In her article about the community forum to launch the new Itasca County Area Forest Legacy Fund, Grand Rapids Herald Review reporter Britta Arendt captured some of the sparky discussion that followed U of M Professor Mike Kilgore’s presentation on the threat of forest parcelization in the Itasca area. Do GenXers’ green consumer habits translate into a land conservation ethic? Britta quotes one community member as saying he thought his twenty-something daughters would be more likely to want to sell the family forest land to buy a Prius and solar panels than to inherit the land itself.
These hunches are empirically supported by new research conducted by the Pinchot Institute for Conservation and the US Forest Service on what offspring of family forestland owners think about maintaining their family forestlands. The results, presented last fall to a VFVC audience by research author Catherine Mater, are alarming: many of these next-gen owners have had little involvement to date in the management of their family forest and express little interest in becoming more involved.
Clearly, figuring out Minnesota’s forestry hedgehog has to start with ensuring we’ve still got working forest landscapes left for GenXers and their children’s children to work, live, and play in.
