Community Forestry Research Fellowship

Community Forestry Research Fellowship Final Report for Pre-Dissertation Fellowship

Assessing the Role of Non-Timber Forest Products in Interior Alaska Communities

Kimberley Anne C. Maher University of Alaska Fairbanks

Research Focus and Goals

The harvest of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) is a prominent activity in Interior Alaska for both personal and subsistence uses. A survey conducted in 2004 showed that one–third of households in Alaska’s Tanana Valley picked wild blueberries and one-quarter of the households harvested firewood (ABFC 2003). A few niche industries in Alaska are based off NTFP resources such as birch syrup production. The birch syrup industry is almost two decades old. Alaskan birch syrup has created quite a buzz and has an unsatiated global market demand (Pounds 2000). Demand for birch syrup is growing (Cameron 2001), and it is a unique forest product that piques the interest of people ranging from tourists visiting Alaska to food connoisseurs (Jackinsky 2001). The number of birch syrup operations in Alaska increased during the 1990’s (ABFC 2005) but has since has declined with only two operations producing birch syrup in 2007. Little data is collected on NTFP harvest practices in Interior Alaska so forest managers do not have a clear idea about (1) who is collecting NTFPs (2) what NTFPs are being harvested, and (3) what non-market and non-tangible benefits people are also seeking and receiving from their harvesting practices. Therefore my research questions are:

1. Are forest management plans needed for personal-use NTFP harvesting? Are people’s current expectations for NTFP harvests being met under the present management? 2. How do other forest uses conflict with the community’s forest harvesting practices and how do these conflicts infringe on the social benefits attained from harvesting? Where they are conflicts of interests, how can these conflicts be mitigated? What are the non-market benefits from NTFP harvest that community members are seeking? 3. What are the impacts from commercial harvest of an NTFP?

My goal for this past year as a Community Forestry Research Pre-dissertation fellow has been to evaluated my research questions and continue to build relationships with the birch syruping community. I also wanted to begin to build a relationship with the village of Northway in order to engage them into my research interest. Northway is a rural village with approximately 100 residents, the majority are Upper Tanana Athabascan. Northway, located on the Alaska Highway near the Canadian boarder, is in the region where commercial morel mushroom harvesters from the Lower 48 came to mushroom pick in 2005. (Alaska had extremely extensive wildfires in Summer 2004 and there are often bumper crops of morels the following summer). I am interested in beginning a dialogue with residents of Northway discussing their thoughts and impressions on how their NTFP harvesting practices are impacted by resource availability, land tenure, and competing outside interest (and possibly internal competing interests). While I am interested in conducting these conversations with other non-rural residents of Interior Alaska, I feel that engaging a rural community will be the most challenging and that it will take time to develop a relationship Although my basic research questions haven’t really changed, I have rethought my methods of trying to answer these questions because of the input I’ve received from personal and commercial NTFP harvesters on their thoughts and concerns.

Preliminary findings

At the end of April I visited Alaska Birch Syrupmakers Association member Kahiltna Birchworks to observe and participate in their sap harvest season. While at the Kahiltna homestead (approximately 40 miles west of the road system), I interviewed company staff on their motivations for participating in birch syrup production. Overwhelmingly, the people involved in the laborious job of birch syrup production weren’t out there for an easy way to make money, but rather they valued the experience of spending time working in the woods and helping create a unique product. In additional to the interviews, I took recorded temperature data from the area and extracted tree cores to analyze for effects of weather on sap flow and impacts of tapping on the growth of the trees. The climatic data and tree ring data are still in the process of being analyzed. Listening to Michael East and Dulce Ben-East, owners of Kahiltna Birchworks, I gained a lot of insight into what their primary concerns are including access to birch trees to tap, weather influence on the variability of sap production between years, and the long- term effects of tapping on the trees. Their valuable input has helped prioritize the way that I develop my research projects. The results of the tree ring analysis will help them make informed tree management decisions on how often to tap trees and when trees should be retired from tapping. Results from the climatic data will help them decide how to invest their energy early in the sap season. While Kahiltna has daily goals for the amount of sap they would like to harvest in order to produce a target amount of birch syrup, the amount of sap a tree produces depends to a certain extent on temperatures and water availability. Michael East is particularly interested in understanding the snow pack and daily temperature may impact trees’ sap production. In July I visited Northway to receive an initial introduction into the community. I have just begun to meet with the community members and initiate discussions on any concerns they may have over access to harvesting areas and the importance of harvesting to their rural lifestyles. Unfortunately, I have not been able to make it back to Northway since the summer due to scheduling conflicts.

Benefits to the community Since I am still fairly early in my work, I have not yet provided too many benefits to Alaskan birch syrup producers or the village of Northway. I have been able to provide birch syrup producers with information about birch tapping in other regions of the world and previous scientific research on the health of birch trees and tapping birch. While in Northway I was able to take a village elder, Ada Gallen, out to harvest spruce roots for the afternoon. This, in fact, was more beneficial to me to be able to spend the afternoon with Ada and being able to learn from her about pulling roots although I was able to provide her with transportation and a strong back to assist her in harvesting so she can make more birch bark baskets. I expect that the benefits that I provide will increase in the near future.

Literature Cited Alaska Boreal Forest Council [ABFC]. 2003. Forest Use Survey. Unpublished data set.

Alaska Boreal Forest Council [ABFC]. 2005. Review of the 2001 Birch Sap harvest in Alaska. Final Report. Fairbanks, AK. 4 p.

Cameron, M. 2001. Establishing an Alaskan Birch Syrup Industry: Birch Syrup--It's the Un-maple. USDA Forest Service General Technical Report, NC-217:135-9.

Jackinsky, M. 2001. Tapping Alaska's Birch. Alaska Business Monthly, 17:54-56

Pounds, N. 2000. Birch syrup maker taps globe. Alaska Journal of Commerce, 24:12-14. Buckets collecting spring birch sap for birch syrup production.

Dulce Ben-East of Kahiltna Birchworks testing the sugar content of birch syrup being drawn of the wood-fired evaporator. Evidence of two previous tap holes in a birch tree retired from birch sap harvest fro syrup production.

Ada Gallen of Northway harvesting spruce roots used to sew together birch bark baskets. Personal comments not to be place on the website because I don’t want to be misconstrued

Lessons Learned

The most important thing that I learned was the importance of maintaining a neutral role as a researcher when working with a small but incredibly divided community such as birch syrup producers in Alaska. I felt this lesson was echoed in a recent episode of National Public Radio’s “This American Life” about rental apartment superintendents. One chapter of the show interviewed a young superintendent who became too involved with an apartment of renters who repeatedly failed to pay rent. The superintendent even sat down with the renters with their tax reports and bills in order to create monthly budgets. After years of struggle and becoming personally involved with the renters, the superintendent had the crushing experience of eventually having to go to court to have the renters evicted. After that experience the superintendent never again got personally involved with any of his renters even though some of the renters were people that, had they not been renters, the superintendent would likely strike up friendships with. Working with birch syrup producers, I felt a bit like that superintendent. Due to a strong rift between different portions of the Alaska birch syrup community, I began to fell somewhat caught between sides. This was accentuated by having a spent time quite a bit more time collaborating with one side and getting to know them (and their family) as people, not just birch syrup producers. Therefore, I felt myself beginning to loose my impartialness to the situation. Because I need to work effectively with the whole birch syrup producing community, I knew that I needed to pull myself out of that situation. While some people are able to balance personal and work relationships, I realized my need for creating boundaries between the two in order to maintain positive relationships with the whole community. Like the superintendent who developed his own boundaries, if these people were not part of the community with which I was conducting research, they would be great to have as friends; instead, I need to limit myself in order to maintain friendly working relationships with the whole group. Trying to involve community participation into research on non-timber forest products sounds like the best way to conduct research in order to make it relevant, but I discovered that it may also limit the data I’m able to collect and/or the robustness of the research results. Specifically, I’m referring to my interest in working with the community of Northway. When setting up my theoretical research design, Northway popped out as a good choice in villages for to try to work with a number of reasons including there has been previous community-involved ecological research and I know a graduate student currently basing her environmental research within the Northway community. Northway has key attributes that I’m looking for such as it is located in my focus area of the Tanana Valley and is on the road system with year-round car access. Realistically, the community may not be in a position to work effectively with researchers, especially on a graduate student timeline. The graduate student I know currently working in Northway initially advised me not to work in Northway because it would be quite difficult. The Village Council is difficult to just get in touch with meets irregularly, and has high turn over. I also have personal safety concerns of being an outsider spending time in the community; I already encountered inebriated men making sexually inappropriate comments to me which even happened in front of a village elder. While I met some really wonderful people in Northway, the social strife that community faces may prevent it from productively participating in research on NTFPs. An alternative would be to shift my focus to work with Eagle Village and the neighboring town of Eagle. Geographically, Eagle Village and Eagle are not in the Tanana Valley but are in the greater Yukon Watershed that composes Interior Alaska. This would increase the geographic scale that I would base my research on, possibly making the project more unwieldy. Additionally, the Taylor Highway to Eagle and Eagle Village is not maintained from October 15th through May 15th which makes the communities accessible by car for less than half of the year. Eagle Village also has its own share of problems such as alcoholism and a lack of jobs, but the main asset that it does have which may make it a better community to engage in participatory action research is that community members that have already expressed interest in my line of research-- specifically Joanne Beck and her mother Ethel who I discovered through a Letter to the Editor that was published in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner newspaper about the importance of harvesting wild blueberries. Joanne has held leadership positions in Eagle Village, a Han Athabascan village. When she was just 19 years old, Joanne was elected the first female chief of Eagle Village and has served as village chief for multiple terms since. Choosing a community to work with creates the dilemma of weighing out factors and trying to predict which opportunities will allow the research to move forward in order to produce valid and meaningful results. Without the interest and commitment of the community, participatory action research will not be successful. In the same way researchers in ecological field experiments have much less control over factors affecting their research settings than researchers conducting experiments in greenhouses, community-based researchers have much less control over factors affecting their research than researchers simply conducting research on communities. I guess this is my way of trying to wrap my mind around when it is more beneficial to conduct participatory action research and when involving the community can hinder reaching the established research objectives. I was able to interview Joanne Beck about her Letter to the Editor and create a short movie (with my limited iMovie skills) which highlights using that interview illustrated with photographs to share her story about the cultural importance of blueberry harvesting to her and her family. The project has been a great partnership between the two of us. Because of this partnership, I’ve been able to assist in her story being retold to a larger audience. One improvement I would see to the Community Forestry Research Fellowship program would be an annual or biannual newsletter (either hard copy or electronic) for current and previous fellows and associate faculty that gives short updates on what people are up to (like has Annette Drewes finished her dissertation and what she is up to next) and recent relevant publications and announcements have to do with participatory action research and community forestry and ecology work.