Building Future Forests:

Politics, Ecology, and the Co-Production of Landscape in Southeastern Ohio

Thesis

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in the

Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Justine Marie Law, B.S.

Graduate Program in Geography

Ohio State University

2010

Thesis Committee:

Kendra McSweeney, Advisor

Becky Mansfield

Joel Wainwright

Copyright by

Justine Marie Law

2010

Abstract

Southeastern Ohio, officially designated a part of Appalachia, was heavily

dependent on coal mining from the mid-1800s until the 1970s. But despite the region’s

history of resource extraction, its forest has largely returned. Interestingly, almost all of this reforestation occurred on private land owned by thousands of individuals. These private forest owners are often viewed as inadequate stewards of the land, and interest groups are constantly pushing governance strategies that would remake the forest to suit their own agendas. Thus, a struggle over this newly-mature forest, its resources, and its future has begun. Here I attempt first to show how local forests owners are actually knowledgeable, active, economically-savvy, and organized scientists navigating a complicated, power-laden space filled with stereotypes and competing interests. Second,

I discuss the connections between soils, trees, nutrients, animals, interest groups, landowners, and economies on this landscape and argue that ecological and human processes are knotted too tightly together to ever be untangled. Finally, through linking human and non-human processes, I explore the possibilities of how southeast Ohio's forests could look years from now. Many of these possibilities are so drastically dissimilar from both each other and today's forest that they would certainly have significant repercussions on local landscapes, ecosystems, and livelihoods.

ii Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I would like to thank the people of southeastern Ohio who so graciously and generously offered their time, put up with all of my questions, and invited me into their meetings, offices, homes, and forests. Secondly, I thank my advisor, Kendra

McSweeney, for introducing me to this fascinating region, guiding me through these past two years, and constantly posing astute and yet accessible questions. I would also like to thank the Outback research group for helping to steer my thinking on this work; Becky

Mansfield and Joel Wainwright for serving on my committee and providing what will certainly be thoughtful and constructive criticisms; my fellow Geography grads for giving me advice, challenging me academically, and forcing me to leave my desk to play wiffleball; all of my non-Geography friends for possessing non-geography knowledge and non-academic perspectives; Brandon for constantly encouraging me; and my parents for supporting me, inspiring me to keep reading and learning, and raising me in a way that allowed me to “talk hunting” somewhat convincingly.

iii Vita

2004...... Ashland High School

2008...... B.S. Environmental Science,

Minor in Studio Art, Allegheny College

2008-present...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department

of Geography, Ohio State University

Fields of Study

Major Field: Geography

iv Table of Contents

Abstract...... ii Acknowledgements...... iii Vita...... iv List of Figures...... vii

Chapters: 1. Introduction...... 1 1.1 Research Problem and Study Site...... 1 1.2 Site History and Background...... 2 1.3 Research Interests and Questions...... 9 1.4 Conceptual Approach...... 10 1.5 Methods...... 13 1.6 Importance of Research, Caveats, and Thesis Framework...... 16 2. Forest Ecology and the Role of Natural Science ...... 19 2.1 Introduction...... 19 2.2 Science as a Tool...... 20 2.3 Forest Ecology 101...... 23 2.4 Idiosyncrasies of Southeastern Ohio’s Forests...... 27 2.5 Conclusion...... 30 3. Private Forest Owners and the Struggle over Forestland...... 32 3.1 Introduction...... 32 3.2 The Stereotype...... 33 3.3 The “Cures”...... 37 3.3.1 Cure Number One: Locals Out...... 37 3.3.2 Cure Number Two: “Help” for Local Forest Owners.. 43 3.3.3 Cure Number Three: Biomass...... 47 3.3.4 “Cures” Summary...... 51 3.4 The Reality...... 52 3.4.1 “Growing” Forest Cover...... 52 3.4.2 Managing, Shaping, and Experimenting on the Forest 53 3.4.3 Organizing for Forest Change...... 63 3.5 Discussion...... 65 3.6 Conclusion...... 67 4. The Co-Production of Landscape...... 68 4.1 Introduction...... 68 4.2 Haraway’s “Rich Webs”...... 69 4.3 Nearing Co-Production...... 73

v 4.4 Co-Production in the Forests of Southeastern Ohio...... 76 4.5 Conclusion...... 83 5. Building “Flourishing” Future Forests...... 86 5.1 Introduction...... 86 5.2 Possible Future Forest in Southeastern Ohio...... 86 5.2.1 Local NIPF-Dominated Forests...... 87 5.2.2 Exurban NIPF-Dominated Forests...... 89 5.2.3 Old-Growth Preservation Forests...... 90 5.2.4 Woody Biomass “Forests”...... 92 5.2.5 Future Forest Summary...... 93 5.3 What Should We Be Striving For?...... 94 5.3.1 Things We Cannot Strive For...... 95 5.3.2 Things We Can Strive For...... 96 5.4 Fomenting “Flourishing” in Our Future Forests...... 99 5.5 Summary Points and Directions for Future Research...... 103

Bibliography...... 106 Appendix: A Non-Comprehensive List of Forest Interest Groups...... 121 Operating or Planning to Operate in Southeastern Ohio

vi List of Figures

Figure 1. Map of Study Site, Including Portions of Northern Athens,...... 3

Eastern Hocking, Western Morgan, and Southern Perry Counties

Figure 2. Map of the Little Cities of Black Diamonds Microregion...... 4

Figure 3. Portion of a Mural at the Arc of Appalachia’s Appalachian...... 41

Forest Museum

Figure 4. Location of the R.E. Burger Power Plant...... 49

Figure 5. M and N’s Handmade Relief Map of Their Property...... 55

Figure 6. The Northern Border of the Previously Strip Mined Hilltop...... 57

Above H’s Home

Figure 7. Forest Future A: Management by Local NIPFs...... 89

Figure 8. Forest Future B: Management by Exurban NIPFs...... 90

Figure 9. Forest Future C: Management by Preservationists...... 91

Figure 10. Forest Future D: Management by First Energy Corp...... 94

vii Chapter 1:

Introduction

1.1 Research Problem and Study Site

One of the reasons we are enamored with the place we call home is its natural beauty and its remarkable resilience after decades of environmental destruction that occurred nearly a century ago...but the legacy of the great Hocking Valley Coal Boom of 1870-1930 still lives on in our environment, economy, and psyche today (Bashaw and Landis et. al. 2007: i-ii).

Southeastern Ohio and its residents have withstood innumerable challenges, changes, and tribulations over the course of their tumultuous past. In just over two hundred years, the region has been home to pervasive and imposing forests, pioneering settlers, booming coal towns, formidable extractive industries, collapsing downtowns and businesses, “at-risk” and “distressed” communities,1 barren and unproductive wastelands,

and newly-mature second-growth forests (Bashaw and Landis et. al. 2007; Buckley and

Anderson et. al. 2006; Governor's Office of Appalachia 2010; Whitson and Wood et. al.

2006). Now, a human struggle over these mature forests, their resources, and their future

has begun, and this struggle will produce results that matter for trees, pheasants, fungi,

local communities, regional economies, and global environments. This struggle is the

focus of this work.

1 as defined by the State of Ohio

1 Much of this activity has occurred—and is still occurring—in what was once

called the Hocking Valley Coal Fields (Bashaw and Landis et. al. 2007). Recently, local

re-christened this region the Little Cities of Black Diamonds Microregion (LCBDM), and this is the area I take up as my research site (Little Cities of Black Diamonds 2010). The

LCBDM study site extends over four counties: Athens, Hocking, Morgan, and Perry

(Figure 1), but it is a surprisingly congruous region covered in forest and filled with small

and decaying company towns such as New Straitsville, Shawnee, Corning, Haydenville,

and Eclipse (Figure 2). Besides the city of Athens, the LCBDM does not include any

county seats or major population centers. And—again, excluding Athens—it is devoid of

a hospital, major employer, or major highway. This study site is, as a whole, a

marginalized region, but its residents pride themselves in being highly resilient, self-

sufficient, and fused to the landscape, and they are currently fighting furiously to

rejuvenate the area.

1.2 Site History and Background

Three hundred million years ago, the study site was under water, covered by

shallow seas and bogs and accumulating dead plant matter that would later harden into

coal beds (Adams 1997). These future coal beds were uplifted into the Appalachian

Mountains—here, the Appalachian Plateau—nearly two hundred and fifty million years

later (Adams 1997; ODNR Division of Geological Survey 2001).2 Over the course of the

2 In fact, the Appalachian Mountains are much older than sixty millions years. They were actually uplifted hundreds of millions of years ago, but as shallow seas swept in and out of the eastern United States throughout much of the Paleozoic Era, they dwindled down to a barely-hilly prairies. Approximately sixty

2

Figure 1. Map of Study Site, Including Portions of Northern Athens, Eastern Hocking,

Western Morgan, and Southern Perry Counties

million years ago, another uplift formed the topography of today’s Appalachian Mountains (ODNR Division of Geological Survey 2001).

3

Figure 2. Map of the Little Cities of Black Diamonds Microregion.

From www.littlecitiesofblackdiamonds.com. 2009.

last fifty million years, the region has supported everything from warm, nearly tropical forests to temperate broadleaf forests to temperate coniferous forests to boreal taiga forests to tundra, depending on climate (Adams 1997; ODNR Division of Geological

4 Survey 2001). Glaciers abutted the region at one point, but they never extended into the

study site itself. And over eleven thousand years ago, after millennia of constant plant migrations and dramatic forest composition shifts, the forests moved into their current temperate broadleaf state (Adams 1997; Bashaw and Landis et. al. 2007).

At approximately the same time, southeastern Ohio’s first human inhabitants arrived. Paleoamericans moved through the study site while hunting, but these occurrences were rare and their stays were short, perhaps because of the region’s difficult terrain (Bashaw and Landis et. al. 2007). The only Native American group to establish permanent villages in the area were the Adena. One of the largest Adena communities settled near the modern day town of The Plains (Figure 2), and they lived there from approximately 900 B.C. to 300 A.D. The Adena hunted for bear, deer, and wild boar, used fire to create small agricultural plots in the forest, and built their famous mounds

over this time period (Bashaw and Landis et. al. 2007). From 300 A.D. onward, Native

American tribes such as the Hopewell, Shawnee, and Delaware wandered the LCBDM

study site extensively while hunting, but their presence here was transitory (Bashaw and

Landis et. al. 2007).

After the United States removed Native American tribes in 1795, white settlers

from Pennsylvania and Virginia poured into the region (Bashaw and Landis et. al. 2007;

Martzolff 1902).3 Nineteenth century writing from the area celebrates the ax and plow of

these “heroes of the forest,” who “laid the foundation of a newer and stronger

Commonwealth…where only wild animals and wilder men could previously live”

3 Although Native Americans had not actually settled in southeastern Ohio, the Treaty of Greenville, the document which forced Native Americans to relinquish all claims to land, effectively removed all Native American influence from the land in 1795 (Martzolff 1902).

5 (Martzolff 1902). These settlers built log homes, subsistence-farmed small bottomland

clearings, and hunted deer, bears, ducks, turkey, and wild pigeons. This subsistence,

family-scale economy persisted for decades. A few villages did, however, spring up by

the mid-1800s, but they could boast of only a handful of buildings: a grist mill, a dry

goods store/tavern, a blacksmith, and maybe a post office, school, or church (Martzolff

1902). Tellingly, forest cover still hovered around seventy-five percent by 1850

(Andrews 2005).

More obvious expressions of capitalism, namely the coal, iron ore, and brick

industries, entered the landscape via railroad in the 1870s. Shortly thereafter, a small

number of individuals began accumulating a great deal of wealth; workers were forced

into company towns; and cheaper labor such as Welsh, Scottish, and Irish immigrants and

recently freed slaves were brought in when local employees became too rebellious. These

industries and laborers converted timber into charcoal, built wooden infrastructure, and

cleared land for mining and development. And they certainly worked quickly; by just

1890, forest cover dropped below twenty-five percent (Bashaw and Landis et. al. 2007).

After the coal industry collapsed in the late 1920s, forms of “conservation” swept in.

Although the United State’s Wayne National Forest plan was perhaps more of a relief

program for farmers affected by the Great Depression and Dust Bowl than anything, the

federal government’s stated goal in 1934 was to purchase “millions of acres” of land

from residents of southeastern Ohio (Andrews 2005). Lastly, spurred by the emergence of

new technologies, the coal industry resurfaced in the late 1940s to strip mine hilltops for

which it still had subsurface mineral rights. The landscape of the LDBDM study region

6 consequently became a patchwork of newly-recovering forests and newly-destroyed

barren wastelands, and this intensive strip mining continued for over thirty years impacting approximately twenty percent of the surface area of southeast Ohio (Bashaw and Landis et. al. 2007; McChesney and McSweeney 2005).

Over the past few decades, southeastern Ohio’s storyline has veered significantly from what might be the expected storyline. We might expect that both the 1920s collapse and 1980s slowing of the mining industry, decline of other regional industries in the face

of globalization, abandonment of poor farm lands, attempted buy-out by the government,

and regrowth of forestland would have forced residents out of southeast Ohio.4 We

might, in short, expect to find no one left in the region’s dense forests. But in an

interesting and perhaps bizarre turn of events, this is exactly not the case. Population

today matches the region’s population numbers during the mining boom and, to date, the

Wayne National Forest has only managed to secure 240,000 acres spread over twelve

counties, less than thirty percent of its proclaimed purchasing borders (Ohio Department

of Development 2008; Wayne National Forest 2010). Within the study site, the Wayne

owns less than sixty thousand acres (Wayne National Forest 2010). Thus, the majority

owners of the forest are local, non-industrial private forest owners (NIPFs).5 These

NIPFs, who in southeast Ohio usually live on or near their property, number in the

hundreds in the study site alone and own over seventy-three percent of the land

4 This is also the scenario that forest transition theory, originally theorized by Mather, would predict (Mather 1992, 2004). 5 Perry County plat maps from 1859, 1935, and 2008 reveal that most current NIPFs own property that has been passed down through family lines for generations, which demonstrates that one population did not simply replace another (Perry County Engineer's Office 2008; Tim Fisher's Consolidated Geneology Website 2010). In other words, the majority of current NIPFs are “local.” I do not, however, have access to plat maps for the other three counties in my study site; my only evidence for these counties comes from informal interviews.

7 (Heiligmann and Dorka et. al. 2005; USDA Forest Service 2009). They cannot be

excluded from maps or denied power; their names appear on all deeds and ownership

maps, and they make all decisions regarding the management of their land.

All this is not to suggest that decades of mining and exploitation had no

repercussions. On the contrary, the many scars that still plague the communities of

southeastern Ohio are probably some of the most prominent features on the landscape.

Signs of poverty imprint every street, downtown, city park, and grocery store, and ghost

towns dot many of the hillsides in my study site. Athens, Hocking, Morgan, and Perry

Counties have lower median household incomes, lower home values, higher

unemployment, and higher percentages of residents under the poverty level than the state of Ohio on average (Ohio Department of Development 2008; United States Census

Bureau 2000).

But education statistics are where these counties lag farthest behind the rest of

Ohio, as well as the rest of the country. Historically, residents of the region have always received less formal education; education was not a priority for most of the coal companies, who also ran the school systems (Bashaw and Landis et. al. 2007; Tribe

1989). By 1910, less than one percent of Hocking Valley’s residents aged eighteen and over had earned a high school diploma (Tribe 1989). Today, high school graduation rates remain below seventy-five percent, over ten percent below Ohio’s average, and only six percent of individuals have attainted a bachelor’s degree, compared with twenty-two percent statewide (Ohio Department of Development 2008; United States Census Bureau

2000). It would be impossible to tie these statistics exclusively to the region’s mining

8 background, but I would argue that decades of company control over education, employment, and nearly every aspect of local lifestyles—not to mention mining’s role in leaving behind a stripped, virtually valueless environment—places much of the responsibility squarely in company hands.

1.3 Research Interests and Questions

Currently, second-growth forests swath approximately eighty percent of the study site (Ohio Department of Development 2008). So from above, the region appears to be a homogenous stretch of green. But these young forests have a great deal of human activity going on underneath the canopy. Local NIPFs are shaping and using their properties in an untold number of ways; an influx of exurbanites are fleeing the cities to buy small plots of forestland on which to build homes; dozens of interest groups are struggling to govern this new forest and enact their agendas upon it; much of Ohio’s nine billion dollar forest products industry operates here, taking out millions of board feet of wood each year; tourism, and more specifically nature tourism, has become the region’s biggest industry; local recreational pursuits such as hunting and ATV riding are competing with more

“refined” pursuits such as hiking and bird watching; as stated earlier, the Wayne National

Forest has patchy ownership of thousands of acres; and resource extraction continues to operate in the form of surface mining and oil drilling (Andrews 2005; Buckley and

Anderson et. al. 2006; Heiligmann and Dorka et. al. 2005; McSweeney and McChesney

2004). Truly, the forests of the LCBDM study site are exceptionally complex, heterogeneous ecosystems.

9 The complexity, heterogeneity, and contested nature of this re-growing, re- greening landscape inspired me to ask four fundamental questions about this space:

• How are diverse human actors trying to remake these new forests?

• How do these complex human processes combine with ecology across the

landscape to co-produce environmental outcomes?

• What might the repercussions of these outcomes be for local communities,

economies, outside interest groups, plants, animals, and other components of this

ecosystem?

• How might we modify our land uses, our politics, our science, and our

relationships with other species to build forests that sustain both humans and non-

humans twenty, fifty, and two hundred years from now?

1.4 Conceptual Approach

Although there are a number of ways to evaluate the forest landscape of southeastern Ohio and perhaps engage some of my research questions, political ecology deals explicitly with issues of control, power, and conflict over ecosystems and ecosystem management, the production of environmental knowledge, the relations of political economy to human-environment systems, the repercussions of environmental change on communities and—sometimes—ecosystems, and the implications of environmental change and management for social justice (Turner and Robbins 2008). I therefore draw most extensively from the field of political ecology, incorporating insights

10 from other literature and theory—especially Donna Haraway’s feminist theory about nature, science, and connectedness—throughout the upcoming chapters.

Political ecology rose out of other research approaches such as cultural ecology, human ecology, political economy, and landscape traditions (Robbins 2004; Turner and

Robbins 2008). Much political ecology work focuses on developing countries, and much of it tells a similar story, which goes something like this: the setting is—or at least once was—a resource-abundant, ecologically-vibrant environment home to a local/indigenous/marginalized/previously-colonized population that has lived there and used its resources for decades, centuries, or even millennia. Next, governmental and non- governmental forces operating under the banners of capitalism, development, and conservation intervene and act as sources of environmental conflict. At the climax, a struggle marked by unequal power relationships ensues, with the “outsider” groups usually winning control of the space and its resources. This resolution drastically alters the flora and fauna of the area and the lives of local people. Generally, local people are either forced to leave (Hecht 2004; Neumann 2004), or if they do remain in the area, they are written off of maps and given little to no voice in management decisions (Escobar

1998; Kull 2002; McSweeney and Pearson 2009; Zimmerer 2004).

Some scholars apply a political ecology framework to the “first world.” Working in the American West, Robbins and Walker both investigate how groups with varying political, economic, and environmental agendas are battling over the landscape (Robbins

2006; Walker 2003). Other research looks more directly at the ways in which global economic forces rearrange environments and stimulate conflict. Haggerty, for example,

11 shows how the neoliberalization of a New Zealand fishery turned whitebaiters into

“accidental environmentalists” and opponents of the state Department of Conservation

(2007). Darling points to the methods by which highly profitable, powerful exurban developers and developments recreated the Adirondacks as a consumption landscape and edged out local land uses (2005). Also similar to political ecology work in developing countries, both Ogden and St. Martin argue for the acceptance of local environmental knowledge, which, even in the United States, is often dismissed as being non-scientific

(Ogden 2008; St. Martin 2001). Ogden makes this claim while examining Everglades hunters (2008); St. Martin focuses on New England’s fishermen (2001). Thus, in first world environments, we encounter many of the same issues and injustices as we do in third world countries. Wainwright, however, warns us against thinking about the first world as separate, available site that is ready and waiting for a political ecology treatment. Instead, we must grapple with all of the political, historical, and contested ways that environmental conflicts at various scales produce space (Wainwright 2005).

One current debate in political ecology is over whether the discipline should concern itself more or less with ecological research and ecological outcomes. Many scholars have written on this issue; some believe political ecology needs to be more political (Rangan and Kull 2009; Watts and Peet 2004), and some contend that the environment has only become a space over which politics happen (Nygren and Rikoon

2008; Rocheleau and Roth 2007; Vayda and Walters 1999; Walker 2005; Zimmerer

1994, 2000). Accordingly, much research in political ecology varies in the degree to which it engages ecology. Some work heavily prioritizes the political end, asking

12 questions about who gets to manage the environment, how knowledge is made, and how policies harm already-marginalized communities (Braun 2002; Braun and Wainwright

2001; McCarthy 1998; Zografos and Martinez-Alier 2009). Other work, which I discuss at length in Chapter 4, deals with non-human species and considers both their roles in producing space and their fates in the face of ecological change (Garcia and Vende et. al.

2010; Goedeke and Rikoon 2008; Ingram 2010; Nightingale 2006; Rocheleau and Ross et. al. 2001). For this particular work, I align myself with the latter category. But I hope to take this more-ecological political ecology one step further by investigating how human processes combine with ecological processes to produce future environments.

This novel approach of projecting into the future will allow us, I argue, to begin to anticipate issues that might arise for human communities and/or non-human communities.

1.5 Methods

All fieldwork was carried out between June and September 2009, and nearly all fieldwork was done within the study site, but in some cases I worked with groups outside the site who either currently wield or soon will wield influence inside the site. My methods were three-pronged. I primarily conducted semi-structured, tape-recorded interviews, but I also employed participant observation and discourse analysis. More specifically, I conducted thirty-to-ninety minute interviews with representatives of approximately fourteen interest groups, including the Appalachian Ohio Alliance, Ohio

Woodland Stewards Program, Rural Action, Ohio Forestry Cooperative, Buckeye Forest

13 Council, Wayne National Forest, and state outreach Natural Resources officers. I also

spoke with approximately twelve local private forest owners. Many of these latter

interviews were more brief, but with two long-term landowners I spent a number of hours

over the course of a few days and toured much of their respective properties. For the

participant observation component of my research, I attended the Southeastern Ohio

Woodlands Interest Group’s (SEOWIG) July 2009 meeting and enrolled in a week-long course at the Arc of Appalachia’s Appalachian Forest School. At the two-hour-long

SEOWIG meeting, I interacted with and met a number of local NIPFs; in the forest class,

I spent six days hiking, sleeping, eating, and learning with some of the most radical forest

preservationists in the state. I identified myself as a graduate student and opted not to use

a tape recorder for both participant observation experiences. I did not, however, identify

myself as a researcher for the Arc class as I did in the SEOWIG meeting. Finally, for the

discourse analysis portion of my research, I evaluated historical plat maps from the site and hundreds of pamphlets, publications, newspaper articles, meeting minutes, educational displays, conservation easements, websites, etc., made by various interest groups.

As with any research approach, these particular methods can be potentially problematic and can never paint a full picture of everything going on within a given space. Interviewees, for example, always have agendas and biases, might exaggerate their role or importance, and might not tell the full story. As Berry advises, “interviewers must always keep in mind that it is not the obligation of a subject to be objective and to tell us the truth” (2002: 680). At the same time, I must always be reflecting on my position as a

14 researcher. I am a young, female graduate student and outsider to the region and was generally speaking with much older, often less-educated men. I therefore expect that people reacted to me differently than they might have reacted to a friend, colleague, or fellow forest owner. Additionally, I remain aware of the fact that I also see my subjects in a particular way because of my background and outlook. This awareness is also essential for performing discourse analysis.

Participant observation has some of its own unique obstacles. Generally, people use participant observation because they hope it will give them the opportunity to observe

“more ‘natural’ interactions and responses” (Kearns 2000: 109). They also expect, as I did, to access communities that they might have a hard time connecting with otherwise

(Dowler 2001). In my case, I was hoping to access potentially-hard-to-reach Appalachian forest owners and extreme preservationists. One potential drawback of this method, though, is that it is difficult to become an actual “insider” when you are not an actual forest owner or preservationist. Also, when I disclosed my status as an academic and/or researcher and began to ask probing questions, I certainly changed the dynamic of the meeting and course. A final potential problem with this method, as well as with interviewing, is something Dowler encountered in Ireland: by building relationships with people, you run the risk of becoming partial towards your subjects (2001). As a whole, it is impossible to ever grasp or predict all of power relations, biases, and possible side effects inherent in fieldwork; as researchers, we can only attempt to be as responsible and reflexive as possible and hope that there is more good than ill to come of our methods.

15 1.6 Importance of Research, Caveats, and Thesis Framework

Overall, this thesis represents, in some ways, a traditional political ecology argument about the infinitely-complex, power-laden, and sometimes unjust relations between local landowners, interest groups, and capital. But I will also deal extensively with ecological processes, and I will argue that in order to scrutinize both the drivers and implications of environmental change, we must recognize the ways in which ecology always becomes political and human processes always intertwine with ecology. And finally, considering both these human and natural forces, I will explore the possibilities for southeast Ohio’s future forests. Many of these possibilities are so drastically dissimilar from both each other and today’s forests that they would certainly have significant repercussions on local landscapes, ecosystems, and livelihoods, and therefore,

I maintain, require our attention. I believe these points alone speak to the importance of this research: the fate of marginalized local people and a new forest—the first biodiverse, productive ecosystem this landscape has supported in generations—are at stake. Local landowners and residents might finally be on the verge of rehabilitating both this exploited region and its economy on their own terms, and this new forest is capable of sequestering immense amounts of carbon and providing dozens of ecosystem services, such as water purification, erosion and flood control, and soil formation (Bashaw and

Landis et. al. 2007; Perry and Oren et. al. 2008).

At the same time, I am attending to many recent calls for research within the political ecology literature. Walker believes we must “provide an intellectual environment that nurtures the integration of ecological and social science”(Walker 2005:

16 80), while Rocheleau and Roth “propose that we join ecosystem, community and

complexity paradigms in ecology with hybrid geographies, relational place and actor

network theory to take human geography and human-environment geography beyond the critique/technique divide” (Rocheleau and Roth 2007: 436). Furthermore, Robbins asks

us to question “the material outcomes of conflict” (Robbins 2004: 182).

This work will not, however, tackle many other important issues. It will not, for example, be an extensive, theoretical discussion about nature and the nature-society divide, although in Chapter 4, I will draw heavily from Haraway6 in order to argue that

we must rethink this divide. To that same end, I will also not use the word “nature” to

refer to things like beech trees, birds, or beavers. Additionally, this will not be a thorough study of the broader political economies that mold the forests of southeastern Ohio, nor will it carefully consider how landowners, interest groups, or even other species have been articulated as specific subjects by discourses, power relations, etc. And finally—on

this decidedly non-comprehensive list of caveats, I will not touch on many of the

important processes that also drive forest change in this landscape, such as transportation

networks or urban-exurban economic connections.

Throughout the following chapters, I will build my arguments gradually. In

Chapter 2, I will use scientific knowledge7 to discuss a number of ecological processes in

these forests. Chapter 3 will revolve around my fieldwork and will focus on the intricate,

complicated human processes on the landscape. These two chapters require some

6 Here I must add another caveat. I will use Haraway’s writings extensively to frame my questions and arguments. For me though, her work is a tool and not a topic, and so I do not find it necessary to trace how Haraway fits into or has sprung out of broader philosophical traditions. 7 By using the word “science” here—and throughout this work—I am referring exclusively to what might be called “hard sciences;” chemistry, biology, geology, etc. Mostly though, I am referencing ecology.

17 prefacing. In many ways, I believe writing two separate accounts of human and ecological processes is not the best approach, and it should certainly seem slightly strange after I have just declared that I wish to bridge the nature-society gap. But just because nature and society might be inseparable does not mean people do not have their own actions and processes and a tree, for example, does not have its own actions and processes. So, as long as we keep in mind that this work is going elsewhere, this should not be overly-problematic. And we will move elsewhere quickly. In Chapter 4, I will remedy the situation and reunite human and ecological processes in order to see how spaces are co-produced over time. Finally, Chapter 5 will take the concept of co- production and use it to speculate on the creation of “future forests,” and I will conclude the chapter by looking for opportunities for hope, change, and political action.

18 Chapter 2:

Forest Ecology and the Role of Natural Science

2.1 Introduction

Today, nearly eighty percent of the study site is forested (Ohio Department of

Development 2008). It is therefore essential to have at least a general understanding of

forest dynamics if we are to theorize environmental change over this space. But this chapter will not be a traditional science article or chapter. In my fieldwork, I did not run soils through a mass spectrometer, evaluate tree cores, catalogue mammal populations, or do any form of an extensive science experiment. I do, however, have a background in forest ecology, and for this research, I attended a week-long course devoted specifically

to Ohio’s Appalachian forests and analyzed a number of forest science textbooks and

articles. This chapter will, accordingly, draw from all of these experiences. I will provide

an overview of the basics of forest ecology using a contemporary forest science textbook,

then I will look explicitly at the forests of southeast Ohio. Before launching into forest

ecology, though, I think it important to discuss my deployment of natural science. A

number of scholars within human geography have suggested that “hard” science is too

dangerous and too laden with masculine, imperialist power to utilize (Nygren and Rikoon

2008). So I will begin by defending my use of science and explaining exactly how and

19 why I am using it. Overall, this chapter does not make one holistic argument. It will,

however, present a great deal of information that will feed into later chapters and will

make two points clear: first, science can be a useful tool for talking about this landscape,

and second, these forests—like many ecosystems—are constantly shifting over time,

even if particular processes do drive them in directions that matter for humans, deer,

squirrels, maple trees, mosquitoes, and bacteria.

2.2 Science as a Tool

“Science is practice and culture at every level of the onion. There is no core, only layers” (Haraway 2004). This assertion from Donna Haraway nicely encapsulates one of the fundamental theses of her work. For decades, Haraway has contended that natural science is culturally-produced and often terrifically flawed. Natural science attempts to uncover objective facts, assumes that the search for these facts does not influence or shape its subjects, masquerades as an ahistorical entity, and holds up the scientist as the ventriloquist who speaks for jaguars, fetuses, or eukaryotic cells, just to name a few of

her critiques (Haraway 2004, 1991, 2008). This science is also not a disinterested science

with benign results. In her words:

In our time, natural science defines the human being’s place in nature and history and provides the instruments of domination of the body and community. By constructing the category nature, natural science imposes limits on history and self-formation. So science is part of the struggle over the nature of our lives…the field of modern biology constructs theories about the body and community as capitalist and patriarchal machines and markets: the machine for production, the market for exchange, and both machine and market for reproduction (Haraway 1991: 43-44).

20 Haraway always uses specific examples from science to corroborate her claims. For

example, she reproduces plates from 1968, 1972, 1977, and 1982 of the “immunological

orchestra,” which was intended by immunologists to be a clever way of teaching the roles

of cytokines, suppressor cells, T cells, etc. The plates depict incredibly disparate images

with the roles and the actors always changing, brilliantly revealing how historical,

constructed, and always-in-flux science is (Haraway 1991). In other work, she highlights

how male primatologists crafted particular knowledge about primates when they

(inevitably) brought their perspectives about male and female positions/relationships into

the field (Haraway 2004). With regard to dogs, one of Haraway’s more recent academic

interests, she demonstrates how science has played a role in making canines capitalist

workers, consumers, and commodities (Haraway 2008). As a whole, she shows natural

sciences to be inextricably bound to and created by society; they are naturecultures. And

these naturecultures have, over time, been devices for the manipulation of populations and accumulation of people, mice, and T cells into capitalist relations.

But Haraway still uses natural science in almost all of her work and has no plans to stop (Haraway 2004; Haraway and Goodever 1998; Schneider 2005). This may seem

odd, but saying that we must be careful when talking about science and conscientious of

its flaws is much different from saying that it is utterly useless. Likewise, demanding that

we are part of the production of science is much different from demanding that

ecosystems, animals, and atoms only exist through our social construction of them.

Haraway denounces strict social constructionist views and insists on “the world,”

materiality, and relationships between very real actors of all shapes, sizes, and

21 taxonomies (Haraway 2004; Schneider 2005). To her, everyone from the tiniest amoebas

to the largest trees to the most cognitively-advanced mammals (i.e. us) participates in the

production of the world. And she believes natural science is a “rich,” “creative,” and

“intellectual” way of getting at this world that often is practiced by many responsible,

well-intentioned individuals (Haraway 2004; Haraway and Goodever 1998).

In fact, Haraway herself has a B.S. in zoology from Colorado College and a Ph.D. in biology from Yale (Schneider 2005). She pulls from this background frequently in her work. Furthermore, she stresses that all good “non-science” people should become intimate with and immersed in science:

I’m not going to let people forget our organic relations with the sciences again…Part of my approach in the new work is directly the result of having experienced the science wars and being labeled as an anti-science person. In no way. Part of my approach also is reminding my humanities and social science friends not to be afraid of the big bad wolf. We are afraid of the wrong things. The notion that somehow sociologists have to fear biological reductionism or something like that is a misstated danger. It would be much more effective for the sociologists and cultural studies people who are concerned about this matter to dive into the evolutionary psychology or the whatever, for what it has to say that is interesting. Take it on board (Schneider 2005: 148).

So for Haraway, and for me, natural science is something with which we must engage.

Yes, it could certainly be improved—and we will delve into these improvements in

Chapter 5—but then again, so could all forms of research. As with any work in the

humanities or social sciences, we must wield scientific tools responsibly, understanding

that even natural science is subjective, historical, and nestled in an intricate web of social

relations. It is necessary for us to take these steps, because science can be a powerful tool.

Natural science can tell us unique, penetrating, and fulfilling stories about many

22 ecological processes occurring on, for example, a forest landscape that social science or

humanities cannot.

2.3 Forest Ecology 101

What then, are these stories forest ecology has to tell? One story that forest

ecology, as well as much natural science, tells now diverges significantly from the one it

might have told a generation ago. “Old” ecology celebrated equilibrium, stability, climax

communities, and perfect wildernesses. “New” ecology now prioritizes change,

flexibility, and resilience (Jorgensen and Fath et. al. 2007; Perry and Oren et. al. 2008;

Rangan and Kull 2009; Walker 2005; Zimmerer 1994). Forest Ecosystems, one of more

widely-used forest science textbooks in the United States, presents examples of these new and old paradigms in its introduction:

Old Paradigm: We want to preserve the old-growth Mettler’s Woods and will do so by establishing the Hutcheson Memorial Forest Center. New Paradigm: We want to maintain the integrity of the processes that have generated the old-growth Mettler’s Woods and will establish and manage the Hutcheson Memorial Forest towards this end (Perry and Oren et. al. 2008: 3).

The textbook also redefines stability as a “complicated concept that does not mean ‘no change’ but rather is analogous to the balanced movement of a dancer or bicycle rider.

The processes of disturbance, growth, and decay produce continual change in nature”

(Perry and Oren et. al. 2008: 2). Another recent textbook, A New Ecology, asserts that ecosystems have “ontic openness,” and describes this quality as follows:

(Ontic openness) relates directly to the theme of this book and the systemness of ecosystems because ontic openness results, in part, due to the complex web of life constantly combining, interacting, and rearranging in the natural world to form novel patterns. Furthermore, ontic openness is at least a partial cause of

23 indeterminacy and uncertainly in ecology and thus the reason that we are not able to make exact predictions or measurements with such a high accuracy as for instance in physical experiments (Jorgensen and Fath et. al. 2007: 35-36).

Even in what might be considered “lay ecology,” we find the same emphasis on this new

paradigm. Commons Myths About Appalachian Forests, for example, says virtually the

same thing as Jorgensen and Fath, although a great deal more simply: “When nature is

left alone, you often get something you didn’t expect” (2004). Thus, forest science today

encourages the belief that ecosystems are constantly in flux, always evolving, and highly

resilient,1 and that there is not one ideal state for any given ecosystem.

That being said, not all ecosystems are created equally. A number of processes help produce ecosystems over time in ways that affect present as well as future species

and communities locally, regionally, and globally. For example, different combinations

of soils, undergrowth, trees, mammals, nutrients, fungi, insects, amounts of sunlight

hitting the forest floor, stages of succession, invasive species, etc. would help build

exceptionally discrepant forests. These forests would have different capabilities when it

came to sequestering carbon, purifying water, controlling erosion, forming soils,

providing habitat, supplying food and timber, and performing countless other ecosystem

services (de Groot and Wilson et. al. 2002; Perry and Oren et. al. 2008; USDA Forest

Service 2009). Over the next few pages, we will use Perry, Oren, and Hart’s popular forest ecology textbook, Forest Ecosystems, to look more closely at some of the ecological processes forest science deems to be most important to the formulation of future forests.

1 Resilience was originally described by ecological economist C.S. Holling and refers to an ecosystem’s ability to adapt and rebound after disturbance without undergoing a qualitative “state shift” (Holling 2001).

24 Forest ecologists work at a number of scales, starting at microscopic levels of

biological functioning and move upward toward the landscape scale. Soils are usually the

first step in this analysis. Knowing what types of soils cover a given piece of land is

perhaps the best way to guess what types of vegetation will grow there, and to know soil

type and chemistry, one must know the climate, topography, parent material, soil age, and

history of the area. These same factors also determine nutrient availability. So, if X piece

of land is on a shale-sandstone hillside, it might have soils with few nutrients—calcium

and magnesium might be especially limited—and high porosity for drainage. Likewise, if

site Y rests on a limestone bottomland that was previously used for pasture, it might have

high nutrient availability, low pH, poor drainage capacity, and soil compaction (Perry and

Oren et. al. 2008). Very different forests would arise out of these two soils, even if they

are physically proximate. In the eastern United States, for example, beech, sugar maple,

and chestnut oak would thrive on site X; red maple, green ash, and sycamore would grow

well on site Y (Kirkman and Brown et. al. 2007). These trees would then, in turn, physically change the soils and create a whole new set of ecological possibilities (Perry

and Oren et. al. 2008). At this small, laboratory-based scale, forest ecologists also closely

examine nitrogen-fixers within the soil such as symbiotic diazotrophs or mycorrhizae,

root systems, and photosynthesis as a measure of primary productivity (Perry and Oren et. al. 2008). These elements of the ecosystem are like elements of soils in that they connect to, promote, and constrain larger-scale outcomes.

The next level of analysis for most forest ecologists is what we might call the study site level. This is the scale at which scientists can rope off an area of forestland and

25 either monitor changes or conduct experiments. Quantifying the study site level’s size is difficult, but study sites are too big to be microscopic and too small to be entire landscapes. Some of the ecosystem processes and indicators that forest scientists consider important at this scale include: successional changes, primary productivity, redundancies

(i.e. species that can perform multiple tasks, which gives flexibility to the ecosystem), snags and dead logs, small-scale diversity, intricate food webs, and keystone species

(Perry and Oren et. al. 2008). Each of these factors also helps determine forest composition and forest change over time. Snags and dead wood, for example, provide habitat for numerous species that could not live elsewhere and eventually deposit nutrients back into the soil. Various states of succession contain unique species compositions, nutrients availabilities, amounts of biomass, and levels of biodiversity.

And keystone species such as nitrogen fixers and large predators are “keystone” because the ecosystem would look and function drastically differently without them (Perry and

Oren et. al. 2008). Again, though, processes at the study site scale are always inseparable from the microscopic processes previously described as well as larger landscape processes.

The landscape is the broadest range of analysis for most forest scientists. A landscape in forest ecology is usually a collection of unique types of forest that spans a relatively large area. Biodiversity again becomes a central concern at this level, since a biodiverse ecosystem is often more stable and better protected against endogenous and exogenous threats. Forest scientists recommend specific strategies for how we should manage forests on a landscape level—still, however, they emphasize the fact that rules

26 are always flexible and depend on geography. Their strategies usually include “core

reserve” areas that are surrounded by buffer zones of minimal management and

connected by corridors (Perry and Oren et. al. 2008). Outside the buffer zones they place

intensively-managed forests, but they suggest that intensive management is best if it

mimics natural disturbances, avoids creating monocultures, and maintains multiple levels

of succession (Perry and Oren et. al. 2008). Of course, all of this basic forest science,

whether at microscopic or landscape scales, generalizes from thousands of more

geographically-specific studies.

2.4 Idiosyncrasies of Southeastern Ohio’s Forests

Southeastern Ohio’s forests certainly have a number of geographically-specific

features. It is not necessary—nor perhaps possible—to outline all of these features

though. Instead, we will examine only a few of the region’s ecological idiosyncrasies. To

begin, southeast Ohio’s forestland is classified as mixed mesophytic forest, making it perhaps the most biologically diverse temperate ecoregion in the world and higher in biodiversity than most ecoregions of any type (Arc of Appalachia Preserve System 2004;

Bashaw and Landis et. al. 2007; Ricketts and Dinerstein et. al. 1999). The World Wildlife

Fund sponsored an assessment of all North American ecoregions that describes

Appalachia’s mixed mesophytic forests thusly:

Forest communities often support more than 30 canopy tree species at a single site, and rich understories of ferns, fungi, perennial and annual herbaceous plants, shrubs, small trees, and diverse animal communities. Songbirds, salamanders, land snails, and beetles are examples of some particularly diverse taxa. Indeed, the ecoregion harbors some of the richest and most endemic land snail, amphibian, and herbaceous plant biotas in the U.S. and Canada. The ecoregion’s

27 freshwater communities are the richest temperate freshwater ecosystems in the world, with globally high richness and endemism in mussels, fish, crayfish, and other invertebrates (Ricketts and Dinerstein et. al. 1999).

These high levels of biodiversity arose because of many of the region’s physical properties, such as topography, climate, and broader geologic history. Appalachia’s rolling hills promote the growth of multiple forest types; as indicated in my brief discussion of soils, a ridgetop, slope, and valley would each contain unique compositions of species (Kirkman and Brown et. al. 2007; Perry and Oren et. al. 2008). The

Appalachian climate, and especially the climate of southeast Ohio, only exacerbates this variance. Because of its climate, southeastern Ohio can support more northern maple- beech-birch forests and more southern oak-hickory forests, as well as many other forest types (Ricketts and Dinerstein et. al. 1999; USDA Natural Resource Conservation

Service 1992). Finally, because the region abutted North America’s most recent glaciation line, it provided refuge to number of species forced to flee encroaching glaciers, thereby making it a hotspot of temperate biodiverty (Ricketts and Dinerstein et. al. 1999).

Also related to glaciation, a second feature of southeastern Ohio’s forests is its soils. Since the area was not glaciated, it has much older, and therefore far less rich, more weathered soils than the rest of Ohio (Bashaw and Landis et. al. 2007; Ricketts and

Dinerstein et. al. 1999). Its bedrock and soils are from the Pennsylvanian geochronologic period, which occurred over 286 million years ago. To contrast, the glaciated areas of

Ohio boast soils weathered from fifteen thousand year-old glacial till (ODNR Division of

Geological Survey 2009). Additionally, regional soil research has shown these soils to

28 have increasing acidity and decreasing calcium-to-aluminum ratios, as well as “slow

nutrient recycling, low microbial activity and recalcitrant organic matter” (Boerner and

Brinkman 2003; McCarthy and Small et. al. 2001). On previously strip-mined land, soil

quality is generally even worse (Shukla and Lal et. al. 2004). The coalescence of all of

these factors results in soils that are less resilient, less capable of quickly bouncing back

after a major disturbance (Perry and Oren et. al. 2008; Shukla and Lal et. al. 2004).

I would like to touch on just two more ecological idiosyncrasies of southeastern

Ohio’s forests, both of which are related to its regeneration. First, forests usually

regenerate naturally, and quickly, in the region.2 This seems counterintuitive considering

the previous paragraph about soil quality, but many early succession species, such as

locusts, have adapted over time to require very little besides sunlight, and they actually fix nutrients back into the soil (Kirkman and Brown et. al. 2007; Perry and Oren et. al.

2008). Second, as southeast Ohio’s forests do regenerate and go through various states of succession, they change dramatically and continuously. All forests shift over time of course,3 but Appalachian mixed mesophytic forests are exceptionally mercurial.4 Unique species compositions at each stage of succession, changing climate, thunderstorms, ice, insects, deer browsing, and invasive species are just a few of the factors that keep these forests in a constant state of flux (Perry and Oren et. al. 2008; West Virginia Forestry

Association 2004). In fact, Drury and Runkle find that past forests in southeastern Ohio

2 There are certainly exceptions though, with strip-mined land being the most prominent one. Without any sort of intervention, it might take hundreds of years for forests to return to stripped land (Kaster and Vimmerstedt 2005). 3 see pages 23, 24 4 They are mercurial compared to, say, a western spruce-fir forest, northern boreal forest, southern longleaf- slash pine forest, or even some tropical rainforests (Perry and Oren et. al. 2008).

29 can in no way offer a blueprint for current or future forests (2006). They conclude that

“apparently, forest ecosystems in southeast Ohio can exist in several alternative stable and/or transitional states” (Drury and Runkle 2006: 207). And as forest composition shifts, the whole ecosystem shifts with it. An older forest, for example, holds more nutrients in its biomass than its soils, has crafted fertile soil aggregates and a network of decomposers, and provides habitat for bears,5 beavers, red-tailed foxes, rabbits, raptors, and many other species that younger forests cannot support. A younger forest sequesters more carbon, has a diverse understory, and also provides specific habitats for species such as wild turkeys and ruffled grouse, which require brushy, early-succession spaces

(Andrews 2005; Bashaw and Landis et. al. 2007; Perry and Oren et. al. 2008; USDA

Forest Service 2009; West Virginia Forestry Association 2004). Furthermore, these distinctive forests—of which old and young are certainly not the only types—will help promote and constrain possibilities for the future forest ecosystem.

2.5 Conclusion

To bring us back to the beginning of the chapter, I must reiterate that all of this forest science is simply a changeable, human-made tool for reading the landscape.

Natural science is cultural, as Donna Haraway tells us, and I experienced this fact firsthand in my fieldwork. Natural scientists working in the region had very different

“scientific” perspectives about everything from invasive species to forest fires, depending on whether they worked for the Forest Service, a nature preserve, or state outreach

5 Black bears are believed to have returned to southeastern Ohio in small numbers (Bashaw and Landis et. al. 2007)

30 programs. Still, social science cannot craft satisfying stories about trees, soil chemistry,

mycorrhizae, black bears, photosynthesis, bacteria, food webs, core reserve areas, carbon

sequestration, calcium-to-aluminum ratios, or biodiversity and the roles they play in producing the landscape of southeastern Ohio without the meticulous “hard science” work done by forest ecologists. And for that fact alone, it is—and will continue to be throughout this work—infinitely useful.

31 Chapter 3:

Private Forest Owners and the Struggle over Forestland

3.1 Introduction

Southeastern Ohio’s forests are not characterized solely by nutrient cycling and succession dynamics; the landscape is filled with human activity. As discussed in Chapter

1, local, non-industrial private forest owners (NIPFs) own the majority of forestland.

These NIPFs, who in southeast Ohio usually live on or near their property, number in the hundreds in the study site alone and own over seventy-three percent of the land

(Heiligmann and Dorka et. al. 2005; ODNR Division of Forestry 2009). Their ownership, however, is contested. While investigating both the specific roles these local landowners play in shaping the region’s forests and the ways in which various groups are attempting to sway NIPF attitudes and actions, I read and heard pervasive stereotypes about local, rural, low-to-middle-income landowners spilling out of forest literature and other

Ohioans’ mouths. These stereotypes frame relations between “outsider” interest groups and local NIPFs. In this chapter, I will begin by outlining what these stereotypes look like and how they work at multiple scales. Next, I will discuss many of the competing “cures” to the local NIPF ownership “problem.” I will close the chapter by looking at how local landowners have actually operated on the landscape over time, arguing that these landowners are wholly undeserving of the stereotypes they are assigned and assistance

32 they are assumed to need. Instead, my fieldwork reveals them to be highly-

knowledgeable and active stewards and natural scientists.

3.2 The Stereotype

Modern environmental movements have a fairly specific target audience, a fairly

specific hero, and fairly specific best practices. These practices include driving hybrid

cars, buying reusable bags, installing compact fluorescent light bulbs, going on eco vacations, shopping for organic foods, etc., and they are marketed toward upper class

“progressives.” Academia sometimes mimics, and perhaps helps facilitate, this popular

environmentalism. For example, Dunlap and Van Liere’s “The New Environmental

Paradigm,” was a groundbreaking work in the environmental studies discipline that

continues to inspire the research of many scholars today (for review, see Dietz and

Fitzgerald et. al. 2005). The article, which has been cited well over four hundred times,

argues that age, education level, wealth, and political beliefs are the best predictors for

environmentalism (Dunlap and Van Liere 1978; ISI 2010). Those who are young, well-

educated, wealthy, urban/exurban and liberal are most likely to care about the

environment. Those who are older, less-educated, poor, rural, and conservative

presumably have no use for the environment or environmentalism. Paper after paper in

this tradition comes to the same conclusions (Dietz and Fitzgerald et. al. 2005).

A researcher would quickly stumble into these same types of biases when

perusing NIPF articles in forestry and environmental science journals. This literature

examines NIPFs’ beliefs about forestland, motivations for owning forest, and potential

33 roles in national forest management. The literature often focuses on second-growth

forests in the eastern United States, and its underlying agenda is to discover how to “deal

with” America’s private forest owners, who many foresters and researchers in these

disciplines see as lacking in forest science knowledge, poorly versed in forest management doctrine, and out-of-touch with the needs of the ecosystem. In other words, these researchers often seek to rescue forests from the private citizens on whose land they unluckily grew back. Neil Sampson, a prominent forest scientist, coined this NIPF ownership situation the “crisis in maintaining forests” (Sampson and DeCoster 2000).

Studies in this literature approach the “crisis” by surveying NIPFs in various regions of the United States. These surveys ask questions about landowner demographics, reasons for owning forest (e.g. aesthetics, privacy, recreation, financial investment, etc.), frequency of management, opinions about nature/environment, and presence or absence of forest management plans (Butler and Leatherberry 2004; Egan 1997; Egan and Luloff

2000; Jones and Fly et. al. 2003; Kendra and Hull 2005; Kline and Alig et. al. 2000;

Rickenbach and Zeuli et. al. 2005; Ross-Davis and Broussard 2007). Most papers emphasize the facts that over ninety-percent of American NIPFs have never made a

formal management plan and that many are duped by loggers who knock on their doors,

offer a price for their wood, and make a mess of the forest by removing all the best trees

(Butler and Leatherberry 2004; Rickenbach and Zeuli et. al. 2005). They then focus on

the distinctions between rural and exurban forest owners. And while some work does

glorify the local, large-scale owners who harvest immense amounts of timber, most place

their hope in newcomer exurbanites who, it is asserted, have stronger environmental

34 backgrounds. Egan and Luloff, for example, discuss the possibility that local rural

residents have “a more utilitarian view of the (forest) resource” and “lower levels of

support for environmental protection,” while recent urban migrants seek “improved

environmental quality in rural forest areas” (2000: 27). As a whole, this literature usually

conceives of local, rural NIPFs as inadequate stewards of the forest who do not

understand proper management practices.

Over time, these ideas and discourses, coupled with cultural biases based on

Appalachia’s low education levels, poor economic performance, and deteriorating

landscape, have infiltrated the public consciousness in southeastern Ohio. These

discourses, which are usually negative but always changing as different individuals take

them up, fall in line with “redneck” stereotypes that hold up “rural poverty as a lifestyle

choice,” “rural, white poor people…as backward, inbred, lazy, dirty, uneducated, and

coarse,” and rednecks as individuals who have no business managing ecosystems (Jarosz

and Lawson 2002: 9; Putz 2003). And these discourses certainly have made their way into other Ohioans’ perspectives about NIPFs in this region. A, the director of the Arc of

Appalachia preservation system, who originally hails from Columbus, OH, fully embodies these biases about “rednecks:”

We’re trying to do something to put this place on the map, but people here, they always say, ‘Can we hunt? Can we fish?’ And we say, ‘Well, no.’ And then they don’t want anything to do with us. Now we have opened up one of our preserves—120 acres—to hunting. A big deer slaughter every fall. That was a huge sacrifice, a huge sacrifice, but there was nothing we could do about it. There could be no arbitration. So we’ve got these people coming in, and it’s a huge cost to us because then we have to, you know, pick up all their Kentucky Fried Chicken containers. If we were in the city, I could bring all you guys to fight, but I can’t down here because you all look like me. You look urban, you’re educated, and you don’t fit in, and they don’t want that (2009).

35

Perhaps it is not entirely surprising that a preservationist might have this perspective, but individuals working for the state Division of Forestry and state-run Woodland Stewards

Program articulate similar ideas:

If it’s rural it’s, ‘Well it’s part of the farm.’ It’s just there. They don’t think about it as a resource. It was too wet or too steep to farm. In that area, usually too steep. It probably had cattle on it at one time, but it’s just there. So they don’t really have a clue as to value. And then as you get closer to urban areas, you have people who purchased the forest to live there. So they have a little better clue, but it’s more for recreation, solitude, a place to be (B 2009, on why people own forestland).

B’s quote references the rural-exurban divide and all the implications about environmental responsibility that many assume to accompany this distinction.1 C deals more specifically with southeast Ohio:

Interestingly enough, we have a hard time filling classes in southeast Ohio and southern Ohio. We can fill a class in almost any other part of the state, but you go south, southeast, and we have a really, really hard time getting folks to pay to go to class. Some of it is the whole economic thought, ‘I’m not paying thirty bucks to go to class.’ They don’t understand what they’ll get for their dollars. And, I’m a firm believer that they think, ‘There’s trees everywhere, so why should we worry about it?’ Whereas in northwestern and northeastern Ohio, they’re seeing trees being removed to build a Wal-Mart. You know they’re much more protective of the resource. They want to do something to better the resource (C 2009).

Not all Ohioans agree with these opinions; however, of the dozens of individuals I talked to, all of those who did not live or work in the region—and some who did—expressed analogous views.

The general stereotype, then, is one that assumes local, rural, less-educated, lower-income landowners to be less-than-desirable managers of the ecosystem. These discourses portray this type of owner as lazy, ill-informed, irresponsible, interested in the

1 see pages 33-35, 37

36 wrong types of outdoor activities (e.g. hunting), economically-naïve, and inactive. And, as I have shown, the discourses touch down very tangibly in southeastern Ohio, coloring perspectives about local forest owners. These local NIPFs then become part of the problem, one of the threats to long-term forest sustainability. So individuals who hope to ensure the conservation of the region’s forests must come up with solutions, or cures, to the local NIPF ownership “crisis,” as well as to any potential pressures on the ecosystem since local owners cannot do so.

3.3 The “Cures”

3.3.1 Cure Number One: Locals Out

One cure is evident in the stereotype. Local NIPFs are not targeted for praise by

the popular environmental movement, are not lauded by foresters and environmental

scientists as the potential saviors of forest management, and are not resoundingly supported and praised in southeastern Ohio. Wealthier, better-educated urbanites and

exurbanites are. They are the instigators in the “New Environmental Paradigm,” and to forest managers in Ohio, they are the ones who “have a little better clue” and “want to do something to better the resource” (B 2009; C 2009; Dunlap and Van Liere 1978). Many

studies within the NIPF literature make this even more explicit. Jones et. al., for example,

conclude in their study of Appalachian private forest owners that:

A majority of the in-migrants to the region came because of its environment, and protecting environmental values remained a high priority. In-migrants are a bit more knowledgeable about environmental issues, more concerned about the environment, place higher priority on environmental protection, and are more engaged in activities that promote environmental values than locals (2003: 221- 222).

37 Another article on “new” forest owners in Wisconsin talks about how exurbanites created

a sustainable forestry cooperative that introduced better management practices to regional

forests (Rickenbach and Zeuli et. al. 2005). Yet another paper on new forest owners in

Virginia recommends that “the forestry profession should take note that the people

buying forests are well educated and economically privileged, and thus have the potential

to be important political friends” (Kendra and Hull 2005: 152). These articles

demonstrate just how engrained this thinking is in the minds of the forestry community.

The best “cure,” therefore, would be to hand over the forests of southeastern Ohio to these more environmental exurbanites before local landowners ruin them.

Indeed, this has already begun to happen. A desire among urbanites and suburbanites to live privately in the forest coupled with a desire among local landowners’

children to sell rather than inherit family land has allowed outsiders to buy land and

stay.2 This decision to move even further from cities—usually Columbus in this case—so as to enjoy a more rural, private, amenity-driven lifestyle mimics national trends (Brown

and Johnson et. al. 2005; Munroe and York 2003; Olson and Munroe 2009). And, also on

track with national trends, this exurbanization tends to encourage parcelization and

fragmentation (Cai 2009; Irwin and Bockstael 2007). Exurban landowners generally do

not want hundred-acre or thousand-acre farms; they want just enough area to build a

home surrounded by forest. As local NIPF D attests, “that one hundred and thirty-one

acres we got that’s set apart, if the realtors would get a hold of that, it’d be broken up in

five to twenty acre chunks in a hurry” (2009). Foresters fear parcelization of land perhaps

2 This is not always the case. Not all exurbanites physically stay on the land. Increasingly, residents of other parts of the state are purchasing land solely on which to hunt. These landowners are termed absentee landowners.

38 more than any other threat to the ecosystem; not only does it break apart habitat, but also

as the land becomes parcelized into five to twenty acre patches, it becomes nearly

impossible to manage. Despite these impacts, exurbanites are still exactly the group that many environmental and forest scientists, as well as average people, laud as the “green,” wealthy, educated saviors of the forest. I do not wish, however, to set up a dichotomy that poses local landowners as good and outsider/exurban landowners as bad. As I will show, local NIPFs are an incredibly diverse group with diverse ideas and management goals, and of course, none of them are perfect. In much the same way, exurban NIPFs are legitimate, heterogeneous, and interested landowners. But they do, importantly, have the power and monetary resources to direct local land out of local hands.

Preservation groups also possess the finances to buy up local land. In addition to

always-active groups such as the Nature Conservancy, the Arc of Appalachia Reserve

System stakes out and buys up land with money donated from across the country.3 In thirteen years, the Arc has raised over ten million dollars, which it has used to purchase approximately seventy properties totaling over five thousand tax-exempt acres, as well as to build and run its Appalachian Forest Museum and Appalachian Forest School. Visitors must pay a fee to access any of these properties, and, except as described earlier with regards to hunting on the Kamelands Preserve,4 are only allowed to hike on a few select

trails. The Arc’s stated goals are to “champion wilderness in the eastern United States,”

“quietly buy back the land,” and “wisely use our few decades before our North American

3 Although the Arc of Appalachia currently functions just outside my study site, it has already extended into six counties and has plans to keep growing. And now that the Arc manages Serpent Mound, a Native American burial ground and one of Ohio’s most famous sites, it is beginning to raise huge sums of money from donors as far away as Japan and Europe. 4 see page 35

39 landscape is indistinguishable from the populated, highly-managed landscape of Europe”

(Arc of Appalachia Preserve System 2004, 2008). In these publications and brochures, it

also uses startling imagery and controversial statements to get the reader’s attention, such

as: “The World’s Last Chance!,” “the reason more people aren’t environmentalists is that

they lack courage,” or “imagine yourself visiting the Highlands Nature Sanctuary5 two hundred years from now. You pick up your hiking permit and drive down Cave Road, passing a large number of expensive houses. As you hike, you hear the constant sound of barking dogs, lawn mowers, and chainsaws in the background. Not what you want to imagine?” (Arc of Appalachia Preserve System 2010, 2004, 2008).

I attended one of the Arc-run Appalachian Forest School classes in the summer of

2009. My classmates were members of conservation groups from Ohio and Indiana, naturalists, and aging hippies. We spent the week hiking, learning about the particulars of this forest ecosystem, hugging trees—literally, eating delicious local foods, and making mental “phone calls” to the Chief of the Division of Forestry and logging companies in order to “save their tortured souls.” We were encouraged by the Arc’s Director, A, to “be tree whisperers,” “own up to our biome,” and “bear witness by watering the trees with our tears.” E, another naturalist at the Arc, demanded that we all be forest activists by the end of the week. He insists that the fight to preserve Ohio’s forest is the most important issue in the state. F, yet another staff member, is an artist, and he is painting eleven murals to go inside the Appalachian Forest Museum. One that is already completed depicts a panda crying over the loss of her habitat (Figure 3).6 Other murals will portray

5 Highland Nature Sanctuary is the name of the Arc’s first preserve system. 6 A panda is apparently fair game because China is also home to temperate forests.

40

Figure 3. Portion of a Mural at the Arc of Appalachia’s Appalachian Forest Museum

all the species that require old growth forests, all the species lost in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the region’s coal background. F is titling the coal mural “The End of the

World.” As a whole, the Arc of Appalachia Preserve System proudly flaunts its perspectives about southern and southeastern Ohio’s forests. Thus far, it seems to have worked. The Arc has successfully sold its brand, which holds up wilderness—the

“nature” outside and separate from us—as something that must be protected from our unnatural cars, homes, strip malls, chemicals, tractors, and axes, to thousands of interested individuals state and nation wide.

The most glaring issue with the Arc of Appalachia’s brand, though, is that it is fundamentally out-of-sync with local communities. Not only do preservation groups like the Arc scavenge for preferential private properties with outsider dollars7 and funnel land away from county tax bases, but they also effectively bar locals from the land by charging steep entrance fees, prohibit most popular regional forest activities, and

7 As A, the Arc director, explains, “Some people say your dollars should come from the area you operate in, but we can’t do that because no one supports us.”

41 contribute nothing to the forest products industry. More symbolically, both the fact that the Arc of Appalachia’s guestbook is filled with the names of visitors who hail from other regions—and often other states—and the fact that its volunteers and employees all drive over two hours to work8 speak worlds about the Arc’s relationship to its local,

Appalachian neighbors.

The Wayne National Forest is a bit of an anomaly in this “Locals Out” cure. The

Wayne already owns a sizable amount of land it purchased decades ago, and simply its presence in the area shifts the dynamics, discourses, relationships, and potential land uses over this space. Today the Wayne only buys private land if it is offered to them by the landowner, and even then, as Richard Jones, the Director of Land Management complains, the government usually cannot come up with the money to purchase offered land. But the Wayne engages in practices such as prescribed burns or species introduction

(e.g. burying beetles, freshwater mussels) that have implications beyond its borders, and it brings in many visitors, which encourages other tourist development in the area (USDA

Forest Service 2009). This tourism, although mostly along the periphery of the study site, consists of everything from hot tub cabins nestled in the privacy of the forest to hikers and birdwatchers to all-terrain vehicle, or ATV, enthusiasts.9 The Wayne also publishes a number of documents meant to promote its own practices (e.g. using fire as a

8 Excluding those who live permanently on Arc property. These five individuals come from cities in Ohio, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania. 9 “Hot tub tourism,” marketed mostly to wealthy Columbus residents, occurs primarily around Hocking Hills State Park. Other recreational pursuits are prevalent in my site, but tourist growth tends to be focused in particular areas around the Wayne (e.g. Nelsonville). In other words, it is not a flat tourism that impacts the whole area equally. It is, however, spreading, and the Hocking Valley coal towns are beginning to encourage tourist development in order to capitalize on those outside dollars.

42 management tool) that certainly endorse particular visions of the forest and influence

local landowners.

3.3.2 Cure Number Two: “Help” for Local Forest Owners

These groups (i.e. exurbanites, preservationists, and the government) have not

taken the majority of the forest out of local hands though. As discussed earlier, local

NIPFs are still the majority-owners of southeastern Ohio’s forestland. So the “cures” for

these owners are aid, education, persuasion, organization, and coercion, if necessary.

These cures take many forms as they are embodied by the state, non-profit groups,

businesses, etc. But these interest groups,10 despite their diversity, have a number of

things in common. They all believe that southeast Ohio’s forest is an important resource,

that local NIPFs need help maintaining it, and that they themselves either have an

important vision for local landowners to adopt or are much stronger than these

landowners and will be able to enact their agenda without local support. And, now that

much of the forest has reached an age where it has become desirable to a number of

groups and individuals, a struggle over the resource has begun. For the remainder of this

section, I will overview the groups and “cures” that I find to be the most powerful,

problematic, and/or promising. For a more exhaustive list of interest groups, see

Appendix.

Many interest groups are actively pursuing landowners for a cause. The American

Chestnut Foundation, for example, is attempting to not only recall but also recreate the

10 For lack of a better word, I will be using the term “interest group” to refer to non-profit groups, state offices, populations with a unifying agenda, businesses, etc. Basically any “group” with some kind of stake or interest in the forest I am calling an interest group.

43 forests of the early 1900s, which were filled with American Chestnuts before the chestnut blight, by introducing a genetically-modified strain of the Chinese Chestnut into the landscape (The American Chestnut Foundation 2010). The organization constantly attends local meetings and has persuaded many local landowners to plant this new chestnut tree. The Buckeye Forest Council, which previously only lobbied to protect state forests from logging, exploratory drilling, etc., is, according to Executive Director G, planning to compile a directory of every private forest owner in the state in order to sway their behaviors as well. The Council will, almost surely, push for “conservation” strategies and no harvesting (The Buckeye Forest Council 2008-2009).

State groups and programs also promote particular landowner behaviors. The

Ohio Division of Forestry’s “Call Before You Cut” packet is distributed to all NIPFs and encourages landowners to consult local foresters, “make the most of your forestland” through sustainable practices, use herbicide to control woody vegetation, and become tree farmers to “make your woodland the showplace you want it to be,” among other things

(ODNR Division of Forestry 2009). None of this is necessarily poor advice, and I think it is important for the state to take these steps. Still, the state both believes landowners need a great deal of advice and prioritizes particular management strategies, such as selling timber, when giving this advice. Ohio’s Forest Tax Law makes this all the more evident.

The law guarantees a fifty percent property tax reduction to any landowner with ten or more acres who “demonstrates his or her intent to manage the land by completing prescribed forestry practices approved by the Chief of the Division of Forestry” (ODNR

Division of Forestry 2009). This basically means landowners must craft an official

44 management plan and harvest their forests based on that plan. Still, only eight percent of

Ohio’s forest owners have such a plan, which is a fact that the Forest Service emphasizes in its recent publications and cannot explain (USDA Forest Service 2009).

Meanwhile, interest groups such as the National Network of Forest Practitioners

(NNFP) and Rural Action are pushing for very different types of management. NNFP was born in New Mexico, is now headquartered in Athens, Ohio, and, while being a national organization, involves itself as much as possible in local affairs. Rather than promoting government involvement, NNFP supports bottom-up, community-based initiatives such as co-ops and, as its director H says, “any organizations and businesses who are seeking to create a livelihood from the woods.” Rural Action, which is headquartered in Trimble, OH and has its hand in a number of local activism pots, runs a very aggressive Sustainable Forestry Program. This program is tied to everything from horse logging to the Appalachian Carbon Partnership,11 but it has constructed itself a unique niche by concentrating on non-timber forest products, more specifically on medicinal herb production. When I ask if this initiative stemmed from their own planning or from locals coming in and asking for help or information, I, the head of the program, replies:

You know ginseng, goldenseal, those are the two high-value species, and lot of other different herb species were traditionally harvested from the wild all throughout Appalachia. It goes all the way back to the 1790s. So, we didn’t start the process, but what we did was show that there had to be a transition from wild harvesting—because all the data was coming out that the wild populations were being impacted. So transitioning to sustainable cultivation, rather than wild crafting was kind of where Rural Action came in and took their stance (2009).

11 see page 48

45 Both of these groups are very passionate about the work they do and their vision for

southeast Ohio’s forest. Interestingly, though, most local NIPFs I spoke with shy from giving these organizations their full trust. Although they are located in the same region

and have fostered relationships with one another, many landowners are quick to point out

that none of NNFP or Rural Action’s employees have forestry backgrounds. Nor are they local. They instead hail from liberal arts colleges on the east and west coasts and were funneled into these groups through AmeriCorps Vista. Perhaps mostly for this reason, local NIPFs echo statements like this one from J: “I don’t like Rural Action. They have particular ideas. Course they might be alright, but I’m not too sure of their motives. They came up with this stuff for the environment and for the people, and well, I don’t particularly believe them I guess.”

The Appalachian Ohio Alliance (AOA) is the region’s major conservation group.

Fifteen volunteer board members oversee the AOA’s conservation easement and fee programs,12 which administer 3800 acres and 1600 acres respectively. Generally, AOA’s

goal is to prevent development, especially of the exurban variety, and especially in four

target areas: Clear Creek, Hocking Hills, Zaleski, and Wayne Forest Area, which neatly follows the boundaries of the study site. But the AOA is more flexible than groups like the Arc of Appalachia, and when they draw up a Deed of Conservation Easement with a landowner, which they have done now over thirty-five times, they negotiate to allow hunting, small farms, new construction on the property, pasture for horses, timber harvests, etc. Examples of activities that are not allowed include coal mining, selling off

12 Conservation easements legally “impose perpetual restrictions on the use of subject property” (Appalachian Ohio Alliance 2006). The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and AOA set these conservation restrictions on a case-by-case basis. In the fee program, ownership actually passes into AOA hands.

46 pieces of the land, or timber harvests that do not abide by the OSU Extension’s “Best

Management Practices for Erosion Control” checklist. And although, according to its

director K, board members do “seek people out” and putting a conservation easement on

property does lessen its value somewhat, landowners willing enter into AOA programs. K

believes they do so to leave a legacy when they either do not have children or when their

children are not interested in taking over the property. But the AOA is also not a local

group. Most of its board members are retirees who moved into the area permanently and

are now spearheading the effort to block others from coming. Additionally, when I ask K

if they have a target for how many acres they are trying to acquire, he responds, “Well if

you talk to some of my board members, they’re going to say all of it. Every last stick they can get their hands on.” He guesses, more realistically, that they will peak between

fifteen thousand and thirty thousand acres.

3.3.3 Cure Number Three: Biomass

The final two interest groups I will outline are the most disparate and possibly the

most capable of rearranging the entire landscape of southeastern Ohio. These groups are

part of the biomass movement, which is increasing exponentially in popularity as

companies—and individuals—look to mitigate or offset their carbon emissions. A study

conducted by agricultural and environmental economists at Ohio State University find

that Ohio ranks eleventh nationally in the ability to produce woody biomass.13 They posit

that nearly all of this biomass must come from south and southeast Ohio, and estimate

that the four counties comprising the study site could produce 41,345,500 board feet of

biomass timber annually (Hitzhusen and Jeanty 2004). The two groups currently trying to

13 In other words, biomass that comes from trees.

47 capitalize on this high forest-biomass-productivity are the Appalachian Carbon

Partnership and FirstEnergy. The Appalachian Carbon Partnership now operates across

the Appalachian counties of Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

Landowners must cover the costs of the Partnership’s Managed Forest Offset Program

and go through an incredibly stringent certification process in order to enroll (The

Appalachian Carbon Partnership 2010). Once enrolled, the Partnership sells carbon

credits—earned through the carbon trees sequester as they grow—to companies, cities,

individuals, etc. The landowners then, at least in theory, would garner some income from

the sale of their credits. It is too early to tell how this will work in actuality; the

Appalachian Carbon Partnership is young and carbon markets are not yet well- established in the United States.

FirstEnergy is entering the woody biomass game via the recapitulation of their

R.E. Burger Power Plant in Shadyside, OH (Figure 4). A district court served the Akron,

Ohio-based electric company with an ultimatum: close the coal-fired plant, which dates back to 1944 and routinely violates the Clean Air Act, or retrofit the plant to meet

pollution standards (Patel 2009). FirstEnergy had until April 1, 2009 to make a decision, and that day it announced it would be switching to woody-biomass generation (Patel

2009). It will be the third woody-biomass plant in the United States, following in the

footsteps of New Hampshire’s Northern Wood Power Project and Wisconsin’s Bay Front

Power Plant, but the largest of its kind globally (Patel 2009; The Sierra Club and

Buckeye Forest Council et. al. 2009). Ted Strickland, Governor of Ohio, instantaneously

hailed FirstEnergy’s decision as “good for the economy, good for the environment, and a

48

Figure 4. Location of the R.E. Burger Power Plant. From Hunt, Spencer (2010). First

Energy Pressured About Biomass Plans. The Columbus Dispatch. 9 May 2010.

Columbus, OH.

newer technology that I think is moving us in the right direction” (Niquette 2009). And in

its press release, FirstEnergy emphasized that this conversion will save ninety-five jobs

and feature a closed-loop system (FirstEnergy Corporation 2009).14

But not everyone is so pleased. Questions and controversy surround the method of

FirstEnergy’s biomass acquisition. Instead of using timber from normal harvests,

FirstEnergy has contracted Renewafuel LLC to grow genetically-modified, fast-growing

cottonwood plantations on leased land. This essentially means landowners will plant rows

of these trees, harvest the entire even-aged stand at once, send the soft cottonwood logs to

14 Theoretically, trees grown to fire the plant will sequester as much CO2 as they later release when burned. The raw material is therefore a carbon sink and a carbon source, thereby creating a closed-loop system.

49 Renewafuel to be pressed into coal-sized pellets, apply plenty of fertilizer, pesticide, and

herbicide to the now-harvested land, and begin the process all over again. Due to transportation costs, these plantations will need to grow primarily in Appalachian Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and northern West Virginia (Downing 2009). FirstEnergy refuses to provide numbers detailing how many acres it expects this whole operation to require, but the Sierra Club has published an estimate based on its own calculations. Assuming that the Burger Plant runs similarly to the Northern Wood Power Project and the Bay

Front Plant, it would demand between 1.6 million and two million acres of total plantation land, or between 5.8 and 7.25 percent of Ohio’s surface area (The Sierra Club and Buckeye Forest Council et. al. 2009).15 For this reason, the Sierra Club, in

consultation with the Buckeye Forest Council and Environment Ohio, declares:

The sheer scale of the Project as proposed may mean that no combination of regulations, restrictions and best management practices can make the Project sustainable…we strongly oppose the unsustainable exploitation of forest ecosystems. Generally, the use of forest material as biomass for commercial energy production creates demand for the byproducts of poor forest management and logging practices (2009).

Local NIPFs mirror these concerns. One comments, for example, that “it could destroy the forest. It’s completely taking everything and grinding it up!” The converted Burger

Plant is set to come online at the end of 2012, so arbitration might still be possible.

FirstEnergy has not yet consulted with local communities; thus, it remains to be seen how

successful it will be at recruiting NIPFs and how the project might change if it finds this

process to be more difficult than expected.

15 Of course, not all of the biomass would come from Ohio, but the amount that might would come almost exclusively from Appalachian Ohio. Cutting the range of analysis down to this area propels the percent of surface area upward to a not-insignificant number.

50 3.3.4 “Cures” Summary

Although this is not an all-inclusive summary of the interest groups vying to educate landowners or govern the land themselves, I have attempted to demonstrate the complexity of these potential “cures” to the NIPF problem. Each of these groups has unique goals, which range from recreating a past landscape to locking up land in preservation to promoting specific harvest methods to building a new, productive, biomass-driven landscape. And their methods of targeting landowners include everything from publishing pamphlets to holding meetings and workshops to seeking out private meetings to using monetary incentives to garner support. But whether a group is trying to get landowners to cultivate ginseng or to lease their land to Renewafuel, it is operating based on the same set of assumptions. All of these groups believe that local landowners need guidance, outside resources, and new visions for the forest. This is not to say that they all are wholly—or even partially—bad. Many of them do have good intentions and are important, widely-used outlets for landowners. The important point, though, is that they do not exist solely to help landowners pursue their own agendas. This is because they see landowners, at worst, as being a problem or, at best, as people who could be part of a viable, long-term forest outcome/solution if only they would do x or y. Local NIPFs in southeastern Ohio are not the cure; outsider groups with more knowledge, more resources, and new perspectives must play this role.

51 3.4 The Reality16

Before embarking on my fieldwork, I anticipated that the stereotypes of local

landowners and cures to forest threats might not match the reality I would find on the

ground. I was certainly not the first person to hypothesize that local landowners are better caretakers than we often give them credit for being. Indeed, this is one of the fundamental arguments political ecology puts forward. Research has revealed First Nations tribes, indigenous populations in Latin America, fishermen in New Zealand, Spanish farmers, ranchers in the western United States, and Everglades hunters to be similarly-responsible ecosystem managers (Braun 2002; Haggerty 2007; McSweeney 2005; Ogden 2008;

Walker 2003; Zografos and Martinez-Alier 2009). Following and adding to this long tradition, I will argue that the overwhelming majority of southeastern Ohio’s local NIPFs are actually concerned, knowledgeable, and highly active stewards and scientists in several obvious or implicit ways.

3.4.1 “Growing” Forest Cover

To begin with, these owners have, in terms of forest cover, at least theoretically

been good for the forest. Forest cover has increased from approximately fifteen percent to

more than seventy-five percent over the past eighty years in Athens, Hocking, Morgan,

and Perry Counties (Andrews 2005; Buckley and Anderson et. al. 2006; Ohio Department

of Development 2008). And although forest of course regenerates naturally in Ohio—

assuming the land has not been decimated by practices such as strip-mining, these owners

16 In using the word “reality” and in titling this section “The Reality,” I do not mean to suggest that I fully understand the entire reality of all the intricate human processes and relationships in the region. This is certainly not the case, nor could it ever be. I do hope and believe, however, that this section paints a truer picture of local NIPFs than the previous two sections have. It is, at least, the reality I experienced as a researcher over the course of a few weeks and few dozen interviews.

52 had to decide not to do other things with the land in order for the forest to return. A few

owners, however, did decide to do other things with their land, as evidenced by the

number of pastures scattered across the landscape. L even attests that he can earn much

more money by pasturing the land than he could by harvesting timber every fifteen years.

The income he reaps from his property is significantly higher than that of his neighbors.

Thus, the majority of forest owners, who do not maintain pasture for livestock—although

they might have open space around their home or grassy openings for deer, may not have

behaved as “homo economici.”17 Certainly this collective decision not to pasture the land

or channel it into other uses helped spur the regreening of the region.

3.4.2 Managing, Shaping, and Experimenting on the Forest

Local NIPF actions do not end with simply allowing forest to return, and for the

next few pages, I will discuss ways in which landowners have shaped the forest we see in the region today. I spoke with a number of forest owners in my study site, but I spent

more extensive amounts of time with two particular forest owners. I relate their stories

here to qualitatively demonstrate the depth and breath of local NIPF management. The

first owners were a couple who have been married since the 1950s, M and N. In 1973,

after inheriting land from his grandfather, M left his job in California, and M and N

moved to Morgan County. They originally intended to become full-time farmers; according to them, their three thousand acres had many more cows than trees on it at that point. But M says that “we quickly found out that it was not suitable for farming, so the

17 It is possible, though, that in some cases the start-up costs to raise livestock would have been too great. Also, not all land owners could switch their land into pasture and expect the same returns margin; supply would likely supersede demand if this were the case. Nevertheless, land owners in the region obviously acted with motives beyond maximizing profit.

53 first thing we did was call in the Soil and Water Conservation people. They said we better do mostly woodland, so, we planted white pine and got more and more into tree farming

and less and less into crops and pasture” (2009). Since M’s father had leased much of

their land to strip-mining companies in the 1960s, it took planting after planting to get

trees to regrow on the denuded soils. To date, M and N have planted thousands of locust

trees, which are soil-enriching legumes, and over 200,000 white pine. N also says that she

“planted hundreds of walnut trees by putting the walnuts in the ground and hammering in

the seeds!” In addition, M and N have conducted three major selective harvests, and they

hire someone from the Ohio Division of Wildlife to take out invasive species, build

habitats for wildlife, plant trees, and maintain trails. Every month, they meet with him to

discuss what changes they would like to make or what new things they would like to try.

He then gives his input and devotes fifteen hours per week to carrying out their plans.

Most of these plans revolve around wildlife; selling hunting and fishing permits

constitutes much of M and N’s yearly income.

Although M and N have spent decades managing their land, the most impressive piece of their property is a giant, land-use relief map M made approximately ten years ago (Figure 5). The map took M weeks to build; he hand-measured every acre to scale,

hand-carved all the topography, and hand-painted the current land uses accordingly to a key he developed (e.g. dark green for pine plantations, medium green for maple-beech forests, light green for oak-hickory forests, etc.). Now all but two hundred acres of their land is forested, and almost all of this forest is in mixed hardwoods, so M is planning on repainting the map soon. For now, it sits in a room that has been taken over by hundreds

54

Figure 5. M and N’s Handmade Relief Map of Their Property

55 of maps and binders. Although M and N might not have a “formal” management plan as determined by the state Division of Forestry, they have documented every change they have made to the land for every week of the past thirty-seven years in those binders.

When asked why they have devoted so much of their lives to these three thousand acres,

N responds, “It’s what we’ve always loved. Our first and second dates were out in the woods. We’ve grown up with that love for the forest, we’ve always had it, and that’s how our love got started!”

J, the other owner I focused on in my fieldwork, was born in 1926 in a slab cabin in southeastern Ohio. His childhood home, however, has since been swallowed by the forest. Much of this surrounding forest grew back on land his father was offered by financially-troubled patrons of his grocery store/bootlegging business in the 1930s. And his father purchased a great deal of land; financial trouble was not a unique affliction in

Perry County during the Great Depression. When J and his brothers and sisters inherited their father’s land in the 1960s, the forest was beginning to regenerate, but past agricultural damage and recent strip-mining still threatened its return. Some of his siblings wanted nothing to do with this pitiful-looking property. J, however, has devoted much of the past fifty years of his life to coaxing along and rebuilding the forest he loves so much. Currently, he owns over two hundred acres of land, which he purchased in 1960 from his grandfather, and he manages the family’s two thousand acre trust.

When I visited J’s property, the first things I noticed were a modest house sitting up on the hill and an old barn surrounded by decades-old farming equipment. The slope down from the house is a patchy field for approximately fifty yards before turning into a

56 sparsely-forested grove of small pine, black alder, and swamp white oak in the ravine.

The hill on the opposite side of the ravine is covered with white pine and hardwood trees.

These trees, though, are a great deal larger and healthier-looking. Behind the house and

barn sits a thin strip of mixed hardwoods, and behind those hardwoods there is a four to

six acre field. On the far southern side of the field, hundreds, maybe thousands, of knee-

high to head-high Austrian pine are growing (Figure 6). Beyond this, I spotted groves of mature pine and hills of mixed mesophytic forest. As I toured pieces of J’s property and the family trust, I could see that both younger and older trees such as ash, maple, hickory,

Figure 6. The Northern Border of the Previously Strip Mined Hilltop Above J’s Home

57 hemlock, oak, walnut, locust and pine fill the forest. Dead wood and mostly indigenous understory plants cover the forest floor. The ground, however, is fairly flat and compacted. A few thin trails and dirt roads—along with a couple of county roads bordering the various tracts of property—carve their way through the trees, and small, patchy openings are interspersed throughout the landscape. Also, a number of other small and mature pine plantations coexist with the mostly-hardwood forest. An old cemetery with graves of J’s family dating back to the mid-1800s stands upon a small hill.

Approximately one dozen genetically-modified chestnut trees ring the plot, and a handful of oil wells sit at the bottom of the hill. Two dilapidated houses, one with a beaver pond behind it, dot the land. Considering all this, I might describe J’s land as a diverse amalgam of forest types and land uses. And although we certainly could not drive and walk through every acre of the property, J assured me that the areas I did not experience mimic those that I did get the opportunity to see.

Like M and N, J has dedicated the better part of his life to molding the forest into the spaces we tour over the course of the day. And, also like M and N, he did it out of love for the forest and for the region; when I ask him why he has made this land his life’s labor, he responds:

Stupidity! I don’t know, I just loved it. It’s what I like to do. ‘Course when I was a kid in my teens and so on, my grandpa lived just three miles that way, and I’d just take off and walk over there anytime. I hunted ginseng, I squirrel hunted, and I knew all this territory back in here for miles. So it’s just my heritage I guess. ‘Course the army took me out. I got drafted when I was eighteen and didn’t get back for three years, but I remember saying that if I make it back home, I’m never gonna get far away (J 2009).

58 The time and effort he has put in certainly show. He tells me about all of the work he has

done as we survey the landscape; at the ravine I mentioned near his home, he says:

That’s all been strip-mined right in there, but it’s a different species of tree. Black alder—that’s the only thing I can get to grow in wet spots. There’s some swamp white oak; those can grow fairly decent on stripped land if you’ve got some good weather. I planted five hundred up in here three years ago, and they all died because it quit raining. And then I planted five hundred again the next year, and about half of those died. But the rest of them did good in the spring, and once I get them established they’ll keep on growing (J 2009).

The huge grassy area north of the house has been his enemy for decades. His father allowed a coal company to remove two strips of coal that were only two feet thick where the field now sits. J explains how he has fought to bring trees back to the space:

See this is where I experimented. This was planted in 1991. I used pine and mixed hardwood, every other tree was an oak. See there’s a little white oak; it’s doing pretty good too! ‘Course I planted green ash, white pine, Austrian pine, white oak, and some swamp white oak. I’ve planted three or four times. See all the little ones? Every time I plant, I get a few more. Now, these are about fifteen years old (2009).

At this point, he was holding up an eight-inch tall white pine. He continues:

I’ve tried everything. We ripped it, what they call rippin’ it, and we sprayed it with Round Up, and we made a soil softener that you can mix with the Round Up. I’ve really tried everything. First day in 1990, I went to the state and spent a whole day with the service foresters talking about how to do it. Then I talked to the people at Ohio State, asking them what was the best thing to plant, and they told me Austrian Pine and Green Ash, and well, you know what’s happened to the ash (J 2009).

In other strip-mined areas, his plantings have taken up much better, and the pine that he originally planted because he “went squirrel hunting once down by Zanesville, and they had some beautiful white pine, and thought, ‘I’m gonna have me some of that’” now has oaks and other hardwoods growing up under the canopy. Besides plantings, J has also done multiple timber stand improvement (TSI) jobs to eradicate multiflora rose and

59 ailanthus, planted small patches of clover for deer and other wildlife, rebuilt the beaver

pond that is now home to a family of beavers, hauled twenty-five dump truck loads of

trash and fifteen pick-up loads of refrigerators and stoves out of a ravine, introduced

chestnut trees back onto his property, and conducted a number of harvests. I ask about the

type of harvests he has done, and he replies:

I did one clear-cutting job up in here, simply because it was old coal mining land that they’d stripped around, and I wanted to level out the growth time on it. So I had them clear-cut it because I wanted to see what would happen. And you can’t even walk through that now. That stuff come back so thick, and it come back with oak and hickory and walnut, a little bit of everything…and that’s a beautiful piece of timber now. And ‘course I’ve tried to avoid high-grading on the other ones I’ve done, and I’ve marked them all myself (J 2009)!

Harvesting timber is not a rare event in this region; marking the timber harvest yourself

is, and this care and attention certainly factored into the state’s decision to honor J with a

conservation award, which he displays proudly on his barn.

Lest it seem like these two NIPFs are the only active landowners in my study site,

I will quickly address the broader population of landowners. Other NIPFs I spoke with

likewise described how they have planted trees, rehabilitated damaged soils, put in ponds, built trails, harvested firewood, maintained open spaces for hunting, left behind snags and scattered dead wood, pulled out invasives (or other trees and undergrowth they did not want), saved seeds of trees threatened by invasive insects, etc. And when I ask about their neighbors, everyone agrees that their neighbors “care quite a bit and do quite a bit,” even if they do not endorse one another’s management decisions. J, for example, attests that of his neighbors, “there’s a few that won’t allow any timber cutting at all. And O down there, she’s a sister to P, I don’t think she even allows hunting” (2009)! Finally, the state

60 employs natural resources outreach staff who are the first contact point for NIPFs when

they have questions or are looking for information. These employees all say that they get

“a lot of questions from landowners,” and that “landowners are getting much better and

coming to programs more.” Q, the outreach contact for Perry County, discusses the

southern part of the county with me:18

Down there, people are trying to do what they can with what’s left. So, people are more concerned and more aware, with the green movement and all this stuff going on. Some of them are planting pine trees, and a lot them are putting in wildlife food plots or wetlands. It used to happen that people would be offered $30,000 for $90,000 of timber, and then loggers would tear up the woods, and it would be worth nothing. But people talk, and they’re more aware, so they’ve stopped using those loggers (2009).

All of these accounts contrast dramatically with the stereotypes of local, rural, low to

middle income NIPFs. In fact, they directly refute notions of these landowners as

ignorant, unconcerned with the welfare of the resource, inactive, and happy to throw their

fried chicken containers everywhere.

Throughout my fieldwork, I instead found local NIPFs in southeastern Ohio to be

well-informed, highly-engaged landowners and scientists. The NIPFs I spoke with could

identify every tree and understory plant on their property, and they were also well-versed

in forest succession processes, management practices, and current issues such as invasive

species. Beyond this, they are actively shaping the forest landscape of the region in four

important ways. First, they are reforesting thousands of acres of previously mined land.

Second, they are selecting for particular species through harvesting and planting practices

(e.g. leaving behind the strongest “seed trees” in harvests, removing unwanted species,

18 The northern section of Perry County, which is not part of my study site, is primarily agricultural. The soils in the North support agriculture because it was previously glaciated. Interestingly, the glaciation line divides Perry County almost exactly in half (Bashaw and Landis et. al. 2007).

61 planting locust, walnut, and white pine trees). Third, they are managing for wildlife and

other recreation by maintaining small clearings, putting in ponds, creating wetlands,

leaving behind snag trees, and planting food stock trees. All of these actions make local

NIPFs deserving of the title “scientist.” Truly, what are these landowners doing if not experimenting on and acquiring knowledge about this regenerating forest ecosystem?

Fourth, and getting beyond their role as forest scientists, they are using the forest to boost

their personal economic situations and shift the regional economic makeup. Whether they

are selling hunting and fishing permits, harvesting timber, or marking non-timber forest

products,19 they have found ways to capitalize on the resource without needing to pasture

land or sell out to developers. They have also tempered the state’s nine-billion-dollar

forest products industry, which operates almost entirely in southeastern and southern

Ohio, by, as Q tells me, driving irresponsible loggers out of business and requiring that

timber will be plentiful in the next fifteen to thirty years (Heiligmann and Dorka et. al.

2005; ODNR Division of Forestry 2009; Romig 2005). And finally, they are promoting

new economic futures for the region by building a tourism industry and attempting to

infiltrate high-end wood products and alternative energy markets (Foundation for

Appalachian Ohio 2010; Perry County Chamber of Commerce 2010). These savvy economic initiatives on the part of local landowners weaken arguments suggesting that groups like FirstEnergy, Appalachian Carbon Partnership, or Rural Action need to help landowners by providing economic opportunities or advice.

19 Non-timber forest products include products such as maple syrup, goldenseal, pawpaw fruit, honey, Christmas wreaths, ginseng, etc. Many of these products are incredibly profitable; ginseng, for example, often sells for $250-$500 per pound (Rural Action Sustainable Forestry 2010).

62 3.4.3 Organizing for Forest Change

On top of all of this, local NIPFs are also extremely organized and have formed a number of regional groups. Little Cities of the Forest sprung from the larger group Little

Cities of Black Diamonds, both of which promote the rejuvenation of the Hocking Valley coal towns (i.e. the study site). Little Cities of the Forest specifically focuses on environmental education; it holds monthly events, designs classroom activities, installs interpretive signs around the region, and publishes the pamphlet Words from the Woods four times each year to raise awareness about the area’s ubiquitous forestland. Other non- profits such as the Sunday Creek Watershed Group and Monday Creek Restoration

Project deal exclusively with riparian forests and attempt to rehabilitate areas destroyed by the coal industry by improving water quality and reestablishing flora and fauna.

Two groups, the Southeastern Ohio Woodland Interest Group (SEOWIG) and the

Ohio Forestry Cooperative, target private forest owners. SEOWIG’s membership numbers in the seventies and hails primarily from Athens, Perry, and Morgan Counties.

These NIPFs meet monthly to listen to lectures on virtually every aspect of forest management, discuss their property, and give one another advice. R, the secretary for the group, discussed their programming with me before the July meeting:

Within this group, there’s a real range of management goals. So our topics vary a lot. Like tonight we’re talking about the Ora Anderson Foundation.20 Ora was one of the founding members of this group. He loved trees and did a lot with them, and we’d go look at his land a lot. And so he’s very important to this group. And then we’ll go all the way to timber management. We’ve had people come in and

20 Ora Anderson is a revered figure in southeastern Ohio. He was a dedicated conservationist, scrupulous journalist, and champion of the region’s forests and wildlife until his death in 2006. The Foundation for Appalachian Ohio awards the Ora E. Anderson Scholarship to two high school students each year, and a popular nature trail in the Wayne National Forest bears his name. He also inspired two documentaries, A Forest Returns and Ora E. Anderson: The Soul of the Woods (2005; 2009).

63 talk about how to do a timber contract. We’ve done programs on invasive species management, non-timber forest products, measuring logs and how that works at the mill, mushroom production, even honeybee production. We’ve done walks on other people’s forest to see what they’ve done. We’ve gone out to Rural Action’s medicinal plants center and looked at what they’ve been doing. And we’ve had some of the strip-mining reclamation projects come in and talk about some of these new methods, and the Chestnut Foundation came and talked after that one. So it does really, really run the whole gamut on what people might be interested in. It’s just about anything you could imagine, like maple syrup production too, and we just went out and looked at a horse-logging job last month (2009).

This interest in and attention to their property on the part of SEOWIG members further

corroborates my arguments about local NIPFs in this region. SEOWIG also actively

recruits new members by holding welcome wagons, setting up a booth at events, and

advertising in local newspapers and on local radio stations. The membership realizes that

its average age falls on the older side of the spectrum (i.e. 60+), and so members have

begun to reach out to newer landowners in their thirties and forties with some success.

The other local NIPF interest group, The Ohio Forestry Cooperative, is the brainchild of SEOWIG members. The cooperative originally started as pine cooperative; members would sell their pine logs collectively in order to demand higher market prices.

It fell into what member S calls a “lull period” in 2007 and disbanded, only to be reformed again the following year as a service cooperative. Now it offers a menu of forest management services, such as “supervision of stumpage sales,” “preparation of

logging contracts,” and “woodscaping to promote wildlife and botanicals,” to both its

members and any interested NIPFs for a la carte prices (Ohio Forestry Cooperative

2010). All of these services are tied into the cooperative’s new focus on “land care,” which S explains to me is Australian movement devoted to cooperative stewardship over the long-term, minimal impact management practices, and engagement with one’s

64 neighbors and local resource extraction companies (e.g. loggers). At this point, the Ohio

Forestry Cooperative is the only forest cooperative in the state, and it has already worked on thousands of acres of land in southeastern Ohio.

3.5 Discussion

So if local NIPFs are knowledgeable, active, economically-savvy, and organized, outsider groups seem to, at least in some cases, be misunderstanding them. Groups such as Rural Action, Ohio Woodland Stewards, National Network of Forest Practitioners, and other state-run programs exist for the sole purpose of helping landowners. And they do.

Many local individuals and groups do collaborate with these organizations and do find ways to utilize their resources while still preserving their own perspectives and independence. But the undertone of these interactions, as many local NIPFs interject in conversation, is always that the state employee or AmeriCorps staffer is the expert, educator, and advisor. Whether this is because stereotypes and biases about Appalachian landowners run too deep or because these outside groups concentrate too exclusively on statistics about management plans and workshop attendance is hard to tell. For other groups, the disconnect exceeds misunderstanding. Groups like the Arc of Appalachia will always oppose local NIPFs; they are not there to provide assistance to them and, more fundamentally, envision a future for the forest that does not include them. The Arc, as well as groups such as exurbanites, the American Chestnut Foundation, and FirstEnergy, have their own agendas and plans for the forests of southeast Ohio. In FirstEnergy’s case, there is even money to be made with their conversion to biomass. Overall, then, it is

65 unlikely that the human processes on this landscape will become any less complicated or contentious going forward.

On the surface, this may not be a problem. H, the director of NNFP, claims that he is “not concerned about other groups’ agendas. I think the more folks talking about and advocating for forests, the better” (2009). In one sense, I agree. Having dozens of groups interested in the area’s forest resources is certainly preferable to having them interested in, say, its coal resources. But I would also amend his statement. These “folks” do not all talk about or advocate for forests in the same ways with the same results. Local landowners, exurban landowners, preservationists, businesses, the state, and other groups all do have certain, specific powers—whether they be powers of ownership, powers to buy land and ascertain ownership, or powers to sway management decisions using wealth or discourse—but their powers are very different. SEOWIG is not equivalent to the AOA, which is not equivalent to the Appalachian Carbon Partnership. All this matters because these different conceptions of the forest partition off and delineate what can or should count as southeast Ohio’s forestland, and thereby ostracize other voices, plans, economic arrangements, cultures, and livelihoods. Some groups would turn this post-productive landscape into a consumptive, amenity-driven one; others would shift it into new types of production. Depending on which groups and which agendas prevail, some perspectives may be at odds with the prevailing structure. Timber harvests, for example, might not be welcome in an space where nature tourism holds sway, and vice versa. But let me be clear. I do not intend to glorify certain groups and demonize others with this discussion.

However, I do believe we must pay particular attention to local landowners and local

66 groups who, despite currently owning the majority of the land, tend to have the least economic and political power—as well as the least cultural support—and are therefore most at risk of losing any claims they might have to the forest.

3.6 Conclusion

This chapter has, in essence, told the story of the current human struggle over southeastern Ohio’s forests. I have argued that local, non-industrial private forest owners are much more conscientious, active stewards and scientists than they are often regarded to be. I have also shown how stereotypes about these landowners and competing visions for the forest shape human processes on the landscape as many diverse interest groups are now vying to remake and govern this new forest. In the following two chapters, I will fuse these human activities, pressures, and relationships to the forest ecology outlined in

Chapter 2. From there, I will examine the how human processes and other ecological processes may combine to produce new “future forest” outcomes. Of the utmost importance here are the repercussions these potential outcomes might have on humans, trees, deer, bacteria, or any other companion species in this landscape, as well in the regional and global webs in which it is intertwined.

67 Chapter 4:

The Co-production of Landscape

4.1 Introduction

I used the terms “companion species” and “webs” intentionally when closing the last chapter. These are Haraway’s terms, and they propel us into the arguments of the final two chapters. In this chapter, I will examine the webs made by ourselves, our companion species—who we are always “becoming with” as we occupy this earth together, and a multitude of other forces (Haraway 2008). The term “web” of course conjures up images of connections, networks, and complexity. Accordingly, I will contend that it is not just humans, not just plants or nutrients, and not just technologies or

economies that produce the landscape of southeastern Ohio. Instead, all of these elements

are entwined in webs and constantly co-produce space. Some elements, or strings, in the

web are knotted tightly together (perhaps because of spatial relationships or other

connections); others weave in more loosely. But all of these strings are eternally shifting

and re-sewing themselves, being made and unmade, responding to one another, and

constraining and promoting the actions of others. These webs are intricate and messy, and

the never-complete tapestries they produce cannot be deconstructed simply. I will

formulate this argument at three levels, starting with Donna Haraway, moving on to work within both political ecology and other fields that attempts to get at this co-production,

68 and concluding with my own research. I will demonstrate that it is exactly these sorts of webs and this sort of messiness that creates the diverse forest landscapes of southeast

Ohio.

4.2 Haraway’s “Rich Webs”

On the first page of When Species Meet (2008), Haraway immediately jumps into connectedness. She revels in the fact that we, as humans, are made up of the same mess of ever-recycling bacteria, cells, water, and protists as our companion species (Haraway

2008). Our composition is fundamentally the same as any dog’s, fern’s, or fungus’s. But as WSM—as well as the rest of her work—reveals, our connections to these dogs and ferns and fungi extend far beyond this “circle of life,” so to speak. In a much bigger sense, we are all tied together in a never-ending web of biology, technology, art, politics, geography, economy, history, research, and so on. And this web and these connections produce our landscapes, our natures, and our world. As Haraway says, “nature is made, but not entirely by humans; it is a co-construction among humans and non-humans. The commonplace nature I seek, a public culture, has many houses with many inhabitants which/who can refigure the earth” (Haraway 2004: 66). This seems deceptively simple.

In fact, it is not simple at all, mostly because this type of thinking is such a departure from how we currently view the world. One problem is that when most people imagine these webs and these co-productions1 (if they image them at all), they place humans at the center and string every other actor or relationship around us. This is a form of human

1 Haraway is very fluid in the way she talks about production of spaces, species, and things by many actors. She uses many terms, such as co-production, co-construction, becoming with, co-constitution, bodies in the making, play, and productive entanglement; here, I have chosen to use the term co-production.

69 exceptionalism, and it is exactly what Haraway is attempting to push us beyond

(Haraway 2004, 2008). She also warns us about breaking down the web into its component parts and examining each part individually, explaining:

When people miss the relations, the whole, and focus only on separate bits, they come up with all sorts of misreadings of my work. All of my metaphors imply some kind of synergetic action at a level of complexity that is not approached through its smallest parts. So they are all metaphors about complexity (Haraway and Goodever 1998: 51).2

Here Haraway is speaking more specifically about her own work than she is about webs in general, but she is making the same argument against singularity. Haraway does not believe scholars can use her writing just to talk about feminism or just to talk about science and then stop there; to her, if we do not get to the complexity, to the webbed interactions, and to our muddled relationships with companion species and global systems, then we have failed.

How then, precisely, do we succeed? Fortunately, Haraway scatters a breadth of clues and examples through all of her work. In a fairly-recent interview, she outlined how to first begin thinking through these interactions. She describes the process thusly:

You might begin by being interested in physiology of redwood trees, fire resistance, say, and in order to think well about that, you are going to have to think about the kinds of practices that are conducive to sustaining forests. Why it is that that wood was especially interesting to loggers, historically; how it is that the labor markets in woodwork are relevant; how changing insect populations are a function of the overall changing relationships; how forests’ edges work; and on and on. There is nothing that a question like that isn’t going to open up (Schneider 2005: 115).

2 It does not escape me that this examination of component parts is exactly what I have just done in the past two chapters. In Chapter 1, I acknowledged that I would knowingly set up a false division between ecological and human processes that I would amend and erase here.

70 So, if we start with a question—which we might think about as a element or knot in a

web—we must eventually follow the strings out from that knot in all directions, pulling at

different pieces to see how and where things connect, how they tangle into these webs,

and how they might retie themselves over time. Haraway calls this playing “cat’s cradle”

(Haraway and Goodever 1998). And it is not a game played solely with strings

representing major changes, global economies, or powerful figures. Cat’s cradle should

instead focus on the mundane and ordinary interactions, conversations, and moments of

pain and pleasure between companion species (Haraway 2008). Everyday connections

build our webs; unique events only reorganize them from time to time.

Haraway constantly plays this game of cat’s cradle in order to demonstrate co- production. Often, she does so using primates. For example, Haraway takes Tanzania’s

Gombe National Park and shows how the space has been created by chimpanzees, forest change, Jane Goodall’s interactions with and science about the chimpanzees, the Gulf Oil

Corporation’s co-option of Goodall’s story in a greenwashing project, the Tanzanians’ struggle for independence, the first world’s subsequent decision to leave local Tanzanians out of the picture and instead frame the region in a way that prioritized a white scientist and her interactions with primates, television programs about Goodall that reinforced stereotypes about the third world and pristine “nature” to Americans, the conservation

projects that followed this exposure, etc. (Haraway 2004). All of these processes are

interwoven, and all of them become political. Even the forest and the chimpanzees get

caught up in power struggles both between and within the first and third worlds over

land, resources, development, and wealth. But trees and chimpanzees are not passive

71 entities here; they help shape scientific discourse, political agendas, and land use at every level. Haraway plunges further into some of the roles chimpanzees play as actors when she discusses NASA’s 1960s space program. When Ham, the first hominid in space, successfully completed his Mercury mission, his flight produced ripple effects in science, technology, politics, and popular culture (Haraway 2004). Scientists received new data about the atmosphere and outer space, engineers tweaked design problems and rebuilt the shuttle for a human, the United States earned another notch in its Cold War/space race belt, and the media hustled to reposition itself in light of these new developments.

Chimpanzees are not Haraway’s only interest though. In When Species Meet,

Haraway devotes an entire chapter to the webby, intricate relationships between

Australian Shepherds and humans. She recounts an exhaustive history of the Australian

Shepherd, including how it has connected to class, race, colonial conquest, ranch economies, sports and entertainment culture, the international trade of animal meat and fur, western United States ecology, Native American resistance to the U.S. Army, and breeding science (Haraway 2008). She does so in order to emphasize the following point:

Dogs’ roles have been multifaceted, and they have not been passive raw material to the action of others. Further, dogs have not been unchangeable animals confined to their supposed ahistorical order of nature. Nor have people emerged unaltered from the interactions. Relations are constitutive; dogs and people are emergent as historical beings, as subjects and objects to each other, precisely through the verbs of their relating. People and dogs emerge as mutually adapted partners in the naturecultures of lively capital (Haraway 2008: 62).

As I stated earlier, however, Haraway does not want us to think about these connections and interactions solely through vague, broad, and academic-sounding terms like “colonial conquest,” “ranch economies,” “sports and entertainment culture,” or “breeding science.”

72 Instead, we must ask more pointed, mundane questions: how did Australian Shepherds

help ranchers complete their daily duties? Which species accomplished which tasks and

how did they assist one another? How do agility games bring joy to the lives of both dogs

and humans? How do breeders slowly expand, distance themselves from the breeding

process, and thereby fall into irresponsible practices that cause health problems for

Australian Shepherds? Or, more fundamentally, how have touch, eye contact, and

conversation between Australian Shepherds and scientists, Native Americans, agility

athletes, or Basque herders formed human-dog relations? How do we continue to retie

these knots and remake these relationships today? And how do these relationships affect

other parts of our lives and our worlds? Only after asking questions such as these can we

understand how daily practices—the daily entanglement “dance” as Haraway calls it—

compose and comprise our messy interactions with other species, other humans, other

countries, and so on.

4.3 Nearing Co-production

Some research within political ecology, anthropology, and science studies, among

other fields, probes into both human and ecological processes and takes the concept of

co-production seriously.3 This work may provide an anchor between Haraway’s theory

and my own analysis of southeastern Ohio. Zimmerer, for example, shows how

ecological processes on wetland fields frame the decisions and capabilities of subsistence

farmers in the Andes (1991). Looking at boutique cheese production in Wisconsin,

3 All of this research does not necessarily use the terms “co-production” or “web” though, and the authors do not always intend to make co-production their primary argument.

73 Ingram demonstrates how E.coli both inform food health regulations and get wrapped up

in these regulations, which deem some cheese makers’ products illegal in this region

(Ingram 2010). Mansfield details the ways in which biophysical properties of catfish and the environments they live in shape cultural and economic debates about organic

certification (2003, 2004). These debates in turn “define and enclose the biophysical

world in certain ways,” which has repercussions for Vietnamese fishermen,

aquaculturalists in the southern United States, consumers, the catfish and their respective

habitats, our perceptions of the first and third worlds, and our definition of “organic”

(Mansfield 2003). In their research on river otter reintroduction in Missouri, Goedeke and

Rikoon find that otters were “actors” in the state’s restoration project (2008). In the early

1990s, the Missouri Department of Conservation (DOC) planned a slow, geographically-

specific otter reintroduction and garnered a great deal of public support for its efforts;

however, shortly after their debut, the river otters befuddled and undermined DOC scientists by refusing to follow their prescribed script. The otters bred quickly, ate popular sport fish, and spread into tributaries that had not been designated as otter habitat.

These actions catalyzed a political battle between the DOC, preservationists, local anglers, and national otter experts that ended by favoring particular groups’ agendas and remaking the Missouri watershed for humans, otters, fish, and plants alike (Goedeke and

Rikoon 2008).4 Goedeke and Rikoon conclude their work by arguing that “non-human

actors have incredible power to challenge and change networks, prompting the recruitment or enrollment of humans and non-humans alike” (2008: 129).

4 Surprisingly, local angler groups prevailed over preservationists and otter scientists in this battle, and Missourians can now trap hundreds of otters annually (Goedeke and Rikoon 2008).

74 Similar research deals explicitly with forests. In his recent work, Garcia uses role-

playing games with local Indian communities to show how forest types, institutions,

water, tigers, and different indigenous groups connect to one another and combine to alter

biodiversity (Garcia and Vende et. al. 2010). Diane Rocheleau has worked extensively in

tropical forests, and she does this work under the assumption that “new material and

symbolic ecologies constantly emerge from the unfolding encounters between social and

biological communities, livelihoods, landscapes, technologies, and the myriad of artifacts

made by people and other living beings” (Rocheleau and Roth 2007: 436). Rocheleau’s

research on agroforests in the Dominican Republic demonstrates how just one tree, the

acacia, joined with a peasant federation, outside NGOs, and broader economic and

environmental initiatives to recast gender relationships, land use, biodiversity, forest

dynamics, local economies, and the peasant and NGO groups themselves in one rural

region (Rocheleau and Ross et. al. 2001). Also working in tropical forests, Tucker,

Randolph, and Castellanos likewise find complexity in the relations between forests and

humans (Tucker and Randolph et. al. 2007). They sampled nine distinct forests in

Guatemala and Honduras, and their results establish that everything from local climate to

soil type to site history to institutional strength to property ownership helps determine forest composition (2007).

All of this research, then, provides us with prototypes for thinking through co- production by human and ecological forces. But I must be careful about letting this section follow Haraway so closely. Although most of this work does cite Haraway, it does not all get at the webby-ness, tangled-ness, messiness, and mundane-ness for which

75 Haraway advocates. This is simply not the goal of many of these authors. It will, however, be my goal over the next few pages as I turn back to the forests of southeastern

Ohio.

4.4 Co-Production in the Forests of Southeastern Ohio

In Chapters 2 and 3, I highlighted the complexity of both human and ecological processes in southeastern Ohio. Thinking about the production of landscape though—as opposed to just examining human and ecological processes as they are now—requires playing my own game of cat’s cradle to re-weave and re-knot all of these diverse strings.

Truly, production is co-production here. I will therefore bring together insights from my fieldwork and the previous two chapters in order to undertake a winding, webby analysis that should elucidate just how connected soils, trees, deer, interest groups, landowners, and economies are in this space. To prove just how universal this complexity is, I will do so using just one example: a seedling growing in my study site. At the completion of this exercise, it should become apparent that all of these elements are too elaborately interwoven to ever be pulled apart.5 Prepare to become dizzy.

I take as my starting point one small tree, one tiny seedling in southeastern Ohio.6

First, we must consider how this seedling got here. Two options exist: either it was planted, or it grew from a seed already in the ground. If it was planted, the planting was done by humans. These people might have been a local landowners, interest group

5 At least not if the goal is to look at production of landscape through time. Understandably, much research does not have this agenda and thus does not need to interrogate the many elements and processes of co- production. 6 The actual species of tree is inconsequential.

76 members, or a coal company employees, for example. They may have planted this

particular tree because of some properties they knew that it would have, such as the capability to fix nitrogen back into the soil. If this is the case, they probably learned this

information—which would have been formed through decades of

experimentation/conversation between this species of tree and scientists—from a forester

or perhaps a piece of forest literature. Or they might have planted the tree simply because

of its aesthetic appeal. This decision would certainly be shaped by their memories, their

daily walks through the forest, a variety of discourses about eastern temperate forests, paintings, etc. In yet another scenario, people might have planted this sapling as part of a tree farm. Since tree farms produce lumber, this would have been an economic decision, but it would have been influenced by at least three facts: southeastern Ohio’s soils and topography cannot easily support agriculture, the region’s tumultuous past has left behind few economic opportunities, and timber industries maintain a strong presence locally.

Finally, the tree might have been planted to rehabilitate previously mined spaces.7 But why was the area mined in the first place? The answer to this has to do with the geologic conditions hundreds of millions of years ago, the chemical processes that metamorphosed plant matter into coal, the promulgation of capitalist industrial growth in the United

States in the 1800s, the availability of cheap labor in the form of immigrants and recently-freed slaves, and the emergence of technology to both find and extract this coal.

Whatever the case, these particular people planted this particular tree because of their connections to science, art, geology, the economy, and the ecosystem.

7 Certainly these are not the only circumstances that might incite the planting of a sapling though.

77 The sapling also could have germinated from a seed spread by the wind or deposited by another species. And again, a number of processes would have produced this possibility. For example, the area might not have had any coal strips, the coal might have been too expensive to extract, or the landowner might not have been willing to open up his or her land to coal companies; in each of these situations, the soils would not have been disturbed by mining, which may have allowed the seed to sprout. The seed’s germination may also relate to forces other than mining (or a lack thereof); instead, certain management practices may have kept the soil reasonably fertile and the pollinators reasonably abundant. These practices might relate to the culture, upbringing, economic needs, and associations of the landowner. Additionally, various ecological processes in mixed mesophytic promote the quick regeneration of plants (Perry and Oren et. al. 2008). Thus, even when focusing on the “natural” reforestation, we can see evidence of human economic, political, and land use processes, just as the human- induced planting incorporated geology and ecology.

But where this sapling came from is a minor point. The essential point is that it is here now, at least metaphorically. So what will determine if and how it grows? To begin with, a number of basic physical factors stimulate and/or inhibit tree growth. The sloping topography of southeastern Ohio supports specific species in specific places. So, if our sapling is not adapted to grow on a steep, well-drained hillside, it will not out-compete another young tree (Perry and Oren et. al. 2008). Light is another essential ingredient for this tree. But more light does not necessarily equate to more growth. Some trees are shade-tolerant, which means that they must photosynthesize—and therefore grow—

78 slowly. Other trees such as locusts and tulip trees require an open canopy; if they do not receive full sunlight, they will not live long (Perry and Oren et. al. 2008). And how much light reaches a given tree depends on a tightly-knit connection between forest succession

processes and forest management. Trees die constantly in mixed mesophytic forests,

creating a patchwork of shaded forest floors and sun-filled clearings (McCarthy and

Small et. al. 2001). Selective harvests also produce openings in the canopy, which shifts

succession processes, which then in turn shapes management possibilities and

opportunities, which again redirects succession, and on and on. Two additional physical

constraints on this sapling are weather and climate. Although these two factors are

loosely tied together, they impact forests in distinct ways. As far as weather, forest

scientists generally only examine weather anomalies, looking specifically at the negative

impacts of drought, flooding, wind, and ice.8 Climate, however, has garnered much more attention. Climate impacts everything from decomposition rates to nutrient uptake to

water availability to net primary productivity (Perry and Oren et. al. 2008). So in the face

of escalating anthropogenic climate change, we can expect significant impacts on tree

development.9 At smaller temperature increases (i.e. 2ºC), increased carbon dioxide in

the atmosphere will inflate rates of primary productivity; at larger temperature increases,

nutrient deficiencies may prevent growth and species may not adapt or move northward

8 “Natural” fires are a rare occurrence in this region. Here, wind and ice cause the most weather-related tree deaths (Kirkman and Brown et. al. 2007; Perry and Oren et. al. 2008). But fire is a highly political issue in southeastern Ohio. Native Americans often used fire as a management tool, and the Wayne National Forest and the state increasingly push for controlled burns to promote oak growth (Bashaw and Landis et. al. 2007; USDA Forest Service 2009; Wayne National Forest 2010). On the other hand, groups like the Arc of Appalachia and Buckeye Forest Council seem to be underestimating the historical occurrence of fire in an attempt to cull the state’s use of this management tactic (Arc of Appalachia Preserve System 2010; The Buckeye Forest Council 2008-2009). 9 The fact that humans are largely responsible for this climate change further demonstrates the unbreakable binds between human and natural processes.

79 quickly enough (IPCC 2007). This represents just a sampling of physical properties that

might influence the growth of our sapling; many other physical processes interact with

human actions over time to steer the growth of this tree.

Next we must consider genetics. A tree’s gene’s predispose it to be a tall, healthy,

straight tree or an expansive, winding, lower-canopy tree or even a non-resilient, dying

tree that will provide habitat for other species (Perry and Oren et. al. 2008). The genes

our young tree inherited might have been formed though a variety of scenarios. If, for

example, a landowner performed a diameter-limit cut in the past, the seed for this sapling

probably came from a small or flawed10 tree with minimal economic value. If, however,

that landowner selected weaker trees for harvest, he or she would have “improved” the

genetic makeup of the forest, and the seed stock left behind would be of high quality

(USDA Forest Service 2009). Of course, the forest this landowner had to work with

initially would have been co-produced itself by previous harvesting practices and natural

genetic drift, among other things. Technology may also have formed our sapling’s genes.

Scientists have genetically-modified a number of plantable trees, with one of the prime

examples being the Chinese strain of American Chestnut (The American Chestnut

Foundation 2010). These trees then pass their lab genes on to every following generation

of trees. Finally, no matter what our sapling’s original genetic makeup may be, ten years

later we might find something completely different, for trees have the power to randomly,

and almost magically, mutate their own genes depending on environmental conditions

(Perry and Oren et. al. 2008).

10 I only mean flawed in the sense that it would not have produced straight lumber boards. These craggy “flaws” are actually highly desirable for wildlife.

80 Non-human species provide yet another set of forcings on the sapling. Dead wood

from other trees fluxes nutrients back into the soil; mycorrhizae and other fungi help the tree fix these nutrients; insect outbreaks periodically consume all growth; other trees and

understory plants—including invasives—compete for the same soil, nutrients, light, and

water; animals such as deer may devour the sapling, depending on what species it is; and surrounding trees will independently change the chemical makeup and composition of the soil (Perry and Oren et. al. 2008). As we may anticipate by now, all of these processes are

also limited or provoked by numerous ecological and human processes. Invasive species,

for example, have their own webs that knot into historical land uses, globalization and

international trade, contemporary forest science discourses, and management practices—

particularly those that produce disturbed, open spaces. And deer browse of course

depends on deer population numbers. Our sapling is less likely to end up in a deer’s

stomach if fragmentation is low, hunting is prevalent—which of course is subject to the

relative power of anti- and pro- hunting groups to purchase and/or manage land, soils are

able to support high levels of biodiversity, management maintains this biodiversity and

perhaps even adds to forest floor forage through plantings, and if the tree itself can grow

taller than four feet quickly.11 Each of these non-human actors, in fact, weaves into an

almost infinite number of webs and networks.

Perhaps the greatest influence on the sapling’s development is soil. As described

in Chapter 2, a number of processes over a lengthy time frame determine soil quality.

Some of these processes are strictly geological, such as the formation of bedrock, which

11 I do not mean to suggest, however, that it would be a tragedy if our sapling did succumb to deer browse. I am simply playing a small game of cat’s cradle with one possible chain of events.

81 becomes parent material for the soil, or uplift and glaciation patterns that establish the

soil’s age. Most processes, however, relate to complicated mixtures of human practices.

For example, if factories have produced acid rain, if management decisions have

drastically diminished levels of biodiversity and removed nutrient banks (e.g. dead logs), if tractors, cows, sheep, logging skidders, ATVs, and mining equipment have compacted and torn apart the soil strata, and if crops have sucked up whatever nutrients remain, then this soil will struggle to nurture our sapling (Perry and Oren et. al. 2008; Shukla and Lal et. al. 2004). This is especially the case in aged, nutrient-poor soils such as those found in

southeastern Ohio (Bashaw and Landis et. al. 2007; Ricketts and Dinerstein et. al. 1999).

It may take decades for mycorrhizal networks to emerge and form efficient soil

aggregates, litter on the forest floor to flux enough nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, and

calcium, and potassium back into the system, and plants to begin remediating soil

chemistry (Perry and Oren et. al. 2008). But practices such as planting nitrogen-fixing

trees, using less destructive harvest methods (e.g. horse logging), or adding lime to soil

can hasten the recovery process (Perry and Oren et. al. 2008; Rural Action Sustainable

Forestry 2010; USDA Forest Service 2009).

In reality, these past few paragraphs do not even begin to engage all of the webs

and processes with which this sapling mingles. This tree certainly is also connected to

millennia of climate variability, evolution processes, Native American practices of

burning and hunting, diseases and famines in Europe throughout the 1800s, frontier and

manifest destiny discourses, the growth of large companies and corporations during the

Industrial Revolution, assumptions about the productivity of all U.S. land for farming,

82 deforestation in developing countries, ever-changing forest sciences and forest management agendas, and knowledge and information produced by landowners, interest groups, and institutions locally, regionally, and globally. And this is only one sapling. If I

were to extrapolate this exercise out to the entire landscape of southeast Ohio, I could easily fill and entire thesis with these looping, knotted, historical interactions.

Furthermore, I did not even touch on all of the ways the sapling “acts back.” As is

no doubt clear from the above section, this tree also affects and changes its surroundings.

It might, for example, alter soil chemistry as mature trees around it have, provide a home

for owls, block other saplings from reaching sunlight, serve as a political boundary,

condition a forest owner’s decision to mow an area, inspire the rhapsodies of

preservationists, lessen the global carbon budget, or attract a logger’s chainsaw, add a

few hundred dollars into local economies, and later become a household commodity.

These changed actors and retied strings will then again urge the tree in new directions,

and always, always these companion species and human and ecological processes will

keep working upon one another and co-producing the forests of southeast Ohio.

4.5 Conclusion

So far, this entire chapter may very well beg the question “what’s the point?” Is

this all just an intriguing, albeit slightly discombobulating, exercise? The short answer is

hopefully not. The long answer is no, assuming that we want to closely examine the

catalysts of environmental, land use, economic, or political change and resulting

ramifications on multiple species on a given landscape. And I would argue that, for two

83 reasons, we should often attempt this examination. First, simply because very few researchers try to “get at” co-production. Instead, we tend to separate politics and ecology as I did in Chapters 2 and 3. Forest ecologists rarely explore at all the complicated, messy human processes that always circumscribe forest dynamics; likewise, political ecologists too often sidestep the immensely important contributions of our companion species and physical earth in making “commonplace natures” (Haraway 2004). Thus, both groups often miss the “synergetic action,” “mutual adaption,” and “unfolding encounters between social and biological communities, livelihoods, landscapes, technologies, and the myriad of artifacts made by people and other living beings” (Haraway 2008; Haraway and Goodever 1998; Rocheleau and Roth 2007: 436). And as this exercise should confirm, it is to our detriment to do so; when it comes to production of landscape and environment, ecological and human processes are knotted too tightly together to ever be untangled.

The second reason why we should attempt these cat’s cradle exercises is that focusing on co-productive allows us to speculate about future environmental change.

Political ecology is often reactive; it theorizes politics and environmental constructions and denounces injustices that have already happened (Robbins 2004). But I believe we should, at least in some cases, forecast the material outcomes of co-production going forward, especially in regions like southeastern Ohio, where the forests have just recently become thriving ecosystems, sources of wealth, and spaces of contention. By imagining these future landscapes—here, future forests—we can begin to see where inequalities might arise, how groups might edge out others, when environmental problems might

84 proliferate, and which of our companion species might be at risk. We can then, accordingly, look for spaces and opportunities to improve our science, politics, and practices now in order to avoid at least some problems later. In the following chapter, I will take up this charge.

85 Chapter 5:

Building “Flourishing” Future Forests

5.1 Introduction

The co-production discussed in the previous chapter never stops. Diverse human and ecological forces are always tangling and untangling, framing and promoting the actions of one another, and erecting—or building (or unbuilding)—new forests in

southeastern Ohio filled with new possibilities and new interactions. This is all a political battlefield; some human and non-human groups may fare well in the future forests of

twenty, fifty, or even two hundred years from today, while others may not. Because

particular populations are especially vulnerable to change, these potential forest outcomes demand our attention and, perhaps, preemptive actions and solutions. In this chapter, I will explore a handful of possible futures for the landscape of southeast Ohio. I will then discuss some of the forest management paradigms that we might strive for, as well as some things we might do to achieve these standards thoughtfully and responsibly.

5.2 Possible Future Forests in Southeastern Ohio

Speculating about the future of southeast Ohio’s forestland is a difficult task.

Because so many groups with unique agendas and management styles are vying for the fate of this land, the forests—and therefore communities—of this region could veer

86 from their current trajectories1 in an infinite number of directions. In fact, considering how many groups do have some level of power and influence (see Appendix), I anticipate this exact outcome. These forests will, I believe, become an increasingly divergent patchwork of forest covers, forest types, and forest uses. How precisely this mosaic emerges, though, will depend on both power relations between various actors and human- forest interactions. And particular groups will certainly begin to dominate in this environmental conflict, which means, consequently, that particular patch types will dominate the forest mosaic. Here I will highlight just four of these potential “future forest” types: local NIPF, exurban NIPF, old-growth preservation, and biomass plantation. These four possibilities are highly dichotomous but also perhaps the most likely to be dominant, problematic, and/or desirable. And they arise out of particular contexts. For example, we might expect to see more exurbanization into the forests of southeast Ohio if credit markets are friendly to potential home-builders and transportation is cheap and efficient, while we might anticipate more biomass plantations if energy policy supports this direction and offers plentiful subsidies. The future forest mosaic, however, will not be determined solely by sweeping national policies or global economies; it will also be negotiated through a day-to-day struggle between various actors in the homes, towns, governments and forests of southeastern Ohio.

5.2.1 Local NIPF-Dominated Forests

One possible category of future forests includes forests owned by local NIPFs.

Although local NIPFs are not a homogenous group, many of them do use similar

1 With the phrase “their current trajectories,” I am referring to things such as the predominant local NIPF ownership, the forest composition of mixed broadleaf trees, the regular management and plural uses of the land, etc.

87 management practices. As Chapter 3 shows, many landowners plant trees—often mixed

pine and hardwood plantations—on previously strip mined land, selectively harvest2 timber every few years, hunt regularly or sell hunting permits to landless gun and bow enthusiasts, maintain open fields for wildlife, cut hiking and ATV trails through the forest, collect firewood, mushrooms, and ginseng from the forest floor, and perform timber stand improvement (TSI) jobs3 such as eradicating invasive species like bush

honeysuckle or multiflora rose, building wetlands, or managing for the emerald ash

borer4 (J 2009, Q 2009, and T: OSU Extension 2009). The forests produced by these

practices are in no way old-growth, seemingly-pristine forests and they cannot support

many species that require such forests. Instead, they often resemble the forest depicted in

Figure 7, a recently-managed stand on a local NIPF’s property. Forests such as this one

support a wide range of plants and animals within their many states of succession,

sequester a great deal of carbon since young trees are always growing, convert

plantations to mixed mesophytic forest cover as shade-tolerant species slowly infiltrate

the canopy, and improve damaged soils and watersheds (Drury and Runkle 2006;

Kirkman and Brown et. al. 2007; Perry and Oren et. al. 2008). These forests also provide

income to local landowners, maintain the regional forest products industry, and reflect the

fact that autonomy over management decisions remains in local hands.

2 Meaning that they harvest only particular trees—usually a mixture of higher and lower value trees—from particular pieces of the property. Any given patch is usually only harvested every thirty to fifty years. 3 The state often matches funding for these TSI jobs. 4 The emerald ash borer, an invasive species from China, plants its eggs in ash trees. The larvae then feed on the tree’s tissue, thereby killing it. Emerald ash borers recently made their way from Michigan into Ohio (Little Cities of the Forest 2008-2009).

88

Figure 7. Forest Future A: Management by Local NIPFs

5.2.2 Exurban NIPF-Dominated Forests

Forests owned primarily by exurban NIPFs will likely constitute another principle future forest type. As more and more exurbanites move into the LCBDM study site,5 we might expect to see additional homes built on five to twenty acre lots (Figure 8), substantial increases in parcelization and/or fragmentation, subsequent declines in populations of species that require large corridors, much “lighter” management hands due to the fact exurban landowners often intend to extract amenity value rather than economic value from the land, and therefore also an increasing burden on the timber industry

(Butler and Leatherberry 2004; Cai 2009; Egan and Luloff 2000). These changes may

5 Which may very well happen upon the impending completion of the Nelsonvillle bypass (Lane 2009).

89

Figure 8. Forest Future B: Management by Exurban NIPFs

then beget further environmental outcomes. For example, in an environment where the forest is not actively managed, productive, older-growth forests might grow and thrive, but then again, so might invasive species (Perry and Oren et. al. 2008). Additionally, more exurbanites may translate into more development, more “box” stores and parking lots, more permanent deforestation, and more rifts and inequalities within local communities.

5.2.3 Old-Growth Preservation Forests

Preservation groups like the Arc of Appalachia add yet another category of future

forests: old-growth (Figure 9). Some of the Arc’s seventy-plus preserves already contain

three-hundred-year-old forests, but the group will own thousands of acres of older-

90

Figure 9. Forest Future C: Management by Preservationists

growth, unharvested6 forests in the upcoming century (Arc of Appalachia Preserve

System 2010). These forests will create immensely-productive soil aggregates, sustain

high levels of biodiversity, foster the return of species that other forest types cannot

support, preserve fragile riparian habitat, and provide a number of essential ecosystem

services (Perry and Oren et. al. 2008). Moreover, old-growth forests often inspire feelings

of wonder and awe, and visiting one can be an incredibly powerful and spiritual

experience.7 On the negative side, older-growth forests primarily store rather than

6 The Arc does, however, manage the forest by picking invasive understory plants and maintaining a handful of hiking trails. 7 Whether or not these feelings arise from social constructions of “pristine” and “natural” forests does not matter; the experience is very real for those affected.

91 sequester carbon and can only support small populations of species that require open

spaces (Perry and Oren et. al. 2008). These forests also contribute nothing to local tax

bases or regional economies and provoke the wrath of local communities that do not want the area’s most desirable land siphoned away into preserves.

5.2.4 Woody Biomass “Forests”

The fourth and final future forest category that I would like to propose is woody

biomass plantations. Assuming that First Energy follows through on its plans for the

Burger Power Plant conversion, this category could dominate the landscape of southeast

Ohio and spread across hundreds of thousands of the region’s acres (The Sierra Club and

Buckeye Forest Council et. al. 2009). The management of these future forests is fairly

simple: clear-cut existing mixed mesophytic forests, plant rows of genetically-modified, fast-growing cottonwood trees, harvest them after approximately six to ten years, and then replant8 (Downing 2009; Funk 2009; Patel 2009, see Figure 10 for example of a

GMO cottonwood plantation). These practices will combine with regional ecological processes to produce, I anticipate, a number of devastating environmental outcomes.

Besides the obvious implications for biodiversity, habitat preservation, and ecosystem

services provisioning, growing trees as a crop will quickly drain all nutrients out of the

region’s already-poor soils (Perry and Oren et. al. 2008; Shukla and Lal et. al.

2004).Most likely, NIPFs leasing land to Renewafuel9 will have to liberally fertilize the

soil in order to replant trees. On hillsides—which will also face the threat of erosion

when there are no strong root systems in place—this fertilizer will certainly runoff into

8 Trees do not need to be replanted after the first harvest, however. Upon this first harvest, they will regenerate from the root, growing up to fourteen feet in their first year (Downing 2009). 9 The company First Energy has contracted to supply its biomass. See pages 49, 50.

92 streams and lakes, polluting the water with excess nitrogen and phosphorus and causing

eutrophication (Perry and Oren et. al. 2008). This is not to say that biomass plantations

have no redeeming qualities. First and foremost, cottonwood trees are not coal. These

plantations would sequester as much carbon as they later release and would not emit

mercury or sulfur in the burning process (Niquette 2009). This future forest scenario also

likely will yield income for NIPFs.10 But how much choice landowners will have when it comes to signing a lease is debatable; many landowners, if presented with a large enough

sum of money, may have no option but to hand over their de facto management authority

to First Energy.

5.2.5 Future Forest Summary

In closing this section, I wish to reiterate four points. First, all of this is merely

speculation; new developments locally, nationally, or globally could make these future

forest categories moot. Second, these four categories do not even begin to encapsulate all

of the complexity in this region and all of the possibilities for these communities and

ecosystems. Third, I fully anticipate that we will find each of these forest types in the

future forest mosaic; the unknown here is how much surface area each type will cover and how a specific pattern will develop. And fourth, as the past few paragraphs have demonstrated, various human and ecological processes will intertwine to co-produce distinct, divergent, and important outcomes for people, trees, other species, and biogeochemical cycles as well as landscape mosaics characterized by highly-unique, incongruous patches.

10 First Energy is currently not releasing information on how landowners will be compensated, nor are they willing to comment on any details of the biomass production or land leasing processes.

93

Figure 10. Forest Future D: Management by First Energy.

From www.richsramblings.com. 2009.

5.3 What Should We Be Striving For?

Before we can judge the merits of these future futures, we must have some idea what it is that we are striving for. For example, which forest conditions are ideal? What is a “healthy” forest? What is sustainable? What exactly do we wish to be sustaining, and for whom? I cannot give concrete answers to these questions; the answers depend—as they should—on geography, values, and the landowner (Warren 2007).11 I can, however,

generalize a few of the perspectives and goals of researchers, theorists, and southeastern

Ohioans in order to outline what some priorities might (or might not) be.

11 For example, all interviewees answered the questions “What do you consider sustainable forest management?” and “How would you describe an ideal forest?” differently.

94 5.3.1 Things We Cannot Strive For

First, we cannot hope for the ecosystem to remain in a static state or mimic the

forests of past generations. Change is inevitable in ecological systems, and so for many,

including Haraway, the answer is not to fear and demonize all change (Haraway 2008;

Jorgensen and Fath et. al. 2007; Perry and Oren et. al. 2008). We have to understand that the mixed mesophytic forests of southeastern Ohio can exist in many different states with many different species compositions, human uses, and management styles. Generally, actions such as selectively-extracting timber, cultivating ginseng, hunting, maintaining clearings, planting pine trees or even genetically-modified chestnut trees, cutting trails for hiking and—to some degree—ATVs, producing maple syrup, or even setting small fires in the underbrush do not throw these forest ecosystems off of their productive successional trajectories (Jorgensen and Fath et. al. 2007; McCarthy and Small et. al.

2001; Perry and Oren et. al. 2008). So, we should not expect the forest landscape to conform to one, ironclad standard or manage it to be an a perfect “nature” or an untouched, inert old-growth forest, although nothing is necessarily ecologically problematic about managing for a dynamic old-growth forest.

We also cannot strive for complete local ownership or autonomy. This would be neither feasible nor perhaps advantageous. To begin, local NIPFs are an aging group; most are over sixty-five years old and, importantly, many do not have children who are interested in inheriting the family property (SEOWIG 2005-2009; USDA Forest Service

2009). Both M and N and J are therefore thinking about writing conservation easements with the Appalachian Ohio Alliance, which is of course not a local organization.

Furthermore, local NIPFs and interest groups probably would not be able to function

95 without the resources, monetary funding, and pure manpower provided to them by outsider groups like the ODNR Division of Forestry, Rural Action, National Network of

Forest Practitioners, or Ohio State University outreach offices. In their work on local forest organizations in Wisconsin and Minnesota, Wolf and Hufnagl-Eighiner find that external groups act as an essential support system for these local groups (2007). I fully anticipate that this is the case in southeastern Ohio as well; these outside groups help make local communities resilient. Thirdly, and as Robbins and Haraway both point out, it would be naïve to assume that local perspectives are somehow intrinsically less subjective or more “true” than other perspectives (Haraway 1991; Robbins 2006). These locals cannot “purify science” or tell stories about forests that that are “innocent, free of determinism by historically specific social relations and daily practice” (Haraway 1991:

106). And finally, just as with ecosystems, we must recognize that change is part of human systems. People have always moved around geographically, and we have no reason to expect that this process will decelerate in the future. In fact, local Appalachians might not even be here today if they had not displaced Native Americans just over two hundred years ago.

5.3.2 Things We Can Strive For

Still, one crucial thing that I believe we should strive for is more local

involvement and power in making crucial decisions. As I argued in Chapter 3, outsiders too often see local NIPFs as inept, ignorant landowners who need to be educated,

advised, and showered with programs and opportunities that, unfortunately, locals usually

have little to no voice in designing. This is an unequal relationship that cannot continue.

Braun in fact states that one of our greatest environmental responsibilities is “a vigilant

96 tracking of the operation of power in all its guises and strategies. Avoiding this,

ecopolitics becomes irresponsible and its acts of ethical responsibility risk new, more

subtle, forms of domination” (2002: 263). Haraway likewise demands that not everyone

participates in or benefits from the production of environments, and she proposes that we

inject local, subjective, and feminist “situated” knowledges into environmental conversations and environmental science (Haraway 2004, 1991; Schneider 2005). In order to do this, groups operating in southeastern Ohio must involve local NIPFs and organizations in the creation of economic plans, outside interest group agendas, and

forest science. And locals in southeastern Ohio certainly seem to be up to the challenge.

The final chapter of At Glacier’s Edge: An Environmental History and Field Guide of the

Little Cities of Black Diamonds Microregion is titled “This Time Around: Little Cities of the Forest” (Bashaw and Landis et. al. 2007). In it, the authors lay out a locally-designed roadmap for the future, which they preface as follows:

A suggested vision for the region’s future is that the land, water, forests and remnant boom towns located here clearly emerge as a special and healthy place to live, work, and visit. This requires civic and economic presence that gives voice to this underrepresented region by creating incentives and collaborations that focus on the well being of the physical environment and people living here. This will involve finding ways to add ‘value’ to the region (Bashaw and Landis et. al. 2007: 55).

Some of the specific strategies listed include: restoring historic and environmental sites, encouraging the development of locally-owned businesses, finding a balance between resource use/extraction and conservation, making the region a classroom for environmental and civic lessons, bolstering low-impact tourism markets, creating incentives for blight removal, and supporting local “place making” while curbing outsider

97 “place taking” (Bashaw and Landis et. al. 2007). These are goals we must attempt to meet

when building future forests.

The other goal I would like to offer is simultaneously a vague and simple concept

championed by Haraway: flourishing. Flourishing means rigorously paying attention to

the well being and vigor of all of our companion species as relationships shift and webs

untangle and retangle. In addition, Haraway explains that “all flourishing involves recognizing that someone in the system is not flourishing at all” (Schneider 2005: 152).12

The point of all of this is to move us into a new world and a new “nature” with better, more responsible human/non-human relationships. But flourishing does not mean allowing a forest to “flourish” by never cutting down a tree, never killing a squirrel, or never planting a genetically-modified tree. Instead, it is about recognizing that powerful, material, and often-problematic forms of capital, science, technology, etc. do—and likely always will—weave their way into our webs, thus requiring us to find ways to navigate these webs with more savvy. Haraway believes that to do so we must first identify the historical and biological inequalities in human/non-human relationships that allow humans to use, transform, or even kill saplings, fungi, songbirds, or deer. And we must realize that this use or killing is sometimes necessary. As Haraway says, “there is no way of living that is not also a way of someone, not just something, dying differentially”

(2008: 80). But we cannot stop here, content with the knowledge that multispecies networks are complex and power-laden; instead, the point is “to become worldly and to respond” (Haraway 2008: 41). Our response, then, can take a number of forms, but it

12 “Someone” here does not simply refer to a human someone; it could also mean a maple tree, a squirrel, or a microscopic decomposer in the soil.

98 requires acknowledging the situated knowledges and contributions of all species,

articulating these contributions into our politics, practices, and economies, and compassionately immersing ourselves in the “daily minutiae of life and death” within and between communities (Haraway 2008: 92).

5.4 Fomenting “Flourishing” in our Future Forests

We must now ask how the four future forests I outlined stand up against the ideals of local involvement and multi-species flourishing. In the first future forest, a space managed by local NIPFs, I would argue that landowners achieve Haraway’s standards of flourishing. Local forest owners in southeastern Ohio visit their properties almost every

day, understand the roles of other species in producing the forest over time, manage explicitly for the benefit of wildlife, create very heterogeneous and resilient landscapes, involve themselves in every step of a project or harvest, and even engage in activities such as saving ash tree seeds that can be replanted if the emerald ash borer wipes out the species (SEOWIG 2005-2009, J 2009, Q 2009, M and N 2009). And, as might be expected, this forest type includes locals. However, full local autonomy is not possible; other interests will shape and inform landowner decision-making.13 This would not be

problematic if it were not for the fact that local landowners “don’t trust,” “don’t

particularly believe,” and “don’t want to get too mixed up with” these outsider

organizations (SEOWIG 2005-2009, J 2009, U 2009). These organizations therefore must

work harder to gain local trust, incorporate local NIPFs at the planning stages of any

13 see pages 95, 96

99 programming or activism, and let at least some of their initiatives stem from specific, locally-crafted goals.

The second future forest type included land owned by exurban NIPFs. This type of ecosystem might not be any more hazardous to flourishing than the first; environmental outcomes depend entirely on the scale of exurban development and the management techniques employed by these landowners. If large houses, driveways, strip malls, and Wal-Marts dot the entire landscape and/or exurban NIPFs propagate fragmentation,14 then much of the region’s flora and fauna will be adversely affected

(Perry and Oren et. al. 2008; USDA Forest Service 2009). This forest type also has the

potential to either stifle or largely not affect local flourishing, again depending on scale

and management. Exurbanization on a small scale could simply be a source of income for

local landowners needing to sell parcels of land. On the other hand, it could pull a large

amount of land out of local hands and, if managed primarily for recreation, could

decimate the regional forest products industry. V, a state forester in southeastern Ohio,

says this threat to the industry is a matter of great concern:

And then (a problem) would be just the subdivision of land into smaller and smaller plots that make it harder to get any management done. It’s to a point where, you can’t do too much if the acreage gets too small... we have some incomers, who will come in and be very much on the green side. So they’d come in, and then we’d go to a sawmill, and they’d see the people working there, and then you need to look at it as, ‘what would they do if they didn’t?’ And what would the economy be like? And what would poverty be like? So if you understand it, and then you make a decision to keep it at a happy medium, you have the best of both worlds. So to me it’s part of the economy. And if (the land) becomes a subdivision as opposed to a forest that has a big harvest every thirty years, which is the lesser of the evils (2009)?

14 As opposed to parcelization, which does not necessarily imply that the landscape becomes an incongruous mosaic of small patches.

100 I believe, as V and other local leaders do, that zoning and education are answers to these possible “evils” (Bashaw and Landis et. al. 2007). Zoning would curb exurban development, and education could familiarize exurbanites with the region and prompt responsible, cohesive, active management. We know that most landowners, including exurbanites, usually harvest their forests even if they do not originally intend to (USDA

Forest Service 2009), so preemptive education can only help prevent future issues.

Old-growth forest preserves, the third future forest type I proposed, imparts much more overt, egregious blows to local communities. Unfortunately, groups such the Arc of

Appalachia have no intention of peaceably cohabitating with local landowners at this point. Pressure, therefore, must come from the outside. This is now beginning to happen;

A says they have recently become a target of county commissioners and local organizations (A 2009). I believe if the Arc has any chance of meeting the two criteria I have set, local governments and NGO groups must escalate this opposition, recruit as many allies as possible, and track property markets and the Arc’s purchasing intentions vigilantly until a workable relationship is achieved. All work here must be on the “social” front; truly, nothing is particularly troublesome about the group’s relationships with other species. Like local NIPFs, these preservationists take their connections to the forest and all of its inhabitants very seriously and pay the utmost care and attention to other species’ well being.

Not so with the purveyors of woody biomass plantations. As the Burger project is currently designed, it could obliterate almost all species on the landscape, from trees to mammals to microscopic organisms (Perry and Oren et. al. 2008; The Sierra Club and

101 Buckeye Forest Council et. al. 2009). The plant will also leave behind a barren, worthless

landscape for local human populations, much as the coal industry did. So, instead of

fomenting flourishing, First Energy and its associates are acting as cogs in a capitalist

machine that always races to reach the bottom line. This is by no means an easy,

vulnerable machine to slow or stop. The only chance we might have to get First Energy

to rethink its methods of woody biomass acquisition15 is for landowners to put up a

unified front against the project and for opponents to utilize all powerful, influential

political channels and media opportunities. On May 9, 2010, awash in a sea of support for

the conversion, the first critique of the plant in a major media source surfaced. In an

article in The Columbus Dispatch, Hunt reports that Environment Ohio and the Ohio

Consumers’ Council have asked the state Public Utilities Commission to veto First

Energy’s request for a “renewable energy facility” designation for the Burger Plant until

the corporation can prove that its woody biomass sources will, in fact, be renewable and

sustainable (2010). The article concludes that “the fuel type and source are important

because Burger will need a lot of it” (Hunt 2010). I emphatically echo this statement.

This woody biomass conversion is, in my opinion, the most pernicious threat to the

forests of southeastern Ohio and the communities that have worked so tirelessly to shape

and rejuvenate them, especially since this conversion may very well represent the future

of energy generation. We cannot be complacent here; this issue demands our unwavering

attention and fervent opposition.

15 But no matter how First Energy acquires woody biomass, it would be nearly impossible to sustain flourishing forests at the scale of production the Burger plant demands. Some improvements, however, such as relying primarily on timber harvested by current selective practices and wood waste might mitigate damages slightly. This is debatable though, as the Burger will consume nearly twice Ohio’s average statewide timber harvest (Hunt 2010).

102 5.5 Summary Points and Directions for Future Research

Over the course of the past five chapters, I have detailed the struggle over southeastern Ohio’s newly-mature forestland and explored the future of this region and its ecosystems. I also have constructed three central arguments. First, a great deal of human activity is transpiring in the study site. Underneath a momentous and perhaps seemingly monotonously green canopy, everyone from local forest owners raised in log cabins to wealthy exurbanites seeking solitude to adamant preservationists to state employees to Americorps Vista members to loggers to regional development groups to

First Energy associates desperately seeking a solution to our nation’s coal addiction are battling over this forest and the bounty of resources it holds. Complexity is therefore the name of the game. But its subtitle is politics; already-marginalized and exploited local,

Appalachian NIPFs and organizations must navigate a space filled with discourses that paint them to be inadequate stewards of the land and outsiders who generally possess more money, power, and influence. My second argument reveals how these complicated human processes always weave into equally-intricate and geographically-specific non- human processes. As I demonstrated in Chapter 4, the planting of a tree by an NGO—a political act—is inherently ecological, just as the incidence of deer browse is unequivocally political. Truly though, it is only in the context of the third argument that the second becomes instrumental. This third argument posits that we can—and should— use the concept of co-production to speculate about future environmental change. In doing so, we can be proactive, as opposed to reactionary, and adjust our practices to hopefully assuage ecological and social problems. Here in southeastern Ohio, this

103 research implies that we might work harder to incorporate local perspectives into outsider

interest groups’ agendas and foresters’ science, focus more carefully on the well being of

all forest inhabitants, and protest a poorly-conceived attempt to reconfigure this space as

a woody biomass plantation.

Obviously work such this, which is short in time frame and small in scope, has a

number of limitations. Because I only spent a few weeks in the region and only talked

with a few dozen individuals, I fully expect to have missed integral pieces of this

complicated story. I would therefore suggest a few possible directions for future research.

Most fundamentally, I believe a larger interview sampling size and perhaps some quantitative data about what NIPFs have done and are planning to do with their land, how

large interest groups’ operating budgets are and how many people they claim as members of their organization and/or email list, or parcel sizes and land tenure data would lend more credibility to my findings and perhaps reveal interesting patterns. I would also infuse the fieldwork with a few explicitly-ecological methods.16 With actual hard forest

ecology data, this research could tie stronger, tighter, statistically-significant ties between

human and ecological processes. Lastly, I strongly recommend that someone carry on this

research to investigate how this environmental conflict develops, metamorphosizes, and

alters the landscape over time. I conducted this work right on the precipice of change, at a

place and time where we can begin to anticipate the ways human and forest interactions

might create important outcomes for communities and ecosystems; however, we must

follow through to see how these webs continue re-tying themselves, what interactions

16 Such as taking dbh (diameter at breast height) measurements and soil samples or cataloguing tree and animal populations over a given space.

104 lead to desirable results, where injustices occur, which species become vulnerable, and when opportunities for connection, change, and flourishing arise.

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Planning A 41: 1726-1744.

120 Appendix

A Non-Comprehensive List of Forest Interest Groups Operating or Planning to Operate in Southeastern Ohio Alphabetized by Group Name: Group Name Headquarters Goals, as Listed by the Organization Other Information AEP owns thousands of acres of forestland, gets much of its coal To "serve about 10 percent of the from, and electricity demand in the Eastern maintains Interconnection, the interconnected transmission lines transmission system that covers 38 in the region. It eastern and central U.S. states and also participates eastern Canada, and approximately 11 in a number of percent of the electricity demand in sanctioned American ERCOT, the transmission system that conservation Electric Power Akron, OH covers much of Texas." projects The ACP is just beginning to enroll Appalachian landowners into Carbon To "link private forest landowners to the fifteen-year Partnership Berea, KY managed forest carbon offset market." contracts. To "promote conservation of natural areas Manages over and open spaces while encouraging 5,000 acres of economic growth that emphasizes the conservation Appalachian region’s scenic beauty and cultural easement and fee Ohio Alliance Non-specific values." land Owns nearly To "establish significant masses of 5,000 acres in protected forest land that is left southern Ohio and undisturbed," "save the living wealth of the is planning to Arc of Bainbridge, Eastern forest," and "teach forest literacy extend into other Appalachia OH and stewardship ethics." forested counties The ALC owns To "work for protection of open-space only a few lands in Athens County, Ohio, and nearby hundred acres areas, including acquisition of land or now, but it is specific rights where appropriate and working on a Athens Land including educational and planning number of other Conservancy Athens, OH activities." projects.

121 These local Example from Perry County: To "promote Chambers of Athens, and advance the economic, business, Commerce Hocking, industrial, educational, agricultural, support local Morgan, and professional, civic, and cultural welfare of business Perry County Perry County, and to promote Perry endeavors Chambers of County as a excellent place to live, work, throughout the Commerce* Multiple and visit." region. The BFC is compiling a To "protect Ohio’s native forests and their database of all inhabitants using education, advocacy Ohio forest and organizing to address the need for owners and is Buckeye forest preservation and low-impact planning a Forest recreation over logging and resource landowner Council Columbus, OH extraction." outreach program. Owns forestland and maintains miles of pipeline in the region; generally a target Columbia To "supply natural gas to more than 1000 of forest Gas Columbus, OH communities in Ohio.' conservationists Environment Ohio To "combine independent research, opposes the practical ideas and tough-minded Burger Power advocacy to overcome the opposition of Plant conversion Environment powerful special interests and win real to woody Ohio Columbus, OH results for Ohio's environment." biomass. FirstEnergy is converting its Burger Power Plant to woody biomass by 2012 and will be firing To "generate, transmit and distribute the plant with electricity, as well as energy management GMO cottonwood and other energy-related services to 4.5 trees from million customers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, plantations grown FirstEnergy Akron, OH and New Jersey." on leased land. Holds conferences on economic development, and awards grants to local communities and businesses, To "promote the region’s assets and to especially for support local, regional, state, and federal clean-energy, initiatives. These initiatives contribute to environmental Governor's the economic, educational, and projects, health, Office of community prosperity of the people of and worker Appalachiaº Columbus, OH Ohio’s Appalachian region." training

122 Promotes the development of tourism, such as hot tub cabins, Hocking Hills To "market and promote the Hocking Hills outdoor adventure Tourism Region and Hocking County, Ohio to businesses, Association Logan, OH visitors." shopping, etc. To "keep alive the past stories and Celebrates the traditions of the Little Cities of Black region's history Little Cities of Diamonds Region and through our history, with festivals, Black culture and environment help enrich the museums, service Diamonds* Shawnee, OH future quality of life in the region." days, etc. Publishes the To "promote recreation, restoration and quarterly Words environmental education in the natural from the Woods, Little Cities of environment where we live, the Little holds monthly the Forest* Shawnee, OH Cities microregion." events Twenty-three certified "Master Logger" logging companies operate in the study site, in Local addition to many Loggers* Multiple NA others Meets monthly and has completed a number of Monday watershed Creek restoration Restoration New To "restore the watershed for the benefit projects in the Project* Straitsville, OH of local communities." region Holds "forest forums," provides resources for peer-to-peer networking and National education, and Network of To "help catalyze development of supports the Ohio Forest sustainable forest economies in rural Forestry Practitioners Athens, OH America." Cooperative To "develop, maintain, preserve and promote the North Country National North County Scenic Trail through a national network of The North County Trail volunteers, chapters, partner Trail runs through Association Lowell, MI organizations and government agencies." the study site.

123 To "promote and apply management for The Division of the sustainable use and protection of Forestry reaches Ohio’s private and public forest lands, NIPFs through its reforest rural lands, and encourage the service foresters, best management of Ohio's non-industrial outreach ODNR private forests through stewardship- literature, Ohio Division of oriented assistance that meets landowner Forestry Tax Law, Forestryº Columbus, OH management objectives." and workshops. To "address important sustainability needs relating to recycling and ODNR conservation of water, energy, soils, and Division of land" and "strengthen efforts to manage Supports many Soil and water and related land resources on a local conservation Water watershed basis which help to form a initiatives with Resourcesº Columbus, OH community conservation effort." funding To "add value to standing timber, logs, lumber, and manufactured products from member lands by direct marketing, aggregation of small land holdings into Has operated on efficient economic units, and engagement thousands of Ohio Forestry of local harvesting contractors and acres of land Cooperative* Trimble, OH manufacturers." regionally Ohio To "protect the rights of road OMTA is a Motorized recreationists, preserve our rights and coalition of over Trails trails, and stop bad legislation from thirty-five state Association Logan, OH placing further restrictions on riders." ATV clubs To "interpret knowledge and research Natural Resource developed by Extension and other faculty Extension Officers and staff at the Ohio Agricultural are usually one of Research and Development Center, Ohio the first contact Ohio State State main campus, and other land-grant points for forest Extension universities – so Ohioans can use the owners when they County scientifically based information to better have questions or Officesº Statewide their lives, businesses and communities." need information. To "promote the growing of renewable forest resources on private land while Ohio Tree protecting environmental benefits and Publishes the Farm increasing public understanding of all quarterly Ohio Committee Zanesville, OH benefits of productive forests." Woodland Journal OWS reaches over 600 forest Ohio To "provide woodland owners with a wide owners each year Woodland variety of forestry skills that they then can through its Stewardsº Columbus, OH apply to their own property." workshops Runs a Sustainable To "foster social, economic, and Forestry Program, environmental justice in Appalachian collaborates with Ohio" and "train landowners and partner many agencies to identify alternative income organizations, opportunities, like forest farming of including the ginseng, goldenseal, and other non-timber Appalachian Rural Action Trimble, OH forest products." Carbon

124 Partnership and Ohio Forestry Cooperative

Forests are one of the Chapter's eight priorities, and the Sierra Club is actively fighting the Burger Power Plant Sierra Club, To "protect communities, wild places, and conversion to Ohio Chapter Columbus, OH the planet itself." woody biomass. Publishes To "advance the science, education, educational technology, and practice of forestry; to literature, enhance the competency of its members; conducts state- Society of and to use the knowledge, skills, and specific research, American conservation ethic of the profession to and provides a Foresters, ensure the continued health and use of forum for Ohio Chapter Columbus, OH forest ecosystems." networking Southeastern Ohio Holds monthly Woodlands To "provide a place for people with similar meetings about a Interest interests to meet and discuss forest wide range of Group* Athens, OH ownership." local forest issues Meets monthly and has completed a To "restore and preserve the water quality number of Sunday of Sunday Creek, protect and promote watershed Creek healthy habitat for local flora and fauna, restoration Watershed and build awareness through community projects in the Group* Glouster, OH outreach and education." region Attends local To "restore the American chestnut tree to meetings and The its native range within the woodlands of encourages American the eastern United States, using a landowners to Chestnut scientific research and breeding program plant its GMO Foundation Asheville, NC developed by its founders." strain of chestnut The Nature Conservancy names "Appalachian Ohio Forest" one of its "Priority Conservation Areas," owns The Nature nearly 20,000 Conservancy, To "protect ecologically important lands acres in the Ohio Chapter Dublin OH and waters for nature and people." region, and runs a

125 specific Appalachian Forest Office.

Runs courses and To "support the management of Ohio's conferences and forest resources and improvement of provides business conditions for the benefit of its educational The Ohio members in their endeavors to engage in material and Forestry forestry-related industries and networking to Association Zanesville, OH enterprises." members To "manages public lands in national forests and grasslands" and "to provide Owns Wayne the greatest amount of good for the approximately National greatest amount of people in the long 240,000 across Forest Athens, OH run." twelve counties * Groups started within the study site º State-run groups

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