What Is a Healthy Forest?: Definitions, Rationales, and the Lifeworld

摘要

First appearing in political discourse in the late 1980s, forest health ( FH) has been a contentious concept in federal resource management for almost two decades, particularly in the western United States. One of its more recent expressions was the FH legislation passed in December 2003, which seeks to reduce the risk of wildfire on public lands while providing jobs in the forest industry. Using interview data collected in 1997 from 25 "leaders" in federal forest policy in Idaho, this paper exploresthe concept of FH: what it is, who says so, how best to implement it, the underlying rationale used to defend it, and the role that the concern with FH plays in the informant's lifeworld.