Enchanted partnerships: in New Mexico, a congressman's idea becomes a Forest Service program that inspires collaboration and protects local forests - Communities

American Forests, Spring, 2003 by Bryan Foster

Ruidoso, New Mexico. looks like a Swiss Family Robinson village--offices, stores, and houses are jim-jammed so tightly in the forest you can hardly distinguish the buildings from the trees. But this picturesque scene comes at a price: The vacation village of 8.500 is also ranked number two in the country for wildfire risk by the U.S. Forest Service.

It's the job of Rick Delaco, Ruidoso's urban forester, to protect the village. "Look, trees are beautiful, they're the reason people vacation here. But this," Delaco says, peering through his fingers as if they were dense tree trunks, "is dangerous and not pristine."

Ponderosa pine forests, which used to carry between 25 and 100 trees per acre over much of the West, are now packed with up to 1,000 trees in an acre. Overlogging, overgrazing, and fire suppression over the last century have combined to turn those sunny savannahs of golden-barked ponderosa into dark, weedy thickets.

Delaco is working with nearby government landowners to create a thinned border--similar to a moat--around the village. The group's latest project, the 438-acre Eagle creek Fuels Reduction Project, is designed to protect a "hot spot"--the village's watershed and reservoir and an expensive subdivision north of town. If it's successful, the Eagle Creek project could have ramifications beyond just protecting Ruidoso. It could help change the way the U.S. Forest Service deals with fire.

A NEW WAY?

In 2000, the U.S. Forest Service established its first-ever grant program--the Collaborative Forest Restoration Program (CFRP)--and established it in New Mexico, The CFRP turns the Forest Service inside out. Instead of the agency creating projects then trying to rally support. the public creates projects then tries to get financial support from the agency.

"Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) found that the Forest Service was stymied," says staffer Kira Finkler. "He tried to do something community-driven to get work going again."

Of the 19 projects the Forest Service funded in 2001 in the Land of Enchantment state, about 40 percent were proposed by the public, with grants typically topping $300,000 over a three- to four-year period. (Ironically. 2002 funding for all Forest Service work, including fire prevention projects, was suspended due to the year's high firefighting expenses).

New Mexico's 2001 CFRP projects included:

* Thinning an area now congested with water-sucking trees where water used to seep into the ground to charge a stream. The stream has dropped from its historical run of 600 gallons per minute to just 40-60.

* Buying equipment and giving forestry training to local workers so they can bid on small thinning projects in their area.

* Measuring vegetation diversity, soil quality, wildlife habitat, tree sizes, and other characteristics to see if the treatments are meeting their goals and not leaving the forest in worse condition.

Although it's too early to assess the value of the program, Walter Dunn, who administers CRFP from Albuquerque, New Mexico, believes "this program may be able to do things the agency alone never could have."

With the Forest Service saddled with planning and litigation processes that can sap 40 percent of its time and budget, Dunn believes in projects like CRFP that empower people outside the agency to do fire control work on the ground. The only problem, he says, is that many poor mountain towns in need of funds to control fire hazards don't have citizens with the information and education to apply for grants.

Already, CFRP has spurred politicians to come up with new ideas for the Forest Service, Finkler says. Legislation passed by the Senate last autumn would develop restoration centers throughout the West. These quasi-governmental entities would have as their a mission raising money from private and public sources to fund community-backed fire protection projects.

Wanting to see the CFRP program in action, I spent a few days last summer driving throughout New Mexico and visiting projects from the southern, central, and northern parts of the state. Here's some of what I found:

SOFT TOUCH LOGGING

Gordon West looks at wood like anyone with a background as a logger, a building contractor, and a furniture maker. He turns a chunk of wood over in his hands, mulling how he could cut it, sand it, chip it, glue it into something.

Inside his shop, a derelict adobe building in Santa Clara, New Mexico, West shows me some chairs he recently made for The Nature Conservancy's local bed and breakfast. The chairs were made, he says, from restoration pine--pine less than 12 inches in diameter that was removed to restore the ecological structure of ponderosa pine forests.

Although his shop can't use as much of the wood as needs to be removed from the forest, businesses like his are an important component of the restoration work because they keep skilled labor in rural towns.

West has teamed up with environmentalist Todd Schulke of the Southwest Center for Biological Diversity--a group better known for litigation than collaboration--to "softly thin" 1,200 acres of flammable ponderosa pine in the Gila National Forest. We hop in my truck for the drive up a sinuous road north of Silver City to take a look.