Enchanted partnerships: in New Mexico, a congressman's idea becomes a Forest Service program that inspires collaboration and protects local forests. (Communities).

Ruidoso, New Mexico. looks like a Swiss Family Robinson village--offices, stores, and houses are jim-jammed so tightly in the forest you can hardly distinguish the buildings from the trees. But this picturesque scene comes at a price: The vacation village of 8.500 is also ranked number two in the country for wildfire risk by the U.S. Forest Service.

It's the job of Rick Delaco, Ruidoso's urban forester, to protect the village. "Look, trees are beautiful, they're the reason people vacation here. But this," Delaco says, peering through his fingers as if they were dense tree trunks, "is dangerous and not pristine."

Ponderosa pine forests, which used to carry between 25 and 100 trees per acre over much of the West, are now packed with up to 1,000 trees in an acre. Overlogging, overgrazing, and fire suppression over the last century have combined to turn those sunny savannahs of golden-barked ponderosa into dark, weedy thickets.

Delaco is working with nearby government landowners to create a thinned border--similar to a moat--around the village. The group's latest project, the 438-acre Eagle creek Fuels Reduction Project, is designed to protect a "hot spot"--the village's watershed and reservoir and an expensive subdivision north of town. If it's successful, the Eagle Creek project could have ramifications beyond just protecting Ruidoso. It could help change the way the U.S. Forest Service deals with fire.

A NEW WAY?

In 2000, the U.S. Forest Service established its first-ever grant program--the Collaborative Forest Restoration Program (CFRP)--and established it in New Mexico, The CFRP turns the Forest Service inside out. Instead of the agency creating projects then trying to rally support. the public creates projects then tries to get financial support from the agency.

"Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) found that the Forest Service was stymied," says staffer Kira Finkler. "He tried to do something community-driven to get work going again."

Of the 19 projects the Forest Service funded in 2001 in the Land of Enchantment state, about 40 percent were proposed by the public, with grants typically topping $300,000 over a three- to four-year period. (Ironically. 2002 funding for all Forest Service work, including fire prevention projects, was suspended due to the year's high firefighting expenses).

New Mexico's 2001 CFRP projects included:

* Thinning an area now congested with water-sucking trees where water used to seep into the ground to charge a stream. The stream has dropped from its historical run of 600 gallons per minute to just 40-60.

* Buying equipment and giving forestry training to local workers so they can bid on small thinning projects in their area.

* Measuring vegetation diversity, soil quality, wildlife habitat, tree sizes, and other characteristics to see if the treatments are meeting their goals and not leaving the forest in worse condition.

Although it's too early to assess the value of the program, Walter Dunn, who administers CRFP from Albuquerque, New Mexico, believes "this program may be able to do things the agency alone never could have."

With the Forest Service saddled with planning and litigation processes that can sap 40 percent of its time and budget, Dunn believes in projects like CRFP that empower people outside the agency to do fire control work on the ground. The only problem, he says, is that many poor mountain towns in need of funds to control fire hazards don't have citizens with the information and education to apply for grants.

Already, CFRP has spurred politicians to come up with new ideas for the Forest Service, Finkler says. Legislation passed by the Senate last autumn would develop restoration centers throughout the West. These quasi-governmental entities would have as their a mission raising money from private and public sources to fund community-backed fire protection projects.

Wanting to see the CFRP program in action, I spent a few days last summer driving throughout New Mexico and visiting projects from the southern, central, and northern parts of the state. Here's some of what I found:

SOFT TOUCH LOGGING

Gordon West looks at wood like anyone with a background as a logger, a building contractor, and a furniture maker. He turns a chunk of wood over in his hands, mulling how he could cut it, sand it, chip it, glue it into something.

Inside his shop, a derelict adobe building in Santa Clara, New Mexico, West shows me some chairs he recently made for The Nature Conservancy's local bed and breakfast. The chairs were made, he says, from restoration pine--pine less than 12 inches in diameter that was removed to restore the ecological structure of ponderosa pine forests.

Although his shop can't use as much of the wood as needs to be removed from the forest, businesses like his are an important component of the restoration work because they keep skilled labor in rural towns.

West has teamed up with environmentalist Todd Schulke of the Southwest Center for Biological Diversity--a group better known for litigation than collaboration--to "softly thin" 1,200 acres of flammable ponderosa pine in the Gila National Forest. We hop in my truck for the drive up a sinuous road north of Silver City to take a look.

The project is in its first phase, 69 acres; more will come when the Forest Service finishes its federally mandated Environmental Impact Statement. "It's really frustrating," West says. "We've set money aside for the EIS, but the EIS process is complex and lengthy, so we're only able to do a small amount considered a categorical exclusion."

Unfortunately, many of the Collaborative Forest Restoration Program projects that enjoy strong community support are delayed by the lengthy EIS study and public comment period.

West's spirits pick up as we drive up into the forest. As we walk around, I'm reminded of a landowner detailing how he plans to fix up the homeplace. West says he'll favor oak, spare any tree over 12 inches, leave groupings of trees, and keep intact trees along the drainages where wildlife travel.

All the work will be done with a chainsaw, a modified 4 x 4 off-road vehicle with balloon tires to reduce compaction, a loader like a giant arm that can reach out into the forest, and a bunk that the trees can be laid on without dragging them out like a regular skidder would. The cut logs will be taken to a storage shed near Silver City that is owned by the nonprofit Gila Woodnet.

"This may not be most efficient," West admits to me, "but Todd (Schulke) wants to make sure that demand and supply are separated so that the work that's being done in the forest is for the health of the forest and not for the profit of a company."

Some of the wood will then be sold to locals as rough dimensional lumber and firewood; some will be sold to Tierra Alta, a nonprofit that makes woodstove pellets; and some will be purchased by West for a small cabin business he's starting.

ANIMAL BEDDING

Outside of Ruidoso, Sherry and Glenn Barrow have turned an old county building into an animal bedding factory.

"We looked at over 300 products that might be produced economically from small-diameter wood," Sherry Barrow says. "This turned out to be the best." Thousands of tons of bedding are used at animal shows, racetracks, fairs, stables, kennels, zoos, pet stores, and dairies all across the country.

Sherry fills my left hand with the kind of animal bedding most commonly used in the West--rough and dusty shavings that come from mill scraps and often cause respiratory problems among animals and their keepers. Into my right she pours the clean bedding she's producing--blonde, dustless chips that look like dried pieces of apple.

"There are only a few other producers of clean animal bedding," she says, "and those are in the Midwest and Southeast, where they use aspen or pine pulp." Barrow will sell 9 cubic feet of bedding, compressed into 3 cubic feet bags, at a competitive rate of S5.50.

The factory starts with a big chipper, a toothy maw that grinds trees up to 12 inches in diameter into chips. The chips then go through driers and a series of shaking sieves to remove dust. Jimmy Foster, a former rancher with hands as strong and versatile as metal tools, has put the machinery together and will keep it running.

The machinery does not require water in this arid climate, but it does sap electricity, requiring a substation outside the building. But, "we have a solution for that too," Sherry says.

Theirs will be the first western company to receive a BioMax 15 system through a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. The BioMax 15, which looks like a high-tech distillery on a trailer, is a portable and clean machine that turns small-diameter wood into gas to generate both heat and up to 15 kW of electricity.

"This will only power the lights and heat the office to begin with," she says, "but we hope that once this works, larger systems producing over 1000 kW might he available." CFRP provided only part of the start-up funds for the Barrows' business. The remainder came from their own funds, the Economic Action Program, the Rural Community Development Program, and the Four Corners Sustainable Forest Partnership.

"This is something that will help the community," Barrow says, "but it's also something we plan to make a living from." The Barrows have already helped a neighboring man develop a busi ness hauling small-diameter wood from the forest. Now they're building steel crates that can be left on forest roads for the disposal of wood by thinning contractors. The Barrows expect to hire four people and produce 2,500 bags of bedding each day-about 40 cords of wood or between 5 and 15 acres of thinned ponderosa forest.

YOUTHFUL ENTHUSIASM

Youth Corps groups exist in nearly every state, still ascribing to the mission of the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s: to give young people skills working outside while providing services for the community.

The Rocky Mountain Youth Corps, whch started in Taos in 1995, now employs 80-120 young adults between the ages of 16 and 25. The crews do everything from building houses with Habitat for Humanity to fixing trails with the Forest Service. The Corps also has a woodshop where the young people can make products out of small-diameter wood-bird houses, wine glasses, salt and pepper shakers.

Two crews specialize in fire-hazard reduction, thinning forests down to a fraction of their original density. The crews work on state and federal lands and private land such as Girl Scout camps. Executive Director Carl Colonius says the crews are efficient, thinning 1 or 2 acres of ponderosa forest a day at a cost of $1,200. Each year, Colonius says, he aims for the crews to thin at least 200 acres.

"We use some grant funds to support our programs because we do some things that aren't compensated," says Colonius. "We educate the public on wildfire and train our youth with classes on forestry and chainsaw use." The CFRP program funds both forest thinning crews working year round. And there's plenty of work for the Corps to do.

"Our forests are in terrible condition," Colonius adds, "We've got a leaking roof and we've got to fix it."

Peter Sharfin, who oversees the forestry crews, and I talk as we head north of Taos to see some of the crews at work. "I wish there had been something like this around when I was a kid," Sharfin says. "A lot of us wanted to find something to do outside, but there wasn't much available."

Sharfin tells me about Ray, a 20-year-old Hispanic who has worked for the Corps for two years. Ray was a bagger at a Taos supermarket before his mom told him about the Corps. He now works on fire fighting and fire-reduction thinning for the Bureau of Land Management.

We find a crew working at the Singing River Field Center, a foundation-funded camp that takes in local children for the summer to teach them about nature. Just south of the camp lie the remains of the 7525-acre Hondo Fire; after six years the front of the mountain is still a pincushion of burnt trees.

At Singing River, groups of 7- to 12-year-olds pair with Corps members. One group cuts small trees from around a cabin, another drags trees down to the main lodge by hand, a third then cuts those trunks into 6-foot lengths for fence poles.

"This is just a dent in reducing fire hazard," says crew leader James Porter, a bearded young man with a degree in geology. "But these children are learning forest thinning and how small trees can he turned into something useful."

I sit down with the Corps crew and campers for lunch. Eight-year-old Reyna looks at me from under her hard hat, toy sunglasses slipping off her face, her hands just reaching out of the sleeves of an old Army jacket.

How big are the trees you're cutting? I ask her. She makes a circle with her hands about as big as her face. How many will you cut today? Reyna holds up all 10 fingers. Why are you cutting the trees? I ask. "We're cutting trees to save the forest," she says as if it were a childhood rhyme.

Bryan Foster, author of the sustainable forestry book "Wild Logging." writes from Santa Fe. New Mexico.