Arizona Forest
Restoration Products Inc.
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Arizona Forest Restoration Products Inc. |
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Tribal Forests
Privately owned forests of non-reserved ponderosa pine sawtimber and poletimber cover 800,000 acres in Arizona (U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station Resource Bulletin RMRS-RB-2: Arizona’s Forest Resources, 1999), and 762,000 acres in New Mexico (U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station Resource Bulletin RMRS-RB-2: New Mexico’s Forest Resources, 2000). Most of this land is located within the Navajo Nation and the White Mountain Apache Tribe reservations, and is managed with the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Navajo Forest
Most of the Defiance Plateau sits between 7,000 and 8,000 feet above sea level, while the more rugged Chuskas Mountains reach up to nearly 10,000 feet, causing the Chuskas Mountains and Defiance Plateau to be the wettest and most verdant terrain of the Navajo Nation. Two-thirds of the average annual surface water generated within the Navajo Reservation originates in this region's ponderosa pine forests. Collectively, the Defiance Plateau and the Chuskas Mountains comprise the nearly 600,000 acres Navajo Forest, which is divided between Arizona and New Mexico. The southern half of the Chuskas is located mainly in the New Mexico portion of the Navajo Nation, while the northern half is located in the Arizona portion.
During the late 1950s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Navajo Tribal Council created Navajo Forest Products Industries (NFPI), a tribal economic enterprise. Between 1962 and 1992, NFPI cut and processed an average of 40 million boardfeet (~ 80,000 ccf) of lumber from the large diameter trees of the Navajo forest each year, creating thousands of good-paying jobs and millions of dollars in tribal revenues. However, this aggressive industrial development program was done with very little concern for how these activities would affect continuing traditional Navajo subsistence and spiritual uses of the forest. In the early 1990s, an intense intra-tribal conflict erupted on the reservation, as the last of the forest's old growth or "grandfather" trees were turned into lumber.
A grassroots Navajo organization called Dinè CARE (Navajo Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment) attempted to change NFPI's and the BIA's industrialized approach to the forest, arguing that commercial timber harvesting was damaging or even destroying the forest's long-term cultural, environmental, and spiritual values. This conflict resulted in the bankruptcy and closure of NFPI's sawmill in Navajo, NM two years later.
Virtually no activity took place in the Navajo forest for the subsequent 10 years but the risk of catastrophic fires have grown to such proportions that in 2000 the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the Navajo Nation Forestry Department released a Final Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (FPEIS) on a proposed 10-year Forest Management Plan for the Navajo Forest. The plan called for the logging of 31% of the Nation's quarter million acre commercial timber harvest base over 10 years. After 4 years of legal and technical difficulties a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SPEIS) was announced in August 2004, and a Record Of Decision (ROD) was finally issued in January 2005 by the BIA to approve the Navajo Nation Ten-Year Forest Management Plan for the Navajo Forest. The ROD was promptly challenged in the USDI Board of Indian Appeals in March 2005, but in April 2006 the board dismissed the appeals, clearing the way for the implementation of the Navajo Forest 10 year management plan.
The scope of Arizona Forest Restoration Products’s activity matches closely the goals of the Navajo Forest 10 year management plan.
White Mountain Apache Forest
With a rapidly growing population of about 12,000 members, the White Mountain Apache Tribe occupies the 1.7 million acres Fort Apache Indian Reservation, ranging in elevation from less than 2,500 ft. to more than 11,400 ft.
In June 2002 a fire started on the reservation that was to become the Rodeo-Chediski fire, the largest burn in the Southwest. The fire burned over 276,000 acres on Tribal land, and ultimately burned a total of over 469,000 acres on Tribal, National Forest, and private lands, destroying over 400 homes. The fire was a high intensity crown fire that utterly destroyed the forest and brought vast landscape disturbances to the entire White Mountains region.
Hundreds of people have been involved with day-to-day recovery activities. In 2004 they built 100 miles of fence to protect reseeded fire-scarred lands, planted over 650,000 pine seedlings, cleaned hundreds of clogged culverts, dropped thousands of tons of hay from helicopters to mulch hillsides, and placed tens of thousands of logs to capture eroding soil. In addition the Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) managers of the Rodeo-Chediski Fire attached importance to the fact that Native American Tribes have special recognition by the United States Congress because of the federal-tribal trust relationship, and they developed a collaborative structure with the White Mountain Apache Tribe as a full partner to implement a long-term program over the entire area. The key position of Implementation Leader of the Rodeo-Chediski Fire BAER Plan and all of the associated emergency stabilization treatments were contracted to the White Mountain Apache Tribe (White Mountain Apache BAER Program).
To avoid the repetition of a similar catastrophe, the members of the White Mountain Apache Tribe have made a dedicated effort to engage proactively and rapidly in a long-term sustainable management and thinning program that is in harmony with strict environmental, social, and economic criteria. In May 2004 the White Mountain Apache Tribe was certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) for their forest management practices. This certification represents the second-largest amount of FSC-certified forestlands in the U.S. covered by one certificate after the 2.2 million FSC-certified acres of the Pennsylvania State forests.
The scope of Arizona Forest Restoration Products’s activity matches closely the fuel reduction and forest treatment program in which the tribe is actively engaged.
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