CCAS Lecture Series - Kelly Kay

"Environmental Histories and Geographies of Public Recreation on Private Industrial Forests in the US South and Pacific Northwest"
Since the 1990s, we have seen a major shift in who owns private industrial timberland in most forest-reliant communities in the United States, with formerly vertically integrated companies restructuring and making vast quantities of land available for purchase by institutional investors like pension funds and university endowments. One impact of this change has been that the norms of access for community members have shifted-with many communities experiencing the rise of gated forest roads, new paid permit systems, and increasingly expensive leases for hunting. In this presentation, I will draw extensively from archival materials collected from the Forest History Society in Durham, NC and the University of Washington’s special collections to trace how public recreation on private forestland has shifted. This material will be supplemented with interviews conducted in rural Oregon and Georgia to show how the changing nature of recreational access has impacted those who live, work, and play in the woods.