Constance Best

Perhaps the greatest threat to the sustainability of America's family forests is that almost no one among the general public realizes how dependent we are on the many goods and services-from timber to clean water to plentiful wildlife-these forests provide. Nor do they care.

It is concern about the broken connections between people and forests that inspired the writing of America's Private Forests: Status and Stewardship, (Island Press 2002) by Laurie Wayburn and myself.

In the course of our work, we discovered that there was no one source to turn to for an overview of the ownership of private forests, the state of their multiple ecological resources and the important changes underway. Nor was there any comprehensive source of ideas and initiatives that will allow private forests to be better conserved for the benefit of future Americans.

Therefore, we hope the publication of America's Private Forests is the beginning of a movement to raise public awareness of the critical economic and ecological roles played by these forests. With this increased awareness, public commitment to the conservation of private forests will grow to a breadth and depth that corresponds to what forests give us.

This book draws on the latest USDA data, a broad review of the literature and scores of interviews with experts, to describe the accelerating threats to private forests from fragmentation, ecological degradation and outright conversion.

The data clearly shows how the booming economy of the '90s, sprawling development and other demographic shifts led to a dramatic increase in forest loss over that of the previous decade-rising to almost a million acres a year. Key forest states such as North Carolina, Georgia, California and Washington lost hundreds of thousands of acres on the one-way street to development.

At the same time, the parcelization of large properties into small tracts has also increased. On top of the million acres of lost forest, an additional two million acres-an area the size of Yellowstone National Park-are broken up every year into ranchettes. After surveying these and other challenges to the sustenance of private forests, America's Private Forests provides a sourcebook of solutions, drawing on public and private established and emerging initiatives.

Our conclusion is that a new, wider effort is needed if America is to enjoy the same extent and quality of forests at the end of this new century as we have today. This wider effort needs to embrace the natural community of all of us who depend on private forests-not just the usual folks from industry and environmental groups who bicker and battle over the forests they both in fact love.

While we lay out this conservation strategy in detail in the book, in summary it revolves around two principles: (1) Engaging the self-interest of private forest landowners by increasing returns from conservation and stewardship to rival those from development; and (2) Finding ways for the urban public to reconnect with private forests and become invested in their conservation.

Pursuing this dual-track strategy, a coalition of people who care about private forests can build a counter-force of conservation in a number of ways such as: