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Idaho
groups find it's possible
but not easy to reach consensus
By
Cyd Weiland and John Freemuth
for Headwaters News
All
over Idaho and the West, collaborative groups hold our attention.
Loosely defined as people working together to achieve a common purpose
and to share resources, collaborative groups typically form where
there are intense and complex conflicts over natural resource management.
Often these conflicts spin off into lawsuits, lost jobs, and frequently,
fractured community relationships. Collaborative groups form as
people turn to each other for solutions, believing there has to
be a better way.
But in Western states, collaborative efforts often involve the landlords
– federal agencies with jurisdiction and authority over public
land and resources.
In
Idaho, for example, the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management
manage almost two-thirds of the state's land base. On these lands,
collaborative partners try to work among themselves, but within
the laws and decision-making authorities held by agency managers.
In recent years, several Idaho collaborative groups have tackled
federal land management projects, while others have developed ideas
for federal and/or state and private land, using federal agencies
as partners.
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Collaboration
isn't new,
but it's not the norm
By
Greg Lakes, editor
Headwaters News
July 24, 2002
Collaboration and consensus, the not-so-novel approach
to the end of the Forest Service's "analysis paralysis,"
seemed everywhere in the headlines last spring.
Since, it's faded a bit, or perhaps just hunkered down into that
long, drawn-out process from which few resource debates seem immune.
Fueled in no small part by a new book by Daniel Kemmis, director
of the O'Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West, collaboration
was the theme for a range of issues under a variety of labels across
the West.
In Idaho, a conference on rural economies drew broad agreement
that the loss of traditional forest and mining jobs, and the influx
of moneyed newcomers were creating profound changes, and not all
for the better. The conference adjourned on the widely approved
notion that all that was needed now was consensus among disparate
groups on what to do next.
In Arizona, volunteers released seven more California condors
in a reintroduction plan heralded as a model of collaboration between
public agencies and private groups. And throughout British Columbia,
columnists wrote that without much more collaboration, or at least
a little willingness to budge, government mandates were unlikely
to settle any portion of the native claims crippling key
industries.
But the real emphasis on collaboration was on public land management.
Again in Idaho, the concept had been at
least six years in the making, since a group of loggers, environmentalists
and civic leaders from Montana coined the phrase stewardship contracts
in 1995 to describe national forest projects that satisfied the
agendas of all the groups. In 1999, Congress authorized 28 such
pilot projects, then another 28 in subsequent legislation.
One of the key components was that
local people representing diverse interests are to be involved
in developing projects, as well as in monitoring and evaluating
the projects as they are carried out. The Forest Service approved
the first such project, a fire risk-reduction project near Priest
Lake, Idaho, in February.
Two weeks later, forest officials in Idaho announced approval of
$135,000 in projects through a project intended
to increase local control over federal land. Although the money
was from a bill that stabilized Forest Service payments to states,
a local advisory committee -- in this case, the North Idaho Resource
Advisory Committee -- has the final say over which projects get
funded.
Criticism immediately followed, with environmental groups alleging
the projects
were just a new euphemism for increased logging, a theme that
has yet to fade.
About the same time, the
idea of charter forests, to be "administered outside the
normal Forest Service structure," showed up as a line item
in the Bush budget. Some saw it as a reaffirmation of proposals
floating around for several years to fix the agency, and others
echoed the complaint it was a new excuse to log.
A decidedly pro-industry proposal to manage a vast swatch
of northwestern Colorado scared those already leery of more local
control. In April, when Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt convened the second
environmental conference on the Enlibra doctrine, a policy to
settle environmental battles through negotiation, the Southern Utah
Wilderness Alliance pointedly was not invited. The intent was to
note success stories, but critics can't name one in Utah.
And the management plan for Colorado's
White River National Forest, released in June as a tribute to
cooperation and compromise, called for twice as much wilderness
but allowed double the amount of logging called for in the draft,
including on 400,000 of the forest's 600,000 roadless acres.
And finally, back in Idaho, the Idaho Conservation League on Monday
blasted a state task force's proposed
bill that would put forest management in local hands. The bill
would let the North Central Idaho Resource Advisory Committee write
five-year plans and set priorities for management of large portions
of the Clearwater and Nez Perce national forests.
The conservation league said the bill was an open invitation to
logging without the usual public input or chance of administrative
appeals.
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