Even cultures that long ago turned their forests into whatever seemed more immediately useful still celebrate the forest primeval in religions and myths passed down over millennia. From ancient Athens to the British empire, seagoing powers turned forests into sailing ships. During the Industrial Revolution, European countries used their forests--and their colonies\' forests--to feed the growth of manufacturing and commerce. In its nineteenth-century push westward, the United States converted forests into farms and cities and railroad ties, even as Brazil is now fueling its steel industry with rainforest charcoal and Indonesia is exporting plywood to stoke its rapid economic growth.

Once let alone, damaged forests can recover as long as the assaults leveled at them haven\'t overwhelmed nature\'s regenerative powers. But in many parts of the world, forests are now under a virtual death sentence. At least 15 million hectares of tropical forest are vanishing each year, taking with them plant and animal species and indigenous peoples and leaving the world a poorer place, both biologically and culturally. In the temperate zones, forests are being fragmented by commercial logging, injured by pollution, converted to tree plantations or farmland, or falling victim to urban and suburban sprawl.

In Breaking the Logjam: Obstacles to Forest Policy Reform in Indonesia and the United States, Charles Barber and Nels Johnson of WRI and Emmy Hafild of Indonesia\'s Sejati Foundation examine the origins and impacts of current forest policies and recommend ways to make forest management more sustainable in two of the most important forested countries. The two countries differ in many ways, but both have forestry policies established in an earlier era and increasingly out of step with evolving perceptions of forests\' true worth. As a result, many forests are under siege in both countries, and powerful forces are arrayed against the policy changes needed to maintain forests\' health and productivity.

The authors of this report chose to focus on the United States and Indonesia to underscore the emerging scientific consensus that forests are in trouble everywhere--and the emerging political consensus that the North cannot deplore tropical deforestation while turning a blind eye to its own troubled woodlands. The authors demonstrate that overcoming the obstacles to more sustainable forest management in both countries will require grappling with three sets of issues: forest property rights regimes, the distribution of the costs and benefits of forest exploitation, and the political process for determining forest policies. All forested countries can learn from the experience of these two, since all face similar problems.

Specifically, Breaking the Logjam spells out how these two particular countries could deal with property rights, forest economics, and the forest policy-making process. But at its heart is a more general point: preserving and using the world\'s forests wisely depends as much on how a nation\'s political economy and political process works as on whether new technologies are adopted or particular forest-sector policies reformed.

Indeed, the report argues that in both Indonesia and the United States, the technical and policy changes needed to sustain forests are already well-known. Neither national government lacks knowledge, but the political will to remake their forest policies in the face of fierce opposition from powerful entrenched interests that benefit from current arrangements is missing. In this context, the authors maintain, forest policy reform must be broadened to encompass the structural elements of national economies, legal systems, and policymaking processes.

Breaking the Logjam extends the analyses and policy recommendations put forth in such WRI studies as Surviving the Cut: Natural Forest Management in the Humid Tropics and The Forest for the Trees: Government Policies and the Misuse of Forest Resources. To carry the work forward, WRI researchers are now beginning regional and local research on issues of sustainable forest management policy in East Africa, Amazonia, Mexico, mainland Southeast Asia, and New Guinea. In the United States, WRI is looking at the role of forests in a sustainable society under the aegis of its "U.S. Sustainability Project."

We would like to express our appreciation to the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Norwegian Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Swedish International Development Authority, the United Nations Development Programme, the Canadian International Development Agency, the Surdna Foundation, the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, and the W. Alton Jones Foundation for their generous support of WRI\'s general research on forests and biodiversity conservation issues. For their foresight and support, we are deeply grateful.