Collaboration—The evolution of a movement

Former adversaries now working together to stabilize degraded streams, improve grazing lands, and enhance forests, met at the Seventh American Forest Congress.

"People can't resist this movement. It just makes too much sense," says Maia Enzer, policy director at Sustainable Northwest in Portland, Oregon.

That is now, a decade after sworn enemies began working together to improve forest management across the West. But in 1996, when many current partners met at the Seventh American Forest Congress, collaboration was just a pipe dream. As they labored elbow-to-elbow at tables under the crystal chandeliers of the Sheraton ballroom in downtown D.C., few realized they were launching a seminal approach to managing natural resources.

Unlike its six predecessors, the now-landmark Seventh American Forest Congress was designed as a citizen's assembly: no delegates, no invitations, no minimum level of attendance. Its organizers wanted to create a conference for anyone with an interest in the nation's forests and watersheds. This happened at a time when the timber wars of the West had paralyzed an already-polarized Congress. But around the tables of the Forest Congress, where traditional adversaries argued for five full days, something new was stirring. Enzer and the 1,500 other participants began finding areas of agreement despite their cavernous philosophical differences.

Today these exploratory conversations have blossomed into a movement that is based on collaboration. In hundreds of small towns and urban centers, once-committed adversaries are working together to stabilize degraded streams, improve grazing lands, and enhance forests. The Forest Congress marked the widespread acceptance of a system of managing public lands based on broad participation, enlightened self-interest, and trust.

In a process born of frustration and gridlock, it was communities that were the first to the table. They were exhausted by decades of boom-to-bust cycles that extracted raw materials from the public lands in their backyards but left them out of both the decision-making and the economic benefits. The Forest Congress gave birth to the Communities Committee, once a loosely knit organization now incorporated as a non-profit and nationally recognized for its focus on building partnerships to benefit forest restoration and neighborhoods.

For most of the timber industry, joining forces with traditional adversaries was the only alternative to the impasse it faced. The industry knew that shifting public values meant an end to the free-for-all harvest levels that it had enjoyed on federal lands. Collaboration offered the potential for at least some level of logging. The effort to save their industry required more than a little humility from timber officials as they pursued local partnerships in timber-based communities around the West.

U.S. Forest Service and other government officials came to the table out of sheer frustration. They had seen an escalation in the collapse of timber programs due to a debacle of public protest, litigation, and court orders. Weakened by shrinking budgets and bureaucratic torpor, agency administrators turned to collaborative partnerships as a way to transform their commitment to resource management into action.

The most reluctant to join these burgeoning alliances were members of the national conservation community. The monkey-wrenching campaign they carried out on paper had all but halted activities on Western federal lands. At a time when many environmentalists viewed human management as a scourge that only damaged wild nature, many national groups were initially reluctant to participate.

But grassroots environmentalists were becoming involved in the efforts sprouting in their own backyards. Alliances ranging from the ponderosa pine country in southwest Colorado to the Applegate Valley in southwest Oregon were developing plans to restore forests and rangelands. As town leaders, loggers, and agency officials began completing projects that won some of what each group wanted, conservation leaders began rethinking their organizations' involvement.

Realizing that they needed to be part of the solution, environmental group after environmental group began entering the fray. Collaboration has become a requisite for restoring the low-elevation forests most environmentalists were recognizing as critical pieces of the restoration puzzle, says Mitch Friedman, a former tree-sitter who founded Conservation Northwest based in Bellingham, Washington.

"Our only hope for meeting the challenge at the scale of restoration needs is through active partnering with timber and community interests," he says in his essay, "The Forest Service is Dead; Long Live the Forest Service!"

The success of these collaborative efforts is legion throughout the West. The Quivira Coalition in New Mexico, Montana's Blackfoot Challenge, the Lakeview Stewardship Group in southeast Oregon - these and many others have been touted in print and online as unlikely alliances that are solving the resource issues none of their members could resolve on their own. The praise is richly deserved, and each success begets more success. Henry Carey, a veteran of collaborative forestry who formed the Santa Fe-based Forest Guild almost 20 years ago, documents a boom in partnerships from 15 in 1988 to hundreds today.

Many are moving beyond single projects to the more difficult task of long-term restoration of entire ecosystems. The Mattole Restoration Council in northwest California has just embarked on a comprehensive 30-year plan to restore the natural systems in the remote coastal watershed. Along with a history of conflicts over land management, it faces the challenge of rapidly escalating land values, which tempt many landowners to sell out to developers.

Across the state in the Feather River watershed, another coalition of ranchers, loggers, anglers, and agency officials is working to return long-term sustainability at a landscape scale. The Feather River CRM Group has embarked on its third decade with the community trust and confidence that may overcome the perpetual funding challenges every non-profit collaboration faces.

Collaboration is not a panacea for the land management dilemmas that have plagued the West. Appeals and litigation remain valuable tools for use against federal agencies that may have overstepped, misapplied, or deliberately ignored a required procedure. Collaboration is not altruism. The process of collaboration is effective only as long as it operates on the principle of enlightened self-interest, achieving some of the goals of each participant. Once the power tips in any direction, that delicate balance is gone and, too often, collaboration goes with it.

If the collaborative movement can mature from single-issue projects to the more difficult arena of holistic ecosystem management, it has the potential to repair vast landscapes and strengthen the communities that lie within them. That will almost certainly require consistent funding which transcends the annual appropriations of conventional agency budgeting. Few familiar with the current administration's fiscal priorities hold much hope for long-term financial commitments to collaboration. But the growing involvement of national conservation organizations in grassroots coalitions offers the promise of an influx of private funds.

If collaborative groups across the West can meet the challenges of funding, and if they can maintain the balance of power within each partnership, they are in position to build on their decade of success since the Seventh American Forest Congress. This will require continued courage and innovation, as well as even more trust among the neighbors who share the West's forests and watersheds.