Let's Get Our Priorities Straight: An Op-Ed Regarding the Maquinita Timber Sale

Bryan Bird and Joanie Berde respond to a Taos News article about the Maquinita Timber Sale to stress the importance of natural wildfire, maintaining water quality, and providing sustainable income for local residents

We appreciate The Taos News covering important forest management issues here in Northern New Mexico, and in particular the story on the Maquinita timber sale that ran Dec. 14. It is imperative that we have a civic dialogue about the management of our public forests and how tax dollars are being spent. We would like to clarify why our organizations are challenging the Maquinita Project.

First, it is important to make clear that Maquinita is a large project covering nearly 6,000 acres in a very remote area near Hopewell Lake; popular for driving, camping, fishing, and skiing. This forest is not, by any definition, a part of the wildland urban interface or WUI.

Six million board feet of sawtimber would be cut over 5-8 years or about 1,500 full-log trucks. Rather than being "troubled" by a prescribed burning program for the Maquinita area as was suggested in the article, our organizations believe jobs and income could be generated between managed burning and limited, strategic thinning.

This particular forest on the Carson west of Tres Piedras has been logged and thinned for decades with the promise of regular burning to maintain natural fuel levels. The crucial burning in this remote area hasn't happened and the agency now offers another hallow promise to burn regularly; after it is logged yet again. This area has been so heavily logged that even the State Department of Game & Fish was "astounded" by the cumulative impacts and how many times an area could be "re-entered, looking for another small stand of timber to be cut."

Also central is recognition that this forest is principally mixed conifer with dormant aspen: a forest-type that naturally would have burned hot or in a "mixed-severity" resulting in widespread, colorful aspen forests in its place. It is not a dry ponderosa pine forest like those found farther south, which would have burned more often and only along the ground or in a "low-severity."

Despite the fact that 74 percent of the trees in the Maquinita area are just 5-12 inches in diameter, the selected action calls for cutting thousands of trees 18 inches in diameter and bigger. If, as the Forest Service asserts, the problem lies in trees smaller than 12 inches in diameter, then the project should target those trees with burning or light thinning, not by logging the remaining big trees.

This logging would require construction of 4 miles of new roads and maintenance of over 30 miles of old roads. The State Environment Department, Department of Game & Fish and local citizens alerted the Forest Service to the extensive and damaging road system in the area, as well as abuses by off-road vehicles and that addressing this problem was paramount. These concerns fell on deaf ears in favor of the roads necessary to haul out trees.

We filed an administrative appeal of the Maquinita Project, a right of any citizen in our democracy because we believe the project will do more harm than good in this particular area and is a waste of taxpayer dollars. Our earlier request for the opportunity to collaboratively develop a plan using the recent, ground breaking New Mexico Forest Restoration Principles was rejected. Meanwhile, as the Carson plans yet another timber sale in this remote locale, Sen. Bingaman has called attention to nearly 7,800 acres of forest on the Carson that is approved and ready for thinning, but unfunded.

The forests of Maquinita are in an ideal condition and location to begin to realize what the regional forester has identified as a major goal: allowing wildfire to play a more natural, restorative role on the broader landscape. This is the place to begin restoring forests with prescribed fire, which is 20 times more cost effective than mechanical treatments. The $565,000 that will be lost on the Maquinita timber sale would be better spent protecting communities in the forest interface.

Considering our limited resources, vast public forest and the need for fire to return to its natural, revitalizing place, a well-planned program of strategic thinning and extensive burning is necessary in Northern New Mexico. Our organizations are still eager to work with the Forest Service on a practical, restoration project for the Maquinita area: one that addresses fires as well as water quality and provides long-term, sustainable work for Norteños.

Joanie Berde lives in the Carson National Forest and is a member of Carson Forest Watch.

Bryan Bird is forest program director with the regional conservation organization WildEarth Guardians.


 

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