Arizona Forest
Restoration Products Inc.
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Arizona Forest Restoration Products Inc. |
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An Economically Viable Model of Ecological Management
Regrettably, until recently there did not appear to be a solution to the increasingly deteriorating situation. At a typical thinning cost of approximately $550 per acre, treating the millions of acres that have accumulated hazardous natural fuel would cost the U.S. Forest Service literally billions of dollars. This money simply does not exist in the federal or state budgets.
At the same time, the U.S. Forest Service is draining its budget trying to fight ever more catastrophic wildfires over an ever increasing number of forests, and the situation worsens from year to year. In Northern Arizona alone, only 4 years ago in June 2002 a fire started on the White Mountain Apache Reservation that was to become the Rodeo-Chediski fire, the largest burn in the Southwest. The fire burned over 469,000 acres on Tribal, National Forest, and private lands and destroyed over 400 homes. And while Arizonans have been lucky over the last few years, only a few months ago in June 2006 over 420 homes had to be evacuated from Sedona’s Oak Creek Canyon as fire raged, and Flagstaff itself made national news as fires propagated quickly through its increasingly large wildland/urban interface areas. Despite constants flights by 3 fire-fighting air tankers and 2 fire-fighting helicopters, and numerous ground crews working around the clock, the fire was only brought under control when it reached areas that had been previously thinned during restoration projects. There, the fire dropped down from the tree crowns to the floor, lost its intensity, and could be rapidly controlled.
Some projects have been attempted in order to implement ecological thinning of the forest, but until now all have been facing enormous economic challenges. Small-scale business models that cannot add significant value to the small diameter wood harvested during thinning operations have very precarious economic viability and are simply not sustainable on the scale required to make a difference. Biomass co-generated electricity, wood pellets heating fuel, landscape wood chips, fire wood, etc. typically do not generate the type of gross margins that allow businesses to flourish and to operate without the subsidizing of their raw material by cash payment from the Forest Service.
Arizona Forest Restoration Products has a different approach. By investing into world-class German engineering and technology, we will build a production plant capable of processing low-value small diameter ponderosa pine into high value-added oriented strand board (OSB). The profitability of the product will allow us to not only be fiscally independent from the U.S. Forest Service budget, but to actually purchase large quantities of small diameter timber from the National Forests, thereby contributing a steady and robust revenue stream to the Forest Service, that will help it fund its forest management activities.
This new approach has been designed not against the will of the local community, but with its active support, and the local environmental constituencies understand and appreciate that Arizona Forest Restoration Products is not only on the side of conservation and forest restoration, but is actually the enabler that they have long been waiting for to see their ecological dreams fulfilled.
We intend to honor their trust and the trust of the Forest Service by operating in the most ethical way, from environmentally friendly mechanized Master Logging programs in the forests, to environmentally friendly low emission and energy efficient equipment in the manufacturing plant.
By pioneering a new business paradigm that serves and protects the forest by implementing forest restoration programs; respects good ecological science; helps protect the community by implementing thinning prescriptions in the wildland/urban interface areas; helps prevent the risk of catastrophic wildfires by reducing the accumulation of hazardous fuel in the forest; partners up with all local constituencies; makes forest treatment economically self supporting; funds the U.S. Forest Service; uses state of the art engineering to convert low value small diameter trees harvested during forest ecological thinning into high value-added oriented strand board (OSB); provides high quality construction materials to the growing markets of the U.S. Southwest; contributes to Northern Arizona rural development; provides high paying local jobs; and rewards investors, Arizona Forest Restoration Products truly creates and sustains a new win-win situation.
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