Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
community put it, “I can't get past the fact that one-third of everything I touch is piled
and burned, it's valueless.” An Apache-Sitgreaves forest manager related that building
an industry around the processing of small-diameter trees “has been more difficult
than one can imagine.”
The experience of the WMSC raises questions of how the trend toward devolved
governance of natural resources intersects with declines in public funding for man-
agement activities (McCarthy 2005), particularly in cases where ecological restora-
tion is needed to remedy degraded conditions. After several decades in which the eco-
logical costs of commodity-oriented public forest management were passed on to
local communities, those same communities are now increasingly expected to bear
the financial costs of restoring damaged ecosystems. While innovative contracting
mechanisms and economic development based on restoration by-products can close
the funding gap to some extent, in the White Mountains, as elsewhere across the arid
West, ecological restoration is still not a break-even proposition.
Conclusion
In recent years, U.S. federal forest policy has made tentative steps toward a shift from
a bifurcated model in which lands either produced commodity outputs or were set
aside as no-touch preserves to a model in which restored, functioning ecosystems pro-
vide a variety of market and nonmarket benefits (Kelly and Bliss 2009). Rural com-
munities, with their diverse populations and interests, are now expected to play a more
substantial role in setting management direction and supporting restoration activities,
and federal forest managers are expected to engage in collaborative, participatory de-
cision making with a range of communities of interest and communities of place
(Carr, Selin, and Schuett 1998). And, as noted earlier, all of this is occurring during a
time of dwindling public funding for land management activities.
Changes to contracting policy have resulted in new tools that agency managers can
use to meet the social, ecological, and economic goals of restoration. This new suite of
contracting options means that managers are no longer reliant on the antiquated tim-
ber sale system, or on traditional service contracts, to meet multifaceted goals and ob-
jectives. These tools are especially significant in light of policies, such as HFRA and
HFI, that direct agency managers to engage local communities and tomake restoration
of degraded lands a priority. The experience of managers and stakeholders in theWhite
Mountains demonstrates that restoration and community needs can be met in con-
structive and even synergistic ways. However, this case also indicates that declining fed-
eral funding for agency staff and implementation costs can prevent community-based
restoration efforts from achieving their full potential.
The experience of the White Mountain Stewardship Contract illustrates that na-
tional-level policy changes can provide space within which local communities work
to achieve improved forest conditions. But, at least in this case, policy changes were
merely one component, and the greater part of the achievements of the stewardship
contract came from the years of sustained capacity building that occurred at the com-
munity level. Federal forest managers would not have been able to embark on a
