The picnic initiative.

These Vermont woodlands owners are proving "cross-boundary management" can be another name for neighbor-helping-neighbor.

Fifteen years ago about the only thing David Clarkson knew about the wildlife on the 230 acres of southern Vermont woodlands his family had owned since 1948 was that it included porcupines. "I knew that," he says, "because I had killed a few - six, in fact, in 1950, so I could pay for my wedding license." At the time, Clarkson explains, porcupines were rampant in the area, and the state paid a 50-cent bounty for each porcupine killed, payable through the town clerk's office, which was also where you got your wedding license. So Clarkson paid for his wedding license with porcupine ears.

"But other than porcupines and pretty trees," he says, "I hardly knew a damned thing about this land. I'm embarrassed to say I didn't even know where the boundary lines were. I didn't know about silviculture or habitat protection or how different parts of the landscape fit together. I was really naive."

That changed in 1986, when Clarkson took a three-day workshop in managing lands for wildlife. Conducted by a group called Vermont Coverts (coverts, which is pronounced like "cover," with a "t," signifies a protective thicket for wildlife) that dedicates itself to educating landowners about wildlife-friendly forest management, the workshop taught Clarkson how to manipulate his woods to enhance food supply, shelter, and other wildlife habitat essentials. Clarkson promptly hired Yale-trained forester George Weir to create a management plan that would accomplish these goals while generating a little income. Then, at a Fourth of July picnic, he convinced two neighbors, Lucille Duncan and the famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith, to do the same. Why not, Clarkson suggested, have a forester create a coordinated plan that would enhance wildlife across all their properties? Duncan and Galbraith agreed, adding their 450-odd acres to Clarkson's property for a total of almost 700 acres.

Thus was born what Clarkson now calls the Newfane WHIG, for Wildlife Habitat Improvement Group. In the following months, through countless front-stoop visits and living-room meetings, Clarkson convinced many other neighbors to join the effort. The owners came with different priorities and from vastly different backgrounds. They were locals and summer people, loggers and doctors, farmers and philosophy professors. Some owned hundreds of acres and had comfortable incomes; others sweated every dollar and counted on logging from their 20- or 30-acre lots to pay property taxes or supply firewood. The one thing they all had in common, says Clarkson, was a deep affection for the land.

Now, 13 years later, this common interest has spread Clarkson's picnic initiative over more than 50 properties covering 7,000 acres in three towns. Forester Weir created a map showing how different wildlife habitats are distributed across the holdings, and the various owners now coordinate management plans to enhance both a diversity of habitat types and the maintenance and expansion of wildlife corridors. They have cut small patches to create deer browse, left brushy coverts for grouse and woodcock, encouraged beech and oak stands to increase food supply for bears, and left large stretches of maturing forest for more reclusive species like bears, thrush, and winter wrens.

Of modest beginnings but significant accomplishment, Clarkson's WHIG is part of a quietly growing trend toward coordinated management of private ownerships. Clarkson calls these efforts "neighborhood cooperatives"; others call them "community-based forestry," "cross-boundary management," or "multiblock management." While similar in spirit to community-based initiatives on public lands, which seek to give local communities a stronger role in managing national forests and other public lands (see "The Woods: Reclaiming the Neighborhood" and other stories, Winter 1998), these private efforts involve neighbors working together to manage their own adjoining holdings. They thus bring landscape-scale management to the type of land that would seem least conducive to such an approach - a patchwork of private ownerships.

While the diffuse, grassroots nature of this nascent trend makes it hard to measure, foresters, conservation organizations, and other observers are seeing a great increase in such projects, particularly in the Northeast. Vermont Coverts, the landowner outfit that got David Clarkson started, is probably the organization most focused on small-ownership cross-boundary management. Aided by a grant from the Vermont-based Orton Family Foundation, it currently has six projects underway involving some 12,000 to 15,000 acres; several more are in embryonic stages. Scores of others have been launched or aided by regional or community land trusts, conservation commissions, and watershed associations or simply by neighbors who stumble on the idea. Together these neighborly undertakings - some as small as two neighbors working a couple dozen acres, others involving dozens of owners managing thousands of acres - are bringing coordinated management to tens of thousands and possibly hundreds of thousands of acres in the Northeast.

It's tempting to see this as a new trend. But as Richard Ober, a senior director at the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, points out, cross-boundary management is in part a return to social connections that over the centuries have been fragmented along with landscape and culture. "When our first towns were established here in New England, neighbors had to work together very, very closely," says Ober. "This is merely a renewed recognition that we share vital community interests that cross private boundaries."

Of course, the owners enjoy private rewards too. David Clarkson, for instance, no longer has to hunt porcupines. One of the many species thriving in the healthier forest Clarkson and his neighbors are cultivating is the fisher, a large, distinctly formidable member of the marten family that specializes in eating porcupines. "One less thing I have to worry about," says Clarkson.

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David Dobbs has presented a wonderful story about neighbors getting together to pursue a common interest - enhancing wildlife habitat across their private-forest landscape in Vermont. Similar stories can be told about neighbors working together in other parts of the country, in diverse public and private ownership settings and pursing a variety of objectives.

We at AMERICAN FORESTS call this type of cooperation among neighbors "community-based forestry." Neighbors cooperate because of a common interest or concern, such as enhancing wildlife habitat or recreational amenities; developing sustainable forestry practices and products; responding to clean air, clean water, or endangered species regulations; reducing wildfire threats; or addressing a broader economic and social crisis, such as that faced by many of the West's forest-dependent communities when timber supplies dropped and mills closed as federal policy shifted to ecosystem management.

In the most successful community-based forestry stories, leaders emerge who are committed to bringing community interests together to develop collaborative processes and overcome the many challenges they inevitably face. These leaders can be private citizens, like David Clarkson; public officials; representatives of interest groups; or members of a growing set of regional nonprofit groups focused on promoting community-based initiatives. Through our community-based forestry program, we have the pleasure of working with many local and regional leaders who reach out to share their experiences and lessons with people in other parts of the country. These leaders teach us about innovative efforts in their communities. In turn, we help them participate in forest policy dialogue at the national level.

- Gerry Gray 

David Dobbs, co-author of The Northern Forest, writes on forests, fisheries, and other environmental, community, and scientific subjects from Montpelier, Vermont.