A man of Las Humanas: George Ramirez's efforts are bringing solid training and steady work to one of New Mexico's overstocked forests

American Forests, Summer-Autumn, 2004 by Bryan Foster

George Ramirez lives in the small town of Manzano, about 60 miles south of Albuquerque. Manzano is a Spanish land grant community where residents depend on wood for heating, cooking, building, and medicinal plants. An effort by Ramirez that began with firewood has created a business that employs locals while lessening fire danger in the woods. I came to Manzano to see how it works.

Ramirez showed me into an unfinished room in his home where he keeps his work tools: an orange Stihl chainsaw and an old Dell computer.

He began by selling firewood, but "soon I needed to get a permit from the Forest Service, then I needed to pay more for the permit. Then access to the wood in the forest became even more limited due to the implementation of Mexican spotted owl critical habitat restrictions," he says. "I wondered why the Forest Service was making it hard for me to cut wood even though the forests were so thick I would rip up my shirt walking through it, and the streams didn't run from the trees sucking up water."

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The inability to thin forests due to a spotted owl court injunction frustrated both community members and local Forest Service personnel. When the injunction ended, they joined the local conservation district to discuss removing small-diameter material in a way that could improve forest health, provide the communities much-needed wood, and give economic stability to a county that is one of the poorest in the country.

Ramirez wanted to create a locally based workforce to help thin the combustible forests around Manzano. He went to Washington, DC, to testify about the hardships national forest policies and court decisions created in small forest-based communities. From this in 1998 came Las Humanas, which translates as "the people," a nonprofit cooperative whose members come from five of the small communities and represent the community's voice.

At the same time, the U.S. Forest Service created a pilot stewardship project that enabled the Mountainair Ranger District to work with local communities to thin small-diameter material and provide firewood for local communities. One hundred thirty-six acres were thinned, Las Humanas members were trained in Forest Service thinning practices, and the communities had their wood.

But workers had to volunteer their time to remove the material, which meant thinners were constantly changing as they juggled employment with the voluntary thinning. Ramirez, president of Las Humanas Cooperative, applied for a grant through the Collaborative Forestry Restoration Program (see American Forests, Spring 2003) to take his group to the next level. He wanted a permanent workforce that could be paid and successfully compete for thinning contracts. In 2001 Las Humanas was awarded a three-year, $350,000 grant enabling it to pay a thinning crew and receive training in business administration and forestry thinning standards.

Las Humanas now has 24 seasonal workers. They have thinned 200 acres of national forest land and implemented three Forest Service thinning contracts in the Ranger District.

"What Las Humanas is doing is really important," says Vicky Estrada, the Mountainair District ranger for Cibola National Forest. "This organization is helping thin the forest to improve forest and watershed health and reduce the risk of catastrophic fire while at the same time providing local employment."

Ramirez and Estrada are now working to ensure that this employment is sustainable via a stewardship contract that would set aside 400 acres of forest land per year for thinning by Las Humanas. It's a win-win situation--both for the forest and for Las Humanas' trained and now regularly employed workers.

Bryan Foster is the author of Wild Logging.