Arizona Forest
Restoration Products Inc.
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Arizona Forest Restoration Products Inc. |
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A Sustainable Approach to Natural Resources
It is not even conceivable to look at the Arizona forest and to divide it mentally into neat square-edged blocks, cleanly separated by straight blacktopped roads, to be harvested, plowed, seeded, farmed, then harvested again, plowed again, seeded again, etc. in an endless cycle. Arizona, is not, cannot, and will not become a tree farm of foreign fast-growth species genetically engineered for the highest yield in the shortest amount of time. Arizona Forest Restoration Products has no interest whatsoever in being in this type of business. Northern Arizona is a high desert where water is scarce, summers are hot, winters are cold, and where mature trees take in excess of 250 years to grow. This is the way Arizonans like it, and this is the way they want to keep it.
But well-intended, and regrettably ill-informed, short-sighted human interventions have destroyed in only one hundred years the balance that nature spent geological ages to fine-tune. First, settlers cut the largest trees for traverses when the railroad conquered the West, then loggers cut whatever could feed the endlessly hungry sawmills as American towns became metropolises. Young trees had no value to them, so they left them. These grew into dense thickets of middle size “jack pines” that proved near ideal for pulp mills. Promptly Northern Arizona was near clear cut, and the air stank and stung from chlorate fumes and massive amount of smoke coming from burning enormous piles of leftover tree tops and branches. As the forest disappeared and the environment suffered, people protested. The pulp mills went. But the sapling that had no value to them and that they had left, grew. And since there was no cover and no competition from larger trees anymore, a lot of them grew.
At the same time, again well-intended, and regrettably again ill-informed, aggressive fire fighting policies were developed and nothing was allowed to burn. Promptly, a jungle of small trees sprawled all over, and Arizona, like most Western states, is now faced with a situation of nightmarish proportions. Forests that once counted 40 well spread trees per acre, and where fires could only be low-ground low-intensity fires that actually served a valuable natural maintenance purpose, now count 400+ trees per acre, competing with each others for scarce nutrients, weakening each others, making each others susceptible to deadly ravages by bark beetles, and interlocking their crowns in a cover ideal for the propagation of high-intensity high-crown fires that destroy the forest rather than clean it, and threaten forest towns with obliteration.
A true sustainable approach to natural resources is an approach that does not move the resource from one unintended consequence to the next, until catastrophic proportions are reached. A true sustainable approach to the ponderosa pine forest natural resources is an ecological program that restores the forest back to its natural density and its naturally fire-adapted condition, by the selective thinning of over populating small diameter trees.
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