Who Owns the Land?

This paper discusses the basis, contours, and initial outcomes of the Family Forest Carbon Program (FFCP), a joint endeavor by The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the American Forest Foundation (AFF) that aims to enroll small landowners in Central Appalachia into the expanding forest carbon market. Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Disney are investing millions in carbon credits to offset their carbon emissions, and the FFCP provides a pathway for small landowners to sell credits from their forests. To be eligible, however, families must agree to an extensive forest management plan, one that ensures the forests are managed for carbon sequestration for upward of two decades. Although small landowners, often families, may technically still own their land on paper, they are agreeing to a form of corporate land enclosure by leasing their land for carbon offsets, bringing forward a critical and perennial question: Who owns the land in Central Appalachia? Using a mixed-methods approach—combining power mapping, archival analysis, site visits, and semi-structured interviews—this paper operationalizes points of generative friction and opportunities for more equitable outcomes, to situate the FFCP at a crossroads between repeating patterns of resource extraction or disrupting them, offering instead a model for genuine socioecological and economic transformation.