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About the Native Forest Network
About the Native Forest Network
The Native Forest Network (NFN), founded in 1992, is a non-profit
conservation organization whose mission is to protect and
restore forests and wild places. We achieve our mission by
representing the public interest in public land- and resource-management
planning and bringing public, media and political attention
to imperiled forest ecosystems while advocating solution-oriented
policies that will put local people in rural communities to
work protecting and restoring forests.
Support the Native Forest Network: Become a Member
Today!
Our success protecting and restoring forests and
wild places depends on people like you! Please help support
effective grassroots forest protection by joining
the Native Forest Network today!
Our Vision: The Restoration Century
America's public lands suffered nearly a century of relentless
industrial logging and road building that have left our forests
and watersheds and countless plants and animals in a rapidly
deteriorating condition. It will take heroic effort to restore
our national forests and simultaneously revitalize rural communities
by creating sustainable economic activities.
The Native Forest Network and other conservation organizations
are working to promote bona-fide, ecologically based restoration
projects which put people in rural communities to work conducting
road removal and watershed restoration activities.
Since 2005 marks the Forest Service's centennial, we believe
there is a golden opportunity to make the focus of the next
100 years of Forest Service management the "Restoration
Century."
While some argue that more industrial logging is needed to
restore our forests, we believe the first step in the restoration
process is to prevent further ecological degradation by protecting
our national forests from industrial logging and other forms
of resource extraction.
Next, we need to redirect taxpayer subsidies currently going
to support industrial logging towards ecologically-based restoration
projects – such as road removal and watershed restoration
– with the goal of restoring natural processes and reestablishing
fully functioning ecosystems. Only once this happens will
we see the Forest Service's management of national forests
in step with the desires of an American public who want to
see our forests protected and restored.
To help support this goal, the Native Forest Network and
other forest advocates have been involved with a three-year
bridge-building effort between community forestry advocates
and restoration workers.
The goal has focused on developing agreement on an ecologically
based framework for restoring our nation's forests that is
not only good for the land, but also good for communities
and workers. While it has not always been an easy process,
it has resulted in us finding a surprising amount of common
ground.
One of the results of this process has been the development
of a set of Restoration
Principles as a national policy statement to guide sound
ecological restoration. The Principles are an essential tool
for stakeholders and decision-makers at all levels to develop,
evaluate, critique, improve, support or reject proposed restoration
projects.
Unfortunately, because the Forest Service’s budgets
are still tied to industrial logging and resource extraction
– not forest protection and restoration – the
public’s clean water, wildlife habitat, wildlands and
recreational opportunities continue to be squandered. Just
consider these facts:
• There are 445,000 miles of roads on national forests
– enough to circle the Earth 18 times – and the
Forest Service faces a $10 billion road maintenance backlog.
• An estimated 50% of riparian areas on national forests
require restoration due to impacts from industrial logging,
roadbuilding, grazing, mining and off-road vehicles.
• Less than 5% of America's ancient, old-growth forests
remain.
• 421 wildlife species that call national forests home
are in need of protective measures provided by the Endangered
Species Act.
Click below to see examples of the Native Forest Network's Solutions at Work.
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