The facts are beginning to support a long-standing suspicion: small-scale, community-based forestry can become a cornerstone for restoring not only North American forests, but community and culture as well. And it is most likely the only way forestry and forest products will ever become truly sustainable.
It is happening in Cascadia (see Note 1). Cascadia includes parts of California, Oregon, Washington, northern Idaho, western Montana, much of British Columbia, and most of coastal southeast Alaska. Cascadia--where the great rainforests of the Pacific Northwest reign supreme, where the majestic sitka spruce, Douglas-fir, hemlock, redwood, cedar, pines, oaks, yew, alder, and maples, and many more have thrived beside the Pacific basin, where great storms brew in the Gulf of Alaska, where torrential rains, potent winds, and vast tectonic and volcanic forces periodically shake cities to their core and burst mountains. Cascadia--the land of the salmon, settled on a shifting ocean edge where we have built massive, fragile cities dwarfed by giant mountains. Cascadia is our home ground, our territory, the greatest forestland in the world. It is ours to wean back from global economic forces and growing cultural muddle into which it is being drawn
There are many social and political distinctions between the regions of Cascadia, but the similarities are as important as the differences. Sustainable forestry throughout Cascadia is developing through the commitment of people--environmentalists, forest workers, natural scientists, restorationists and others--who share in common a land with natural integrity.
Privatization means, when the chips are down, the sale of assets or functions goes to the highest bidder, which is rarely the community of people to be affected the most by the sale. Large commercial interests are given more opportunities to gain increasing control of local economies and cultures, which do not benefit usually from the goals of the controller. Low-paying jobs, with loss of stability, reduced quality of life, and waning community spirit, might be the result of deals made in the corporate interest. Trading control by remote governments for control by remote corporations is hardly a great bargain.
Localization is another means of decentralization that may be more effective and empowering. While privatization is a tool of free market economics--a means of control by those who can afford acquisitions--localization is democratic control of local resources and services by those who have commitment to place and community-- the residents. Admittedly, there are probably untested waters about how localization can succeed. However, one key to success is creating standards and guidelines: you write into the deal about how, given the best knowledge available, the store ought to be run.
In a study of Italian politics (Note 2), political scientists Robert Putnam and co- authors discovered that some communities were more capable of or ready for self-regulation than others. Self-regulation is perceived as being an important tradition during times of volatile national politics in Italy. The distinguishing characteristic was accumulation of social capital, a term developed by Putnam. Social capital is the strength that communities build through long-term commitment to working, recreating, and celebrating together. Shared love of place is both a term of social capital and a product of it. Perhaps we need to develop a way to evaluate when communities are ready for self-regulation. Once such a determination is made, then government could step back.
Localization is a process by which management of local resources and services is returned to residents committed to places as they meet standards that guarantee a level of overall responsibility to the whole of society and the planet. Such standards must not bind communities to picayune details of management, but rather serve as guidelines that guarantee a general level of ecological and social responsiveness. There are also no formulas for standards. Each community must be allowed to develop guidelines based on the distinctive realities of their place. The needs of both the forest and the people must be considered. People-based, localized forestry, practiced under guidelines that guarantee ecological and social responsibility, is a better economic deal than control of forest lands by governmental and corporate powers. Certainly it is a better deal for communities. It may be better for consumers, too, since more of them will be employed in the long run.
Environmentalism has shown us that this freedom is illusory. Fossil fuels are finite, unequally distributed, and their unfettered use is destructive to natural systems. Many, if not most, of our technologies trap us in a sea of proliferating pollutants and nonrecyclable wastes. Vast inequities produced by arbitrary shifts and exploitative relationships in a technologically-driven economy threaten to drown civil society. Given all this, it becomes clear that we have to reorient ourselves to the realities of where we live.
Bioregionalism is an effort to reorient culture to better fit the places of which it is a part, as cultures have done for centuries. It is readaptation and reinhabitation. There are no clear routes, no codes, maps or checkpoints. It is as much an instinct as an effort, a predisposition based on the physical world and our natural limitations, such as how far a person can walk in a day or how much wood is needed for winter.
In terms of economy and governance, localization does not mean a return to isolation, provincialism or separation. It means a return to focus on community as the essential building block of society and a unification of communities tied to each other by virtue of natural realities, shared interests and values and a market interdependence that guarantees economic and cultural exchange. By virtue of common ecosystems within continents or ocean basins, whole regions are united. One of these is Cascadia.
Why bioregionalism? Why Cascadia? Our commitment to place within a larger region in common can inspire our sense of majesty and respect for Cascadia. Once we leap to an identity with place and region, other elements will fall into perspective. Once we become responsible citizens of a region, rural and urban, our respect for the land unites and motivates us. The Pacific Certification Council is built on its Cascadian identity and a commitment to the forests that sustain us.
Note 2. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. R. D. Putnam, R. Leonardi, and R. Y. Nanetti, 1993, Princeton University Press.