Creating Space for Mobile Wild Mushroom Harvesters in Community-Based Forestry in the Pacific Northwest

Abstract

"Though the future directions of public forest management in the Western United States are uncertain, rural communities are clearly attempting to take on more prominent roles. Community movements in the Western U.S. take many forms, and their proponents espouse a variety, and often very different agendas. These agendas range from devolving national forest ownership and management authorities to counties and states; according preferential access over public forests to individuals, groups, or communities; and developing co-management strategies that redistribute power amongst stakeholders. A commonality of these diverse movements is that all seek to capture a greater share of the power over forest resources for 'local communities'. In these struggles, with residential proximity to forest resources has been advanced as one of the main criteria for bounding the 'local'. However, our examples from wild mushrooming show how defining 'local community' by residential proximity to forests may be socially, ecologically, and ethically unsound."