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Between mountains, steep valleys, dense forests, and blue lakes in the Kootenay region of British Columbia are the communities of Harrop and Procter. With a long history of environmental activism, the Harrop-Procter Community Cooperative (HPCC) is an integral part of the area through forestry management, wildfire mitigation, and local job creation. 

Community forests are essentially when a locally-led community organization leads forestry management and makes environmental decisions in the surrounding area. They often rely on provincial funding to carry out projects.

Harrop-Procter’s community forest was established back in 1999 after decades of local protests around environmental issues in the area (like clearcut logging), and feeling like the community was not being consulted by the provincial government on solutions. What started out as the Harrop-Procter Watershed and Community Protection Committee in 1984 eventually paved the way for the HPCC. 

Today, the cooperative has been a part of the community for over 20 years, manages the 11,300 hectares of forestry in the area, creates employment opportunities for locals, and strengthens the community through forestry education and involvement. 

Like HPCC, there are several community forests across Canada that are using local knowledge and resources to protect their surrounding environment and build their community’s resilience against climate change, and by extension the general well-being of the community. For instance, community forests create jobs and economic opportunities for local populations, as well as increase local engagement on climate-related issues. 

Post-COVID, many community forests have also been vital in delivering economic benefits to local communities by providing jobs and a stable income during a time of instability. The Creston Community Forest, for instance, has recently been able to hire 15 new employees within the town to work on a wildfire mitigation project. 

“Community forestry, by definition, is about local people. Making local decisions, having the control, bearing the risks and reaping the benefits of those decisions,” says Erik Leslie, forest manager at HPCC. “It’s all about having control, and a devolution of power, up to a certain point, to communities.” 
 

How community knowledge shapes wildfire prevention

When the community bears the risk of wildfires, the prevention work they do can actually be more proactive, according to Leslie. 

“We know the land-base very well at a level that the government doesn’t because we’re a relatively small area and it’s everyone’s backyards,” says Leslie. “So we know where the water lines are, where the recreational trails are, and where the fire risks are. The people that are bearing the risk of wildfire in the community are the people who are making the decisions.” 

This kind of knowledge, shared by locals, is vital, but even more important is the way groups like HPCC use that knowledge to protect the community. 

For instance, there are local walking trails in the community that locals use all the time recreationally, to walk their dogs and pick huckleberries. These trails aren’t on any official map and aren’t designated, but they’re important to the locals, says Leslie. 

HPCC then realized that these informal trails would actually serve as a great starting point for wildfire fuel breaks (a strip of land where a fire can be better controlled) because it would slow down the spread of a potential wildfire from the lack of trees on the trail.

“We use the access trail and can work off of that for reducing the fuel on both sides of the trail, providing access for firefighters, and reducing risks of ignition,” says Leslie. 

In the case that there is a wildfire, HPCC will know all those access points, they can get the resources there, and can also establish the tactical part of fire suppression like knowing where to lay hoses and put in sprinklers. This kind of solution can save communities from immense damage. 

In their paper on the role of local knowledge in conservation efforts, Ryan K. Brook and Stéphane M. McLachlan state that the insights that local communities have about their surrounding environments is increasingly important especially because of the complex problems posed by climate change. 

“The documentation of local knowledge can provide important avenues for discussion and building dialogue between scientists and the communities in which they work, and help ground studies in the realities of non-experts throughout the research process,” according to Brook and McLachlan. 

Steve Kozuki, executive director at the Forest Enhancement Society of BC (FESBC), says,as an organization that funds forestry initiatives across the province, they depend on the knowledge of locals. 

“We rely on local people and local communities to come forward and propose projects,” says Kozuki. “That philosophy is rooted in the belief that the best people who are most suited to know what’s best for their communities, are people who live and work in those communities themselves — they’re the experts.” 

FESBC has supported 263 projects valued at $238 million as of March 2022, and more specifically provided funding for over 120 communities to do wildfire risk reduction all across British Columbia from Vancouver Island to the interior BC. 

Many community forests are primarily funded by provincial governments. “We try to leverage as many provincial dollars as we can, otherwise we wouldn’t have enough money to do the work — because it’s millions of dollars worth of work,” says Leslie. 
 

Using the cooperative model within a community forest 

As a cooperative, HPCC is owned by the residents of the community, who can become lifetime members for $25. Leslie, as the forest manager, reports to the board of the co-op, as well as directly to the community.

Through public meetings, field tours, newsletters and just chatting on the street, the HPCC’s members provide information and feedback about forestry matters, whether that’s concerned with mill operations, wildfires, or watershed issues. 

Leslie explains that because HPCC is literally owned by the community, everything from conservation efforts to wildfire mitigation is directed by the community.

The number one priority for the community since they were founded continues to be watershed protection, followed by sustainable jobs. Leslie also added that community wildfire protection now comes under watershed protection, “because it’s one thing that houses could burn down, but the more likely scenario is that large portions of the watersheds can burn down, and if it’s a high intensity fire everyone’s drinking water can be significantly impacted.” 
 

Resilience in social cohesion and building local knowledge

A University of British Columbia case study on HPCC found that more than protecting the local environment, community forests can also provide a way for locals to connect with each other. Given the history of activism at HPCC, which continues today, the spirit of local support, and participation in forestry matters makes a difference when it comes to community cohesion — and therefore resilience. 

Also building on top of the existing community knowledge, HPCC also educates locals as new projects emerge, relevant forestry and watershed information, which strengthens community awareness of local environmental issues.

The study states that the continuous learning has allowed the co-op to evolve and become more successful as the community’s knowledge of the area grew along with their participation in conservation efforts.   

That community engagement is a crucial element to the effectiveness of community forests like HPCC, says Leslie. It means the group can work to make big management decisions on highly complex and contentious issues, because they are deeply invested in the wellbeing of the area.

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