Editor's Column

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Forest Facts

By: Jim Petersen

“The police and sheriff cars were broadcasting by megahorn to ‘EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY.’ I grabbed some of my photos and filled up a backpack with books and Susan’s collection of Chinese antique teapots and my autographed pictures of Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Lou Gehrig and Ty Cobb and shoved as many CD ROMs into the backpack as I could and grabbed the Lou Gehrig sculpture and some of my ‘hero’ photos with Colin Powell and took off back down the hill in Susan’s car.

“The roadblock [person] wanted to know where I had come from and I told her I had just come back from Phoenix. [She] hurriedly said, ‘OK,’ and waived me through, as about a dozen fire and emergency vehicles were trying to get up Copper Basin.

“A sheriff’s car came by and the deputy saw me and screamed at me through the mega-horn to ‘get the hell out of here. Where did you come from?’ He told me to get in the car. I did, and he took off, letting me know that I was causing a real problem and that if he saw me in the quarantined area again he might shoot me. I did not doubt it.

“We will continue to work on the biomass and small tree initiatives, which seem so insufficient after witnessing a fire. This one is not out as yet, but they say that it ‘only’ burned about 1,200 acres. The Forest Service is predicting ‘many potential’ fires this year of 100,000 acres or more.”

Bob Hennkens, Prescott, Arizona; excerpted from an e-mail note to colleagues after a May 15 wildfire nearly overran both the town and his neighborhood.

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“Our country is facing some very expensive global challenges,” he observes. “Thanks to tremendous support from the Arizona and New Mexico delegations we’ve been successful in generating startup funding for lots of different approaches to forest restoration, but we need to move quickly past subsidies and into businesses that can prosper in our forests.”

Fellow EECO directors Pete Shumway and vice chairman Mark Herrington share Mr. Christensen’s belief that success rests on plumbing the depths of county-federal cooperation, on befriending federal agencies while also holding them accountable.

“We are the unit of government that is closest to the ground and closest to those whose livelihoods depend on how well the ground is managed,” declares Mr. Shumway, a Navajo County supervisor. “The land belongs to the federal government but its decisions impact local folks. We cannot accept ‘No’ for an answer and we cannot exclude anyone who wants to work toward common ground.”

Gordon West, Santa Clara Woodworking, displays a beautiful high-back chair he fashioned from smalldiameter ponderosa pine no one else wanted. “I am a scavenger,” he says of the success of his New Mexico venture. “You have to be in this part of the country or you aren’t likely to get any wood.”

Mr. Herrington, who is chairman of Graham County’s board of supervisors, is even more direct. “We have said to the federal agencies, ‘We want to be your partner, but if you don’t want to partner with us we are prepared to go around you’.” The Forest Service fears environmentalist litigation more than it fears catastrophic fire. I say the agency has a larger mission and a larger public that it needs to accommodate.”

Doing nothing is not an option for Mr. Herrington, who terms federal inaction “morally wrong.” “Our economies are so rural and so fragile. Our communities are rooted in farming, ranching, mining and logging. We are not going to become hi-tech parks no matter how hard we try. Nor can we survive on the minimum-wage jobs that tourism provides, and even if we could, tourism and persistent wildfire don’t mix.”

Of all the partnership possibilities EECO is exploring, none seems to generate greater enthusiasm than biomass utilization—the conversion of low quality wood fiber into energy. “Most of the wood fiber that needs to come out of our forests is of such poor quality no one wants to buy it,” explains Dr. Moore. “We have to develop commercial markets for this material or forest restoration can’t go forward without long-term federal subsidies, which none of us want. Commercially viable biomass technologies hold great potential for alleviating the West’s worsening energy shortage while also reducing our dependence on air polluting fossil fuels.”

In the hope of laying a proper biomass foundation, EECO has partnered with Steve Hall, a former trucker who, with his family, owns Environmental Forest Solutions at Eagar. Mr. Hall is erecting a small woody biomass power plant on the old Southwest Forest Industries-Stone Forest Industries sawmill site just west of the tiny northern Arizona community. 250 Eagar area workers lost their jobs when the collapse of the federal timber sale program forced Stone to close the mill in 1999. Stone made him a deal on the 133-acre site he could not refuse.

“It is the perfect place to build an energy park,” he explains. “We want to attract businesses engaged in biomass-based research and development. So the power plant becomes both a revenue stream and a marketing tool.”

Mr. Hall learned his biomass lessons the hard way. He nearly went broke hauling wood chips to a California biomass-fired power plant that filed for bankruptcy.

“The plant was too big for the available supply of fuel,” he says. “They went broke trying to haul wood fiber farther than the price of power allowed for. It cost us a lot of money, but I learned a valuable lesson: wood is heavy. You can’t afford to haul it very far and expect to make a profit.”

It is clear that Mr. Hall is not easily discouraged. Despite nearly losing his business, he quietly set about the task of learning all he could about biomass energy development. The result is a six-inch thick three-ring binder filled with government reports, newspaper clippings and research documents.

“Knowledge is our roadmap to an exciting future,” he says of the binder. No doubt it is, but Mr. Hall is also turning out to be an exceptionally skilled fundraiser. After negotiating a 30-year buyout agreement with Stone, he secured a $415,000 grant from the Forest Service to retrofit the old mill boiler and add a turbine. Then he signed a $2.56 million power and technology transfer agreement with Arizona Public Service. Now the Department of Commerce, the Small Business Administration and the Department of Energy are on his call list.

“You would be amazed who is interested in what we are trying to do,” he says with some satisfaction. One of them is President Bush, who shook hands with Mr. Hall during his June 25 visit to Rodeo- Chediski fire lines. “I looked him in the eye and told him we could not live like this,” Mr. Hall later said of his moment with the President. “We promised we would help each other make some big changes in forest policy.”

[Top] Malcolm Cajero, right, runs a portable sawmill for the Pueblo of Jemez. New Mexico staff forester Todd Haines helps him find logs including those in the background, salvaged from the Los Alamos Fire. [Below] Former logger Ted Heath has been supervising a thinning program at a Girl Scout camp north of Albuquerque. When we caught up with him he was inspecting burn piles with his dog, Dixie.

Another is Bob Hennkens. Mr. Hennkens was nearly burned out of his home by a May 16 firestorm.

While he is not the President, he is clearly in a position to help Mr. Hall. In his capacity as consultant to the Federal Laboratory Consortium, Mr. Hennkens spends his days ferreting out possible commercial applications for government- funded research. Last year, the 711 laboratories he represents filed nearly 3,800 patents. Among them: promising technologies for using enzymes—compounds produced in living cells that are capable of producing chemical changes in organic substances—to digest cellulose, the carbohydrate that forms the cell walls in plants, including trees. Once digested, research suggests cellulose can be reformed into a wide variety of compounds including bio-fuels.

“I’d like to see some of this research advanced at Eagar,” Mr. Hennkens says. “The location is perfect—close to major laboratories and right in the middle of a huge supply of fiber with tremendous energy possibilities.”

With Mr. Hennkens help, Mr. Hall’s site is now in the running to be named a national demonstration site for the federal Department of Energy. Such a designation would quickly transform the old Eagar mill site into an energy research park—a possibility that Mr. Hall admits strains even his imagination.

“I have to remind myself that not so long ago I was trying to sell 25 chip trucks, so that I could start over again,” he says. “But if you stop to think about it for a moment, Bob’s idea makes perfect sense. The Forest Service is swimming in trees it can’t get rid of and the Department Energy wants to diversify its energy portfolio for reasons of national security. Wouldn’t you think they’d get together and talk about it?” Mr. Hennkens agrees, but unlike most of us, who can only ask questions that go unanswered, he has at his fingertips the resources necessary to do something meaningful about what is happening to the Southwest’s forests. And he intends to make the most of his considerable network with both the Federal Laboratory Consortium and the Department of Energy. As the Rodeo-Chediski neared Show Low he sent an e-mail note to several colleagues declaring his intent to aggressively promote bio-fuels, bioproducts and bio-energy projects he believes would provide a significant economic stimulus for an estimated 23,000 rural communities facing wildfire risks.

“I’m going to do everything in my power to speed technology transfer to small entrepreneurial ventures that can help develop products made from small diameter wood, including chopsticks if necessary,” he said in a subsequent Evergreen interview. “We’re already up to our armpits in environmental assessments. Now we need some action to reduce the wildfire risks these communities are facing. We’ve got to find mixes of products and strategies that turn more of our adversaries into allies.”

Few people are more skilled at turning adversaries into allies than New Mexico State Forester Toby Martinez. Though he refuses to take credit, he is undeniably the driving force behind the Four Corners Sustainable Forests Partnership, a multi-state forest collaboration that remains the largest such project ever undertaken. The partnership, which started in 1997, takes its name from the geographic point where the borders of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Utah converge. It works in several venues: rural economic development, small wood utilization and marketing and community-based forest restoration. Funded largely by the federal government, Four Corners has thus far disbursed funding to 39 community-run demonstration projects. Among them: Phil Archuletta’s sign company at Mountainair and Rob Davis’ pellet plant at Show Low, Arizona. Also, Gila WoodNet at Silver City, New Mexico and the Navajo tribe’s Hogan Project in northern Arizona.

“We are focused on developing marketing solutions to the region’s forest health problem,” says Mr. Martinez. “Wood processing ventures have to be sized so that they are in synch with the community and able to prosper in sustainably managed forests.” It may sound easy, but Mr. Martinez will be the first to admit it is not. “Scale is a problem,” he concedes. “Even in communities where forest restoration is popular, recruiting sufficient industry to deal with the problem is unpopular. Everyone loves cottage industries, but most still resist the presence of larger manufacturing plants. I believe small-wood technologies hold the answer. Rather than have one or two large manufacturers we may have 100 smaller ones, each utilizing a different part of the tree.”

Talk about irony. A coal train made up of cars that once belonged to now long gone Southwest Forest Industries sits on a siding at Holbrook, Arizona, destined for the furnaces at the coal -fired power plant at nearby Joseph City. Meanwhile, less than an hour away, woody biomass—dead and dying trees no bigger around than your forearm—choke what’s left of a forest near Pine Top.

To raise public awareness of the high risk of catastrophic fire, Mr. Martinez has turned to fire assessments—documents that quantify the risk and forecast likely outcomes of stand-replacing wildfires. Initially no one paid much attention, but the Los Alamos Fire changed everything. The May 2000 conflagration began as a controlled burn set by the National Park Service in the Bandelier National Monument south of Los Alamos. High winds drove it northward across 47,000 acres. The entire town was evacuated and 405 homes were destroyed before firefighters got it stopped.

“Good sometimes comes of great tragedy,” Mr. Martinez says. “We seem to move forward in the aftermath of big fires. Los Alamos stimulated renewed community interest in forest restoration.” To assist businesses interested in evaluating the wood manufacturing potential in New Mexico, Mr. Martinez’s staff is now utilizing forest inventory data developed by the U.S. Forest Service, which has been monitoring growth, harvest and mortality in the nation’s public and privately owned forests for nearly 50 years.

“Companies interested in making investments in new wood manufacturing facilities need hard numbers they can take to their bankers,” Mr. Martinez says. “We try to show them in some detail what is out there that is available for purchase and harvest.”

Unlike Arizona, which has little privately owned timberland, individuals and Indian tribes own 41 percent of New Mexico’s 4.2 million acre timberland base. The state employs a cadre of professional foresters whose job it is to help landowners cope with the risk of catastrophic wildfire. Reducing the risk generally means thinning—a process that requires a permit under the state’s forest practices act.

“Our primary goal is to promote good forest stewardship,” says Todd Haines of the state’s forest practices act. Mr. Haines, a timber staff forester in the state’s Bernalillo office, somewhat sheepishly admits that he used to try to scare neglectful landowners with “horror stories” about wildfires.

“It didn’t work,” he admits. “Now I stress pride of ownership and get much better results. No private landowner wants to be thought of as not taking responsibility for the land he buys.”

Mr. Haines is particularly proud of work he oversaw at a Girl Scout camp northwest of Albuquerque. The 900-acre thinning was completed without a hitch despite some hand wringing from Chaparral Council members who feared thinning might despoil the camp.

“It’s understandable,” Mr. Haines says. “Most people have no idea that this kind of work can be done with so little visual impact. The nice thing about the camp is that it is large enough to provide a perpetual harvesting income stream for the scouts. This round of thinning generated $120,000. That’s not bad.”

Down the road at Jemez Pueblo, Mr. Haines wears a different hat. The state is trying to help the Pueblo of Jemez market products milled by a small portable sawmill erected on an old landfill dumpsite. Malcolm Cajero, who runs the mill, explains that the tribe has rejected gambling as a revenue source, and now hopes that its Walatowa Woodlands Initiative will generate sufficient revenue to support a variety of tribal activities.

Walatowa, which means “human” in the tribe’s native language, is funded in part by the Four Corners partnership. The mill’s output, which is harvested mainly from the tribe’s 45,000 acres of forests and woodlands, includes custom-cut timbers and beams, dimension lumber, firewood, peeled poles, vigas, patio furniture and interlocking sidewalk kits cut from scraps of wood. To boost employment on the reservation, the tribe also contracts trucking and restoration services for landowners.

Phil Archuletta, P&M Signs, Mountainair, New Mexico demonstrates his prototype extruder. Using a blend of finely ground juniper and pellets made from recycled plastic milk cartons he presses signs – including the Forest Service ensign you see here.

“We do it all here,” Mr. Cajero says with a broad grin. “What can I sell you today? We deliver.”

If Malcolm Cajero is a natural born salesman, then Gordon West is a natural born tinkerer. Very simply, he can make almost anything from practically nothing. A visit to his small furniture factory at Santa Clara, about four hours south of Albuquerque, proves the point. Among his creations, beautiful hand-crafted antique-style high back chairs cut from ponderosa pine no one else wanted. “I am a scavenger,” he says. “You have to be in this part of the country or you aren’t likely to get any wood.” Most of the furniture Mr. West has turned out in his shop now graces Bear Mountain Lodge, a Nature Conservancy owned bed and breakfast inn he renovated from an old schoolhouse, outfitting it with some 250 missionstyle pieces including tables, bookcases, armoires, night stands and frames for easy chairs, couches and bed frames, all beautifully crafted from small diameter ponderosa pine.

“I guess we had the right pedigree,” he says. “You know, local, small business doing forest restoration work, making nice things for people to use and enjoy.”

In Mr. West’s neighborhood timber harvesting is taboo, a result of the presence of the Tucsonbased Center for Biological Diversity. The Center, which has a long history of litigating proposed Forest Service projects has scared off most who might otherwise bring small-log milling technologies to the South-west’s imploding rural economy. But they have not scared off Mr. West.

“We get along fine,” he says of his relationship with the Center. “I take what they give me and try to make something useful out of it. They really aren’t against cutting trees, but they oppose commodity-influenced forest management.”

To overcome the Center’s resistance to commercialism, Mr. West incorporated Gila WoodNet, a non-profit that searches for markets for by-products that forest restoration yields. Last January the organization received a $356,400 federal grant to restore Mill Project, a rundown 1,400-acre Gila National Forest site 18 miles northwest of Silver City. It has U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman to thank for its good fortune. The New Mexico Democrat authored the Community Forest Restoration Act, which funnels about $5 million a year into the state for collaborative forestry projects.

Mr. West, who is also WoodNet executive director, expects that just ten percent of Mill Project’s trees will be of sufficient quality to be used in furniture making. The rest will go to other small wood ventures. Among them: a nonprofit pellet plant at Silver City that helps low-income workers start businesses. On the strength of the plant’s social mission, the Ford Foundation gave WoodNet a $750,000 five-year grant to develop its chip supply.

“The Ford grant really raised our profile,” Mr. West says. “The competition for this kind of money is fierce.” It has also helped immeasurably at the Silver City/Grant County Economic Development Corporation (SIGRED), which is the interface between WoodNet and Ford.

“Ford is clearly committed to our success,” say SIGRED assistant director Judy Ward. “I do not doubt the sincerity of their effort to help our community develop small businesses that can utilize the fiber forest restoration is producing.”

Mr. West is using the Ford grant—and another from Four Corners—to develop a miniaturized harvesting system he hopes to test this summer on the Mill Project, assuming extreme fire danger does not keep him out of the woods. He has also erected a metal building that will house his debarking and chipping operations. Over time, he hopes to incubate other entrepreneurial ventures on the six-acre industrial site.

Rob Davis, Forest Energy Corporation, Show Low, Arizona, turns low quality wood fiber into wood pellets and other products including cat litter and animal bedding. Assuming public support for thinning he hopes to build other plants in New Mexico and Colorado.

“Traditional lenders won’t even look at this stuff,” he says of his prototype operation. “It’s too theoretical. I think we’ve scaled our equipment for efficient operation, but grant monies will remain our lifeblood until we know that the operation can sustain itself without subsidy. Meanwhile, we’ll take what we can get.”

Phil Archuletta knows all about taking what you can get. P&M Signs, his Mountainair, New Mexico sign company has perfected an extruder that can transform a steaming hot blend of recycled milk cartons and finely ground juniper wood into an all weather sign.

Armed with asbestos gloves, tongs and dark goggles, he happily demonstrates his invention to anyone who can help promote it. And voila, it works. As proof he offers free samples: brown and yellow Forest Service chevrons that are part of his strategy for prodding the agency into buying his composite signs as replacements for the old growth redwood signs that were standard fare for decades.

Mr. Archuletta clearly knows how the political game is played. His office walls are lined with photographs showing him shaking hands with some very important people he considers to be his friends: Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush (I and II) and New Mexico Sen. Pete Domenici to name only four. He also appears to be extraordinarily patient, having already invested a princely sum in a process that is just now able to turn out a single 12-inch by 20-inch panel every five minutes.

It took even longer before the Four Corners Sustainable Forests Partnership stepped forward with a grant to pay engineers at Sandia Laboratory in Albuquerque to modify Mr. Archuletta’s prototype extruder. Now he says it is time to ramp up.

“Independent materials testing confirms that the composite is a very solid product,” says Mr. Archuletta, adding that he believes the wood-plastic blend may outlast the conventional aluminum and plywood-backed signs P&M builds by the thousands.

“I’d like to build a composite assembly line this year,” he says, “But first we need to nail down our financing.”

Help may be on the way. P&M is in the running for a $360,000 grant from the Collaborative Forest Restoration Program—the same outfit that funded Mr. West’s 1,400- acre thinning project on the Gila National Forest. Mr. Archuletta will add another $100,000 to complete the installation and, if all goes according to plan, his company will soon be massproducing composite signs, not just for the Forest Service but also the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management and state highway departments.

“It’s very gratifying for us,” he says. “We’ve had the unselfish help of a lot of people who share our belief this product can provide a viable market for juniper fiber that will be coming from woodlands restoration projects in our area.

Two hours west of Mountainair, over the Manzano Mountains, 90-year-old Ted Wilbert is placing another big bet. Mr. Wilbert, who made his fortune building paper mills, hopes to build his last mill at Belen, an hour south of Albuquerque in the Rio Grande Valley. He has thus far spent $3.5 million on feasibility studies. And he has found two able partners—an engineering firm that designs paper mills and a company that builds papermaking machines.

Forest industry analysts familiar with the Southwest say that national forest restoration cannot go forward without taxpayer subsidies unless sufficient new manufacturing capacity can be developed to process and market the millions of tons of low quality fiber that must be removed from the region’s forests. Most have suggested a pulp or paper mill, which would no doubt spawn some sort of associated lumber manufacturing complex, or perhaps two or three oriented strand board or medium-density fiberboard plants. But even among environmentalists who favor forest restoration support for the re-emergence of such large capital-intensive facilities is at best lukewarm. No wonder then that one of Mr. Wilbert’s consultants says that the availability of federal fiber will not be a consideration in the final decision to build or not build the mill.

[Top] Just completed fuels treatment project near Flagstaff, Arizona. Logger Allen Ribelin, whose High Desert Investments did the work, said the stand was so thick he doubted sunlight had reached the forest floor here in more than 25 years. [Below] Mr. Ribelin stands beside decked logs the thinning produced. With no mills nearby, there is virtually no market for these logs in the Southwest.

“We intend to run the mill on fiber purchased from state, tribal and private sources,” says Martin Devere, a long-time industry consultant from Tombstone. “We would buy federal wood if it were available—and we expect that some will be—but you cannot make investments this large on the basis of government promises. The political climate is too uncertain. No lender in his right mind would talk to you.”

Mr. Devere says Nuera Ford Products hopes to break ground on its $750 million odorless, chlorine-free thermo-mechanical paper mill early next year and be on-line in 2005. The facility, which will make finecoated paper for the magazine and office products markets, will consume about 400,000 bone dry tons of wood fiber annually.

Nearly 180 miles southeast of Belen, back across the Manzano Mountains, lay two small sawmills that attest to the extraordinary difficulty associated with operating in an environment that lacks a paper mill or some other outlet that can annually soak up thousands of tons of wood chips and waste.

“We’d be very interested in selling chips and pulpwood to Nuera,” says Jim Bridge, manager of Mescalero Forest Products sawmills at Mescalero and Alamogordo.

“We currently rail our chips to Louisiana, but everything used to go to Stone’s pulp mill at Snowflake, Arizona.” When Abitibi bought Stone’s Snowflake mill and converted it to recycled pulp, which it rails from Canada, the Southwest’s pulp market vanished overnight.

“Now there is no market in the Southwest for chips, pulpwood or the waste stream created by small diameter logs,” Mr. Bridge laments. “We really need something down here to smooth out the fiber flow.”

Mescalero Forest Products belongs to the Mescalero Apache Tribe. Virtually all of the 28 million board feet of logs that annually feed its two sawmills come from tribal or private land. “We buy an occasional Forest Service salvage sale,” Mr. Bridge says. “But you can’t make plans on the basis of what the federal government says it might do,” he adds, echoing Mr. Devere’s sentiment.

True enough, but the tribe recently closed a deal with the federal government that significantly improves its longterm forest management prospects. The U.S. Fish and Wildfire Service approved the tribe’s Mexican spotted owl management plan in an agreement that waives the normally imposed critical habitat designation. Nor will the tribe have to contend with diameter cut limits imposed on the Forest Service.

“The way we manage the forest is more for multiple species, not a single species,” explained tribal member Thora Padilla, a silviculturist and project manager for the tribe’s Division of Resource Management and Protection. “It’s not one way across the forest. It’s a mosaic with different management treatments.”

To close the loop on its long-term management plan, Mescalero Forest Products has secured a $250,000 Bingaman grant to purchase a pole peeling and merchandizing system that will permit improved utilization of small diameter trees the tribe intends to harvest as part of its plan for increasing habitat and age-class diversity in its forests.”

[Top] This is the No.1 fairway at a golf course development under construction near Flagstaff. High Desert Investments cleared the golf course and thinned home sites for the developer. Permanent clearcuts like these don’t cause nearly as much debate as does thinning in nearby forests. [Bottom] With no mills nearby, a High Desert log truck is loaded for the 460-mile trip to Terra Bella, California.

“But what a process!” Mr. Bridge declares. “I don’t want to seem ungrateful but the hoops we had to jump through to get the money were amazing. We might have given up had it not been for the help of some very determined state and county folks.” Clearly, not every new wood processing business in the Southwest needs federal help. In fact, some don’t want it. Put Rob Davis in the latter group. Mr. Davis is president of Forest Energy Corporation, a wood pellet manufacturer based at Show Low, jumping off point for northern Arizona’s most popular recreation area.

“I’ve never been keen on government money,” he says. “Huge amounts of well intended public and private money are flowing into ventures that have no future without permanent subsidy,” he explains. “The sudden fervor is understandable given our forest fire problem, but I don’t think Congress will bankroll them indefinitely.”

Despite his belief many subsidized businesses will eventually fail, Mr. Davis thinks the political climate has improved so much since the Bush Administration came to Washington that he recently dusted off an eight-year-old plan for building a biomass-fired power plant that would draw some of its fiber from national forest thinnings and fuels management projects.

“It looks like there will be sufficient fiber available,” he says. “There’s talk about making the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest a Pilot Forest, which would mean a stronger local voice in how the forest is managed. We’re also seeing a lot more activity among the regional biomass folks in the Forest Service. And now the Department of Energy has entered the picture. These are all positive developments. I expect we’ll make a decision within two or three months.”

Currently, Forest Energy manufactures about 30,000 tons of pellets annually for sale in residential wood stove markets in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and southern California. They also make and market cat litter, animal bedding, fuel logs and absorbents that soak up oil spills.

Mr. Davis understands the politics that are driving restoration forestry as well as anyone can. And he has crafted a marketing strategy that takes full advantages of its many nuances: the fear of large scale wood manufacturing infrastructure, the desire to help small businesses prosper, global warming worries, a fossil fuel dread and the quest to blend sustainable forestry with sustainable community development.

“Heat your homes, your hospitals, your offices, your schools and your communities with a refined fuel that comes from your land,” he urged attendees at the recent National Indian Timber Symposium.

If Mr. Davis’ words sound like a call to arms it is by design. Unlike moisture heavy green wood chips, which yield about 85,000 Btu’s per cubic foot, bonedry wood pellets generate a whopping 350,000 Btu’s per foot. And the wholesale price of pellets hasn’t varied more than ten percent in ten years. Such price and performance benefits would seem to be worth considering perennially chaotic energy markets.

“The stars have lined up,” he explains. “We have unhealthy forests, air pollution from forest fires, global warming concerns, rural economies in ruin and an unsustainable lifestyle. We can positively impact all these negatives, and control our forest and energy destinies, by simply substituting wood waste heating for fossil fuels.”

Logger Jerrold Reidhead is dwarfed by a sea of trees that he thinned from Forest Service land near Alpine, Arizona, where he lives. Mr. Reidhead qualified for a $75,000 matching federal grant to purchase a used mechanical harvester he needs, but faced with so many political uncertainties he isn’t sure he’ll take the money.

In the hope of capitalizing on what he believes to be a bright future for biomass energy products, Mr. Davis has begun a quiet search for private capital needed to develop commercial markets and build cogeneration facilities and additional pellet plants as markets develop—one at Alamogordo, New Mexico, another at Trinidad, Colorado and a third in western Colorado. He’s also mulling construction of a pellet plant in nearby forests that would provide fuel to co-fire wood pellets with coal at Arizona Public Service’s coalfired power plant at Joseph City. “The future potential is huge,” he says. “We hope to be a part of it.”

So does Alpine, Arizona logger Jerrold Reidhead. But Mr. Reidhead is in the throes of an odd dilemma. He is the recipient of a $75,000 Four Corners grant made to help him buy a used $165,000 mechanized logging system ideally suited to efficiently thinning dense forests. The trouble is he has no work for the machines, so he’s not sure if he should claim the grant. He thinks he might, but he’s having trouble reading the Forest Service’s tea leaves.

“There’s a 5,000-acre urban interface thinning coming up for bid here in Alpine late this fall,” he says, “but I don’t know if there’s enough money in the project to pay the difference between the grant and the cost of the machine. The rest of our forest is shut down so I have to make my decision on the basis of what I think I might make from this one project.” Mr. Reidhead, a third generation logger, has until December 2003 to assess the future for a harvesting machine that costs as much as a Mercedes sedan and might only be driven once. Meanwhile, he’s making ends meet hauling sand and gravel for building contractors who are making a small fortune building vacation homes for affluent customers who find northern Arizona’s forested environs irresistible.

But in trademark logger fashion, Mr. Reidhead refuses to give up hope. And around Alpine hope has a name and his name is Steve Hall. The earlier profiled Mr. Hall is a shirttail relative of Mr. Reidhead. Assuming his biomass power plant and energy park at Egar are successes, there will be plenty of work for Mr. Reidhead. So to be sure he has left no stone unturned in his quest to keep his culture alive, he has applied for yet another government grant—this one to help him buy a portable chipper he will pair with his yet to be purchased mechanical harvester: one machine to quickly dispatch dying trees and the second to give them new life in chip form.

“It is what I know how to do,” he says. “We used to log six million board feet a year. Now we log less than one million. We are all hoping next year will be better.”

Allen Ribelin used to hope for better days too. But now he thinks it might be a waste of time. He can afford the luxury. The Ribelin’s, one of Arizona’s most successful logging family, will be just fine no matter what the future holds for restoration forestry. Make no mistake, Mr. Ribelin and his brother Kenny would like to continue logging, but it isn’t the end of the world if they don’t. In fact, they’re doing just fine clearing land for golf courses and roadside rights of way for the Arizona highway department. So why on earth are the brothers and their father even considering a several million-dollar investment in a highspeed sawmill in Flagstaff?

“Because we see a market for one if the Forest Service ever gets its act together,” declares the plainspoken Mr.Ribelin. “But we’re not going to do it without some assurance that our investment is protected.”

Just how the Forest Service might offer such an assurance isn’t clear, but the elder Mr. Ribelin has an idea whose time may have come. “If the federal government can’t guarantee a set log supply for investors who are trying to help them then they ought to guarantee the investment,” he says.

“If I invest in a small log sawmill and a lawsuit is filed to stop the project the government hands me a check for the full amount the next day. ‘Here’s your money Mr. Logger. Thanks for trying to help your country. Sorry for the inconvenience’.”

Three generations of Walker’s posed for this picture near Show Low, Arizona where they were completing a thinning job for the Forest Service. The family made a name for itself logging for Ted Turner on his New Mexico ranch. Even so, Dwayne Walker [center] thinks the future is brighter in pipeline construction than logging.

George Ribelin is not your run of the mill logger. He is a maverick who, some years back, told the Forest Service it was headed for political trouble if it took too many big trees from northern Arizona forests.

“I opposed the heavier cuts and I said so publicly,” he recalls. “It was not a popular thing to say at the time but I still believe I was right. I liked the old pick and pluck method we used years ago. You took old trees that were dying and other trees that were defective and you left the best quality trees as a seed source for the future.”

The Ribelin family’s fingerprints are all over northern Arizona’s forests, but you’d be hard pressed to see them. Over the years their company, High Desert Investments, has logged most of both sides of the highway between Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon, a distance of some 70 miles.

“You can do a lot when you are careful,” Mr. Ribelin says. “Trees grow much faster here than most folks believe. Don’t forget, the pulp mill at Snow Flake ran day and night for 40 years and never made a dent in our stand density problem.”

Like many others, including Mr. Davis, Mr. Ribelin believes biomass development is essential to any serious effort to reduce stand density in the Southwest. “We have to thin and we can’t leave the limbs and tops in the woods to fuel new forest fires,” he explains. “The best solution is to haul as much as the market will bear to a pulp mill or to biomass generators.”

The near-total lack of wood manufacturing infrastructure in the Southwest is undermining the already slim profit margin that thinning small diameter trees yields. High Desert recently completed an interface thinning in the Flagstaff area—and ended up trucking the larger logs 460 miles to Terra Bella, California. No wonder the family is pondering the merits of a highspeed small-log sawmill.

“You could run a high-speed sawmill here forever on 16-inch diameter trees,” says Allen Ribelin. “Or you could get stuck with $8.5 million in useless iron if the ‘Zero Cut’ radicals have their way.”

Lawrence Crane would have loved to buy the Ribelin’s logs, but lousy pine markets and distance—440 miles one way—make such a long haul an economic impossibility. Mr. Crane is resource forester for Rio Grande Forest Products at Espanola, 25 miles north of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

“I look at every sale within a 200- mile radius of the mill, but realistically you can’t afford to haul logs much more than a hundred miles and expect to make any money. Flagstaff might as well be on the moon.”

Rio Grande is the state’s largest sawmill. It employs about 100 workers and cuts some 48 million board feet of dimension lumber annually. Mr. Crane buys most of the mill’s logs from private and tribal timberlands, though he does try to buy Forest Service thinning sales whenever he can. But many of them are of such poor quality they have little value. “You end up running the logs through the mill just to stay open,” he says.

Mr. Crane expects 2002 will be a difficult year for Rio Grande. The company’s log inventory is low and he does not see many new sales on the horizon. “The Santa Fe National Forest expects to offer some salvage contracts on the Viveash but the trees have been standing dead for two years. I doubt there’s much left.”

The speed and ferocity of the July 2000 Viveash Fire astonished fire fighters and fire behavior experts. On a windless day it consumed 28,000 acres of mixedconifer, pine and aspen in a matter of hours. Subsequent flooding in one ravine scoured a stream channel to bedrock. Across many southfacing slopes organic topsoil was vaporized by intense heat, leaving nothing but sterile mineral soil. Mr. Crane just shakes his head.

“The private timber that burned here was quickly salvaged, but we’re still waiting to see what the Forest Service might do— if anything,” he says. Salvaging fire-killed timber from national forests is controversial. Invariably, environmentalists immediately appeal most such proposals, further delaying federal planning and consultation processes that often require the approval of several different agencies— a difficult task under the best of circumstances given the fact that these agencies often have conflicting mandates. Once court arguments is added to the time frame, salvage work is rarely completed before insects or decay render the wood useless.

“I understand the public’s desire to protect its forests, but that isn’t what’s happening out here,” Mr. Crane says. “Why, for example, are we leaving old trees that are dying and removing young trees that are healthy? We should be harvesting unhealthy trees without regard to their age or diameter and retaining healthy trees as a seed source. It doesn’t make sense to make cut-no cut decisions solely on the basis of tree diameter.”

Ed Collins understands Mr. Crane’s displeasure, but isn’t quite sure what to do about it. Mr. Collins, who is the district ranger on the Apache-Sitgreaves Lakeside District, has been involved in one of northern Arizona’s more notable forest restoration projects—the Blue Ridge Demonstration Project—since its formation in 1997. The project, which spans 17,000 acres just east of Lakeside and Pine Top, is notable for two reasons: it has not been appealed by environmentalists and it has not sold a single stick of timber despite the fact that the project’s three timber sales were twice offered for sale.

“There simply aren’t any viable commercial markets for trees this small,” Mr. Collins admits. “Now we’re paying loggers to do the work.”

He is nevertheless excited about Blue Ridge’s future prospects.

“We came together in 1997 to find ways to move the natural resource management dialogue beyond the courtroom,” he explains. “We have been successful in that regard. Now we need to move forward.”

Loggers Raymond Cordova and his father, Louis, near Cuba, New Mexico. The elder Cordova, who has been working in the woods for nearly 40 years, is dismayed over the fact that young healthy trees are being thinned while old dying trees are not because of politically imposed limits on the size of trees that can be harvested.

Richard Remington agrees. Mr. Remington is Region 1 supervisor for the Arizona Game and Fish Department and was, together with Mr. Collins, one of the driving forces behind formation of the Blue Ridge project.

“We all felt trapped,” he says of the impetus for early meetings between the various state and federal agencies now involved at Blue Ridge. “We began to ask one another what we could do to stay out of court—and it dawned on us that catastrophic fire was the catalyst we needed to bring folks together on common ground.”

Throughout the 17,000-acre Blue Ridge Demonstration area that is an overabundance of pole-sized trees (five to 12 inches in diameter), a shortage of trees in every other diameter class and, thus, a shortage of the various forest structures used by both goshawks and owls.

Blue Ridge’s partners—local, state and federal agencies, environmentalists, ranchers, academics and business leaders—agreed to test three different restoration treatments: one replicating the Apache-Sitgreaves forest plan with Mexican spotted owl and northern goshawk guidelines added; a second that is a watered down version of Dr. Wally Covington’s forest restoration model and a third laid out by environmental groups.

By monitoring the three different treatments, scientists hope to determine which treatment yields the best growth response in residual trees. Preliminary results suggest the most aggressive thinnings yield the greatest increase in tree growth while trees in the least aggressive treatment areas are continuing to decline.

“It is a reality that will take some time to settle in,” Mr. Collins says. “If we are serious about restoration, about habitat, about protecting and creating older forests we are going to have to make some hard choices very soon.”

Mr. Remington agrees.

“In some quarters we’re still dealing with a ‘let nature take its course’ mindset, but the demonstration projects are helping to built trust and understanding both internally and externally.” he says. “But the scale at which we are currently working is insignificant compared to the size of the problem.”

But as much as Mr. Remington would like to do more, especially for wildlife, he’s fearful that the public will have little stomach for the degree of thinning that will be necessary to achieve the much sought after presettlement model.

“Frankly, it worries some folks in my own office,” he says. “Everyone understands the need to create more structural diversity in forests as a first step in the process of creating more biological and species diversity, but there is a deeply felt desire to move slowly so that we don’t make any mistakes. “That’s fine, but we’ve made a great deal of progress in species recovery in Arizona in recent years and I don’t want to see all of our gains swept away by catastrophic wildfire.”

The Blue Ridge area, which adjoins Lakeside and neighboring Pine Top, is northern Arizona’s most popular forest hideaway.

A stand-replacing wildfire here would destroy much more than wildlife habitat. Thousands of summer homes would also be lost, perhaps the entire twocommunity enclave. (Thanks to previous fuels management and harvesting activity, the Rodeo-Chediski Fire was stopped at the edge of Show Low, which is adjacent to Lakeside.)

“I am scared to death,” admits John Bedell, Apache- Sitgreaves supervisor. “Stand density on this forest is many times what it was a century ago. We could easily lose lives and towns.

Somehow the gravity of our situation has got to get conveyed to the public in a way they will understand.” Mr. Bedell has spent 37 of his 38 Forest Service years in the Southwest and knows the region’s forests as well as anyone. And he is plainly very concerned that the fire season everyone has feared for years has finally arrived. But he also worries about the Forest Service’s inability to embrace forest restoration on a meaningful scale. “Some of us understand the forest health problem and feel a great sense of urgency,” Mr. Bedell says. “But there is so much public suspicion swirling around restoration forestry that I’m no longer certain the Forest Service can overcome it. We’re doing a decent job at the local level, but how do you unravel such a complex story with so many national implications in a media world dominated by six-second sound bites?”

Not easily. But Mr. Bedell long ago embraced the problem the only way he knew how. He assembled a planning staff capable of producing timber sale plans that could survive court appeals.

“I decided that if we acquired the necessary skill sets we could prepare thinning sales that passed muster with judges,” he says. “We did it and the result is that we have 100,000 acres ready for thinning.”

But because of other regulatory constraints, forest management activity on the Apache-Sitgreaves is generally limited to about 30,000 acres annually, less than five percent of the 772,000 acres labeled suitable for management.

“It isn’t much compared to the size of the forest,” Mr. Bedell concedes. “But it is enough acreage to support a perpetual thinning program that would in turn support several small wood processing businesses.”

My, how times have changed. When Mr. Bedell was named Apache- Sitgreaves supervisor 12 years ago, there were seven sawmills vying for the 75 to 80 million board feet of timber the forest offered for sale every year. Now there are no sawmills.

“But we still have a job to do,” he says. “We have to create markets for the small diameter trees that need to come off this forest.”

Forest Service district ranger Ed Collins stands beside a biomass pile on the 17,000-acre Blue Ridge Demonstration Project near Lakeside, Arizona. “There simply aren’t any viable commercial markets for trees this small,” he says of the highly praised thinning project. “So we are paying loggers to do the work.”

But Mr. Bedell does not think the larger more capital-intensive forest products companies will ever return to the region.

“We can’t promise them what they want most which is a guaranteed annual volume or a long term contract,” he says. “So I don’t think you will see a pulp mill or an OSB plant here. But you will see lots of smaller less capitalintensive business that can roll with the punches, businesses with ten to 25 employees that dominate small market, small diameter niches.”

And to retain experienced loggers in a business that is by nature capital intensive Mr. Bedell expects the federal government is going to have to do what it has never done before. It is going to have to bankroll equipment with grants and pay loggers to do the necessary thinning work.

“I don’t see how else it can work,” he says. “We’re not in the timber business anymore. We can’t expect loggers to go in hock for half-million dollar machines then ask them to park the machines in their front yards while appeals are resolved. No, this is a national forest problem and the national forests— meaning the nation’s taxpayers—are going to have to pay the bill.”

Everything changes 25 miles south of the Lakeside Ranger Station. Here, at Fort Apache, on the White Mountain Apache Reservation, the tribe operates the Southwest’s largest sawmill and the only large mill in Arizona.

But unlike Rio Grande Forest Products, New Mexico’s largest sawmill, the Fort Apache Timber Company does not buy federal timber. It gets all the wood it needs from the tribe’s 800,000- acre forest; considered by many to be one of the best managed tribal forests in the United States.

You will see two things on White Mountain land that you will not see in any Southwest national forest today: a commercial timber harvesting program and a thinning program that is not driven by diameter limits. “

We are working to create a more natural appearing forest and greater structural diversity,” says tribal forester Jim Pitts. “Rather than thin from below as the Forest Service does, we thin in every age class. Stands are thinned at 10-20 year intervals, depending on sitespecific objectives. We retain the best quality trees as a seed source. The result will be a multi-aged stand capable of hosting greater biological and species diversity.”

Timber landowning tribes hold several advantages over the U.S. Forest Service where their management decisions are concerned. First, their decisions are not subject to administrative appeal. Second, while tribal forestry actions must be consistent with the federal Endangered Species Act— and other federal environmental laws as well—they are not burdened by the additional layers of costly process and analysis the U.S. Department of Agriculture has heaped on the Forest Service over the years. Moreover, tribal forest management decisions cannot be overturned by other federal agencies— as is the case in the Forest Service’s often stormy relationships with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service. Finally, tribes don’t face the daunting task of having to devise management programs that please an entire nation—a nation that has grown increasingly queasy about logging in national forests. Tribes need only please tribal members, no one else. And at White Mountain support for sustainable commercial timber management is rock solid.

“We do enjoy strong support from tribe members,” says Tribal Forester Paul DeClay Jr. “It has allowed us to move well beyond small demonstration projects.”

Because White Mountain forestry decisions are not subject to federal administrative appeal environmental groups have not been able to stop the tribe from harvesting timber on their land. In fact, environmentalists can’t even gain access to tribal timberland without permission.

“They’ve tried,” Mr. DeClay says. “Our unwillingness to give them access upsets them quite a bit, but these are our lands, not theirs.”

When the Mexican spotted owl was listed as a threatened species—a decision many still question—tribal leaders quickly demonstrated their political skills by signing a memorandum of understanding with then Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, setting aside reserve areas that do not impede the tribe’s overall management program.

“We don’t accept the idea that if you manage for species you can’t also manage for timber,” Mr. DeClay explains. “It’s true you can’t have every forest value on every acre all of the time, but you can do what we do, which is to manage our forests in perpetuity for productivity, products, habitat and cultural resources.”

The tribe currently harvests about 50 million board feet annually, well below the 110 million board foot harvest of a few years ago, but enough to supply Fort Apache Timber Company with all of the fiber it needs. The mill, which was built in 1963, cuts dimension lumber and employs about 330 tribal members. A few years ago the tribe added a remanufacturing facility. It makes several high value products for the door and window industries plus tongue and groove logcabin siding, house logs and a variety of poles and timbers used in landscaping. And just recently, a portable bark peeling operation was added to utilize small diameter trees harvested from fuels management zones that border tribal communities.

This thinning project on White Mountain Apache timberland near Honda, Arizona stands in sharp contrast to nearby Forest Service thinnings. Because radical environmentalists cannot appeal or litigate tribal timber management programs, tribal foresters can thin trees of all ages, creating more diverse forests.

But unlike most western sawmills, Fort Apache does not have a co-generating plant for disposing of its wood waste. Instead, it rails its best chips all the way to Longview, Washington. Lesser grades heat the mill’s lumber driers or are sold to Forest Energy Corporation at Show Low. Still more decaying sawdust is sold to Western Organics, a wood waste marketer with operations in six western cities. But the accumulating pile of sawdust behind the mill attests to a huge untapped potential the tribe has yet to consider: the biomass power business.

“We enjoy the best of all possible worlds,” says Fort Apache controller Mike Humphrey. “Great location, great pine, great customers and just about everyone else has been run out of business. What more could you ask for?”

The end to an already very costly fire season would certainly be worth asking for. The tribe lost about 25 percent of its timberland in the disastrous Rodeo-Chediski Fire, which started on reservation land. Tribal foresters are currently considering several salvage logging options, and it appears that it will take about two years for the mill to process all of the tribe’s burned timber.

Meanwhile, forest closure fire restrictions have forced tribal leaders to temporarily shut down the mill—a misfortune that is costing $10,000 a day according to general manager Mary Classay, who also estimates the mill has already lost at least $52 million in sales of its highly prized ponderosa pine lumber. And now the mill’s 400 workers are unemployed—an especially devastating hardship on a reservation that already has 60 percent unemployment. As the crow flies, it is 130 miles from Fort Apache to Phoenix, 170 to Egar, 140 to Show Low and 120 to Flagstaff. But the cultural distance from Arizona’s largest city to its forested outposts might as well be measured in light years. No one is more painfully aware of this fact than Arizona Deputy State Forester Kirk Rowdabaugh.

“Most people living in the metropolitan area don’t have a clue what is happening in northern Arizona,” he says. “The forestry story isn’t on their radar screen and fires only make news when they are burning. Television stations get pretty excited about ecological consequences when fires explode but when the smoke clears they’re gone.”

Mr. Rowdabaugh, who is a forester by training, spends most of his time putting out forest fires and worrying about where the next one will occur.

“We’re trying to save lives and keep homes from burning to the ground,” he says of the state’s primary mission. “If the butterflies come back later that’s nice, but it isn’t our mission.”

Though he is mainly engaged in fighting and preventing forest fires, Mr. Rowdabaugh is well aware of what needs to happen to reduce the risk of what he believes to be inevitable calamity.

“We are at a crossroads and in desperate need of a long-term thinning program,” he explains. “In another ten years it won’t matter. We’ll lose it all. Too many Arizonans don’t seem to understand that when it’s gone it’s gone for 300 to 400 years. As things now stand, we aren’t even able to keep up with growth much less reduce tree density to a point where forests can recover.”

Both Mr. Rowdabaugh and the Arizona State Lands Department are heavily involved in efforts to create and recruit new businesses that can utilize small diameter trees harvested from forests in Arizona. Among the initiatives the state is supporting: EECO (including a grant in support of this report), the Four Corners Sustainable Forest Partnership and the Greater Flagstaff Forest Partnership, for whom Mr. Rowdabaugh is trying to find state land the Partnership can use to merchandize logs for highest value. Despite clear progress on several fronts, he’d worried about the fact that major companies seem disinterested in restoration forestry and its marketing possibilities.

“The companies with deep pockets, technological know how and access to global markets haven’t resurfaced yet,” he observes. “I know that trust is a big issue and I don’t know what more we can realistically do to reassure them, but we could surely put their expertise to work down here. And I do believe there is a future here for those who are willing to step up to the plate.”

Marty Moore agrees.

“Forests and rural communities are a natural match,” EECO’s very determined executive director declares. “We see all sorts of opportunities for the formation of successful partnerships involving businesses engaged in small wood utilization.”

Brian Cottam also agrees.

Mr. Cottam, who heads the nonprofit Greater Flagstaff Forests Partnership, sees opportunity almost everywhere he looks, but he readily concedes he has had great difficulty finding suitable markets for wood fiber the partnership is harvesting from several demonstration tracts in the Fort Valley area just west of Flagstaff.

“We need viable small businesses capable of turning small diameter trees into marketable products,” he says of the environmental group’s quest to restore area national forests. “Restoration isn’t going anywhere without markets and infrastructure.”

Mr. Cottam is right. But there is considerable rancor over the size of businesses that are needed. Most environmentalists who support restoration favor small ventures and fear that more sizeable operations will lead the Southwest back down the road toward increasing dependence on an ever-increasing federal harvest.

But while Mr. Cottam also favors a suite of smaller businesses capable of filling multiple niche markets he clearly recognizes the need for a larger complex capable of processing significant quantities of low quality fiber.

“Our members would be very uncomfortable with something as large as an oriented strand board plant or anything else on that scale,” he says. “But it is a good sign that most also agree that restoration forestry needs to be addressed on a much larger scale that it has been thus far.”

Mr. Cottam reports biomass-toenergy projects are particularly popular with his members because they offer hope for mitigating smokefilled skies and associated cardiac and respiratory problems. So too are midsized businesses that make molding, windows, doors and other valueadded products from small diameter trees.

“We need to start building new milling capacity on a scale that will allow us to meaningfully address both our forest problem and our forest future,” he declares. “Creating firebreaks around communities and calling it ‘forest restoration’ isn’t going to get the job done. I am on record in support of someone building a high-speed sawmill in our area. It’s time to get moving!”

Dr. Marty Moore,left, Executive Director, Environmental Economics Communities Organization (EECO), with Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest Supervisor, John Bedell, on a wood tour near Lakeside, Arizona. As bad as the 2002 fire season has been, Mr. Bedell believes the worst is yet to come in the Southwest.

But many in Congress apparently see no urgency. Despite strong support from New Mexico Sen. Pete Domenici and Arizona Sen. John Kyl, provisions for including 75 forest stewardship projects and a biomass grant program in the $190 billion Farm Bill were dropped at the last minute. The failure of House-Senate conferees to reach consensus prompted House Forestry Subcommittee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) to angrily criticize Senators Tom Daschle (D-SD) and Tom Harkin (D-IA) for caving in to extremist environmental groups who opposed the pilot programs.

“Today, Senate Democrat Farm Bill Conferees put at risk millions of people who are facing the threat of catastrophic wildfire,” Rep. Goodlatte said in a prepared press release. “Instead of reaching out to the communities at risk, the Senate Democrats reached out to extreme environmental groups who are opposed to cutting trees at any cost, even if that cost is human life.”

But both Messrs. Daschle and Harkin drew strong praise from American Lands, an environmental coalition that opposes forest restoration on federal lands. In a memo to other activists who lobbied against the Farm Bill’s stewardship contacting provisions, the group’s campaign coordinator, Steve Holmer, wrote “my deepest gratitude for all of your out-standing work to stop this dangerous legislation.” Jim Petersen Dr. Marty Moore,left, Executive Director, Environmental Economics Communities Organization (EECO), with Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest Supervisor, John Bedell, on a wood tour near Lakeside, Arizona. As bad as the 2002 fire season has been, Mr. Bedell believes the worst is yet to come in the Southwest.

“It’s all politics,” declares Chris West, vice president of the American Forest Resource Council, an industry coalition that lobbied hard for the provisions. “Radical environmentalists and their friends in the U.S. Senate don’t like stewardship contacting because it is a very cost effective tool for getting forest restoration and fuels management work done. They know they’ve lost the ‘Zero Cut’ battle publicly so now they’re working behind the scenes to scuttle us.”

“It is a major setback for us,” concedes EECO’s Dr. Moore. “However, forest restoration will only be history after we are all dead and buried, not before.” The defeat would seem to be a major setback for the Bush Administration too. On May 23 it signed an agreement with the Western Governor’s Association endorsing the association’s ten-year plan for reducing the risk of catastrophic fire in western national forests and, concurrently, developing new uses for small diameter wood fiber. But minus project monies that were removed from the Farm Bill, many initiatives are now in limbo.

If anything, the entire incident has only hardened the resolve of the association’s incoming chairman, Montana Governor Judy Martz.

“It’s political terrorism—and we have no intention of giving in,” she said in a June Evergreen interview. “Many in Congress don’t yet understand the grave danger wildfires pose in the rural West. The western governors do. Someone recently reminded me that our federal government rightfully spends millions protecting historic buildings and documents. We wouldn’t dream of squabbling while the Lincoln Monument crumbled. So why are we fighting among ourselves while our treasured national forests burn to the ground? These forests do not belong to a political party or a special interest group. They belong to all of us—and they are crumbling.”

 

 

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