Editor's Column

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Forest Facts

By: Jim Petersen

“A vast forest of gigantic pines, inserted frequently with open glades, sprinkled all over with mountains, meadows, and covered with the richest grasses, was traversed by our party for many days. We came to a glorious forest of lofty pines, through which we have traveled ten miles. The country was beautifully undulating; and although we usually associate the idea of barrenness with pine regions that was not so in this sense: every foot being covered with the finest grass and beautiful grassy glades extending in every direction. The forest was perfectly open and unencumbered with brush wood so that traveling was excellent.”

Edward Beale, transcontinental railroad surveyor, traveling south of the Grand Canyon, 1858

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A remnant of the seeming infinite colonnades forest surveyor C.E. Dutton wrote about in an 1882 U.S. Geological Service report. This one lies west of Flagstaff.

It is hard to believe that the Southwest’s tumbledown forests once fit Edward Beale’s idyllic description, but they did. His lofty pines and grassy glades grace countless black and white photographs taken as early as 1890.

Thousands who walked or rode the region’s northern reaches in the early years following the Civil War recorded what they saw in their journals. Among the more picturesque accounts: C.E. Dutton’s vivid description laid down in painstaking detail in a report he wrote for the U.S. Geological Service in 1882.

“The trees are large and noble in aspect and stand widely apart except in the highest parts of the plateau where the spruces predominate. Instead of dense thickets where we are shut in by impenetrable foliage, we can look far beyond and see the tree trunks vanishing away like an infinite colonnade. The ground is unobstructed and inviting. There is a constant succession of parks and glades, dreamy avenues of grass and flowers winding between sylvan walls, or spreading out in broad open meadows. From June until September there is a display of wild flowers which is quite beyond description.”

Scientists believe perhaps 75 percent of the Southwest’s ponderosa pine forests fit this description 150 years ago, but today you have to look long and hard to find settings in either Arizona “A vast forest of gigantic pines, inserted frequently with open glades, sprinkled all over with mountains, meadows, and covered with the richest grasses, was traversed by our party for many days. We came to a glorious forest of lofty pines, through which we have traveled ten miles. The country was beautifully undulating; and although we usually associate the idea of barrenness with pine regions that was not so in this sense: every foot being covered with the finest grass and beautiful grassy glades extending in every direction. The forest was perfectly open and unencumbered with brush wood so that traveling was excellent.” or New Mexico that even come close to what Messrs. Beale and Dutton found. To be sure, you can still find big trees in the high country—many more than you might think would be there—but they are entombed in dog-hair thickets that hide their existence from all but the most observant eyes. To be sure, this remains the largest contiguous ponderosa pine forest on earth, but the pine colonnades, the dreamy avenues of grass and the wildflowers winding between sylvan walls that inspired the poet in C.E. Dutton are nearly gone.

Today, some 73 million acres in the Interior West are on the verge of ecological collapse—a chain reaction calamity brought on by the presence of far too many trees for the natural carrying capacity of often-arid lands. Choked by drought and robbed of soil nutrients they are easy prey for marauding insects and diseases that can somehow detect stress in sickly trees. Inevitably, merciful wildfires end their misery.

Throughout the Southwest there is great concern for public safety. Forests surround many communities, including dozens that are summertime retreats for families seeking relief from the scorching desert heat. One such mountain enclave—heavily wooded Show Low-Lakeside, Arizona—had to be evacuated and was nearly overrun by the 468,000-acre Rodeo- Chediski Fire. Some 470 homes were destroyed, mainly in neighboring communities. It seems silly—maybe even callous—to say that it was inevitable, but is was. And if just one more warning was needed, it came in a May 15 dress rehearsal when 1,500 Prescott residents were forced to flee their homes as a furious fire bore down on their community. Though only five homes were lost, the swiftness of the conflagration prompted fire experts to predict that this season would likely bring one or more 100,000-acre conflagrations to the West. There have been three thus far.

Virtually all of the region’s communities—with their hundreds emerald-green golf courses—get their water from reservoirs that collect spring runoff from forested watersheds. But a fourth consecutive year of drought has pushed stream flows to all time lows. Less obvious is the amount of water that isn’t flowing because it is being sucked up by millions of drought-stressed trees that weren’t here a century ago. More obvious is the fact that last winter was a non-event across the Southwest. At 7,000-foot Flagstaff, where three feet of snow is considered normal in February, lawns were already greening up by Washington’s Birthday.

Tangled ponderosa thickets like this on in northern New Mexico’s Santa Fe National Forest are commonplace in the Southwest. These tickets often hide larger trees that could be saved by thinning the decadent trees that surround them.

Still worse, tree ring research underway at the University of Arizona suggests that, for all the talk about drought, the Southwest has actually been in a wet period for the last 211 years—and may soon re-enter a prolonged dry spell. By comparing the distance between rings— wider spacing indicates more robust tree growth brought on by above normal rainfall—scientists have concluded there have been four prolonged wet-dry cycles over the last 2,129 years. Wet cycles have averaged 225 years in length, so the region may well be approaching the end of a fourth such period and the beginning of a fifth dry spell: average length 339 years.

The last dry period, 1399-1790, caused the widespread abandonment of agriculturally advanced Indian settlements in six locales—thriving and increasingly populous communities that drew domestic and irrigation water from rivers and streams during the previous 375-year wet period.

Packing up and moving on is no longer an option in the Southwest, now the nation’s fastest growing region. And if polling data is any indication, most living here have no interest in standing idly by while forests they love and depend on burn to the ground in increasingly frequent and destructive wildfires. Questions abound.

Will this fire season be a bad one? [It already is]

Is anything being done to avert calamity? [Yes, high-risk forests adjacent to some communities are being thinned, but the pace of work is very slow when compared to the urgency of the wildfire problem facing hundreds of western communities] Can anything be done to pull forests back from the brink of fiery disaster? [Yes, but not without controversy. Some environmentalists say thinning dense forests is nothing more than an excuse to resuscitate a nearly dead logging industry. In an opinion piece he wrote last March for the Arizona Republic, Phoenix attorney Charles Babbitt, a member of both the Southwest Forest Alliance and the Audubon Society insisted, “We need to stand back and let our forests burn.”]

Who to believe? What to believe? Begin with this metaphor: like all who discover cancer raging in their bodies, we have choices to make where our desperately ill forests are concerned. We can fight or we can lie down and die. If the choice is to lie down and die, catastrophic wildfire will do the rest, just as surely as relentless cancer claims its victims. But if the choice is to fight, restoration ecology—a relatively new science rooted in holistic principles—offers hope for corralling metastasizing wildfires that are devouring the Southwest’s forests.

Unlike most forest management strategies, which define themselves in per acre yields and the timecost of investor dollars, restoration forestry seeks to recreate forest conditions and biological processes that were prevalent during a particular period of natural history. And no one who is familiar with what Southwest forests looked like 150 years ago should be surprised to learn that a great many people would like to recreate that look. Among them: Dr. David Garrett, former dean of the Northern Arizona University School of Forestry. Now retired, Dr. Garrett is campaigning for massive restoration projects in Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado—projects so large they would engulf entire national forests spanning multiple river drainages now threatened by the extraordinarily high risk of catastrophic wildfire.

“We have sufficient scientific data to proceed with large-scale restoration,” the ever-impatient Dr. Garrett said in a recent interview. “We need to get started soon or we are going to lose large chunks of the Southwest for hundreds of years to come.” Unlike most scientists, whose reputations rest on the quality of their research, Dr. Garrett’s reputation is that of a builder, an idea man. NAU’s lavish new forestry school was constructed during his tenure and, though often at odds with faculty members who resisted his more disciplined Forest Service approach to research, he is widely credited with having pushed the school to the forefront in restoration research. Now he wants to make certain that it escapes the theoretical confines of its laboratory beginnings. And he has again enlisted the help of some very powerful friends who helped him turn NAU’s forestry school into a research powerhouse. Among them: Senators Jon Kyl, Arizona and Pete Domenici, New Mexico. Also, a cadre of state and county officials—elected and appointed—who are demanding a larger say in the fate of the region’s national forests.

Top] Dr. David Garrett and his wife, Pam. Dr. Garrett, former dean of the Northern Arizona University School of Forestry, is campaigning for massive forest restoration projects in Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado. [Bottom] Aftermath of the Viveash Fire in New Mexico’s Santa Fe National Forest: the denuded trees reveal a forest far too dense to survive the impact of wildfire.

“I like the pre-settlement forest condition restoration forestry advocates because it pushes us away from valueladen societal goals written into environmental law over the last 50 or so years,” he explains. “Though wellintended, these laws don’t give us the flexibility needed to cope with present forest conditions. If we can agree that the biophysical character of pre-settlement forests is a desirable goal, then I’m here to tell you we have the knowledge and the tools necessary to re-create that system, or at least something very close to it.” While optimistic about restoration’s possibilities, he concedes the public may resist removing the number of trees that would have to be harvested to recreate the precise character of presettlement forests. “We’re talking about removing half the trees from some forests, more in others,” he says. “Fifty percent may be too much for the public to tolerate, but at the very least annual harvest has to exceed annual growth. Otherwise, we’re only perpetuating the current condition.”

It is easy to get lost in statistics that quantify the amount of wood that is being added to forests in the Southwest every year. Imagine a solid block of wood the dimensions of a football field stretching a mile into the sky. Now imagine that this massive wood block is made up of trees that in their lifetimes will never grow much bigger around than a saucer. The big ones will be dinner-plate size.

Perhaps more meaningful are the astonishing visuals that burst from field studies Dr. Garrett has conducted on three southwestern national forests since 1995: the Lincoln near Ruidoso, New Mexico, the Kaibab north of Flagstaff, and the Apache-Sitgreaves in Arizona’s White Mountains. All three forests are very popular tourist destinations. Each has undergone profound change over the last century.

On the Lincoln National Forest, Dr. Garrett reports ponderosa stand density has increased from 20 to 50 trees per acre in 1900 to 180 to 220 trees per acre today. Suppression of wildfire is the main reason, though overgrazing, high grading in big trees and, more recently, the absence of an aggressive thinning program, have also contributed to the situation. Before the downfall, low intensity ground fires, carried by abundant grasses, occurred on three to ten year intervals, clearing away accumulating debris in countless two to 100-acre meadows. Ground litter averaged one to three tons per acre.

Today, the meadows are gone, ground litter averages ten to 30 tons per acre and most wetlands and springs have been sucked dry by sickly drought-stricken pines. Biological diversity is a fraction of what it was when water and sunlight powered pine-accented meadows. It is the same in higher elevation mixed confer forests and in pinyonjuniper woodlands.

The scene repeats itself in the North Kaibab. Dr. Garrett reports that, despite the harvest of 1.4 billion board feet of timber from the area between 1900 and 1993, continuing forest growth exceeded losses from both logging and tree mortality. In the absence of frequent ground fires, which probably killed 90 percent of all seedlings before they were knee high, saplings eventually overran most Kaibab meadows and wetlands. And stand density in trees of all sizes continues to increase. In trees smaller than six inches in diameter density has increased from 107 per acre in 1910 to more than 900 today. And in trees larger than six inches, density has increased from 45 per acre to 115.

Concurrently, the average number of acres burned annually in the Southwest has increased from 7,000 to 98,600 acres since 1930. And the trend lines suggest the situation will continue to deteriorate until forest restoration work begins in earnest. “Nature and the public are on a collision course in these forests,” Dr. Garrett observes. “We are either going to remove some trees or Nature will do it for us. If we do the restoration we can control the outcome. If nature does it, we can’t.”

It is the same on the Apache- Sitgreaves National Forest. Dr. Garrett reports an astounding 500 percent increase in the number of trees four to 20 inches in diameter—from an average 25 to 50 trees per acre in 1900 to an average 314 per acre today.

But there has been a 50 percent decline in trees over 20 inches in diameter—a fact he says argues persuasively for a forest restoration. “The public benefits twice,” he explains. “In the near term the high risk of catastrophic wildfire is reduced and in the longer term natural systems that drove these forests for eons repair themselves. If we want to protect watersheds, recreation areas and wildlife habitat we have no choice but to remove some trees.” But there is a caveat. Reducing forest stand density to a point where community safety and forest recovery are assured—to a point where wildfire can reassume its more natural role—is going to require the presence of a wood manufacturing complex large enough and sophisticated enough to manufacture and market the fiber.

“We have to get the wood out of forests or we do nothing to alleviate the risk of fire or the spread of insects and diseases,” Dr. Garrett explains. “I know the presence of industry is controversial for some, but we can’t expect taxpayers to pick up the tab for restoration. We need to recruit businesses that can buy the fiber, remove it from forests and profit by turning it into products consumers will buy. If we aren’t willing to accept this kind of industry then we have to accept the consequences of catastrophic wildfire.”

[Top] Hiram “Doc” Smith is program liason officer for Northern Arizona University’s Ecological Restoration Institute. “I have been to most of the big dances,” he says of his 35 years with the Forest Service, many of them spent on fire lines. [Bottom] This is the old superintendent’s house at Fort Valley - the oldest forestry experimental station in the U.S. It was founded in 1908.

Not everyone who supports restoration is anxious to see new life breathed into the region’s nearly dead forest products industry, but Dr. Garrett does not see an alternative. “Some have suggested the industry could be temporarily revived, but I don’t see it. Once restored, Southwest forests will need to be thinned in perpetuity or stand density will again quickly increase. Some argue that we can control density with prescribed fire, but I think the amount of fire needed to do this region-wide would generate an unacceptable volume of smoke. Fire is a good tool, but I suspect you’ll see it used in combination with a thinning program designed to perpetuate a diverse multi-aged forest.”

The rubber meets the road west of Flagstaff at the Fort Valley Experimental Station. Scientists from the widely regarded Ecological Restoration Institute are working with community groups, testing a variety of thinning and controlled burning techniques to determine which ones best approximate the natural processes that are thought to have produced the forests thousands of pioneers found so captivating. At issue is the number of trees that must be removed from stagnating ponderosa pine forests to nudge a natural restart of biological processes that drove these ecosystems for eons before European settlement began—before grazing, fire suppression, logging and community development combined forces to profoundly alter first the structure and subsequently the vitality of the region’s forests. Most restoration ecologists agree that more than half the standing trees in the region’s forests must be removed, without regard to their size; but many environmentalists who support thinning question whether the restoration must include so many trees—and adamantly oppose removing trees larger than 14 inches in diameter.

Fort Valley is the oldest forestry experimental station in the United States. What better place to solve forestry’s Rubic’s Cube—that seemingly unfathomable convergence of collapsing forests, emerging science, political calculus, lost milling infrastructure, new market opportunity and gut-wrenching emotion.

The station was established in 1908, just three years after the Forest Service was founded. Its’ assigned task was to figure out why the region’s then wide open ponderosa pine forests were not producing very many seedlings. By 1919, nature delivered the answer in the form of a wet spring and a heavy seed crop—an alignment of the stars that scientists would later determine occurs only once every 50 years. Most of the trees standing in Southwest forests today—even those that are no bigger around than your wrist—germinated in 1919 or 1920.

The Institute, which is housed at Northern Arizona University’s College of Ecosystem Science and Management, is directed by Dr. Wally Covington, an early proponent of restoration forestry and one of the first forest scientists in the country to speak out about the plight of forests in the Interior West. Environmentalists were so enraged by his 1993 presentation at a forest health conference in Spokane, Washington that they took out a full-page advertisement in the Spokesman Review declaring, in a banner headline, “Where There’s Smoke There’s Liars.” They subsequently dubbed his Fort Valley research “Wally’s World,” after National Lampoon’s “Vacation” movie.

“I try not to pay much attention to them,” he said in a February interview in Flagstaff. “It’s strange. Forest restoration’s main goal is to increase biological diversity in forests. You would think environmentalists would favor it. Many do, but there is a very vocal minority that doesn’t. Instead they argue that the science is bogus and that our projects are designed to disguise logging. It’s unfortunate they’re so misguided.”

In addition to being a fine scientist, Dr. Covington is, in his words, “a life-long environmentalist.” Proof of his assertion would seem to lie in the fact that he was fired from his first job for organizing a rally in celebration of the first Earth Day. But his life underwent something of a sea change after the Spokane conference. He wrote an article for the prestigious Journal of Forestry in which he suggested, for a second time, that the West’s forests were in big trouble. But he added a kicker, noting that the thinnings he advocated would produce a significant supply of wood for struggling Southwest mills.

“I got a lot of establishment support for writing the piece,” he recalls. “But [he says only partly in jest] the real curse came in the form of widespread timber industry support for forest restoration!”

These days Dr. Covington’s main concern is that the public will confuse fuels management—thinning and burning to create firebreaks around communities—with forest restoration.

“Fuels management is certainly an important and necessary safety measure where property and lives are at risk, but restoration forestry is a much different and far more complex proposition,” he explained. “We begin with the evolutionary history of the land, assess its carrying capacity and answer the question, ‘What’s sustainable?’ Then, to create a more sustainable landscape, you depart from the current unsustainable condition to get what you need—hiding cover for wildlife, increased plant diversity, a decrease in the presence of insects or pathogens, increased natural reproduction in ponderosa pine, more meadows or better balance in the ages of trees that are present. The departure, or treatment, may involve controlled burning or thinning or a combination of the two.”

Despite his reputation for meticulous research, Dr. Covington readily concedes that forest restoration does not demand the precise re-engineering of presettlement forest conditions that in recent years have been the focal point of so much discussion in scientific and popular literature.

“We just have to be in the ballpark,” he explained. “Treating sick forests is a lot like treating sick people. Normally, bodies—and forests—can heal themselves if the infection or disease is treated. But when human and natural systems are totally out of whack greater intervention is necessary. Restoration forestry is that greater intervention. It is designed to give forests a fighting chance at natural recovery.”

This ponderosa pine stand on the Coconino National Forest was thinned using a management prescription developed by Dr. Wallace Covington, one of the most respected forest ecologists in the world and director of the Ecological Restoration Institute at Northern Arizona University. On seeing the result, radical environmentalists from Flagstaff called it “a clearcut” and said the stand had been “nuked.” You decide.

Dr. Covington’s first large scale forest restoration work began in 1995 at Mount Trumble in the Uinkaret Mountains north of Flagstaff. Working in concert with Institute colleagues, the federal Bureau of Land Management and the Arizona Game and Fish Department, he laid out four test plots in which tree density was reduced by varying amounts. But before the plots could be burned, years of accumulated debris had to be hand-raked away from the bases of old trees that were left behind as a future seed source. Had debris not been pulled away from the trees, the burn would have quickly eaten its way through the duff layer and into the root structure, killing the trees. After the sites were burned, sophisticated computer models capable of replicating crown fire behavior were used to determine which plots might best survive a wind-driven wildfire. Not surprisingly, thinned stands fared much better than untreated control stands. Flame lengths were reduced from 38 to 11 feet, Btu’s per square foot fell from 1,780 to 673 and only 20 percent of the forest canopy was burned versus 68 percent in control stands.

At Fort Valley, the thinning-controlled burn combination has produced the same positive result and the same negative outcry from environmentalists who support “Zero Cut,” a Sierra Club initiative aimed at ending all harvesting in national forests, including restoration forestry. As if on cue, one spokeswoman labeled Dr. Covington’s early Fort Valley tests “clearcuts” and said the site had been “nuked.” But in fact hundreds of trees were left behind to seed the next forest. Moreover, the remaining stand does hold about the same number of trees it would have held before European settlement began. If anything, Dr. Covington and his colleagues erred on the side of caution, leaving behind a forest that still contains too many trees.

But the work continues despite wild exaggeration and administrative appeals that delayed the project for two years. Credit the recently renamed Greater Flagstaff Forests Partnership, formerly the Grand Canyon Forests Partnership, a collaboration which draws participation from local conservation groups, local, county, state and federal government agencies, the Flagstaff Chamber of Commerce, several fire departments, the Institute and remnants of northern Arizona’s logging industry. The partnership has been at the forefront in more than 20 different restoration projects—all in the Fort Valley area. In one test plot 80 percent of the trees were removed, creating a park-like setting that virtually eliminated the risk of standreplacing wildfire and led to an early increase in plant diversity—thanks to the presence of sunlight for the first time in perhaps 50 years.

Another thinning proved its mettle in June when an approaching wildfire simply died out before it could cross the open tree stand into a neighboring subdivision.

“Ninety percent of the environmentalists we work with support this work,” says Brian Cottam, the partnership’s coordinator. “We may disagree amongst ourselves about some of the finer points, but conceptually we are all on the same page. We are engaged in every aspect of restoration: coordination with other groups, project planning, small wood utilization and public outreach. Our partners are working their guts out to make this work because for them catastrophic wildfire is an unacceptable alternative.”

But like the rest of the restoration projects now underway in the Southwest, the Fort Valley tests are subsidized in total by the federal government. And like everyone else involved in restoration initiatives, Mr. Cottam longs for the day when the work can pay for itself through the sale of logs and other wood residues.

Numerous entrepreneurial ventures are being incubated (again with federal funds) in both Arizona and New Mexico. “We are well aware that the nation’s spending priorities changed in the aftermath of last September’s World Trade Center tragedy,” he says. “It is clear we don’t have a long time in which to turn federally subsidized restoration into the bustling small business havens we believe it can be.”

But getting wood fiber to flow smoothly and efficiently into brutally competitive and increasingly global markets is difficult without sawmills—and there are only three milling companies of appreciable size left in the region. Rio Grande Forest Products at Espanola, New Mexico still buys federal timber when it can. But the Southwest’s two tribal-owned companies, White Mountain Apacheowned Fort Apache Timber Company and Mescalero Apache owned Mescalero Forest Products processes only tribal timber.

Worse, the region’s only paper mill, Canadian owned Abitibi, does not buy any wood fiber locally. Instead, it rails recycled pulp from British Columbia to its Snowflake, Arizona mill. The mill, built in the 1960s by Southwest Forest Industries, was for many years a major purchaser of small diameter logs and mill residues, but when Abitibi came to town it converted the plant to recycle-only operation. Rumor also has it that the company did not want to invest the estimated $100 million it would have taken to bring the mill back into compliance with stricter air and water quality regulations. Others familiar with the situation say the company would have made the investment if it could have struck a long-term fiber supply agreement with the federal government.

“Perceived size is a problem,” concedes Hiram “Doc” Smith, a 35-year Forest Service veteran and the Institute’s program liason officer. “Even among people who support restoration forestry there is a concern for limiting its scope to prevent large-scale forest products manufacturing from regaining a foothold.

A logger stands amid the rubble in a federally funded fuels reduction project behind several rural homes near Albuquerque, New Mexico.

To overcome this fear, we are moving slowly rebuilding public confidence as we go. But the time is fast approaching when we are going to have to get serious about building sufficient manufacturing capacity to process and market the wood that restoration will produce. Taxpayers aren’t going to foot this bill forever, nor should they.”

Mr. Smith’s multi-faceted career made him the perfect choice to be Institute liason officer. He has been a district ranger, a smokejumper and a fire incident commander. And just two years ago he earned an MA is forest ecology at Northern.

Though he fondly recalls his early years in the Forest Service, when Fortune magazine declared the agency and the United States Marine Corps to be the two most admired organizations in the country, he can just as easily rattle off the names of more than 80 plant species that thrive in Fort Valley thinnings. And he is plainly excited when he spies birds, butterflies, beetles, squirrels and mice settling in amid the woody rubble restoration creates.

“I have been to most of the big dances,” he says of his years on the front lines of some of the West’s biggest wildfires. “And I can tell you that restoration forestry is a lot more fun and a lot more productive than picking up the pieces after a big fire.”

Like Dr. Covington, Mr. Smith frets about federally imposed constraints on the location and size of restoration projects and on the size of trees that can be removed.

“We aren’t removing enough trees to meaningfully alter wildfire behavior,” he says. “We may say we’re improving forests, helping the economy and protecting homes but in many instances we aren’t. I understand the need to accommodate as many differing points of view as possible, but limiting the scale of restoration and the size of trees that can be removed does little for forests or the economy. Many people believe Southwest forests suffer from an overabundance of little trees, but the fact is that we have too many trees of every size except the very largest. If we want more big trees in our forests, and if we want to significantly reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire, we have to thin the whole forest, not just the smallest trees.”

Marlin Johnson concurs, though he sees the situation in a slightly different light. Mr. Johnson, who has also been with the Forest Service for more than 30 years, is Assistant Director of Forestry for the agency’s Albuquerque-based Southwestern Region.

“Treating or thinning trees of all sizes without regard to diameter limits is vitally important for two reasons,” he explains. “First, we do a better job of reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfire. But second, and maybe even more important, we leave a more ecologically diverse forest in place. That’s the future.”

But it may be that the most practical if not politically appealing reason for thinning trees of all sizes and ages lies hidden in the fact that adding some larger more valuable trees to each project transforms publicly subsidized restoration into a paying proposition. This according to a recently completed New Mexico study conducted by two University of Montana researchers, forest ecologist Carl Fiedler and forest economist Charles Keegan.

The study, titled “A Strategic Assessment of Fire Hazard in New Mexico,” indicates that comprehensive forest treatment—treatments in which tree diameter limits are not imposed— net $8 per acre after logging and haul costs are paid. By contrast, removing all trees nine inches in diameter or smaller requires a $439 per acre taxpayer subsidy, while imposing a diameter limit of 16 inches costs taxpayers $368 per acre.

Simple multiplication yields a staggering taxpayer burden. In New Mexico alone nearly four million acres are said to be at high risk of crown fire. Add another million acres for Arizona. Worse, in the two states one million more lie within the urban interface and need immediate treatment. Now multiply: 6,000,000 x $439 per acre = $2.63 billion. That’s for the Southwest alone. Pocket change compared to the cost of pulling the entire west out of the frying pan: $32 billion, based on Dale Bosworth’s estimate that 73 million western acres are at risk. Mr. Bosworth is Chief of the U.S. Forest Service.

After the disastrous 2000 fire season, Congress appropriated $2 billion-plus for mop up work, fuels reduction, and to train and equip a larger firefighting force—not quite as much as the estimated cost of urban interface fuels management in Arizona and New Mexico alone. No wonder so many federal budget watchers think Messrs. Keegan and Fiedler are on to something. Their more comprehensive thinning approach—which is similar to Dr. Covington’s restoration vision—turns a west wide $32 billion taxpayer subsidy into a $500 million net gain. It also tracks with Fort Valley research showing that thinning reduces the future risk of crown fires by 69 percent when, as the New Mexico study suggests, the treatment includes trees of all sizes.

But not all of Dr. Covington’s colleagues see forest restoration as an end unto itself. Mike Wagner, who directs research in NAU’s 50,000-acre Centennial Forest, sees restoration as more of a reference point than a destination.

“At Fort Valley and in the Centennial Forest we can see what was here in the Southwest hundreds of years ago,” he begins. “But it is very important to remember that the old trees these forests hold are products of a completely different set of environmental conditions than are present today. We can’t re-create all those conditions, but we can go forward. We can manage these forests in ways that produce a wide variety of societal benefits, including commercially valuable timber. But we need to quickly address the fact that southwestern forests are so dense and so sick that seedling reproduction is abysmal. We have tons of four to eight-inch trees and tons of 14 to 20-inch trees, but too few trees over 30 inches in diameter and way too few seedlings. A comprehensive thinning program, with no limits on tree diameter, is the only way out of this mess—and the only way we can add much needed biological diversity to our forests.”

"We must always consider the environment and people together, as though they are one, because the
human need to use natural resources is fundamental to our continued presence on earth."