A professor at the University of California at
Berkeley has taken a scholarly look at the Quincy Library Group and
at its plan and decided that both are flawed, but not because he
opposes consensus efforts. In the same article, Timothy P. Duane
finds that a consensus group in California’s Yuba River watershed
does something the QLG fails at: It successfully integrates local
and national concerns to manage a chunk of Bureau of Land
Management forest. But at Quincy, writes the assistant professor of
environmental planning and policy, the Quincy Library Group chose
to go it alone, without the Forest Service and without national
environmental groups. That wasn’t accidental, he writes. In his
view, the Quincy group is held together mainly by resentment of
urban influences on rural areas. The result, he writes, is that the
local community has all the power within the QLG process, and
non-residents are excluded. The article, titled “Community
Participation in Ecosystem Management,” says that the group’s bill,
HR 858, now before the U.S. Senate, “runs the risk of being a
Trojan Horse for dismantling existing environmental laws and
disempowering environmental interests.” The 27-page article is
available from the Ecology Law Quarterly, 20 Boalt Hall, #7200,
University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-7200. Ask for Vol 24,
No. 4, 771-797.
*Ed
Marston
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Quincy comes up short.
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