Working Lands Initiative

The Mt. Adams landscape is a patchwork of public, private and tribal lands; some are protected as wilderness, primitive or natural resource conservation areas. Others exemplify the working lands that have been the backbone of local timber and agricultural economies for more than a century. Some of these lands provide recreational opportunities and all perform a number of important ecological functions. However, as residential real estate values have skyrocketed in recent years and more people are interested in a home in the woods, the conversion of private lands to non-forest and non-agricultural uses has been on the increase.

Mt. Adams Resource Stewards promotes community development efforts that maintain and support existing livelihoods in an effort to revitalize rural communities without threatening local culture. Essential to this process is protecting the land base that is one of its greatest assets and this has led to our interest in developing the Working Lands Initiative.

Through the Initiative, we envision a process in which we will engage the community and a variety of expertise in identifying characteristics of essential lands where there are opportunities and needs for conservation. The Working Lands Initiative will work with interested and willing private landowners that desire to continue current uses of their land into the future, but may not be able to do so because of escalating real estate values and development pressures. We also anticipate engaging land managers and corporate land holders in an effort to explore opportunities for protecting current “working” uses of their lands.

The Initiative will ultimately seek to conserve key lands as opportunity permits, using any of the following tools:

• working forest and conservation easements
• fee-title land purchase
• coordination with conservation-minded buyers
• support to development of markets for local ecosystem services

Mt. Adams Resource Stewards has a particular interest in opportunities for development of community-owned forests, as a means of preserving contributions that working forests make to local economies and communities through production of commodities and support for sustainable forest-based industry, recreation, aesthetics and ecosystem services. While the potential for community-owned forests is becoming an increasingly popular topic for western U.S. communities that have experienced rapid development of their resource lands, few successes have been had in this region.  The sheer amount of capital required for land acquisitions in a very competitive timberland investment market often makes such a project cost-prohibitive. It is our goal to continue exploration of new ideas and possibilities as they emerge, and prepare and position ourselves for action when the appropriate time, funding and level of community support surfaces.