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IFCAE Project:

Cave Junction Mushroom Monitoring Project





   
Timeframe:  2000-2001
Investigators:    Ajit Krishnaswamy
Administration: Institute for Culture and Ecology
Funding: IBIG Forestry Action Committee/National Forest Foundation
   
 
Project Overview

In Fall 2000, the Illinois Basin Interest Group-Forestry Action Committee engaged IFCAE to function as an independent observer of the Cave Junction Mushroom Monitoring Project. FAC also requested IFCAE’s assistance in writing an assessment of the project.

The Forestry Action Committee is a citizen group established in the early nineties to improve the health of the Illinois River watershed. With the influx of traveling mushroom pickers into the Valley starting in the early nineties, social tensions emerged between local residents and outside pickers. In 1999, the FAC initiated a grassroots effort aimed at reducing those tensions and improving harvesting practices. The fall 2000 Cave Junction Mushroom Monitoring Project was a continuation of the 1999 project.

Organizers of the project sought to diminish social tensions and improve harvesting practices through employing a bi-cultural team of harvesters to monitor pickers in the woods and by holding campfire and community-based meetings where pickers could voice their concerns and have an opportunity to interact directly with Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management staff responsible for regulating mushroom harvesting activities on public lands in the Illinois Valley. Groups and individuals taking an active role in the project during the 2000 season included the Illinois Valley Mushroom Club, Forestry Action Committee, Illinois Valley Ranger District, BLM Medford District, USDA Forest Service Civil Rights Department, Forestry Community Research, Surdna Foundation, Alliance of Forest Workers and Harvesters, USDA Forest Service Asian Community Liaison, The Jefferson Center, Cave Junction Methodist Church, Phong and Limai Phonepaseuth, and the Institute for Culture and Ecology.

The main outcomes of the 2000 project included

  • Increasing communication between traveling harvesters, local community members, and land management agency staff;
  • Providing cooperative and mutually agreed upon solutions to law enforcement problems, and
     
  • Giving government agencies an opportunity to learn how to work within citizen-initiated self-regulation processes.

Key lessons learned from the Cave Junction Mushroom Monitoring Project for similar efforts by forest users to regulate themselves include the importance of:

  • Grassroots control and management in forest user self-regulation efforts,
     
  • Organizational structures/processes based on consensus, open-mindedness, and diversity, and
     
  • Employment of monitors who are experienced harvesters and respected by all parties.