Routledge Forest Community Connections: Implications for Research, Management, and Governance (Resources for the Future)

Product Description The connections between communities and forests are complex and evolving, presenting challenges to forest managers, researchers, and communities themselves. Dependency on timber extraction and timber-related industries is no longer a universal characteristic of the forest community. Remoteness is also a less common feature, as technology, workforce mobility, tourism, and 'amenity migrants' increasingly connect rural to urban places. Forest Community Connections explores the responses of forest communities to a changing economy, changing federal policy, and concerns about forest health from both within and outside forest communities. Focusing primarily on the United States, the book examines the ways that social scientists work with communities-their role in facilitating social learning, informing policy decisions, and contributing to community well being. Bringing perspectives from sociology, anthropology, political science, and forestry, the authors review a range of management issues, including wildfire risk, forest restoration, labor force capacity, and the growing demand for a growing variety of forest goods and services. They examine the increasingly diverse aesthetic and cultural values that forest residents attribute to forests, the factors that contribute to strong and resilient connections between communities and forests, and consider a range of governance structures to positively influence the well being of forest communities and forests, including collaboration and community-based forestry. Review 'This book provides a comprehensive understanding of what has occurred in what otherwise might be considered tumultuous times. The past two decades have seen a dramatic shift in the social forces that affect natural resources policy. This shift has created many new and innovative relationships among individuals, organizations, communities, and forest ecosystems. Policymakers, forest managers, and community leaders will find the book useful as they work toward understanding the dynamics of natural resources management today.' Gordon Bradley, University of Washington About the Author Ellen M. Donoghue is a social scientist with the USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. Her research focuses on the institutional dimensions of community and resource management agency interactions. Victoria E. Sturtevant is professor of sociology in the Department of Environmental Studies at Southern Oregon University. Her research has focused on forest communities in transition; collaborative stewardship, monitoring, and planning; and the social dimensions of wildfire.