A story in the Los Angeles Times features Idaho’s collaborative process for managing public lands as President Trump calls for a truly representative process.
The president flew to Salt Lake City this month to remove 2 million acres from two national monuments in Utah, and to rebuke “distant bureaucrats” for acting to safeguard the West’s public domain without adequately consulting neighboring communities.
The Times says that though the president’s critics questioned the administration’s call for more inclusion in managing the West’s natural bounty, one place that the president and his aides could look for a model of a “truly representative process” is how former foes have cooperated to manage millions of acres of national forest land in Idaho.
The Times piece focuses on how Idaho environmentalists and the timber industry compromised to keep logs rolling into mills while also establishing more wilderness protection. Participants say a nearly decade-old program fostered by the U.S. Forest Service to form multi-stakeholder groups, called “collaboratives,” is under pressure from powerful political influences in Washington and Idaho.
2008 saw the creation of the Clearwater Basin Collaborative, one of nine such groups that assist the Forest Service in managing Idaho’s 20.2 million acres of federal forest, more than in any state except Alaska and California.
Both sides say they realize that there is opportunity when they work on the things they agree on. (Los Angeles Times)
