Community-based forestry in the western United States

Abstract

In the western United States, community-based forestry (CBF) organisations are restoring forests, re-negotiating relationships with federal land management agencies, and influencing federal and state natural resources policies. This chapter examines these processes through the evolution of one influential CBF organisation, the Watershed Research and Training Center (Watershed Center) based in northern California. Focusing on the Watershed Center’s work on sustainable livelihoods and wildfire management, the authors explain the context within which community forestry has emerged here and the entrepreneurial form of place-based CBF that has evolved through peer-learning networks to include hundreds of organisations, tribes, agencies, and individual actors across local, regional, state, and national scales. The authors argue that this re-imagining of the relationship between communities and forests and the associated shift in the culture of forest management institutions are critical to society’s ability to adapt to the challenges of sustaining resilient forests in future.