ip photo: autumn and gambel oak emerge on a portion of the Santa Fe National Forest after the Las Conchas Fire.
Dense stands of water-sucking, heat island-creating ponderosa pine concentrate volatile organic compounds or VOCs that become explosive under hot and dry conditions. The aerosols are like charcoal starter fumes just waiting for a spark. Ponderosa pine sucks billions of gallons from aquifer recharges, needles absorb heat and accelerate snow melt while aspen leaves reflect sunlight in the summer months and hold snowpacks in winter. Insects like the mountain pine beetle and spruce bud worm can help promote drought resistant and fire tolerant species like aspen.
Land managers have climate change guns to their heads so it’s usually damned if you do and damned if you don’t conduct prescriptive burns. But it’s probably a straight line from the previous administration’s Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue and crashes in morale within the US Forest Service to current conditions on the Santa Fe National Forest so pillorying former Supervisor Debbie Cress solves nothing. She predicted conflagrations whether the Forest Service sets fires or not.
There is even a row between publicly funded scientists and NGOs with loads of lawyers competing for the same foundation money and doing nothing is one option but little is ever resolved.
The U.S. Forest Service engaged Earth Economics to conduct an analysis of the social, environmental, and economic benefits that the fireshed provides for the surrounding community, and to explore the impact of the proposed fuel reduction treatment on these benefits. This conservative analysis found that the proposed fuel treatments are estimated to generate between $1.44–$1.67 in benefits for every dollar invested in treatment. The majority of these benefits directly accrue to the Santa Fe community, through avoided air quality impacts, recreational losses, damages to structures, and source water impacts. [GREATER SANTA FE FIRESHED: TRIPLE BOTTOM LINE ANALYSIS OF FUEL TREATMENTS | 2021]
Fuel treatments and burns on the Santa Fe National Forest helped contain the Rio en Medio Fire in 2020 and the Cerro Pelado Fire last year. Now, those of us who live in Santa Fe County are seeing the aspen bowl above The City Different holding snow and the pine accelerating the sublimation of critical water supplies.
Tribes, well-funded local and volunteer fire departments could conduct prescribed fires and burn road ditches to create buffers where contract fire specialists don’t exist. But even government can’t always protect you from your own stupidity.
Sen. Ron Griggs, a Republican from Alamogordo, prefiled legislation on Tuesday that would prohibit the use of prescribed burning during the spring by any government entity. The bill, if passed into law as written, would preclude federal, state, local and even tribal governments from conducting any burns in the spring. Whether such a law could be legally enacted or enforced is not clear. [Legislator seeks to ban springtime burns like the ones that sparked the state’s largest wildfire]After a stand-replacing fire the mycorrhizal network tells which trees to grow where and the southeastern slope of the Sangre de Cristos has been neglected and overgrown for decades. Next spring will be different as all the runoff will help charge depleted aquifers and fill empty reservoirs and the Santa Fe Fireshed is watching closely.
Comments where insular ideologues poke at competitors and declare their derision for those in public service simply reinforce my quest to move the Forest Service into Interior as a sister agency or even married to the Bureau of Land Management in cooperation with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and local tribal governments.
— interested party (@larry_kurtz) January 5, 2023
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