Our Approach –Implementation consists of the following ten components:
- IDRS works with tribes that have forest land of their own and/or have ancestral forest lands located adjacent or near to potentially millions of acres of forest lands managed by the USFS and BLM
- IDRS enters an agreement (MOU) with the tribe that spells out how we will assist the tribe in increasing capacity to actively engage in forest maintenance and restoration activities. These activities consist of fuels reduction, thinning, controlled burning, reforestation, restoration of wildlife habitat, etc to address the risks of devastating wildfires, insect infestation, the invasion of non-indigenous species, and other conditions that reduce bio-diversity and resilience of the tree stands.
- IDRS encourages and as necessary assists tribes in developing their own Forest Management Plan that emphasizes sustainable management; a focus on forest maintenance and restoration; and reintroduces the tribe’s own place-based wisdom, traditional resource management practices, and other cultural and subsistence practices on its own forest lands.
- IDRS supports tribes to get involved in the Forest Service’s current efforts to Forest Management Planning rules for
National Forests and revising revise/updating the Land Resource Management Plans for National Forests. We support tribes in utilizing this opportunity to persuade the Forest to reprioritize its goals, redirect appropriated dollars, and reintroduce the tribes’ local based wisdom and traditional forest management practices. - IDRS provides technical assistance and training to tribes designed to build their capacity to evaluate the feasibility of business ideas; prepare business plans; identify and secure grants and loans; develop, start-up and operate small businesses; build strategic alliances with the business community, create legal corporate structures within which to manage the businesses; budget, prepare bids, and negotiate contracts and other agreements with public agencies (e.g. USFS, BLM, NPS, USDA, etc) etc.
- IDRS works with tribes to develop their own forest maintenance & restoration crews, and to transform these into self-sustaining businesses that employ and train tribal members, and generate revenues by marketing forest restoration and related services to federal and state land management agencies and private forest owners.
- IDRS supports tribes to sustain their involvement in marginally profitable forest restoration work by implementing an “integrated wood utilization strategy” that transforms woody biomass materials left on the ground after thinning into marketable revenue generating products. We work with the tribe to develop new enterprises that transform the biomass feedstock into clean renewable energy (biomass conversion facilities), and into other value-added products (wood chips, pellets, packaged firewood, small diameter posts and poles (custom logs, railroad ties, fence posts and rails, etc)
- IDRS helps tribes, the USFS, and the BLM to understand the substance of the Tribal Forest Protection Act (enacted in 2004), and how to use it to further their mutual objectives of restoring forest health.
- IDRS assists the tribe to use its unique legal and political position to persuade federal agencies to take proactive steps to engage in forest restoration. Tribes are in a position to initiate the TFPA; their retained rights to fishing, hunting and gathering on their ancestral lands; their special “government to government” relationship with the federal agencies; and the agencies’ legal responsibility to protect and enhance trust and treaty resources. Each and all of these devices can serve as the tribe’s leverage to initiate restoration projects and share in managing forest resources on the public lands.
- IDRS works with these forest based tribes and tribal coalitions that are engaged in promoting forest health, and helps to organize them into an increasingly vocal constituency that forms strategic alliances with other conservation organizations and advocates for conserving and restoring the health of this Nation’s threatened forest lands.
For further information regarding Environmental Development Services, please contact:
Steven Haberfeld, (916) 482-5800