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NEW
HOPE IN NEW MEXICO
First it was Arizona. Now it is New
Mexico. Two beautiful states caught in the grip of an unprecedented
wildfire-forest health crisis without a hope in hell of turning back the
relentless march of marauding pine beetles and deadly forest fires.
The problem, of course, is that there is no sawmilling
infrastructure left in the Southwest, no way to process and market
hundreds of millions of tons of wood fiber scientists say must be removed
from the region’s forests and rangelands if they are to be pulled back
from the brink of ecological collapse. Most of the Southwest’s milling
capacity was auctioned after the federal timber sale program collapsed
under the weight of litigation in the early 1990s. Between 1992 and 2003,
15 sawmills, including six in New Mexico, went out of business. In good
years, they processed 368 million board feet of timber. The last and largest sawmill in New
Mexico, Rio Grande Forest Products at Espanola, shut down more than a year
ago. Eight tiny mills remain. Together they are capable of milling 19
million board feet annually, six million feet less than Rio Grande milled
by itself in a good year.
Meanwhile, 702.68 million board feet of new growth are added
to New Mexico’s forests annually – and that’s just on
non-reserved forestlands that are deemed suitable for harvest, meaning
they are growing wood fiber at a rate of 20 or more cubic feet per acre
annually. Another 108 million board feet die annually, including 70
million feet of sawtimber: trees nine or more inches in diameter breast
high.
Faced with such a bonanza, you would think sawmill owners would be
standing in line for the chance to build new sawmills here. And you would
be wrong, because almost 69 percent of the timber that grows and dies
annually in New Mexico lies within national forests. What is not tied up
in litigation has fallen into the bureaucratic black hole created by 30
years of conflicting environmental law: a regulatory nightmare Forest
Service chief Dale Bosworth and others have liked to the fabled Gordian
knot. In fact, the need for infrastructure has become so dire that ranchers in northern New Mexico are burying ponderosa pine thinned from their forests in trenches – because there is no market for it. How can this be? The answers – and New Mexico’s response to its forest health crisis – are described in this special report.
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