The Policy Context of the White Mountain Stewardship Contract
The White Mountains region of Arizona consists of the high-elevation, forested terrain roughly encompassed by the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests (fig. 12.1) and White Mountain Apache tribal lands (the Ft. Apache Reservation). Conditions in the pondero
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The Policy Context of the White Mountain Stewardship Contract Jesse Abrams
The White Mountains region of Arizona consists of the high-elevation, forested terrain roughly encompassed by the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests (fig. 12.1) and White Mountain Apache tribal lands (the Ft. Apache Reservation). Conditions in the ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) forest that predominates here reflect those throughout much of the western United States. These historically frequent-fire forests, once characterized by open stands, an abundance of larger trees, and a rich ground cover of grasses and forbs, are now more commonly overstocked with small-diameter pines and lack a productive grass layer; such conditions leave them susceptible to uncharacteristic, stand-replacing fires (Cooper 1960; Johnson 1994; Covington 2003). The White Mountains region also resembles much of the western United States in that it was recently the scene of divisive social and political conflict regarding public land management, endangered species, timber harvesting, and wildlife. Conflicts took the form of legal challenges to federal timber sales, the intervention of federal courts in management decisions, and accusations and finger-pointing as activity in the woods ground to a halt and local mills closed down (Nie 1998; Abrams and Burns 2007). The communities of the White Mountains are unique, however, in the manner in which they ultimately addressed these forest dilemmas. A catalyst for community action was the Rodeo-Chediski Fire, which burned through nearly a half-million acres of tribal, federal, and private lands in 2002, forcing the evacuation of more than thirty thousand people and incinerating vast swaths of forest (Wilmes et al. 2002). On federal lands (the focus of this case study), national forest managers and local communities worked together in the wake of this devastating fire in an attempt to proactively restore forests that had long since departed from their historic structures and functions. The community looked to stewardship end-results contracting policy, a suite of land management tools designed to meet ecological restoration and community development objectives simultaneously, to address their particular restoration challenges. The Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests were not the first in the country to use stewardship contracting authorities, but they were the first to apply them over large areas (tens to hundreds of thousands of acres) and long time frames (ten years, the maximum allowed contract length) (Sitko and Hurteau 2010). The story of this D. Egan (eds.), Human Dimensions of Ecological Restoration: Integrating Science, Nature, and Culture, 163 The Science and Practice of Ecological Restoration, DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-039-2_12, © Island Press 2011
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p ow er : p o l i t i c s, g o v e r n a n c e , a nd p la nni ng
Figure 12.1. Location of the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests in Arizona, USA.
stewardship contracting experiment contains important lessons about both the promise and the challenges of this emerging
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