Some 1.5 billion trees are planted in the U.S. every year, about 5 trees for every American.

Annually, U.S. forestland owners plant about 6 trees for every tree harvested.

About one-third of America's original forest - some 300 million acres - have been converted to other uses, principally agriculture.

There are 26 million more acres of forestland in the Northeast than there were in 1900.

Today, forests blanket about one-third of the U.S. land base and about half the U.S. East.

U.S. annual growth rates have exceeded harvest rates since the 1940's.

Timber harvesting is forbidden on 50% of all National Forest lands in the U.S.

National Forests account for 20% of the nation's forestlands and 19% of its timberlands.

National Forests hold 46% of the nation's softwood timber inventory but only provide 6% of the annual harvest.

Since 1986, the harvest of timber from America's national forests has declined 70%.

In the West, 34% of all forestland and 54% of all timberlands are in national forests.

National forests in the Pacific Coast and Intermountain West regions hold 68% of the nation's softwood timber inventory, but provide less than 28% of annual harvest.

Forest density has increased 40% in the U.S. over the last 50 years.

“This is forest restoration,” shouts Brian Cottam as he stands beneath giant ponderosa pines at Fort Valley, minutes west of Flagstaff, Arizona. Mr. Cottam is coordinator for the Greater Flagstaff Forests Partnership, a coalition of environmental and community groups that are pioneering forest-thinning strategies for use in the area’s national forests.

In this issue we write about “The New Pioneers,” an eclectic mix of entrepreneurs, visionaries, scientists, politicians and true believers who are rallying around a simple but powerful idea whose time has come: caring for the West’s desperately ill national forests beats standing by helplessly while they burn to the ground.

Our story is centered in Arizona and New Mexico where yet another dreadful wildfire season is already underway. Most of the story we tell was completed before the disastrous Rodeo-Chediski Fire swept across big pine country in northern Arizona. The 468,000-acre blaze—the largest in Arizona history—forced the evacuation of several rural communities including Show Low, a lovely mountain town centered in what was the largest continuous ponderosa pine forest in the United States. 423 homes were lost, mainly in neighboring Heber, Overgaard, Pinedale, Linden and Clay Springs. On June 19, two thousand degree heat was recorded at the head of the wind driven conflagration, which was then advancing on Pinedale at 1.5 miles per hour.

But if wildfire were the story we wanted to tell, we could just as easily be reporting from the forest graveyards of northern California, western Montana, southern Oregon or southwest Idaho— all scenes of earlier conflagrations that were just as devastating. Since 1995, the West has lost more than 25 million acres in stand-replacing wildfires. As anyone who was living near one of these holocausts will tell you, the losses to communities are measured in decades, not acres.

Sadly, we know the wildfire story all too well. In our Winter 1994–1995 edition we autopsied the charred remains of some of the West’s biggest forest fires, repeating the unheeded pleas of foresters who, in the early 1950s, first warned of the dire consequences of federal neglect in forests that were then showing early signs of the onset of pestilence. But this is not just another wildfire story. Nor is it a story about restoration forestry, a hands-on science endorsed by many ecologists and biologists; or letting nature take its course, a handsoff approach some environmentalists prefer. We compared these opposites in our Winter 2000-2001 issue and concluded that leaving the West to the vagaries of big wildfires is a hopeless and irresponsible proposition with no future in a society that expects as much from its forests as we expect from ours.

No, this is a people story—a glimmer of hope accounting of the good things that happen in forests and communities when humility and determination finally overcome arrogance and refusal, when science-based options and public values jointly form the basis for shaping rational strategies for overcoming irrational fears.

We have watched this story unfold for nearly four years. At first, it looked like numerous other reports from western logging towns that had embraced restoration forestry in their struggle to hang on to their cultures in the aftermath of the collapse of the federal timber sale program: Quincy, California and Medford, Oregon to name just two.

But something different is happening in small towns all over the Southwest. Community based collaborative forestry—the all too clinical name given to the gut wrenching process of replacing distrust with consensus—is working here as it has not worked elsewhere in the West. We wanted to find out why, so we spent five months traveling the Southwest talking with those we now call “the new pioneers.”

In our report we lay out what appear to be the reasons for their extraordinary success. We also describe the daunting task that lies before them. How, for example, do you thin dead and dying trees from ready-toburn forests in a region with so little logging or saw milling industry left? And how do you keep the federal grant money flowing long enough to cobble together the manufacturing infrastructure needed to process the virtual sea of trees that crowds the region’s forests? And, by the way, what sort of milling infrastructure will be accepted in a part of the country where so many want nothing to do with a return to “the old days” when logging and saw milling were big industries?

We owe our Evergreen readers an apology for the long delay in completing this issue. Research took longer than expected. Then the Rodeo-Chediski Fire broke out, forcing several people we interviewed to flee their homes before they could review our draft manuscripts for accuracy. We subsequently decided to postpone publication long enough to get a sense for what might happen in the aftermath of this fire. Three delays later this much is clear. Save for radical environmentalists—who seem to enjoy the publicity that comes with these conflagrations—the rest of Arizona has seen enough. Nearly 97 percent of respondents to an azcentral.com poll say they support restoration forestry and other preventive measures. In a separate six-state poll, Portland, Oregon pollster Bob Moore found that 80 percent of registered voters surveyed are concerned for the risks catastrophic fires pose. 73 percent said they favor thinning to reduce the risk. Even in more populous urban environs, two-thirds favor thinning over catastrophic fire. We’ve never seen such groundswells of support for science-based forestry.

We have laid out this issue to be read from cover-to-cover, just as you would read a book. We set the stage with the answers to eight commonly asked questions about the situation in the Southwest. After you’ve studied these you’ll be ready to read our two main stories, “Solving Forestry’s Rubic’s Cube” and “The New Pioneers.”

So get settled in wherever you are. You are about to meet an extraordinary cast of characters: pioneering men and women acting on faith who have embraced one another’s hopes and fears in a way unlike anything we’ve seen before. We hope their story inspires others who are trying to cross the cultural divide that has separated those living in the West that was from those living in the West that is.

Onward we go,

Jim Petersen, Editor