Elsevier

Geoforum

Volume 44, January 2013, Pages 182-192
Geoforum

Looking under the canopy: Rural smallholders and forest recovery in Appalachian Ohio

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2012.09.008Get rights and content

Abstract

Political ecologists and other critical geographers have been steadily chipping away at the tenets of forest transition theory, which equates forest return with economic modernization. The role of rural smallholders in post-industrial forest recovery, however, remains largely unexplored. These local landowners are the focus of this work, which we ground in a case study of Appalachian Ohio, formally a hotbed of both underground coal mining and strip-mining. In this tumultuous landscape of ecological devastation and subsequent recovery, we find an ideal landscape to investigate how marginalized rural smallholders have (or have not) facilitated forest return. We also examine how their roles and visions for the forest are conceptualized and perhaps challenged by outsiders. Drawing primarily from interviews, our research demonstrates that local landowners, contrary to their depiction by many foresters and outside interest groups, are highly engaged, active, shrewd, and organized forest stewards. In many ways, the forests of Appalachian Ohio flourished because of smallholder landowners’ management practices and deliberate efforts to resuscitate what was a post-industrial wasteland mere decades ago. But, now that the forest has reached maturity, the battle over the region’s ecosystems, resources, and future has begun anew.

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

References (119)

  • P. Robbins

    The politics of barstool biology: environmental knowledge and power in greater northern Yellowstone

    Geoforum

    (2006)
  • T.K. Rudel et al.

    Forest transitions: an introduction

    Land Use Policy

    (2010)
  • T. Aide et al.

    Globalization, migration, and Latin American ecosystems

    Science

    (2004)
  • Andrews, J.M.S., 2005a. A Forest Returns: The Success Story of Ohio’s Only National Forest as Told by Ora E. Anderson....
  • Andrews, J.M.S., 2005b. “So here I am:” An Eyewitness Account of the Beginning of the Wayne National Forest in...
  • Appalachian Ohio Alliance, 2010....
  • Arc of Appalachia Preserve System, 2004. Dreaming the Arc of Appalachia: Wilderness in Ohio, if You Could, Would You...
  • Bashaw, A., Landis, S., White, D., Winnenberg, J., 2007. At the Glacier’s Edge: An Environmental History and Field...
  • Bertrand, P., 2012. Fracking Opponents Don’t Like Ohio’s Proposed Disclosure Law, The International Business, Times, 23...
  • D. Billings et al.

    Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes: Back Talk from an American Region

    (1999)
  • P. Blaikie et al.

    Land Degradation and Society

    (1987)
  • C. Bolgiano

    The Appalachian Forest, A Search For Roots and Renewal

    (1998)
  • C. Bolgiano

    Living in the Appalachian Forest: True Tales of Sustainable Forestry

    (2002)
  • B. Braun

    The Intemperate Rainforest: Nature, Culture, and Power on Canada’s West Coast

    (2002)
  • D.B. Bray et al.

    Mexico’s community-managed forests as a global model for sustainable landscapes

    Conservation Biology

    (2003)
  • G. Bridge

    Contested terrain: mining and the environment

    Annual Review of Environment and Resources

    (2004)
  • J.P. Brosius et al.

    Communities and Conservation: Histories and Politics of Community-Based Natural Resource Management

    (2005)
  • D.G. Brown et al.

    Rural land-use trends in the conterminous United States, 1950–2000

    Ecological Applications

    (2005)
  • Buckeye Forest Council, 2010....
  • G.L. Buckley et al.

    Living on the fringe: a geographic profile of Appalachian Ohio

  • B.J. Butler

    Family Forest Owners of the United States, 2006

    (2008)
  • B.J. Butler et al.

    America’s family forest owners

    Journal of Forestry

    (2004)
  • N. Castree

    Nature

    (2005)
  • G. Constantz

    Grassroots-based watershed conservation in central Appalachia

    Mountain Research and Development

    (2000)
  • D. Davis

    Where there are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians

    (2000)
  • W. de Jong

    Forest rehabilitation and its implications for forest transition theory

    Biotropica

    (2010)
  • T. Dietz et al.

    Environmental values

    Annual Review of Environment and Resources

    (2005)
  • M. Dove et al.

    The epistemology of sustainable resource use: managing forest products, swiddens, and high-yielding variety crops

    Human Organization

    (1997)
  • M.A. Drummond et al.

    Land-use pressure and a transition to forest-cover loss in the eastern United States

    BioScience

    (2010)
  • A.F. Egan

    From timber to forests and people: a view of nonindustrial private forest research

    Northern Journal of Applied Forestry

    (1997)
  • A.F. Egan et al.

    The exurbanization of America’s forests: research in rural social science

    Journal of Forestry

    (2000)
  • M.R. Emery et al.

    Interrupting the telos: locating subsistence in contemporary US forests

    Environment and Planning A

    (2005)
  • FAO

    Global Forest Resources Assessment 2010

    (2010)
  • T. Gragson et al.

    Land use legacies and the future of southern Appalachia

    Society and Natural Resources

    (2006)
  • R. Halperin

    The Kentucky way: resistance to dependency upon capitalism in an Appalachian region

  • R. Hayter

    “The war in the woods”: post-fordist restructuring, globalization, and the contested remapping of British Columbia’s forest economy

    Annals of the Association of American Geographers

    (2003)
  • Hecht, S.B., 2004. Invisible forests: the political ecology of forest resurgence in El Salvador. In: Peet, R.P.a.M.W....
  • Heiligmann, R., Dorka, J., Perry, P., Lashbrook, W., Berger, T., 2005. Managing Ohio’s Forest Resources: Challenges and...
  • Hix, D.M., Smith, G.B., 2005. The Role of Timber Harvesting in Forest Management. Society of American Foresters....
  • L. Hoch et al.

    Financial attractiveness of smallholder tree plantations in the Amazon: bridging external expectations and local realities

    Agroforestry Systems

    (2012)
  • Cited by (20)

    • Wood bioenergy for rural energy resilience: Suitable site selection and potential economic impacts in Appalachian Kentucky

      2022, Forest Policy and Economics
      Citation Excerpt :

      The economic situation in Appalachia is driven by the decline of the region's coal extraction and processing industry in recent decades (Freudenburg, 1992; McIlmoil and Hansen, 2010; Deaton and Niman, 2012). The region would benefit from economic diversification, and the bioenergy industry may present such economic opportunity (Law and McSweeney, 2013; Lobao et al., 2016; Taylor et al., 2017). Kentucky's rural communities, especially in Appalachian eastern Kentucky, are particularly needful of energy resiliency, and markets for residuals and low-quality wood.

    • Family forest owners and landscape-scale interactions: A review

      2019, Landscape and Urban Planning
      Citation Excerpt :

      These processes of urbanization and globalization operate across multiple scales, impacting family forest owners who respond through forest management decisions that aggregate into deforestation and degradation, or reforestation, driving changes in global climate and regional biodiversity (Dermawan et al., 2013). The role of policy leakage in deforestation and reforestation patterns is not yet thoroughly understood, nor are commonly-held perceptions about the role of family forest owners and smallholders in large-scale forest cover change (Delacote, Robinson, & Roussel, 2016; Henders & Ostwald, 2014; Law & McSweeney, 2013). This collection of papers provides many examples of policies which address cross-scale drivers, linkages, and impacts, as well as remaining policy needs.

    • Socio-economic factors affecting the rate of adoption of acacia plantations by smallholders in Indonesia

      2018, Land Use Policy
      Citation Excerpt :

      There is a need to promote adoption of timber plantations by smallholders and improve their forest management, if to maximise grower returns and contribute to reducing rural poverty. At the household level, knowledge of the adoption rate of Acacia spp. and socio-economic conditions influencing the early-adopters are limited, despite increasing literature on smallholder forestry: e.g. see Grossman (2012), Law and McSweeney (2013), Maryudi (2013), Maryudi et al. (2016), Maryudi et al. (2017), Nawir et al. (2007a), Pokorny et al. (2013), Van Noordwijk et al., 2007, Sabastian et al. (2014), and Sikor and Baggio (2014). This study aims to fill this gap by investigating the factors that affect time-to-adopt for Acacia spp. (A. mangium and A. auriculiformis) in three provinces of Indonesia (Yogyakarta, South Sumatra and West Kalimantan), representing different stages of landscape transition.

    • "You kill the dam, you are killing a part of me": Dam removal and the environmental politics of river restoration

      2016, Geoforum
      Citation Excerpt :

      Throughout his work, McCarthy argues that the broad themes of political ecology could contribute to understanding environmental relations and conflicts in the industrialized world. There is now a wide range of research drawing on political ecological concepts in the United States, ranging from studies of coastal development in North Carolina (Campbell and Meletis, 2011), local knowledge and fisheries in Alaska (Holen, 2004), environmental knowledge in Yellowstone National Park (Robbins, 2006), the ‘ex-urban’ Sierra (Walker and Fortmann, 2003), the peculiarly American obsession with suburban lawnscapes (Robbins and Sharp, 2003; Robbins, 2007), and the role of smallholders in facilitating reforestation in southern Ohio (Law and McSweeney, 2013). To interpret our findings and inform our analysis, we draw on key concepts associated with a political ecology approach—many of them exemplified in the work above—that intersect with the themes that emerged from research participants’ experiences with removal.

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text