News

[ PWCFC Environmental Justice Sourcebook Goes Live ]
[ PWCFC Co-Sponsors Research Conference ]
[ New Report Describes Participatory Research with Mushroom Harvesters ]

PWCFC Environmental Justice Sourcebook Goes Live

The Pacific West Community Forestry Center is pleased to announce a new addition to its website -- the Environmental Justice Sourcebook microsite. The Environmental Justice Sourcebook provides a primer on environmental justice, with an emphasis on rural contexts. Though Enviornmental Justice is often framed as an urban issue, the examples cited in the sourcebook make it clear that environmental justice issues affect the lives of low-income and minority communities in rural areas. The sourcebook includes a summary of current literature and a description of current legislation and regulations that have environmental justice implications for communities. In the future, you'll be able to download the text of laws and memoranda from the microsite. In addition, there is a growing database of resources for communities working on environmental justice issues.

The Environmental Justice Sourcebook was written by Beth Rose Middleton.

You can access the sourcebook as an interactive Web site (a "microsite") or as an Adobe Acrobat file.

Microsite: To visit the PWCFC's Environmental Justice Sourcebook microsite, click here.

PDF: This sourcebook is available as an Adobe Acrobat file here (124 KB - PDF).

The microsite is a work in progress, and we welcome your comments. Please send comments to pwcfcinfo@fcresearch.org. Our microsite was designed by Jean Calaci and developed by John Bennett of Berkeley, California.

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PWCFC Co-sponsors Participatory Research Conference

With the California Communities Program at UC Davis, Forest Community Research, and UC Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources, the Pacific West Community Forestry Center co-sponsored Making a Difference in Communities: Bridging Research and Community Agendas through a Participatory Research Approach. More than 65 UC Cooperative Extension advisors, specialists and researchers, students and community members attended the two-day workshop September 15-16, 2003 at the University of California Davis. Through case presentations and facilitated discussions, the workshop explored how adopting a participatory research approach can enhance the quality of scholarship and make research more responsive to community needs and aspirations.

To download a summary of workshop outcomes, including a list of resources on Participatory Research, click here.

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New Report Describes Participatory Research with Mushroom Harvesters

The Pacific West Community Forestry Center helps facilitate two participatory research projects to monitor non-timber forest project harvesting in the National Forests of southern Oregon: the matsutake mushroom harvests of Crescent Lake, Oregon and Cave Junction, Oregon. These projects aim to maximize participation by low-income harvesters in multi-party monitoring of the social and environmental impacts of mushroom harvesting and related land management issues. The Pacific West Center has prepared a new publication: Sharing Stewardship of the Harvest: Building capacity among low-income Non-Timber Forest Product harvesters. The report describes these exciting partnerships and summarizes the outcomes and lessons learned during the 2001 and 2002 harvest seasons.

To download the report, please visit our Publications page.

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