| This dissertation is about two efforts to propose and enact management arrangements on sections of national forests in California's Northern Sierra region: The Quincy Library Group (QLG), and the Maidu Cultural and Development Group (MCDG). Both of these organizations have been described as "place-based" meaning that their origins, the collaboration between their members, and the bases of their forest management plans are all grounded in relationship to particular locales. This dissertation explores the dynamics of conflict and collaboration associated with these two place-based efforts. I present a way of seeing place in both spatial (local/non-local) and temporal (past/present/future) dimensions. Seeing place in this way allows me to move beyond the typical accounts of the QLG, as merely the conflict between local and national control of national forests, and the MCDG, as merely the conflict between tradition and modernity in forest management and the reconstitution of the Maidu nation.; I examine the role of place in the mobilization of the MCDG and the QLG, in their forest management plans and management areas (the Maidu Stewardship Area and the QLG Area), the means of legitimating these plans and areas, and the dynamics of conflict and collaboration that arose in the attempts to put these plans and areas "on the ground." In telling these two tales, I hope to open up new opportunities for the study of "place-based" natural resource management---how such efforts form and change, how they devise and employ their rhetorical and material tactics, and why they evoke certain relations of conflict and collaboration. Seeing place as a zone of contact between dialectical elements of local and national/global, and tradition and modernity, I hope to support a more dynamic analysis of the community forestry phenomenon in the United States; one that is relevant to both practitioners, and to the theoretical realms of political economy, social movements, cultural politics, and the politics of nature. |
