Harvesting guidelines and agency-issued permits, while each a step toward ensuring some kind of ecological and social balance, are loosely regulated and their effectiveness is as yet unknown. The sudden rise of interest in NTFPs has left the agencies with little precedent to follow. The Jefferson Center's philosophy is that system monitoring and other environmental activities will not succeed unless the harvesters are involved. According to Brown, the parallel decline of timber and increase in other marketable forest products has brought multicultural issues related to NTFPs to the forefront. Traditionally, there have been many thousands of people working in the woods.
People are very concerned about the forest.
With NTFPs, much of the work is seasonal and short-term, varying from a few weekends to every day up to six months a year. Loggers on the coast may harvest florals in the off-season, while people who work with medicinals primarily in the spring and summer may do other kinds of work in the fall. Though the common perception is that there's easy money to be made in this type of woods work, the reality is often long, wet days filled with taxing physical labor. Because the industry follows the harvest, some harvesters travel hundreds of miles from their homes for days or weeks at a time to reach stands of coveted matsutakes or morels. Elton Baldy agrees.