May the Forest Be With You

As the horrific “fire season” begins again, I want to throw my vote in with Arthur Firstenberg (My View, Sunday April 8^{theSanta Fe New Mexican}  http://www.santafenewmexican.com/LocalColumnsViewpoints/My-View--Arthur-Firstenberg-Controlled-burns-a-prescription-for) who stated a strong case against “controlled” burning.  In addition to all of the things he said, the reality is right in front of us; are we going to be a part of nature and work in the forest or are we going to let the ways of the city rule us? (None of our presidents and most of our representatives have almost no background or cultural contact with the forests; they are city folk, plain and simple…no offense to them, of course).   There are millions of young people out of work or faced with hardships of all sorts (including obesity) and they are the natural inheritors of the forest and the natural choice for who can help fix them.  Sweden gets 40% of all of its energy from biomass (forest products) and we appear to be basing our economy on resisting being a part of the forest; we give  lots of jobs to firefighters, yes, but not to forest thinners, forest tenders or careful forest products gatherers, or research (our favorite thing) and training.  It is so beyond the scope of reason that we still charge people to go into the forests to help thin them (firewood gatherers).  Consider the sheer numbers of BTUs that go up in the fires like we are seeing all over the west and southwest (and even the east now).    It puts the science of global warming and the practice of ‘no burn days’ to absolute shame.  To consider that what we are seeing in front of us is nothing less than an  apocalyptic  sign of not a religious sorting out, but a sorting out of the basic underpinnings of our value systems; we are so afraid that we cannot control forest raping from large corporations and interests such as did the original damage, that we refuse to notice that we must learn to cure our own nature deficit disorders just as we begin to heal the wounds created in the past and also pave the way for a future whose economy is based on carefully, thoughtfully and stridently using the solar and renewable energy that the trees are just standing or lying there waiting for us to recognize.  Forests and clean water represent our wealth.  Period.   If biomass is not economical, then why do so many of us go out into the forest every year to gather firewood; and if that is so bad in terms of smoke,  then why do we stand here and allow the skies to fill with smoke every spring, summer and fall.  I personally ran up our hill three times last summer, shovel and cell phone in hand; ready to fight a fire that ‘must be just over the hill because of the ash and smoke in the air’, only to realize the it was, again, the huge fire on the Arizona/New Mexico border, close to 200 miles away.  The ‘environmentalists’, bless their hearts, sit  speechless with hat (and a lawyer, maybe a camera) in hand.   We have and can create the green and sustainable nature-based methods to do this.  Hey, kids, have you ever seen the cool equipment they use to do biomass work around the world; you can throw away your game boys  and thoughts of joining the army and join the war against foolish forestry.  You can design really cool access roads for smaller rigs; do induced meandering  work in the upper watersheds, invent and work superior energy producing systems that create heat, compost and methane; find beauty and peace up in the hills and mountains of the world; find ways to use those batteries, electric vehicles, steam engines, wood fired vehicles, on the spot wood charged electric chainsaws and electric dozers and pick-ups.   Spend the spring, summer and fall living with your  cool comrades of both sexes and do something important at the same time.   Build trails and learn about one-rock dams and study biology and economics and do accounting, study and do agriculture and controlled grazing experiments…in the field.   Let the controlled burn be in a woodstove or generator.  I also want to throw in with Aldo Leopold and the concept of developing a “Land Ethic” and a forest’s “Bill of Rights” as we do this.   May the forest be with you!

-Thor Sigstedt (60) now climbs the escarpment on his property every year and harvests firewood;  climbing up with a rope and  rolling the logs down.  He has done controlled grazing, forest products gathering and watershed restoration of all sorts for  a few dozens of years , as well as routinely creating rustic art and furniture.

The Irony of Wildfire in Los Alamos

The atom bomb of Hiroshima and Nagasaki fame,
Created in Los Alamos by teams of scientists;
Men and women working to make a blaze
That defied the scale of all blazes
Created firestorms that defy imagination of scale
Scorching cities and roasting humans

 And

 Today the flames lick the town, as it devoured hundreds of houses recently,

The flames not atomic, but rally around the same scale
Creating clouds not unlike the mushroom one,
Fooling drivers from Chama who peered carefully into car windshields
For a hint of panic on the faces of terror stricken motorists

 But, No, not this time;

 This time just a huge fire that rivals the atomic blast

Creating irony upon irony about the whole affair;
Nature bearing down on nuclear waste fields and plutonium reserves
In a kind of behemoth clash of the Titans
Staged between the Valle Grande and the Rio Grande
On the foothills namely Santa Clara sacred grounds;

 Scorched earth policies personified in a sort of;

What goes around comes around irony
Richest county in US of A on Fourth of July
Evacuating then......
Returning to celebrate, one more time,
“Bombs bursting in air” amidst cries from the populace;
“please no fireworks this year “, except for large scale
Public shows by public minded citizens using big boxes
Full of Chinese gunpowder;

All roads lead to White Rock and Los Alamos;

All fires please converge here and decided what to do with us
And the forests that have been lurking around, camouflaged
As wilderness; waiting patiently to be rediscovered.

 The gentle Swedes who scared themselves into pacifism and neutrality

Now  carefully invading their forests with love and chainsaws and modern tools
And quickly shedding the terror of oil; trading for the beauty of well tended forests
And winking at the  people who scurry with helicopters to dump slurry all over

Running around like chickens with their heads cut off

Wisdom From Dixon Orchards

I watched the news last night and, for the first time, I heard someone talk about something other than fireworks issues (no brainer) or the number of acres burned, how hard the firefighters are working (rarely  how much they are paid or what the total cost is), the percentage of containment (a vague number based on ?), how the Santa Fe watershed is safe (but the Nambe watershed is devastated) and the smoke.  An interview at the Dixon orchards which was first reported to be safe and then was found to be devastated was the first time I heard from someone close to the land who had a thought more piercing than the above banter.  He actually wondered why the forests had not been previously logged and thinned.  The nerve; to mention the unmentionable; why not wisely use the forests and get the wood and biomass before the fires do and protect the surrounding areas at the same time.  How dare he mention this kind of stuff when we are in the midst of a crisis like this (which occurs every summer with varying size and location).  How dare he suggest we create erosion in the forests by any roads (ever looked at the erosion caused by these fires).   Doesn’t he know we are in serious drought (of course we were in serious drought in 2000-2001, 2004, 2006 and pretty much every year).  Doesn’t he understand our love of trees (other than he is part of one of the most celebrated orchards in this country)?  Isn’t he just ignoring the need to protect our wilderness (believe me these areas are not wilderness areas, including the Pecos wilderness as they are the result of massive logging and poor management from 1850 to the present).  Maybe it is time to listen to some of these people and try something new other than a steady diet of controlled burns (if only they knew when to light that match), and compare millions of devastated acres to a network of very carefully thought out roads and access to the forests that would allow biomass fuel production (kind of a controlled burn wouldn’t you say), a way for the people to help out (rather than the easier job of hired hot shot firefighters, planes and fuel guzzling helicopters who can really do very little under these conditions).  All this is to appease the litigious guard dogs of the forests and the naïve enviros.  The solutions are right in front of us and represent billions and billions of btus that do not have to go up in smoke and can create jobs, a true environmentalist movement that is based on careful interaction with our forests, which represent the only thing that will prevent our civilization from collapsing.  Imagine; thousands of young people in clear and purposeful interaction with the one thing that will save our economy.  Hmmm…..sounds like a plan.  At least the subject should be raised rather than tossing off such thoughts as not cost effective (as the price of gasoline goes up, the cost effectiveness changes, doesn’t it).  There is a wealth of ideas out there that have been worked out in detail and are close to being foolproof.  I would look up Jean Pain for something that might be of interest to some and see that he was thinking of what to do in arid areas surrounded by forests.  Check it out as well as the numerous other possibilities.  Read Away With All Pests by Norman Bethune for some idea of what “the people” are capable of.  As Henry David Thorea said, “….the world is bigger than our view of it”!  In the end it is all about aesthetics as many have suggested.  When we solve the aesthetic problems (Santa Fe might be able to glom onto that idea) we are on the way to solving all the rest.  I find the aesthetics of helicopters and burned out watershed to be almost untenable.  How about you?  The forests are like the acequias and water rights; you don’t use them, you lose them.  That was the Law of the West.  We need more environmentalists who know how to use a chainsaw and a bulldozer properly.  Same goes for newscasters who reflect the air conditioned response to the problems and the lack of clarity by urban people for a rural problem. We need more people who can protect the watershed, the viewshed, the soil, the air quality and our economy at the same time. I pose the question: how many foresters do we have in the state?  What is their jobs? Is this about competing with oil interests?  Do most people know that utilizing biomass is carbon-neutral?  As Einstein suggested, “problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them”.