Place-Based Agreements & Laws Symposium

Another reason to travel to Missoula in June

I thought some of our faithful readers and contributors might be interested in attending the Place-Based Forest Agreements & Laws Symposium, to be held in Missoula, Montana on June 8th and 9th

I’ve teamed up with the National Forest Foundation to organize the event.  We have invited representatives from the following initiatives to Missoula:

  1. Beaverhead-Deerlodge Partnership Proposal (Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest)
  2. Three Rivers Challenge (Kootenai National Forest)
  3. Blackfoot-Clearwater Landscape Stewardship Project (Lolo National Forest)
  4. Clearwater Basin Collaborative (Clearwater and Nez Perce National Forests)
  5. Oregon Eastside Forests Restoration, Old Growth Protection, and Jobs Act of 2009
  6. Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act (Lewis and Clark National Forest)
  7. Northeast Washington Forestry Coalition (Colville National Forest)
  8. Lakeview Stewardship Group (Fremont-Winema National Forests)
  9. Four Forest Restoration Initiative (Arizona)
  10. Alabama Forests Restoration Initative
  11. Wild Rivers Master Stewardship Agreement between the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest, Lomakatsi Restoration Project and Siskiyou Project (Oregon)
  12. Montana Forest Restoration Committee
  13. Wallowa Resources (Oregon)

We’ve confirmed most speakers and will have things settled by the end of the week hopefully. 

The plan is to learn more about these initiatives and have representatives answer questions posed by attendees and organizers (the latter written with feedback provided by USFS officials, interest group representatives, congressional staffers, and others).  Plenary sessions will be followed by smaller, more focused breakout sessions where we’ll try to have more participation and open-discussion. 

Here is the official invite with registration link:

The National Forest Foundation and the Bolle Center for People and Forests at the University of Montana invite you to join us in Missoula on June 8 and 9, 2010 for the Place-Based Forest Agreements & Laws Symposium. We look forward to an engaging discussion around the challenges, strategies, solutions-development and achievements of landscape-scale stewardship initiatives on National Forest lands.

Throughout the country, divergent interests are collaborating about how they would like particular forests to be managed. Many of these proposals include provisions related to forest restoration, economic development, wilderness designation, and funding mechanisms, among others.  Approaches include state-level principles, memorandums of agreement regarding how collaborative groups and federal agencies work together, landscape assessments that lead to on-the-ground work, and place-based legislation. Each initiative is different in significant ways, but all are searching for more durable, bottom-up, and pro-active solutions to national forest management. 

With so much happening so quickly we believe is the time to bring people together in a symposium to assess the big picture and help identify common problems and possible solutions.  We invite you to join us for a two-day event focused on place-based, landscape approaches to forest stewardship. In addition, we encourage you to forward this invitation to others who you think might be interested in participating.

Registration for the symposium is $100.00.  We are planning an event that mixes plenary sessions with break outs to explore specific issues in more depth. We plan to summarize the discussions and ideas in a synthesis paper following the event.

For further information and to register, please go to http://nff.wildapricot.org.  I recommend you bookmark this site for future reference, as we will continue to update the site with further information. We will soon be posting background documents about each of the landscape-scale stewardship initiatives that will be presenting at the Symposium.

Thank you, and we hope to see you in Missoula in June!