Time is running short - Santa Fe New Mexican
Like sand running through our hands, the time is short to find creative solutions to New Mexico’s forest crisis before the dead timber from recent fires becomes unmarketable, and the next big one decimates more land and livelihoods.
Well, actually, there are over 100 million reasons why we need to act now and act fast. This is not just the estimated dollar value of standing dead timber from the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon. Fire that will be lost if we don’t harvest within the next 18 months to four years. It also represents the opportunity cost of not using this value to help underwrite the expense of forest thinning and restoration. Because once our dead trees have no commercial value and forest restoration becomes expensive and dangerous, we’ll have lost the window of opportunity to chart a new course for our future.
The stakes could not be higher. There is much more on the line than whether we have to look at an unsightly bunch of burnt sticks for decades. If the forested uplands are not rendered safely accessible for firewood cutting, hunting and grazing, it will prompt the existing population’s exodus from our rural areas and jeopardize centuries of rich Hispano-Indigenous culture. Restoration and managing our forest are not just an economic or ecological issue — but a social justice issue. Do we turn our back on life ways that have come to define New Mexico, or do we lean into the hard work of reconceiving how we treat the land and the people who rely on it? It is not just a rural rights issue; the damage to the Las Vegas, N.M., municipal watershed and water supply is an abject lesson in the cost of complacency. It could just as easily have been Santa Fe, and it was just dumb luck the monsoons arrived early and quenched the flames before they reached the urban centers of the upper Rio Grande Valley.
The good news is this: A future of cultural and ecological destruction is far from inevitable. We can change course. The irony is it will be cheaper in the long run because the average large wildfire costs over a billion dollars just in suppression costs. Meanwhile, thinning and revitalizing our forest industry costs a fraction of fighting fire and dealing with destruction. Healthy forests and all the associated ecosystem benefits, such as more water for the downstream acequias and associated agriculture, dwarf the value of forest products. It’s a win-win. The problem is we are very poor at collective, preventive action (even when an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure). The issue of valuing individual over collective benefits is especially acute in New Mexico, where we have many programs to support businesses and niche industries (such as film) but few programs to jump-start collective action that benefits everyone.
Here at the Sangre de Cristo Mountain Initiative, we have an audacious proposition. How about we take a fraction of the money that goes to individual businesses, and that too often enriches out-of-state investors, and apply it directly to benefiting our landscapes and communities? Our team has a plan based on years of conversations with business leaders, landowners, loggers, foresters, conservationists, agency staff and many others. We’ve attracted a world-class team to address the issue who share our passion for finding creative solutions. This is a plea to our political leaders, foundations and other influencers to join us in supporting this endeavor before it is too late. For more information, see sdcmi.org.
Charles Curtin has three decades of experience in landscape conservation across the West and beyond and has co-founded programs in adaptive management at MIT, taught at Harvard and elsewhere, and is the author of numerous books and articles. He lives and works in the Mora Valley, where he co-founded the Sangre de Cristo Mountain Initiative to find collective, commonsense solutions to natural resource challenges.
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