A Shared Commons
Coming Together Through Community Forests
Editor’s Note: A simple patch of woods can provide countless and diverse benefits to nearby communities, both human and wild. Betsy Cook describes how community forests have evolved from the early days of common lands for the harvesting of wood to today’s myriad uses of these places. She shares just how meaningful the collaborative efforts to identify, protect, steward, and cherish community forests can be. – Alex Redfield
In the face of increasing social isolation and division, public lands provide a special opportunity to build true in-person connections with strangers, acquaintances, and neighbors alike. Land connects us.
Across the country, the power of land as a community-building tool can be felt in public lands of all sizes, from the smallest town green space to the most dramatic blue-sky landscape. In New England, the pinnacle of this remarkable dynamic is seen most clearly in the rich and ongoing heritage of our community forests.
The simple definition of community forests is that they are owned, stewarded, and used by the community, for the community. They are created and managed through a participatory process that fosters collaborative decision making. Ultimately, that combination—the use of the community forest and the process of coming together to create it—both strengthens social bonds and enhances the foundational social fabric of a community.
The concept of a community forest has existed across many cultures for thousands of years. In New England, community forests—or town forests—served a specific role in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They were shared commons where anyone could harvest timber and firewood to build and heat their homes, and revenue from forest products often supported the creation of public schools. Today, due to changes in land ownership models and rising interest in protecting forests for community and climate benefit, the traditional town forest has been reinvented as the community forest.
13 Mile Woods, a community forest established in 2005 in Errol, New Hampshire, safeguards the local forest-based economy—it produced $1.7 million in timber revenue and supported $2 million in earnings in the logging sector in the first seven years after it was conserved. Each year, the forest supports two local jobs in forestry and logging and indirectly supports 10 additional jobs in other sectors. Photo © Jerry and Marcy Monkman, courtesy of Trust for Public Land
Four pillars define this modern approach to community forests.
First, the community drives all the management decisions about the land, from the land’s initial acquisition to ongoing stewardship priorities.
Second, benefits flow to the community. These benefits could be financial, like revenue generated from sustainable timber harvests or the outdoor recreation economy, or they could be benefits that are harder to quantify, like supporting the mental, physical, or spiritual health of community members, or providing key ecosystem services like clean water and flood resilience. These benefits were recently quantified in a special report by the Trust for Public Land (TPL), Community Forests: A Path to Prosperity and Connection.
The third pillar is community ownership: The land is owned by the community, which can be a town, county, nonprofit, tribe, or other local entity. This ensures that the forest will be managed in service of the broader public rather than a single group or individual.
The fourth and final piece is permanent legal protection, guaranteeing that the forest is conserved and that the community will benefit for generations to come.
In 2001, TPL helped establish one of the region’s first community forests in Randolph, New Hampshire. Since then, TPL has directly supported the creation of more than 30 community forests across the country, covering at least 30,000 acres. Echoing that support, the USFS Community Forest and Open Space funding program has also supported the creation of over 90 community forests since 2012.
The Huntington Community Forest in Vermont has quickly become a cherished landscape for students and teachers at the nearby school. Photo courtesy of Trust for Public Land
More recently, TPL has embraced a growing number of requests for community forests next to schools. As a recent example, TPL teamed up with the Town of Huntington, Vermont, and the Vermont Land Trust to protect the Huntington Community Forest in 2021. Immediately adjacent to the Brewster-Pierce Memorial School, the 245-acre property provides an outdoor classroom where kids can learn about the natural world every day, all year long.
Though community forests provide educational, ecological, and economic benefits to their surrounding communities, perhaps the most important benefits they offer stem from a community forest’s role in building community and promoting civic engagement. Community forests are created only through a public process where community members come together with shared goals and make collaborative decisions. This process helps communities clarify the values they care about, creating bonds and clarifying community priorities that can be carried forward to all facets of community life.
We have seen local leaders in community forest efforts choose to run for office. We have witnessed real estate developers, foresters, and mountain bikers who have never met before forging lifelong friendships over a shared love of their local woods. We’ve seen how voting for community forests has strengthened local democracies at annual town meetings. The whole community will turn out, sit in a room together in person, and raise an orange placard for Yes and red for No. There are few places where this model of in-person, community participation in decision making is seen in its truest form.
Residents vote in support of establishing a new community forest at the annual Town Meeting in Bethel, Maine. Photo courtesy of Trust for Public Land
The process of coming together to create a community forest strengthens social bonds, civic empowerment, and local leadership. Once created, these community forests become a shared backyard for the entire community.
In Vermont, the Catamount Community Forest hosts an annual Halloween trick-or-treating event in the forest, while the Barre Town Forest has become home to an annual music and art festival, RockFire, celebrating the community’s granite quarrying heritage. In Maine, the Bethel Community Forest hosts monthly trail work days and annual community forest days. Some towns host trail races, mountain biking events, tree planting days, and more on their community forests. Some towns or nonprofits allow local residents to harvest wood from the forest to heat their homes. And throughout all these places, community forests are a source of life and energy as they directly support the needs and priorities of a place.
Local, close-to-home community forests also foster a greater sense of connection to, and appreciation for, the natural world. Every investment made in accessible outdoor spaces like community forests is an opportunity created for kids and adults to develop and strengthen their conservation ethic.
“The process of coming together to create a community forest strengthens social bonds, civic empowerment, and local leadership. Once created, these community forests become a shared backyard for the entire community.”
As we watch changes happening in the world around us, fueled by increased social isolation and national divisions, our community forests are an increasingly important foundation. They are a genuine beacon of hope with long-lasting positive impacts. They are the physical infrastructure on which relationships within a community are built and community values are defined. They are the seeds that can sprout true collaboration and joint decision making, in all facets of life, as we work to regain the important roots of our democratic institutions. They are the land that connects us.
Betsy Cook is the Maine State Director for the Trust for Public Land. Previously, Betsy worked with the New England Forestry Foundation, and also Triangle Land Conservancy and Duke Forest, both in Durham, North Carolina. Betsy lives on Peaks Island in Casco Bay and enjoys exploring all corners of Maine, cross-country skiing, hiking, and paddling with her spouse, Jesse; their two kids, Nora and Malcolm; and their energetic dog, Banjo.