In at least one location in the drought-stricken United States, citizens who live near national forests are considering taking matters into their own hands to prevent forest fires from spreading from national forests to their own lands.  In the Jemez Mountains near Santa Fe National Forest, local ranchers have become frustrated with the pace of fuel reduction and prescribed burning in their area, and are considering illegally thinning the forest themselves.  They believe that the forest is a ticking time bomb that could wipe out their livelihoods in one huge fire.

According to them, loggers and sheepherders once kept the forest’s undergrowth sparse enough that a horseman had no problems riding anywhere in the forest.  Now, however, a shift in management policies towards conservation and away from extraction of forest resources has led to it being hard to even walk anywhere off main trails.  They argue that current management practices are bad for both.  “You can’t preserve something if you’re letting it burn 100,000 acres at a time,” says Ernie Torrez, a local cattle rancher.

I think they have a point, but I also think that the Forest Service’s hands are tied on the issues.  The forest is home to the federally protected Mexican Spotted Owl, which only lives in old growth forests.  Legal battles related to spotted owl conservation halted all logging in the southwest for over a year at one point, and the Forest Service only produced a final Mexican Spotted Owl Recovery Plan in 2012.  In addition to that, the federal government has cut budgets significantly over the past few years, and the Forest Service had a lot fewer voices putting pressure on elected officials to protect it than Social Security, Medicare, or defense.  And though President Obama called for a shift in wildfire funding earlier this year to better prevent and fight wildfires, that initiative has yet to become reality.

I can’t blame residents of this area for becoming increasing worried given the droughts and forest fires that have afflicted the western states over the past few years, but I’d like to see residents work out an agreement before thinning the forest in a way that might hinder conservation initiatives, or even unintentionally hurt their own goals of fire prevention.