Published on Thu, 09/08/2016 - 2:54pm
In the northwest corner of Montana, a coalition of partners recently turned a piece of lakeshore slated for subdivision into a new type of public forest. It exists largely because the U.S. Forest Service in 2012 launched a fund it calls the Community Forest and Open Spaces Program. The fund is vastly underutilized in the West, with more than two-thirds of its 35 recipients lying east of the Mississippi, but as development proliferates, Montana’s now-protected Alvord Lake offers a model more Westerners might consider adopting.