Looking under the canopy: Rural smallholders and forest recovery in Appalachian Ohio
Highlights
► Local, rural smallholders are the majority forest owners in Appalachian Ohio. ► Standard narratives depict these smallholders as problematic forest stewards. ► We highlight how locals have been and continue to be critical for forest recovery.
Introduction
What role do local residents play in forest change? In the case of forest loss, particularly in the tropics, conventional narratives have highlighted the negative role of resident smallholders, whose sheer numbers and slash-and-burn techniques have been widely blamed for deforestation (see Robbins, 2004). Decades of work by political ecologists and others, however, have demonstrated how political-economic factors such as agrarian inequalities and perverse government incentives offer more tractable explanations for deforestation (Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987, Hecht, 2010). In fact, smallholder livelihood practices have been shown to be compatible with flourishing, productive, and biodiverse forest landscapes (McSweeney, 2005; Dove and Kammen, 1997, Hecht, 2004, Rocheleau et al., 2001). While conventional “blame the victim” narratives certainly endure, policymakers now acknowledge that political and economic forces working at multiple scales cause deforestation. Furthermore, resident smallholders are increasingly understood as critical constituents for forest conservation (e.g. UN, 2006).
But in the case of global forest recovery, the story is different. Here, the dominant lens of forest transition theory (FTT)—a subset of modernization theory—explains reforestation in terms of economic transition, the concurrent replacement of agricultural/extraction jobs with manufacturing/service jobs, outmigration, and rising demand for amenity landscapes (Mather, 1992, Mather, 2004). Long-term resident smallholders are typically cast as problematic holdovers from an obsolete era, and their exodus from the landscape is depicted as necessary to forest recovery (see Aide and Grau, 2004). This framing of forest change has proven extremely durable (see, for example, Barbier et al., 2010, Gragson and Bolstad, 2006, Kauppi et al., 2006, Pfaff and Walker, 2010, Rudel et al., 2010), and has clearly influenced forest management approaches in the US and elsewhere (e.g. USDA Forest Service, 2009a). In sum: if once-orthodox narratives of deforestation blamed rural residents, current stories about forest recovery do much the same by, at best, ignoring long-term rural residents, and, at worst, suggesting that these lingering rural folk might hinder forest return.
FTT, however, is coming under increased scrutiny, particularly—but not exclusively—in the developed world, where post-industrial forest recovery has been underway for decades. Rather than framing forest resurgence as an inevitable and ecologically-desirable outcome of in situ economic development, scholars are drawing attention to how reforestation is premised on developed countries’ ability to export extraction to developing regions (Mansfield et al., 2010, Perz, 2007). Other researchers have revealed the contested, highly political nature of forest recovery—as in the Scottish highlands, where reforestation was less about economic decline and more about the state’s promotion of forest plantations and outdoor recreation (Robbins and Fraser, 2003). Kitchen et al. also demonstrate how Britain’s community forest policy encouraged reforestation while simultaneously stirring up community disagreements, class conflict, and precarious state-private interactions that conditioned forest resurgence (2006). These latter studies join research from developing countries to highlight the state’s active and oft-contested role in reforestation efforts (e.g. Clement and Amezaga, 2008, de Jong, 2010), and, in doing so, undermine explanations of forest recovery as a passive result of economic transition.
Collectively, these recent critiques of FTT open the space to question other aspects of dominant forest recovery narratives. This includes the conspicuously-understudied role of local peoples in shaping forest recovery (see Lambin and Meyfroidt, 2010, McCarthy, 2006b, Satake and Rudel, 2007). In fact, in the northern context, where we find the majority of the world’s forestland (FAO, 2010), attention to the role of smallholders in forest recovery is virtually non-existent, especially in relation to work in Latin American landscapes (e.g. Bray et al., 2003, Brosius et al., 2005, Hoch et al., 2012). We therefore begin to fill this gap by asking: over the last half century or so, what roles have long-term residents played and what roles do they continue to play in the astonishing return of northern forests?
By exploring this question, we hope to contribute a critical component to the ongoing reconceptualization of forest recovery processes. Here forest recovery is no longer linear and apolitical; instead, by foregrounding local peoples and their often-surprising actions and interactions with other actors, regreening becomes complex and unpredictable. Unraveling these dynamics is essential for understanding not only if forest returns, but where, when, at what pace, with what composition, and for whom (see also Mansfield et al., 2010).
Specifically, we explore human-forest interactions in southeast Ohio, or Appalachian Ohio, a 37,200 km2 unglaciated and coal-rich portion of the state (US Census Bureau, 2010). Once swathed in imposing forests, the region supported intensive extraction throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries; by the 1920s, forest cover had dropped to less than 15%, and the landscape was considered an ecological “wasteland” (Bashaw et al., 2007, Buckley et al., 2006, Whitson et al., 2006). But today, dense and mature second-growth forests cover nearly 80% of the landscape (Heiligmann et al., 2005). Widely regarded as an environmental success story, many sources attribute this impressive regreening to economic shifts, outmigration, and government buyouts (e.g. Andrews, 2005a, The Appalachian Land Ownership Task Force, 1983, Williams, 1989). The Ohio Department of Natural Resources’ passive summary of the region’s forest transition is typical: “remarkable changes soon took place, due to sound government policy and social changes” (ODNR, 2012).
But a closer look at the landscape itself belies such pat explanations. Most noteworthy is the unusual endurance of smallholders. Net migration from the region has been negligible; indeed, the region is so densely populated as to challenge the definition of rural (McSweeney and McChesney, 2004). Further, smallholders are the majority forest owners here, with state and federal landholdings accounting for only 14% of the region’s forestland (Widmann, 2012). But exactly how smallholders have presided over a period of spectacular forest recovery remains glaringly unexplored, particularly with respect to: (a) how narratives of forest change write local landowners into or out of this ecological success story; (b) what the forest management strategies and practices of non-industrial private forest owners—or NIPFs—have been over time; and (c) how these practices and visions for the landscape compare with outsider prescriptions for the forest.
We begin our interrogation of these issues by contextualizing our study within the American forest policy discourse on NIPFs (Section 2). We juxtapose that discourse against the basic tenets of political ecology to consider how we might alternatively understand local agency in southeast Ohio’s forest return. Section 3 then reviews the particulars of the region, while Section 4 outlines our research methods. Ultimately, our findings and conclusions (Sections 5 and 6) summarize how local forest owners have facilitated and guided forest recovery in Appalachian Ohio—thereby contradicting both national stereotypes of NIPFs and stereotypes of Appalachian residents—and how local forest owners are situated within a high-stakes struggle over the future forest.
Section snippets
Forest smallholders in the United States
Forest cover in the eastern US is estimated to have been between 70% and 90% in the early 17th century, but by 1907, it had plummeted to less than 40% (Smith et al., 2001, Williams, 1989). In the mid-1900s, forests in the East (i.e. all states east of the Mississippi River) began to recover and stabilize, and today, forest cover now hovers above 52% (Drummond and Loveland, 2010). Patterns of recovery are uneven (Ramankutty et al., 2010), however, and many regions have experienced reforestation
Forest change and forest landowners in Southeast Ohio
Our research focuses on a portion of Appalachian Ohio once known as the Hocking Valley Coal Fields, but recently re-christened the “Little Cities of Black Diamonds Microregion” (Little Cities of Black Diamonds, 2010). Extending over four counties—Athens, Hocking, Morgan, and Perry (Fig. 1)—the region is surprisingly homologous, sharing virtually the same extractive history, forest trajectory, and degree of forest cover.
In many ways, this study site distills patterns and processes that have
Research methods
The majority of evidence presented here comes from fieldwork carried out by one author in 2009. The paper also draws on the ongoing insights of a larger NSF-sponsored research program on southeast Ohio’s forests, and thus includes data from team research efforts in 2010 and 2011 (see Munroe et al., 2010). Methodologically, we rely primarily on interviews conducted with local forest owners, local forest interest groups members, local outreach coordinators and foresters, “outsider” forest
Dominant narratives about NIPFs in southeast Ohio
Appalachian residents have long been stereotyped by outsiders as backward, uneducated, violent, and racist “rednecks” and “hillbillies” (Billings et al., 1999, Scott, 2010). Even Appalachian scholars themselves deem ecologically-minded, responsible Appalachian forest owners to be few and far between (e.g. Bolgiano, 1998, Kilbourne, 2002). Moreover, in southeast Ohio specifically, these stereotypes combine with national-level discourses about NIPFs to create an image of southeast Ohio’s
Discussion and conclusions
Our goal in this paper is to interrogate the role of smallholder forest owners in instances of forest recovery within the post-industrial, developed world. We have striven to demonstrate that forest recovery is not a passive process. Forests do not return simply because blanket economic and demographic changes inspire land abandonment or landowner neglect. Far from being a forest regenerated out of indifference, the landscape of Appalachian Ohio flourishes because of human intentions,
Acknowledgements
All fieldwork conducted in 2009 was supported by the AAG Rural Geography Specialty Group and Ohio State University. Subsequent research was conducted under the preview of the Appalachian Ohio Forest Research Group and was funded by the National Science Foundation (BCS#1010314). We would like to thank all study participants for generously giving of their time and knowledge, and we are especially grateful to the private forest owners who dedicated countless hours to this project. Thanks also to
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