Community Forestry in the United States; Learning from the Past, Crafting the Future. (Reviews).

Community Forestry in the United States; Learning from the Past, Crafting the Future, by Mark Baker and Jonathan Kusel.

$25.00, Island Press, 2003.

This book is a bold statement of the philosophy and principles that define and drive the "community forestry movement," foremost of which is the concept of the inextricable link between "healthy forests and healthy communities." Community Forestry in the United States is the product of the authors' study of community forestry, based on "a survey of secondary literature, interviews, workshops, and the authors' insights born of their association with community forestry."

The analysis is intended to describe the current state of the movement and where "it might go in the future." It rests, however, on the controversial premise that "the dominant paradigm of forest management bequeathed by the Progressive Era...has failed to steward forest ecosystems and maintain vital communities." Baker and Kusel describe that failure as the substituting of "scientific expertise for participatory democratic institutions," as a result of management principles pursued by Gifford Pinchot "with almost religious fervor."

This is a complex treatise that is impossible to meaningfully review in a few paragraphs, other than to recommend it to anyone who wishes to understand this provocative forestry movement. Many mainstream forestry professionals, like Yale's John Gordon, have chronicled the end of forestry's "dominant paradigm." Whether community forestry will be the movement that turns traditional forestry upside down is for the reader to decide.