MOFGA's Low Impact Forestry (LIF) Project seeks to encourage LIF practices in Maine through establishing networks, appropriate standards of practice, and providing public and professional education.
Forestry work at MOFGA is carried out primarily by the volunteer LIF Committee, which meets several times a year, and coordinates MOFGA's LIF Workshop each November.
Common themes of the LIF work:
a great appreciation of the community that one finds among people who work in, with and for the forest;
a simultaneous respect for wise use of natural resources and natural ecology; and
a simple love for the woods and interest in trees.
Long-Term Goals of the Program
- establish and promote an overall standard of LIF practice and policy for loggers and landowners
- manage a network of pracitioners
- educate interested landowners and loggers
- establish a certification program with a standard contract to ensure that LIF loggers are compensated fairly
- establish a network of sympathetic mills, truckers, foresters and loggers to promote resource sharing
- increase educational offerings at the Common Ground Country Fair
- increase the annual number of educational workshops and site visits open to the public
- create LIF apprenticeships with experienced practitioners
- promote publication of LIF-related topcs in academic and public journals
- develop a web page for LIF resources
Additional Resources
Low-Impact Forestry and MOFGA: A Program in the Making, about the MOFGA LIF program's goals and history, by Mitch Lansky
Forestry as Ecosystem Management (7 page PDF) and The Living Soil (2 page PDF), two conversations between Barbara Alexander, a Vermont forester, and David Perry, professor emeritus of ecosystem science at Oregon State University
Excerpts from Mitch Lansky's Low-Impact Forestry: Forestry as if the Future Mattered
(PDF files -- some are very large!!)
For more information about MOFGA's LIF programs, contact:
Andrew Marshall, MOFGA Education Director
Sam Brown or Peter Hagerty, LIF committee chairs