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IUFRO Forestry Extension Conference Lorne, Oct-Nov 2001 ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ KEYNOTE PAPER EXTENSION AND THE FUTURE OF FAMILY FORESTS:MAKING CONNECTIONS John C. Bliss Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, USA. 97331. Email: [email protected] Abstract In this paper I address three questions: Why sustain family forests? What are the major challenges to sustaining family forests? and, What roles can extension forestry play in sustaining family forests? Family forests are critical components of forested landscapes around the world, providing a unique and valuable set of ecological, economic, and social values. Sustaining family forests is challenged by profound changes occurring in 1) environmental conditions, 2) land tenure patterns and institutions, 3) the globalization of markets, communications, and politics, and 4) changes in social demographics and values. I propose "sustaining family forests" as a worthy mission for extension forestry, and suggest that achieving this mission will require facilitating connections; 1) between forest owners and their neighbors across the landscape, 2) between forest owners and global markets, and, 3) between forest owners and the public. About the Author John Bliss holds the position of Starker Chair in Private and Family Forestry in the College of Forestry at Oregon State University, U.S.A. Dr. Bliss earned degrees in cultural anthropology and forestry from the University of Wisconsin – Madison. He has worked in the field of nonindustrial private forestry for 20 years, first as a private lands forester for the State of Wisconsin, then as an forestry extension specialist at Auburn University, Alabama. John has published extensively on forest-based rural development, private forest policy, public attitudes toward forest practices, and social science research applications in forestry. In his free time, John enjoys bicycling, backpacking, skiing, and playing jazz guitar. Introduction Corvallis, Oregon, where I live, is a college town of 50,000 souls at the feet of the Coast Range Mountains, about an hour's drive from the North Pacific. The Coast Range is a maze of narrow valleys and ridges scraped up from the ocean floor as two massive tectonic plates collided. The Douglas-fir forests that cover the slopes of these low mountains are among the most productive forests on the planet. When I moved to Corvallis in 1998, I visited dozens of people with some sort of connection to the forests, trying to gain an understanding of the issues. One of my first conversations was with an environmental activist, Reid Behrens, who had moved to Oregon from San Francisco. Reid had been among the first citizens to contact me in my new capacity as manager of a 260-acre demonstration forest. Reid had organized neighbors of the forest in protest over the initial harvests on the property, and was anxious to check out the new manager. Over coffee at a local coffee shop, he told me how he had wept when he first drove north along the IUFRO Forestry Extension Conference Lorne, Oct-Nov 2001 ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Pacific Coast, and encountered Oregon's Coast Range forests. Instead of the vast, pristine old growth forests he envisioned, what he saw were great swaths of destruction: huge gaping scars of clearcuts torn out of the sides of the mountains. The spectacle of such wanton destruction, he said, brought him to tears, and fueled his zeal to bring a halt to it. Reid's Coast Range is a despoiled place, a raped place, a place begging for relief and protection from the insatiable hunger of humans. Shortly after this conversation, I met with Thad Springer, a logger and forest owner from Harlan, a tiny logging and farming community snuggled in the Big Elk Creek Valley deep within the Coast Range. He'd agreed to drive me around the area in his pickup and show me his tree farm. As we bounced along on gravel and dirt roads, sometimes climbing steeply up the mountainside, then following the Big Elk Creek, Thad constantly pointed out places of significance to his life: the site of the one-room schoolhouse he attended as a child, a remnant snag from the Yaquina fire of the 1850's which reduced much of the Coast Range forest to ashes, the stand of fir that was "nothing but a fern patch" when he was a kid, the hillside he used to slide down on his way to school, the church where three generations of his family had been married, the church yard where family members are buried. Thad's Coast Range has the familiarity of neighborhood. Its forest is a mosaic of stands - some harvested yesterday, some 50 years ago. The cut patches move across the landscape, but the forest endures. Each patch of timber is, in Thad's memory, attached to some individual who cut it, or planted it, or grazed it. Some farmer who cared for the forest, or didn't. Thad's landscape is a humanized landscape, in which natural and human resources are intertwined, inseparable. But it is a landscape in the throes of major ecological, economic, and social change. Thad's hometown of Harlan is a ghost town; its once-thriving mills are closed, most of its residents have moved to the city to find work. Over the years, large portions of the patchwork of family-owned farms and forests have been transformed incrementally into a less diverse landscape of large, intensively managed corporate tree farms, and large, National Forest reserves. Local forest products mills have all but disappeared, and mergers and acquisitions have produced new, unfamiliar, distant companies competing in global markets. The timber-based economy and culture, once so central to Oregon’s identity, now seems a quaint historical relic to most Oregonians. Today’s citizens are more likely to associate Oregon's economy with Nike and Intel, rather than with Willamette or Weyerhaeuser; with microchips rather than woodchips. Most fail to make the connection between their wood frame houses, log trucks in heavy interstate traffic, and clearcuts on the mountainsides. And very few realize that most of the timberland in the United States is owned by non-industrial, private owners. Reid and Thad's competing views of the forest, and the ecological, economic, and social changes underway in the Oregon Coast Range, are illustrative of forces affecting family forests all around the globe. Although the circumstances vary with differences in culture, history, form of government, and land tenure relations, family forest owners everywhere share some common attributes. By referring to the Oregon situation, about which I know at least a little, I’ll try to heed the advice IUFRO Forestry Extension Conference Lorne, Oct-Nov 2001 ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ of that great American philosopher, Mark Twain, who admonished us that “It is better to know a few facts that is, than many that ain’t.” My observations from Oregon present a context for considering three questions might be of some value to our discussions over the next few days: 1. Why sustain family forests in the landscape? 2. What are the major challenges to sustaining family forests? 3. What roles can extension forestry play in sustaining family forests? Before proceeding with these questions, a definition is in order. I use the term "family forest" to emphasize the unique attributes of non-industrial private forests owned by families or individuals, and to distinguish them from other ownerships in the NIPF category such as banks, pension funds, real estate companies, and other corporate entities. The term "family forest" is somewhat imprecise, but it conveys the essence of a great many of these ownerships, namely, the centrality of family attachments, values, and objectives to management of the forest. Although I’ll be speaking about family forests, my observations may be relevant to many other non-public, non-corporate ownerships such as community and tribal forests. In the United States, family forests are tremendously important by virtue of their extent alone; non-industrial private forests comprise 59 percent of the nation’s timberland, the bulk of that being held by individuals and families (Birch 1994). Even in a state such as Oregon, where public and industrial forests dominate, over 4 million acres of forestland are owned by families. Here in Australia over one quarter of the forest is privately owned (Dargavel 1995), much of it in the hands of family farmers and ranchers. Now to the three questions I posed. I’ve organized my discussion of these questions around the familiar sustainability triad of social, economic, and ecological considerations, resulting in a three by three matrix (Table 1). This is certainly not the only way to approach the topic, but it has the advantages of simplicity and familiarity. Why Sustain Family Forests in the Landscape? Ecological Dimension About three years ago I set out to test a hypothesis that I suspect many of you have intuitively assumed to be true, namely, that a diverse pattern of forestland ownership correspondingly supports a diverse forest. The Coast Range, with its large expanses of National Forest, vast industrial tree farms, and thousands of family forest ownerships, is an ideal test case. Using statistical spatial analysis, graduate student Brooks Stanfield and I systematically examined relationships between forest ownership patterns and patterns of forest

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