.
The WMSC, however, was planned and implemented with the active involvement of
local, multistakeholder community forums. Community-based restoration planning
for federal lands in the White Mountains had been under way since the mid-1990s
when a small group of local leaders and stakeholders, including traditional adversaries
representing environmental and wood products interests, worked to develop and test a
series of forest density reduction prescriptions on a parcel of national forestland
known as Blue Ridge, located near exurban housing developments in a high fire haz-
ard area. The seven-thousand-acre demonstration project was one of the early suc-
cesses of the community forum that came to be known as the Natural Resources
Working Group (NRWG) (Lenart 2006). This evolving collaborative organization
would act as the voice of the community on issues such as the creation of Community
Wildfire Protection Plans and the WMSC. A key component of the success of this col-
laborative group was local national forest managers' willingness to redefine their role
vis-à-vis the local communities, as explained by an Apache-Sitgreaves forest manager:
During all the time that we did any work on the Blue Ridge Demonstration
Project, I used the Natural Resource Working Group as, they're my boss. So I
went to them, I made presentations and said, “Here's a decision that needs to
be made, now which way do you want me to go?” So it wasn't the Forest Service
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