OVANDO, Mont. - When the Plum Creek Timber Company decided to sell its 88,000 acres in the mountain-ringed Blackfoot Valley near here in 2003, ranchers, conservationists and other locals worried that a crop of new houses would sprout. Dependent on the forest and mountains to make a living and for hunting and fishing, they formed a nonprofit group mostly made up of area residents to buy the land.
In a complex deal that will be complete in 2007, they are selling parts of the land to federal land agencies, to ranchers and to other private owners with strict easements on it. Combined with other easements, the agreement will keep more than 100,000 acres undeveloped. The group, called the Blackfoot Challenge, will keep 5,400 acres.
"Our goal is to maintain a large intact landscape and the character of our valley," said Hank Goetz, a retired forestry professor from the University of Montana.
The interest of local people in managing the neighboring woods for their benefit is known as community forestry, part of a growing international trend. A 2002 report by Forest Trends and the Center for International Environmental Law found that since the early 1990's the number of acres under some form of direct community management had doubled in the Southern Hemisphere, the only region that was studied.
"It's a dramatic new model for forest management," said Jeff Campbell, senior program manager for environment and development at the Ford Foundation, which has given $25 million to finance community forestry in the United States over the last five years.
In community forestry, traditional opponents like environmentalists and loggers often join to fight a common enemy, for example subdivisions, absentee landowners or the decline of a local economy. The concept has been embraced by the Bush administration, which held a conference on what is known as cooperative conservation in late August in St. Louis.
"It's a new way of doing business," said Kathleen Clarke, director of the Bureau of Land Management, who toured the Blackfoot project in August. "Ours is not a command-and-control operation. It acknowledges that the best hope of being stewards is to pull together folks who live on these lands with the federal agencies."
The idea, however, worries some environmentalists, who see it as a way for industry to co-opt environmental protections. It could, they say, lead to the sale of public lands.
"It's Sagebrush Rebellion light," said John Horning, executive director of Forest Guardians, an environmental group in Santa Fe, N.M., referring to an effort in the 1980's by some Western politicians to persuade the federal government to turn over federal land to the states. "It's sinister and it's frightening, because it comes at the same time federal environmental safeguards on public lands are being dismantled to allow logging, mining, and oil and gas development."
Community forests have long been a part of the landscape in Europe, Canada and elsewhere, and there are "town forests" in New England. Community forestry is different. It means that a community may or may not own the forest, but it recognizes that community members have a stake in what happens around them and gives different interest groups a voice in management.
"Part of it's fear," said Frank Reed, director of development for the New England Forestry Foundation, which is working to protect 342,000 acres of forest in Maine called the Down East Lakes. "People living in rural areas are worried about the cities advancing on them."
That is part of what drove the Blackfoot Challenge. Subdivisions are one of the biggest environmental threats in the West. So The Nature Conservancy is buying conservation easements on existing ranches, and with that money the ranchers buy the land newly acquired from the timber company. By the time the deal, involving dozens of transactions, is complete, much will be preserved as it is today.
But a major component of community forestry is that the protection is not like creating a park; it allows traditional uses of the land that benefit the local economy to continue as long as they meet community-set environmental standards.
The cobblestone-studded Blackfoot is the river made famous by Norman Maclean's novel "A River Runs Through It." But the movie version of the book was not filmed here. When Robert Redford came to scout the location, there were so many clear-cuts, he said, that they had to film elsewhere.
That is one thing the Blackfoot Challenge hopes to change. It will allow logging, which will keep a local sawmill and loggers in business, but with guidelines that protect wildlife, water quality and scenic values.
In the West, these kinds of collaboration often involve vast tracts of federal land, which is intermingled with private land, as is the case here. Ms. Clarke and other federal officials vow to work with local communities on these kinds of projects. To enable the Blackfoot project, for example, the Bureau of Land Management has bought 3,640 acres and will buy more than 20,000 more.
One large experiment in cooperative management is on the 89,000-acre Valles Caldera National Preserve, a cattle ranch just west of Los Alamos, N.M., which the federal government bought in 2000 for $101 million. The government wanted to protect the scenic area but not simply turn it into a park. It set up a nine-member board of presidential appointees, who represent a variety of interests, including agriculture, wildlife and history.
"It's the most open process I've ever witnessed in terms of getting people's views and managing land," said Ray Powell, a former New Mexico state land commissioner and the departing director of the preserve. "It has worked here."
Mr. Horning, however, contends that the preserve board has not enforced environmental standards when it comes to livestock grazing. "As result, every single stream is polluted and violating state water quality standards," he said.
Mr. Powell denies that cattle are the problem. Water quality is not what it should be, he said, largely because of historic timber clear-cutting. After a rain, he said, soil is washed into the streams. "We're bringing the stream quality to a level that will surpass what it has been," he said.
Ms. Clarke, the B.L.M. director, said cooperative management would not change the federal mission to manage land for all Americans. "It doesn't relieve the agencies of their laws or mandates," she said.
In Eastern forests, the issues are different. Out-of-state timber and real estate interests are buying forests and depriving local communities of their use.
In 2000, the Ford Foundation financed 10 community forest projects in New England. One was the Vermont Family Forest Partnership, an effort to involve low- and moderate-income people who had lost their jobs. With modest investments, 16 people are buying shares in a 120-acre forest plot. They can hike and hunt on the land, and as the project moves forward the land will be logged and the owners may do the work and will share in the profits.
But even collaborative decisions can run afoul of the powers that be. In the 1990's millworkers, timber company officials and environmentalists negotiated for seven years to devise a plan to reintroduce grizzlies into the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness Area in Idaho and Montana. But the agreement was vetoed by Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton at the request of Gov. Dirk Kempthorne of Idaho.
Such actions "become a problem," Mr. Kemmis said, "because you can't ask people to go back to the table over and over again."New York Times
