Nepal RPCV Joe Krueger has been to Liberia four times in the past two years as part of a program that is drawing on skills from the U.S. Forest Service to restore Liberia's timber industry
The Liberian Forestry Initiative came about as a means of re-establishing a viable and responsible industry, as the country operated under a shaky interim government. While the initiative is driven by a U.S. Forest Service team, it is funded by the State Department with the cooperation of the United Nations. The program is aimed at establishing laws and regulations and a general framework for managing Liberia's forests. Krueger said he was tapped for the program because he had worked on a community forestry project in Senegal in 2004, and had served in the Peace Corps in Nepal in the early 1990s. He first went to Liberia in April 2005 and has been back three times since, most recently in December. Krueger said there has been progress in rebuilding the country's timber industry, and a big part of it is due to the relative stability that's developed since last year, when a competent, Harvard-educated president was elected, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.
"Right now, the industry is completely unregulated," he said. But many of the pieces are falling in place for an organized, regulated timber industry to start up soon. And there is pressure for Krueger and his fellow advisers to make it happen. "There is a lot of pressure on the Forest Service to get this sector back up and running," Krueger said. "People want to know, where are the logs, where is the revenue?" The old contracts have all been nullified and new ones will be issued under a system that will more closely monitor the movement of products. A "chain of custody" system is being developed to track logs from the stump all the way to their export destination. Read more.
Niger RPCV Clark Fleege helps rebuild Afghanistan's forests
Fleege, who directs the Lucky Peak Nursery for the Boise National Forest, will make his second trip to Afghanistan to continue working on a United States Department of Agriculture project to plant native tree species for reforestation, soil improvement and beautification. The country has lost a lot of its forests to a drought that has plagued the area for the past several years.
"By us going in there and helping improve their natural resources, we can help these people improve their lives and have a more stable country," Fleege said. The U.S. compound where Fleege will stay includes dorm-style housing in metal shipping crates. He will be confined to working in and around Kabul because of safety concerns, and will need an armed escort everywhere he goes. "What we do is management of natural resources, and sound natural resource management is just fundamental for anything, for life: having good water, good soil, clean air," he said. Read more.
Stuart Conway has been living half in the U.S., half in Central America for about 25 years now. He and his wife Jennie Bramhall joined the Peace Corps, went to Guatemala for their honeymoon, and didn't come home for three years. They lived and worked in a small town just south of the beautiful highland colonial city of Antigua. Since then, they return to Central America several times a year, specializing in helping small communities grow trees and protect their watersheds.
Stuart co-founded Trees Water and People (the name grows on you) in 1998 with Richard Fox, a veteran forest arborist, who specializes in North American forest preservation and watershed protection. Both of them moved with their families to Ft. Collins, Colorado, rolled up their sleeves and got their organization up and running. They work along with a small staff in a lofty 2nd floor suite in an old brick and timber building on College Avenue between downtown and the University. Towering Plains Cottonwoods hang huge limbs overhead (Cottonwoods decorate the whole city, and why they aren't planting new ones is beyond me), and just one block north the main train line intersects the street. If you call them and hear a roar in the background, it's just a freight train about two hours on the tracks from Denver.
When the folks at Trees Water and People aren't providing funds and expert assistance growing trees and protecting watersheds in Central America, they are working closer to home, protecting watersheds in the Rocky Mountains of the U.S. This is Richard Fox's area, and he brings to his work a lifetime of experience in forests throughout America, but mostly in the Rockies. In his time, Richard has had crews of planters where, using a special planting tool, each person could plant up to 1,000 trees per day. I didn't believe him, but we timed the motions, and I did the math. I guess it's true. We could have fun with this! One thousand people could plant a million trees a day. A billion trees in less than three years!
Planting trees is only part of the solution, though, and managing a forest and a watershed is complex work that is never done. Richard's trees and watershed protection has so far enlisted the support of communities throughout Colorado and Wyoming, mostly along the "Front Range," the eastern slopes of the Rockies. Read more.