Arizona Forest
Restoration Products Inc.
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Arizona Forest Restoration Products Inc. |
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Stewards of the Land
The majestic beauty and the incredible riches of the Northern Arizona ponderosa forest have long been celebrated:
"We pursued our course westward to San Francisco Mountain. The country at the foot of that mountain (a gradually ascending plain) although somewhat rocky, in places was covered with the finest grama grass, with timber sufficient for fuel, and water in abundance. [It is] well watered with springs, and is by far the most beautiful region I ever remember to have seen in any portion of the world. A vast forest of gigantic pine, intersected frequently by extensive open glades, sprinkled all over with mountain meadows and wide savannahs, filled with the richest grasses, was traveled by our party for many successive days." The comments of E.F. Beale in 1857 as he traveled through northern Arizona, as quoted by D. Ashworth in Biography of a Small Mountain (1991).
People have long been staring with envy... Several times, and periodically, major wood industry conglomerates have been gazing at the ponderosa pine forest and have seen in it millions of dollars of untapped natural resources waiting for the taking. Mountainous terrain would not be an obstacle; if the Northwest could be cut clear, so could the Southwest; and if spotted owls could be dislodged in Washington State, then so could they in Arizona. And unsophisticated Arizonans would be no match for sleek lawyers. All it would take would be to roll into town, cut clear, smog the place out, ship out the lumber, and laugh it all the way to the bank. Right? Wrong! The big conglomerates failed to establish themselves in Arizona because of their operating practices and environmental track record. Arizonans are passionate and tenacious people who love their land and their forest, and they simply would have none of it. They organized, they became politically active, they defended their National, State, and Tribal forests, and the big conglomerates’ agents were sent back home. The forest was saved from another cycle of abuse, and the spotted owls, the bald eagles, and the goshawks continued to soar majestically above the Northern Arizona ponderosa pines ... until the next fire!
Indeed, the forest is in the gravest danger it ever faced. Over a century of short-sighted practices need to be corrected if the forest is not to end within a very few decades in a parched land burnt to the ground in uncontrollable catastrophic high intensity wildfires that scar the landscape and destroy everything in their path.
Arizona Forest Restoration Products exists not because we see the ponderosa pine forest as a prize, but because we see it as a treasure to cherish and protect, and because we see ourselves not as exploiters but as a stewards of the land.
This is why Arizonans support Arizona Forest Restoration Products, and welcome our essential role as enablers of the ecological restoration process that is needed to insure that our forest will flourish for centuries to come.
Yes, Arizona Forest Restoration Products will be a profitable wood business, and this is OK, people understand that the forest can be carefully managed through good restoration science, and must support economically the ecological restoration services that it needs. |
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