Most Santa Fe residents recently got a mailing from a group called “The Forest Advocate” which discusses forest management around Santa Fe. While I appreciate the spirit of the publication, I found it confusing, contradictory, and conveying some basic factual errors.
The Forest Advocates seem to want to preserve “a forest in a natural state” and they urge us to participate in US Forest Service planning for forestry activities meant to reduce the risk of severe wildfire near Santa Fe. Apparently, The Forest Advocates are mostly opposed to thinning and prescribed fires planned by the agency. Yet doing nothing as they seem to advocate will result in high severity fire close to Santa Fe, possibly burning down many homes and devastating our forests.
The publication ignores the history of land use in northern New Mexico which changed forests from their (natural) pre-European settlement condition to the stressed, overgrown, fire-prone forests of today. The forests east of Santa Fe (and in the Jemez Mountains) have been exploited and mismanaged for 140 years and are an ecological mess.
In a nutshell, for thousands of years our local ponderosa pine forests experienced ground fires started by lightning every ten to twenty years according to numerous researchers. The forests had plenty of large trees above grassy forest floors. Ground fires would thin young trees, burn up debris, and stimulate grass and these fires would often burn thousands of acres.
In 1880 millions of sheep were brought into New Mexico. The sheep ranged through the mountains decimating grasses and other plants. Without grass, trees seedlings proliferated. In 1903 the US Forest Service arrived to manage the newly established national forests. The USFS tried to extinguish all fires, causing a large build-up of fuels.
Between 1920 and 1990, loggers cut down most of the big trees in the forests near Santa Fe and Los Alamos. With the big trees gone, thickets of seedlings and brush proliferated. In 1977 we started to see large, high severity fires exploding in these highly altered forests. In western states, high severity fires have increased eight-fold since 1985. The Pacheco Canyon Fire, Tres Lagunas, Cerro Grande and Las Conchas fires and others have all killed hundreds of thousands of acres of trees, converting forests to scrublands.
These fires were vastly hotter and more destructive than fires before 1880 and climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of fire in the West.
So how do we get out of this mess? We start by being honest about what happened and the risks we face today consequently. Publishing simplistic diatribes from a dreamland where nature is best left along, after we have totally altered almost every acre on earth… does no good. Hyperbole doesn’t make up for actual knowledge.
The forests in northern New Mexico are not in their “natural” state. While the US Forest Service has a record of promoting destructive forest uses, the agency has absorbed the large amount of research from hundreds of scientists working to understand how to make forests resilient in the face of climate change and high severity fire.
The Santa Fe National Forest plans to thin (not log) and burn land near Santa Fe. Similar work is happening on millions of acres throughout the West to help protect cities and homes from big forest fires. Based on research from many scientists, their basic goal is to prevent the sort of damage Los Alamos sustained from wildfire in totally altered and overgrown forests in 2000. Removing thickets, thinning out trees that would have been killed by ground fires in the past, and leaving many large healthy trees that can become the old growth trees of the future.
No doubt Forest Service plans need public input and improvement to limit new road building and cut fewer trees. If anything, we will need more, larger prescribed fires at natural intervals to do the most good calming future wildfires. The US Forest Service needs to expand its prescribed fire program to encompass much larger areas in each burn. Rather than burning a few hundred acres, they could be burning a few thousand acres at a time. Congress needs to provide budget for the agency to do this work West-wide.
With climate change, our opportunities to make these positive changes will be limited in the future. Prescribed fire or natural fire can only happen with conditions are right and with global heating, the windows of opportunity are fewer and fewer.
Tom Ribe
