Perspectives On Line: The Magazine of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences

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 Summer 2004Home From the Dean

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NRLI helps diverse panel agree of forest restoration

Seeing the forest for the trees: Community members and a U.S. Forest Service representative discuss the long-leaf pine woodland restoration at Bankhead National Forest.

Ornate letter "F"or the first time, the U.S. Forest Service in 2003 launched a major forest health and restoration project in a southeastern national forest, thanks at least in part to an interdisciplinary N.C. Cooperative Extension program administered in the College’s Agriculture and Resource Economics Department.

Since 2002, Mary Lou Addor, associate director of the Natural Resources Leadership Institute at N.C. State University (www.ces.ncsu.edu/NRLI ) and Juliana Birkhoff, a senior mediator at RESOLVE Inc. (www.resolv.org), a national conflict resolution group, have worked with a group of diverse forest users and USFS officials to arrive at the initiative.

The project, spearheaded by the USFS, national forests in Alabama and the U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution, is still under way. Congress created the USIECR to help resolve environmental conflicts around the country that involve federal agencies or interests. To reach a plan acceptable to the many involved parties, the Forest Service first had to approve a five-year plan that included all loblolly pine stands on 16,312 acres in northwest Alabama’s 182,000-acre Bankhead National Forest.

“The overall goal was to foster a positive and productive approach to guide the future management of the Bankhead National Forest,” said Addor, “to restore forest and plant community types that are uncommon to private lands in northern Alabama.”

The Bankhead, Alabama’s largest remaining contiguous deciduous forest tract, is available for recreation, timber, wildlife and fish, water and soil, wilderness and range. To decide about the Bank-head’s future by providing diverse perspectives, USFS engaged local residents, timber consultants, companies, elected officials, American Indians, local history groups and state and federal agencies. During the process, the Forest Service also worked on building trust and developing better working relationships with the community.

“Environmental disputes can be very complex,” Addor said. “They are often about many other circumstances other than the substance of the controversy and its solutions. Disputes can entail undefined problems and therefore numerous problem definitions. But public acceptance of recovery measures will in part depend on the level of input that the public has in their development and implementation.”

Forest officials maintained that 200 years of insufficient woodland fires and major land-use changes depleted the range of rare upland native fire-dependent forest communities such as common native grasslands and shrubs. They also maintained that 22,000 acres of dead 15-to-45-year-old loblolly pines still standing after a Southern Pine Beetle infestation not only could escalate catastrophic wildfire risk, but the standing dead timber also posed a safety risk to hikers.

The initiative study group agreed, to some extent. In May 2003, the Bankhead Liaison Panel stated its preferences for the forest ecosystems restoration project. In addition, the public engaged in the initiative throughout the formal National Environmental Policy Act process.

The final initiative calls for:

• Intermediate thinning on approximately 9,452 acres of loblolly pine stands.

• Site preparation of Southern pine beetle-affected areas of standing deadwood to ensure successful reforestation efforts.

• Natural and artificial reforestation to restore Southern pine beetle-killed areas on approximately 6,860 acres.

“However,” Addor said, “reaching decisions that parties support is only the first step in the overall process of better management for the Forest Service, Bankhead National Forest and the Bankhead community. We need monitoring and evaluation not only to ensure appropriate management decisions, but to ensure that working relationships provide opportunities to grow, develop and sustain themselves where necessary.”

To that end, the liaison panel proposed creating community-based work groups to monitor progress and performance for timber and thinning performance, recreation, culture and history, wildlife and desired future conditions, she said.

Through its Leadership Development Program, NRLI educates and trains North Carolinians seeking consensus on issues affecting our natural resources’ sustainable development and our environmental quality. NRLI also has an Environmental Decision-Making Program, providing policy negotiation, facilitation and mediation services to manage conflict over environmental issues and aid collaborative decision-making. While NRLI expanded its geographic reach in the Alabama project, it also recently supported negotiations involving the Nantahala and the Tuckasegee cooperative stakeholder teams.

—Art Latham