SUSTAINABLE FORESTS: GLOBAL CHALLENGES AND LOCAL SOLUTIONS

In Sustainable Forests: Global Challenges and Local Solutions, a collection of professional and scientific papers presented at an international conference on sustainable forestry, you learn about social and environmental issues related to forestry and indigenous people. It features, in easy-to-understand terms, different cultural, operational, and political perspectives on sustainable forest management. Professional foresters and conservationists and students of natural resources management, forestry, conservation biology, and Native American studies will come to understand how and why people's awareness of the alarming state of the world's forests is growing and indigenous people are becoming more adamant about protecting their traditional knowledge and inherent rights.The conference “Sustainable Forests: Global Challenges and Local Solutions” was held in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, to take stock of the extent to which conceptual and political developments have influenced and assisted forest management at the local level. Conference participants illustrate and discuss in quite practical terms some ways of relating social issues to forest conservation by drawing from a wealth of forest management and community experiences in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Their findings, presented in Sustainable Forests: Global Challenges and Local Solutions, help strengthen your arguments for delegating decision-making authority to local people and for demanding a precautionary approach to forest management. Some of the topics and issues you learn about include:

• empowerment of indigenous people
• social forestry and forest values
• community forest management, collaborative restructuring, and partnerships
• socioeconomic analysis of sustainable forestry
• biodiversity values and measuresAs Editor O. Thomas Bouman explains in the book's Preface, “The presenters accomplish both a reality check and a vision-building exercise toward forest sustainability. Clearly, there are distinct factors that cause and modify the loss of primary forests across regions. However, the [book] has brought home that the involvement and empowerment of communities and non-governmental groups are increasingly seen as the means of changing the way forests are managed. Nevertheless, the views expressed and the factual evidence presented . . . have left little doubt that the future of natural forests is bleak. This concern has been further aggravated because, even where the political commitment has been made, operational and scientific support for achieving forest sustainability is generally in its infancy.”