On their own initiative, about twenty residents of the northern Sierra Nevada, including environmentalists, timber industry representatives, and local officials, held a series of meetings beginning in 1993 at a library in the logging town of Quincy, California, and after months of deliberation and negotiation they agreed on a plan to manage the surrounding Plumas, Lassen, and Tahoe National Forests. They had chosen the library, it was said, so that they could not scream at one another – and by all accounts, the strategy worked. “After fifteen years of fighting … the idea that we would sit in one room and recognize each other's right to exist was a new one,” said Michael Jackson, an environmentalist in the Quincy Library Group (QLG). A newspaper serving the area explained, “Local combatants were forced to deal directly with each other or to remain in perpetual struggle and gridlock.” Laura Ames, who directs an alliance of grassroots environmental groups, noted that deliberation succeeded where litigation failed. “We are in a new era,” she said.

Across the United States, and especially in the West, hundreds of citizen associations like the QLG bring together environmentalists and their adversaries in face-to-face collaboration to manage shared resources. The more inclusive these associations become – for example, by engaging public officials and representatives from national business and environmental groups – the more democratic are their deliberations and the more legitimate their results.