Mexico's Community Forest Enterprises: Success on the Commons and the Seeds of a Good Anthropocene

The road to sustainable forest management and stewardship has been debated for decades.Some advocate for governmental control and oversight.Some say that the only way to stem the tide of deforestation is to place as many tracts as possible under strict protection.Caught in the middle of this debate, forest inhabitants of the developing world struggle to balance the extraction of precarious livelihoods from forests while responding to increasing pressures from national governments, international institutions, and their own perceptions of environmental decline to protect biodiversity, restore forests, and mitigate climate change. Mexico presents a unique case in which much of the nation’s forests were placed as commons in the hands of communities, who, with state support and their own entrepreneurial vigor, created community forest enterprises (CFEs).David Barton Bray, who has spent more than thirty years engaged with and researching Mexican community forestry, shows that this reform has