A friend told me he wanted to have the forests of northern New Mexico left “natural”. I heard the same from other people who are not happy about the Forest Service thinning trees and prescribed fire on the land. The Hermit Peak fire last spring didn’t help. Now people worry about prescribed fire getting out of control for a good reason. Some people want the forests to be left natural.
I’ve puzzled over what “natural” means in this context. Perhaps I’ve lost perspective because I’ve thought about this too much.
Let’s take the Pecos Wilderness as an example. It was set aside in 1964 to be a wild area without any mechanical travel and no buildings, mining, logging, or road building. The quarter million-acre area has cattle grazing within it and the US Forest Service, which manages the land, puts out fires that start in the wilderness or on nearby lands. Sure the forest is natural but it is also distorted by modern human activities.
Then we have the Native people who lived here before Europeans colonized New Mexico. As far as anthropologists can tell, and according to the Pueblo people themselves, Pueblo people did not start fires as a normal practice, probably because there was so much lightning fire on the landscape already. They didn’t have livestock until Europeans brought livestock to this region. So Native people probably had minimal impact on the Pecos Wilderness and other high-country area in prehistoric times. (Closer to their large villages they had a strong impact.)
The Pecos is natural land. But the biggest influences on wild land in the Southwest have been fire suppression and livestock grazing. Grazing has been changing plant communities here since 1880 or earlier. Fires have been put out since 1900. These are big human influences. Is the land’s condition natural?
Grazing has ruined grasslands and plant communities in many places and it has polluted our streams and damaged their structure. It removes grass that would normally carry low intensity fire to clean up the land and revitalize plant communities.
Closer to Santa Fe, the US Forest Service plans to thin out small trees and then set fires in-season to try to prevent the high severity fires that have plagued the Southwest for the last 30 years. Many people are not happy. They don’t want trees cut down, saw cuts on the trees and the scars of fire on the lands where they hike and enjoy an illusion of wilderness.
I understand this too as I hike daily on national forest land near Santa Fe and I enjoy the feeling of wildness out there. The place I hike was heavily logged in the 1930s, so you find ancient stumps and fading logging roads everywhere. I know that the Forest Service has been putting out every fire that starts in my woods because we are close to houses and town. I don’t see livestock up there because there is nothing for them to eat but I know sheep grazed these forests starting in the 1880s.
As a land management person, I know this forest is a mess from human interventions. Still, it is beautiful. As a firefighter, I know that it could really use a good, prescribed fire and I hope they will bring their torches soon. I would love to see the grass and wildflowers come back after a ground fire that would burn up the needles, logs and branches and kill some of the smaller trees. The deer and elk would love the post burn world!
But my view is not shared by many other people who fear fire so close to town and who don’t want to breath smoke. They worry the fire will burn Santa Fe and that it will ruin the forest. How can we blame them after the Cerro Grande prescribed fire burned Los Alamos in 2000 and the Hermit Peak (Las Dispensas) prescribed fire burned homes, farms, and national forest land in 2022?
Fire is like age. We can’t escape the aging process as people and forests can’t escape fire. Back in the 1930s the Forest Service required that all fires were put out on national forests. The result was thickets of trees and piles of dead material on the forest floor today. In this dry area, only fire can remove the debris and kill the too-many young trees that clog the forests. In wet places, forest debris decays quickly. Here it can persist for decades.
We have two choices. We can leave the forest alone and wait for a big wildlfire to come and likely kill large areas of trees, or we can get out in front of it and remove some of the fuels built up from logging, grazing and fire suppression. The thinning and burning that we need will not be pretty in the short term, but over time they will allow the forest to fill will native plants and allow millions of trees to get big and old like the ones logged in the past.
It would be wonderful if we could just leave the forest alone and believe it was natural. It would be great if the forest would restore itself to a beautiful green landscape without our help. But sadly, we have done so many things to change the forests that they are no longer natural. They are wild places that have been deeply changed by people. And they will adjust themselves if we leave them alone. Likely such adjustment will be in the form of fire. Perhaps the fire will be calm and perhaps people will let it do its cleaning work. More likely it will be a high severity fire started by humans and it could change the forest into a land of dead trees and scrub for generations to come.
I agree that thinned forests are somewhat ugly after the work has been done. But I also notice that with time these forests assume a wilder feel as saw cuts fade and vegetation returns, usually in more profusion than before the thinning.
A natural forest? Natural food? These are idealistic ideas that don’t stand up well to scientific or historical scrutiny.
Even so, I respect and appreciate deeply the people who want to protect forests from too much management. I share their love of wild land. And I hope they can walk their dogs and their children in beautiful forests for decades to come, even if they are managed to protect them from inevitable firestorms on the horizon.
