Book Description

Privately-owned forests in the U.S. provide ecological and socioeconomic benefits to Americans. At the same time, they challenge common law principles that govern the administration of public goods. There is long-standing tension between private property rights, which entitles forest landowners to make land management decisions about their properties, and the role of state governments in protecting public trust resources on behalf of the general public. Each state chooses to protect public trust resources on private lands in a different way, meaning the U.S. is a patchwork of diverse private forest policy approaches. Describing this range of approaches can help inform policy discussions. Researchers typically administer quantitative surveys to identify policy diversity, but few have utilized qualitative methods to characterize policy approaches to forest management on private lands. This two-part study addresses this gap in literature by sampling the diversity of state-level forest policies present in the U.S. In Chapter 1, I use qualitative interviews with forestry policy experts to provide an in-depth look at different state forest policies across 12 case studies. In Chapter 2, I further explore the California case study to understand its highly regulatory forest policies from a landowner perspective. I interviewed a group of California family forest landowners to understand how they perceive the state's balance between private property rights and public trust doctrine and how they navigate their regulatory policy environment to successfully achieve their forest management objectives. Examining this cross-section of U.S. forest policy diversity builds additional nuance into traditional frameworks (e.g., voluntary-to-regulatory framings), which allows for key comparisons between states and adds in-depth forest policy expert and landowner perspectives to the body of state-level forest policy literature.