Natural Resource Access Rights and Wrongs: Nontimber Forest Products Gathering in Urban Environments

ABSTRACT

This article uses research about non-timber forest products (NTFP) gathering in Seattle, Washington, USA to examine how people gain access to natural resources in urban environments. Our analysis focuses on gathering in three spaces: parks, yards, and public rights of way. We present a framework for conceptualizing access, and highlight cognitive mechanisms of access associated with foragers’ internal moral judgments about harvesting. Key findings are: (1) internal moral calculations about whether it is right or wrong to harvest a particular NTFP in a particular place are an important but previously unacknowledged mechanism governing resource access; and (2) these calculations may help prevent over-harvesting of NTFPs, which are common pool resources, in urban environments where social and environmental conditions lend themselves to a de facto situation of open access. Our findings suggest that voluntary codes of conduct may be the best way to manage NTFP access in cities.

KEYWORDS:

• Access
• common pool resources
• foraging
• nontimber forest products
• tenure
• urban forestry

Acknowledgments

Joyce Le-Compte Mastenbrook and Lauren Urgenson helped conduct interviews. Lee Greer helped edit the manuscript. Kendra Wendel assisted with manuscript preparation. Marla Emery and Patrick Hurley contributed toward shaping the research design. We thank three anonymous reviewers for their comments, which helped improve the manuscript.

Notes

NTFPs are plants, plant parts (e.g., leaves, fruits), plant exudates (e.g., resins), and fungi that are harvested from forested places. In urban environments they include wild, cultivated, and feral species, native and non-native.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station Joint Venture Agreements PNW 10 JV 11260489-024 and PNW 09 JV 11261975–056, and Contracts AG-046W-P-12-0054 and AG-046W-P-12-0061. The Institute for Culture and Ecology provided in-kind funding support.