Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
heating pellet manufacturer—provided the means to add value to otherwise unmer-
chantable restoration by-products, thereby providing both local employment options
and economic support for activities in the woods. This local capacity didn't emerge in
response to the WMSC; it was built over a number of years prior to 2004 through a
combination of federal grant programs and local community organizations, such as
the Arizona Sustainable Forests Partnership, the Little Colorado Plateau Resource
Conservation and Development Area, and the Northern Arizona Wood Products As-
sociation, all of which worked together to foster and support local businesses capa-
ble of adding value to small-diameter material. The WMSC allowed the Apache-
Sitgreaves National Forests to take advantage of the groundwork already laid by these
community-based initiatives by tapping into the community's capacity to process res-
toration by-products. According to one active member of the local wood products
community:
We've had a lot of people visit us from other areas, wanting a stewardship con-
tract, and what we've decided is most of them don't understand that a steward-
ship contract itself is not going to solve their problem. If they haven't put the
time and effort into rebuilding their infrastructure, the collaboration, a stew-
ardship contract isn't the magic answer. There had been a lot of work done
prior to the stewardship contract ever coming here.
Zone of Agreement
One of the most significant features of the WMSC is the fact that it was built on, and
continues to receive, widespread public support in a region that was recently charac-
terized by social divisiveness and conflict over forest issues. Much of the credit for this
transformation goes to the NRWG, which made an explicit effort to bring all of the
major stakeholders together to work toward viable solutions (Lenart 2006), as well as
to several individuals who personally worked to build relationships with those repre-
senting different interests. The demonstration restoration project at Blue Ridge in the
late 1990s was the first tangible manifestation of a “zone of agreement,” within which
all major parties were willing to work. The WMSC represented the growth of this
zone of agreement, moving from the demonstration to the landscape scale. Signifi-
cantly, the WMSC met most of the major concerns held by local leaders and stake-
holders: (1) for wood products businesses, the contract assured a baseline level of ac-
tivity, allowing them to secure loans to make capital investments; (2) for local
communities, most restoration activities would take place in the wildland-urban in-
terface where the risk of catastrophic fire brought with it the threat of harm to life and
property; and (3) for environmental organizations, there were assurances that the fo-
cus of woody material removal during treatments would be the smaller and younger
trees, with trees over sixteen inches in diameter being removed only under unusual
circumstances. Some environmental advocates were initially apprehensive at the
prospect of a large corporation entering the picture to provide for wood utilization,
but apprehension turned to support when it became clear that a network of smaller,
local businesses would act as the utilization component of the project. One local
wood products businessperson described the zone of agreement this way:
