Recently, considerable discussion has centered on whether broad stakeholder interests, uniting together to work collaboratively on natural resource project recommendations to restore functioning ecosystems and enhance ecological processes, is an appropriate and effective way of managing our Forest Service lands.

Collaborative conservation emphasizes the importance of local participation, sustainable natural and human communities and voluntary consent and compliance, rather than enforcement by legal and regulatory coercion. Collaborative conservation reaches across the great divide connecting environmental advocates, commodity producers, forest practitioners, biologists, hydrologists, local residents and national interest groups to find working solutions to intractable problems that will languish unresolved for decades in our existing policy system.

Forests cover one-third of the nation. These forests offer important functions by filtering half the nation's water supply, providing jobs to more than a million forest products workers, contributing more than $100 billion in labor income and sales, absorbing 20 percent of the U.S. carbon emissions, generating $14.8 billion of recreation revenue and providing habitat for numerous wildlife and plant species.

Montana's total land base covers approximately 93 million acres. Forests occupy 22 percent of the land base, with 30 percent under private ownership. The remaining 70 percent is under state or federal jurisdiction. Of the 70 percent under state or federal ownership, the Forest Service hosts roughly 61 percent (or just over 12.2 million acres) of the non-reserved timberlands.

Non-reserved timberlands lay outside of wilderness, wilderness study areas, inventoried roadless areas, and administrative and research sites. Even though Forest Service plans identify non-reserved lands as "suitable" for timber production and harvest, they have become the epicenter of the land management debate for the last 30 years.

Recognizing that the "timber wars" of the past has not and will not produce a successful platform for federal resource management, the forest products industry has undertaken a number of conservation programs in an effort to address sustainability and environmental concerns associated with the sustainable growth, harvest and processing of forest products.

Collaboration between the forest products industry, environmental and non-government organizations can be an effective way to identify common objectives, reduce conflict and produce mutually acceptable land management programs and activities. Collaboration on specific landscapes allows industry to continue to harvest fiber and timber and produce forest products and provide jobs with the support from interest groups and the local community.

Those that choose to engage in a collaborative group understand that reaching consensus on a project recommendation requires considerable time and an ability to listen to opposing values and viewpoints. In addition, a successful collaborative strives to be proactive, to understand each other's interests and where positions are "checked" at the door. The group is committed to the process by adopting rules of engagement, understanding the consequences of no action and determining the role and source of science.

In Montana, long-standing watershed collaboratives and new emerging stakeholder groups all in some degree mirror a national effort encouraging ecological, economic and social sustainability. These collaboratives look to leverage national, state, local and private resources, work to facilitate the reduction of wildfire management costs, including re-establishing natural fire regimes, demonstrate the degree which various ecological restoration techniques achieve ecological and watershed health objectives and use forest restoration byproducts to offset treatment costs while benefiting local rural economies and improving overall forest function.

There are those who choose not to enter into a collaborative discussion or process by opting to continue with the failed status quo model of attacking projects through the appeals process and litigation arena, instead of working to reach consensus recommendations. Unfortunately, the greater emphasis on process has had a collateral affect of facilitating the growth of adversarial activities and behaviors. An administrative record has too often taken the place of a conversation, leading to a point of diminishing returns.

The jury is still out on whether all the effort stakeholders put into collaborative conservation leads to work done at the right place for the right reason. The collaborative process may not be a perfect system or offer a perfect solution, but if it fails due to an orchestrated attack by opposing forces, the options are to revert to the "timber wars" of old, where biodiversity is not an objective but rather a constraint, or to congressional intervention.

Julia Altemus is the executive vice-president of the Montana Wood Products Association.