Plodding through a meeting agenda around an oversized table in an undersized room is a lot less thrilling than thwarting loggers by making a home in a tree. In fact, it can be downright boring: the discussion is slow as molasses. But that's the route members of the Yellowwood Lake Watershed Planning Group have taken in the past two years. Working with the administrators of Yellowwood State Forest, they feel, will do more good than working against them.

The planning group is a quality-of-life concession for forest authorities, too. Since fall 2000, when the group began, Yellowwood's property manager Jim Allen and resource specialist Brenda Stine have been at times verbally abused, at others patronized, and nearly always told how to do their jobs. But they persist because they think taking advice from the watershed group will ultimately improve the way they manage the forest.

Many say it has paid off already. The watershed group has considered two projects for the state forest already. One is a horse trail proposed by Indiana Trail Riders Association. The other is a "demonstration cut," an educational tool for private loggers. In the beginning, some of the group's members strongly opposed each of the projects because they feared more erosion and siltation in the lake. But instead of trying to stop the projects, they have worked to make them better, understanding that recreation and logging are parts of the state forest system mission, at least for now, whether they like it or not.

"My goal is that the goals of the watershed group and the goals of the timber management program can find some common ground," Friends of Yellowwood representative Charlie Cole, a musician and naturalist, told the watershed group at a recent meeting. Such statements represent a compromise for Friends of Yellowwood, which has a policy of opposing logging in the watershed.

"Friends of Yellowwood has always been a kind of a radical group," says Linda Baden, Friends of Yellowwood member and publication editor at Indiana University Art Museum. "We've been always in a reactive position. When a giant paved road was proposed to go through Yellowwood, we protested that. A radio tower, we were able to stop that. A big private development on really fragile watershed land, we were able to stop that. We've always felt that we were always in this reactive position. We wanted to be much more proactive. Instead of reacting to bad decisions, we wanted to help formulate good decisions."

Department of Natural Resources officials say the watershed group is part of a conscious attempt to include more public input in its decisions. In addition to activist organizations like Friends of Yellowwood and tree-sit organizers Indiana Forest Alliance, the group-which has a core of about eight members-has representatives from Hoosier Fly Fishers, Indiana Trail Riders and private landowners, who make up about a fifth of the nearly 3,500-acre watershed.

The state forester also has a citizen's advisory committee. In 2002, the DNR started holding open houses at all of its facilities to present new projects to the public and take comments.

"One of the biggest criticisms has always been that we don't have a public input process," Yellowwood resource specialist Stine says. In the past six years, she says, she's "seen a lot more comments coming in-more people feeling like they can give a comment."

She also thinks that activist groups like Friends of Yellowwood are now voicing their concerns more often-and more quietly-through the watershed group. Friends of Yellowwood's Baden agrees, but warns that the equilibrium the group has struck is tenuous. She worries that compromising with the timber management program will dilute the goals of Friends of Yellowwood and the watershed group.

"There's something clean and unambiguous about being against something, especially when you know you're right, when you're just calmly sure you're right," Baden says. "What we're trying to do now is a lot more complicated, and in some ways less satisfying in the short term. And maybe futile. It depends on how entrenched the state is, how committed they are to continuing the commercial logging, how willing they are to look at other options."

Property manager Allen sees the fact of group's existence as proof that the DNR is flexible and willing to work with the community. "We're willing to try new and different things, and I think it's neat."

Logging practices at Yellowwood have long been controversial, but around the time of the watershed group's conception, the state forest was witness to tree sitting, lawsuits and a highly publicized tree spiking. During its rocky first year, the membership fluctuated a lot, and many people seemed to be using the meetings to let off years of built-up steam.

But now, the watershed group seems to be entering into a phase of self-reflection. Now that it has stable, committed members, some think that its advisory role should be more formal, so that the forest administration would be required to heed the committee's recommendations. However, Stine-who runs the meetings-says they still have a hard time reconciling all of the different opinions at the table: "How to take just a group of people and turn them into a functioning body is another thing because everyone comes with his own agenda."

Indiana Trail Riders representative Yvette Rollins appreciates the effort DNR officials have gone to in creating the watershed group and thinks the advisory role should be left informal. "We have the same issues in Monroe County with Lake Monroe. But I've never been on any advisory watershed committee meetings-I don't even know if there's any that exist. And I think this is a great step for Jim to go to the trouble to sit down at the table and listen to what the consumer has to say, where a lot of people wouldn't even take the time. He spends evening hours there that he doesn't need to be spending working with and dealing with, I have to say, a very diverse, sometimes difficult group of people to work with. And I don't think they train you for that in your forestry training."

This lack of training is exactly what former Fly Fishers representative Larry Barber criticizes. Barber resigned from the group last month because he thinks Allen and Stine have refused to acknowledge the full extent of their agency's role in the accelerated siltation of the lake. As a deputy superintendent of the Louisville, Ky., school district during desegregation in the 1960s, he was responsible to citizen advisory committees of black parents who felt wronged by the unequal practices of a previous administration.

Barber says he and his colleagues had to acknowledge those wrongs before they could gain the trust of the parents and make positive changes. "We had to be trained to be head of an advisory committee. And you can't just walk of the woods and all of a sudden deal with people who are angry over the way in which you've been cutting wood. You just can't do that. Life doesn't operate that way. But the state I don't believe has trained any of those people to do that."

To Barber, the siltation of the lake is a personal assault. He has been fly fishing there yearly since 1958 and thinks deep, structural changes need to be made in the way the watershed is managed.

"I think that the value of something like Yellowwood Lake and Yellowwood State Forest is immense. It is an island of both history and natural wonder in this state. And I think to have it managed by professional loggers is really foolhardy. Because if you go to school to learn how to be a logger, what are you going to do? You're just going to cut trees," Barber says. "And the state's attitude is that it's a source of income, not a source of beauty. So I don't think an advisory committee in the state of Indiana is worth the powder it would take to blow it up. I think it should be different, it should be people organized who have a vested interest in that property for its beauty, its wonder, who can tell them, no by God, you can't do that any more, and they're not be able to. The only way they're going to learn is take it away from them."

For people like Barber, who are focused on changing DNR policy or state laws, the advisory group is of little use. They have to work through legal means such as lawsuits and lobbying legislators. But most of the people who have stuck with the group believe it can have influence, even if it means compromising with the DNR on timber harvesting.

"Can this ultimately change policy? Sure," Tim Mathers, who took over from Barber as a representative of Hoosier Fly Fishers, told the group. "But that requires a lot of work and a long-term idea."

Chelsea Wald is a master's student at the IU School of Journalism. To see other stories written on forest issues by J-school graduate students, go to: ...