| In Canada, governments have historically promoted economic development in rural regions by promoting exploitation of natural resources, particularly forests. Forest resources are an economic development driver in many of the more than 80% of native communities located in forest regions. But forests also provide aboriginal people with cultural and spiritual values, and non-timber forest amenities (e.g., biodiversity, wildlife harvests for meat and fur, etc.), that are incompatible with timber exploitation. Some cultural and other amenities can only be satisfied by maintaining a certain amount of timber in an old-growth state. In that case, resource constraints might be too onerous to satisfy development needs. We employ compromise programming and fuzzy... |
