Summary
The forests of North America represent enormous natural bounty. Yet, in the United States at least, the benefits of this wealth of nature are not being fully realized. Taxpayers lose money on their public forests, and the forests face severe ecological threats.
Concern about the forests has inspired a search for different approaches to the management of logging and other forest-related activities. This search has led to Canada, where public forests are managed in ways that are strikingly different from those in the United States.
In this essay, Alison Berry presents examples from Canada that illustrate the benefits of long-term leases and licences (often called tenures) and decentralized control.
Alison Berry is a research fellow at PERC, the Property and Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Montana. PERC is a nonprofit institute dedicated to improving environmental quality through property rights and markets. This essay is part of a project sponsored by the Dufresne Foundation and the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust.
Berry has an undergraduate degree in biology from the University of Vermont and a master’s degree in forestry from the University of Montana. Before joining PERC, she worked for the U.S. Forest Service as a supervisory botanist and forestry technician. She has also been a restoration specialist with the Trustees of Reservations in Massachusetts and a biological science technician for a private company, Biological Control of Weeds in Bozeman. Her research has been published in the Journal of Forestry and the Western Journal of Applied Forestry.
