The woods: reclaiming the neighborhood.

Some call it a mutiny of upstarts, others a dangerous dogma to challenge business as usual. For those involved - environmentalists and loggers, store owners and elected officials, housewives, students, and bureaucrats - this grass-roots movement is a birthright. They are reclaiming their communities and redefining their relationships: with each other and with the trees, the streams, and the land in their own backyards.

They call it community-based forestry, a bold, sometimes desperate bootstrap operation to save neighborhoods and the woods around them. From towns as small as Applegate, Oregon, to cities as big as Baltimore, Maryland, community leaders are united by the belief that if they take care of the forest, the forest will take care of them.

If they succeed, these pioneers could recreate an interdependence between land and people to last through time. Families could count on forests for jobs harvesting big and small trees, repairing eroded stream banks, and picking mushrooms, herbs, and other woodland fruits. In return, the forest ecosystems could depend on communities to tend their timber stands, heal their overused meadows, and restore their natural fire patterns.

If the new movement fails, it's back to gridlock or, almost worse, the grinding cycle of boom and bust, which has been sucking the lifeblood out of both forests and forest communities for decades.

"Will it turn out happily ever after? I don't know," says Lynn Jungwirth, director of the Watershed Research and Training Center in Hayfork, California. "Is it pie in the sky? Probably. But if we don't get off our butts and try to do something, nothing happens. That's not OK on my watch."

People like Jungwirth, chairwoman of the Seventh American Forest Congress Communities Committee, are launching new companies to market wood chips, small-dimension lumber, manzanita, mullein, and other nontraditional forest products. They are training a new labor force to do the work and designing new equipment more sensitive to ecosystems than conventional woods machines.

In northern New Mexico, Forest Trust Lumber is linking businesses producing specialty woods and standard dimension lumber with urban markets. The most visible result is a $5 million renovation of La Fonda, Santa Fe's oldest hotel, using lumber exclusively from forests certified for management practices that protect forest ecosystems.

In the northern Sierra Nevada of California, community foresters are testing the specialty market for fine-grained lumber cut from trees logged in crowded stands that suppressed their growth. The project is experimenting with equipment that can turn small-diameter logs into two-by-fours, four-by-fours, or chips.

These and hundreds of similar projects all have been developed by local people seeking to provide jobs while preserving the long-term health of the forest. They worked closely with their neighbors, often overcoming years of hostilities to cultivate trust based on a shared commitment to their communities.

"We've passed beyond rock throwing and yelling. Everybody realized that nobody was winning and the big loser was the environment," says Carol Daly, president of the Flathead Economic Policy Center in Kalispell, Montana.

Lessons from abroad

The inspiration for community-based forestry came from far-away forests and unfamiliar neighborhoods. In India, Africa, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere, natural resources were being depleted at rates even more alarming than in the United States. Because those societies depended almost exclusively on forests for their livelihoods, the methods they developed to renew the health of their natural ecosystems were survival tools.

The irony of Americans, "the wisest people in resource management," learning so valuable a lesson from dirt-poor developing countries is humbling, says Henry Carey, director of the Forest Trust in Santa Fe. "They were simply way ahead of us."

The lesson reached the United States in the 1980s, an era of disintegration for America's forests and forest communities. Annual logging on national forests had held at a steady 11 billion board-feet since the 1960s, more than double the harvest the land can comfortably sustain. Even people who had never seen an old-growth grove understood that their national forests would be decimated if Forest Service management continued at that rate.

The public perception of an agency out of control became a legal reality as courts began handing down orders to halt cutting on national forests. Most drastic was the 1990 Dwyer decision to protect the habitat of the northern spotted owl. It all but stopped federal logging in the Pacific Northwest.

As harvests plummeted, the timber industry began to bail out. In the small towns where they had bought out mom-and-pop sawmills on a promise of perpetual employment, lumber mills shut off their saws and barred their doors. Between 1989 and 1996 a total of 273 Western sawmill and veneer plants closed, eliminating 22,788 jobs. Industry officials blamed environmentalists, but the record also shows that automation and other improvements in productivity cost 14,000 of those jobs.

The mill closures forced many workers to become itinerants, moving from town to town in search of employment. For those who stayed put, it was obvious that the well-being of their community was not synonymous with the well-being of either the Forest Service or industry. They could see as much in the empty windows of abandoned businesses up and down their Main Streets. They could see it in the woods, too, where the old trees were nearly all gone and the young ones often left in unproductive, fire-prone thickets.

It was an ugly awakening for loyal small-town Americans, but it taught a critical lesson. Community leaders, faced with a responsibility for both themselves and their forested back yards, partnered with equally exploited ecosystems. Communities that had always depended on outside industry and government agencies were going it alone. Nobody else, they realized, was going to take care of them.

"Nobody who said they would did," says Leah Wills, a coordinator for a Feather River watershed coalition in northeastern California. "It began to dawn on people all over the place that we would have to do this one for ourselves."

A similar wakening was occurring in cities around neighborhood gardens scratched into back alleys and abandoned lots. Like their rural counterparts, urban residents began turning to one another. Citizens in isolated and forgotten places - urban and rural - began a grassroots movement to build new commitments around the land and their communities.

The first task for these new leaders was to soothe the heartache they had caused one another. In rural areas that meant rebuilding a trust shattered by the national polarity over forest management. While they held widely divergent views and would never agree on many issues, they believed in themselves and agreed to work together, excluding no one. Whether they had grown up in small towns or immigrated in search of refuge from the urban rat race, they all saw the landscape through the lens of rural living: a working landscape that includes people who care deeply about ecosystems.

Their accomplishments to date are modest in scale: 25-acre timber sales, fencing to keep cattle out of sensitive streams, community-owned yards for sorting logs and marketing them collectively. Near Charleston, West Virginia, community leaders are taking a first step by encouraging private landowners to think beyond the boundaries of their own property and beyond timber as its only economic worth.

A few communities have turned to legislation to repair the federal forests surrounding them. In the northern Sierra Nevada, the Quincy Library Group, at odds with Forest Service managers since the coalition's formation in 1993, drafted a plan to manage 2.5 million acres on three national forests. By pooling their collective political savvy, coalition members developed a federal bill that may be signed into law.

The Quincy Library Group captured national attention. Its grass-roots win-win spirit seemed to disarm a normally bellicose Congress and inspire elected representatives to work harder on solutions of their own. But it sets a dangerous precedent for other community groups. Most have neither the capital nor the connections to attain federal legislation& And regulations, far from a panacea, will not create new businesses or nurture innovations for local land management.

That hard work is left to communities themselves. They are finding ways to diversify their economies with industries that improve forest health and circulate the social and economic benefits through the community before they are sent out to the greater world.

Not everything works

The Applegate Partnership in southwestern Oregon developed its first on-the-ground project as a model timber sale that included restoration and maintenance along with timber harvesting. It didn't sell. Twice. In Michigan's Upper Peninsula, timber industry and agency officials were working with environmentalists and local citizens to develop a timber management plan that would respect roadless areas and high-risk ecosystems. Their collaboration fell apart when one member filed a lawsuit over the plan.

While it's a far cry from business as they have known it, timber industry officials generally support community efforts to find new ways to work on public forests. Some sawmill operations continue largely because of the logs that come from local projects. It's clear, officials say, that an era of logging on federal land has ended and the new one requires more sensitivity to local initiatives and ecosystems.

In contrast, most national environmentalists regard community forestry with suspicion, in part because of the timber industry's enthusiasm. But many environmentalists also are genuinely afraid that local initiatives on national forests will exclude non-local residents who have an equal share of the federal land ownership. Those who worry about the exclusion of people living far from national forests are missing a fundamental principle of community-based forestry, says Jungwirth. The grass-roots movement is about local involvement, not local control. Communities, historically excluded from the process, are simply insisting not that they take over, but that they now be included.

So far agency officials at the national level are greeting the community-based forestry movement with enthusiasm, even ebullience. In one of his first acts as chief of the U.S. Forest Service, Mike Dombeck chartered a collaborative stewardship team to act as a liaison between the agency and the work going on in communities.

Whether officials' interest results in real change depends on whether they put their money where their mouths are. Communities can plan innovative solutions and provide expertise, workers, and infrastructure, but they cannot allocate funds, change laws, or control market forces. The toughest message for community-based forestry may be conveying the real costs of forest products - the price of clean water, healthy stands of mixed species, and habitat to nurture all forest creatures. Stewardship requires rehabilitation of damaged resources as well as maintenance of healthy systems. Some work, such as thinning to reduce the threat of wildfire, may pay for itself. But much will require outside capital as long-term resource investment.

"If things don't change, we're closer to the end than the beginning," Daly says.

Although they will continue to work for it, no one involved in the community forestry movement expects an overnight transformation in government agencies, national organizations, or the public. Their mission is long term and it is, at heart, less about politics or economics or science-based ecology than something more fundamental. For most it is a quest to live in their communities in simple harmony with the surrounding landscape.

Jane Braxton Little covers community-based forestry issues for American Forests from her home in Greenville, California.