Researcher(s):
Perri Pond
ENVS course(s): 400 Initiated: September 2016 Completed: May 2017 Go to project site
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Land use planning is rife with wicked problems. In this thesis, I look at the wicked nature of managing the Tongass National Forest and assess the recent clumsy solution: the Tongass Advisory Committee (TAC). Located in southeast Alaska, the Tongass is part of the largest contiguous temperate rainforest in the world and “spans more than seventeen million acres of southeast Alaska, from Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve to the north to Misty Fjords National Monument to the south” (Steinkruger 2008, 15). The Tongass has a long history of environmental conflict—primarily disputes over the old-growth timber industry. For decades, the conservationists, loggers, and Native Tribes have battled in the courtroom over the controversies of old-growth logging. At the core of these disputes are fundamental differences in how each party values the forest—to some the Tongass represents recreational leisure and adventure, whereas to others the Tongass represents economic opportunity.
In 2013, the United States Secretary of the Department of Agriculture issued Memorandum 1044-009 calling for an expedited transition away from old-growth and towards a young-growth timber program. Shortly after the release of the memo, the Secretary of Agriculture charted the TAC—an assembly of stakeholders invested in the Tongass National Forest—to advise and provide recommendations on to Secretary and United States Forest Service on how to expedite the transition. In short, the TAC was a clumsy attempt to reconcile the long history of stakeholder gridlock present in the Tongass.
In this thesis, I assess how collaborations such as this could potentially resolve U.S. public land management conflicts through a specific examination of the TAC. I pursued three methodologies. I interviewed individual members of the TAC, conducted a news analysis on articles published after the TAC submitted its final recommendations and the Forest Service's final record of decision on the EIS, and finally a content analysis of the TAC's drafting materials. Ultimately, I argue that while collaborative natural resource management catalyzes critical conversation across historically polarized arenas, the TAC’s structural limitations ultimately explain both how and why the committee reached consensus and the lingering tensions which remain.