Our Secret Forest: Paths For Community Land Use

By Adriane Lesser

    Panting, I folded my little legs beneath my tutu and settled on the bank of a stream dividing a field from a forest. I reminded Mom that I hated going with her on errands, especially when she tricked me and drove somewhere other than home after ballet class. “What if this were home?” she asked. I stopped dragging my fingers through the silt and actually looked at the trees, dirt, and shadows in front of me. I set scenes from “The Secret Garden” to the tune of the forest chatter and nodded vigorously. “You mean my own forest?”
    When we made the move from one suburban town to another, I brought the idea that my new house came with my very own forest. This idea didn’t last long. The previous owners of the house and land were elderly and stayed indoors — they knew nothing about what went on behind the trees, where our neighbors had become active over the years. The first week my parents uprooted a marijuana patch growing in our woods, wondering which of the hikers or horseback-riders passing by might have harvested it. Not long after, my mother confronted a local elementary school teacher swimming naked with her lover in our pond. As she picked up her clothes and beer cans, she protested that she had been coming here for years, and had no intention of changing her habits. As we discovered in the coming months, many of our neighbors felt similarly. I had to give up on having my own forest, all to myself.
    While my family holds the land title, the fields and woods that surround my house are actually shared by many in the community. Some of these relationships are mutually beneficial for us and the forest; the beekeeper who puts his hives among the wildflowers in our yard gives us honey, the hobbyist who builds duck boxes by the pond is preserving the local ecology, and the Hunt Club that gallops in uniform through the trails in mock pursuit of fox helps pay to mow the fields once every couple of years. Other relationships are mandated, such as the easement on the land that the natural gas company holds so it can access its pipes and provide energy to the greater Boston area.
    Some don’t make formal requests to use the land but rather wander into the forest for recreation or to pick wild blueberries, grapes, asparagus, and cranberries. We would never think to press trespassing charges on these harmless but uninvited wanderers. Yet if I see a stranger traipsing out of the woods with a big bucket of berries or fish (or the occasional Christmas tree), I might give him a suspicious glance as a reminder that the land does not belong to him, after all. In recognition of our property rights and their tacit infringement, most wanderers try to keep their visit a secret by skulking out through a hidden way.

SUPERMARKET SWEEP
    Villagers in Northeast Thailand don’t skulk out of the forest like my neighbors. Boonruang Yangkreu, the headman of a village within the Kok Yai forest, says it is different here. Private landholders expect and accept others will come onto the land to gather mushrooms and firewood for themselves, using the “forest as a supermarket.” When villagers cultivate their fields during the rice-growing season, their grazing cows freely meander between community and private land. Convinced that such land use was important for the quality of life of the villagers, Boonruang helped create and heads a committee to defend these practices.
    The Community Forest Committee oversees private and community forest land in 14 villages within the Kok Yai forest. The Committee coordinates with substantial private landholders, other villagers, and the local government to build understanding and cooperation among these groups for sustainable forest management. As we talk, I stare at the scrawny trees and bushes pushing up from the exposed pale and sandy soil. I don’t notice any mushrooms. Boon- ruang gestures at the landscape and reminisces about a once-thriving forest before addressing the reality: “It looks the way it does now because the government didn’t consider Kok Yai to be an official forest, and anyone was allowed to come and use it as they pleased.”
    Boonruang’s dedication to conserving the Kok Yai forest began over two decades ago when he noticed villagers (who had moved in recently under encouragement of a development plan) had cut down all the big trees for building houses and as firewood for salt-boiling operations. Following policy promotions, villagers turned the stripped land to small “cash-crop” farms. But Boonruang noticed villagers weren’t making much cash, largely since the cost of inputs like chemical fertilizer were high and increasing annually. Boonruang posed his question to the Kok Yai communities, “If we have nothing to show for having destroyed the forest and our ability to benefit from it as a community, why not let the forest return to its former state?”
    It took Boonruang five years to convince people in the surrounding villages that the way they treated their private property was important to preserving the way of life of the communities. He leans back and sighs when he says “five years,” as if it were a long time to get people to change their ideas and habits. In addition to preserving public community forest land, there is now an agreement among the communities that people will not cut down big or slow-growing trees on their private land without permission from the Committee.
    Not everyone is content to make private land meet the needs of the community, especially when this means restrictions on how they can use their own land. One man, angry he couldn’t cut down his trees for profit, had Boonruang arrested on defamation charges. Boonruang explains, “Some people or investors who have lost their benefits [to profit from their land] hate me. But these people are afraid to cut their trees for fear their public image in the community will suffer.” Even though self-interest remains, overall community consensus motivates individual cooperation.

QUEEN OF THE FOREST
    "But who does the forest belong to?” I ask Boonruang, as if I hadn’t made up my own mind at age five standing at its edge in my tutu, wanting it to myself, even if I did grow up and learn to share. I expect (and receive) an unhelpful answer about it belonging to both everyone and no one. Anyway, ownership doesn’t determine the health of a forest; it is responsibility I am concerned about. I re-phrase, “Who do you trust to take care of the forest?”
    Despite the relative success of the Community Forest Committee in achieving local awareness and cooperation, the villagers overtaxed the Kok Yai forest in the first place. And Boonruang worries the loose agreement they now share will become tenuous as more investors move in looking to grow eucalyptus, rubber trees, and other cash-crops. This has already become a threat, as he recounts that “When [Prime Minister] Thaksin came to power, he wanted to turn everything into assets and people started to forget what we had promised together.” Villagers are responsible for how they treat their natural resources, but government is responsible for the incentives and messages it provides about how villagers should manage these resources.
    Public forest land under more direct control of the Community Forest Committee endures similar mistreatment. Boonruang gestures at a charred section of scraggly trees and mentions two recent fires that got out of control on the community land. He believes one was started by a man wanting to burn the tall grasses so his cows could graze more easily, and the other by a man who thought a fire would leave a stripped field where no one would object to his planting rice. This mix of unawareness and greed in public land use is often tempered (though never completely averted) by the rest of the community – which in both cases turned out en masse to put it out together. That is, until the fire trucks came to finish the job.
    It makes sense, then, that Boonruang doesn’t believe the villagers can preserve the forest on their own, but rather need government help. The Committee tries to engage local government officers in their meetings, because they are likely to give funding for forest awareness campaigns and camps. Involving local government officers also strengthens networks between communities. Boonruang is fond to tell me of the Queen of Thailand’s visit to the forest 11 years ago. He asked her for funding so the Committee could build 14 public ponds (one for each village in the area) to provide water access for livestock and agricultural purposes. He was taken aback when the military showed up soon after to dig 151 ponds — a certain improvement for the villagers, even if 151 ponds could not eliminate their reliance on the municipal fire department. But even the Queen’s generosity is characteristic of the often inconsistent and forceful government aid for community forests. Boonruang finishes his story, “The government just sets up some committee and leaves. In theory both of us must work and plan together... but ultimately I think the government should let communities take care of themselves more and not be over-controlling.”

INSTINCTIVE CLAIMS
    I had experienced the results of applying too much control the previous day while visiting Sam Pak Nam village. It is a controversial community because of its location inside national park borders. Passing the park checkpoint and information center, I noticed the same species of tree stood in uniform rows along the road. As we drove past the government-owned land and entered the village boundaries, Somjit Eakwaree, president of the Sam Pak Nam community forest, scoffed at the formation. “The forest is not like the military; trees don’t have to stand in line.” As opposed to the national park protocol, Somjit said the management plans of the village worked towards “true diversity in the forest.” He did not want or trust government help in caring for their community forest land. The government was equally distrustful of the villagers, forcibly evicting them in 1991 when establishing the national park.
    Somjit pointed out the diverse tangle of bamboo and trees on our visit to see the village monks at the temple, proud how the health of the community forest had improved since their protests won them the right to return to the land. I asked if the villagers’ success in forest management wasn’t motivated by their fear of being evicted again. “That’s part of it,” Somjit agreed.
    The community forest has rules, but unlike national park regulations, the rules emphasize the interactions between villagers and the environment rather than restrict them. For example, villagers are allowed to harvest mushrooms in the community forest, but they must use a basket rather than a bucket so that some of the spores can sift through the holes and develop. Despite asserting the success of the community in managing their forest, Somjit seemed acutely aware that the villagers would be blamed first should the health of the national park forest decline. I shared with Somjit and the monks a little bit about the national park system and the use of public land in the United States.
    They were surprised to hear that in our urban and suburban American communities, the “look but don’t touch” principle regulates much of the public access we have to nature. One of the monks replied, “That’s not enough. By just looking you can’t learn enough about the balance between nature and people.” My childhood in a private-turned-community forest taught me that in fact this isn’t enough— when given the opportunity, our instincts are to plant and harvest, to swim, to raise bees and collect honey.
    In the United States, we no longer expect these opportunities. We are very lucky if we live near a forest or other land we can use this way. Ironically, the fact that my family land is privately owned is the key to it being a community resource; were it public land, I can’t help but think it would either have been sold to developers, turned into yet another set of soccer fields, or else cordoned off to be viewed only through trails and from picnic benches. Yet having neighbors depend on my family to share our land is not a real solution, because we reserve the right to sell it, destroy it, or place our own restrictions on its use. Alternatively, a true public domain would fall under regulations decided by the community that uses it together.
    Boonruang feels the key to successful community forest management is getting the community to feel joint ownership over their resources. In a long, late-night conversation in Sam Pak Nam village, Somjit responded to my waning attention by shouting, “Do you think this world only belongs to you?” Under his stare in the harsh fluorescent light, I again felt like the little girl sitting in a tutu, hands in stream silt and eyes on the woods ahead of her, claiming it as her own. In the end, however, the forest is better off in the hands, beehives, and baskets of neighbors. And we, in its company, flourish.