Putting trust back into forestry.

The Forest Trust is using innovative ideas to solve local economic and resource-management problems.

The Santa Fe-based Forest Trust operates in a place where sound American forestry and a sense of history must go hand in hand. Consider one example:

On June 6, 1967, 20 "Chicanos" (the politically correct term) armed with rifles and pistols stormed the Rio Arriba County courthouse near the Carson National Forest in northern New Mexico. A two-hour shootout ended with one lawman near death and a reporter and a sheriff's deputy held hostage in federal forests that seemed darker and deeper than before. Thus appeared a new southwestern twist on Robert Frost's line: "Whose woods these are I think I know." The small but mighty Forest Trust operates in this challenging forest setting. With 20 employees, Forest Trust is more effective pound for pound than many of the environmental heavy-weights I know. The reasons range from Henry Carey, its savvy director, through a down-to-earth approach to forest economics, and all the way to the hardest task of all: developing sustainable forestry in tough rural communities.

Just how does the Forest Trust operate? Here's the rest of the story...

Through actions like the 1967 shootout and the "citizens' arrest for trespassing" of Forest Service officials at a federal campground, the members of the Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grants) demanded the return of millions of acres of Forest Service-administered land. They insisted that the disputed property was their inheritance, granted to their ancestors by Spain and Mexico but stolen over the years since 1848, when the U.S. Army made New Mexico a part of the United States.

The leader of the Alianza was a once and future itinerant evangelist, Reies Lopez Tijerina. Though that June day's gunfire was perhaps not heard around the world, it touched off the largest manhunt in state history. The National Guard, the state police, local sheriffs, and the Jicarilla Apache police, accompanied by tanks, jeeps, helicopters, and planes, combed the rough country of the Carson National Forest, searching in vain for Tijerina's gunmen and their hostages. The "Hispanics" (the locally but not politically correct term) had reason to know the neighboring forests well, for they could look back on almost 400 years of life with the land. Typically, the faraway King of Spain would grant large and poorly defined areas of land to small groups of families. Each family had a long, narrow private plot. The lower end accessed vital water, while the upper end opened onto a common grazing and firewood-gathering area called an "ejido." When Tijerina rallied La Raza (the people) to the Alianza cause, he promised the return of a golden era of communal living, the era before the Forestas (federal foresters) stole the commons. Never mind that there was little legal or historical basis for most of the Alianza claims, especially since many encroached on Indian lands supposedly protected by Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. law. Never mind that both Hispanic and "Anglo" land speculators had competed to defraud the illiterate land grantees of their common property before reselling it to the federal government as watershed protection and nascent national forests. The buck stopped with the Forest Service, which, unlike the speculators, was large, slow-moving, and not afraid to fight, especially where the welfare of the land was at stake.

Don Seaman was the Carson National Forest supervisor in those troubled days. He inherited this post from Aldo Leopold, who had had the sense to marry into one of New Mexico's great Hispanic sheep-raising families, the Lunas. Such strokes of genius were not available to Seaman, who saw his job as keeping the Carson under multiple-use management, even when that meant harsh measures. By 1966-67, Seaman was encountering suspicious forest fires and high rates of vandalism, timber theft, and grazing trespass. Both the land and the people were suffering. When the smoke of gunfire and wildfire cleared, President Lyndon B. Johnson asked Congress to authorize a major project to improve Forest Service relations with local people. A quarter-century later, the results are mixed. Though most observes agree that some positive changes occurred in range management and increased sensitivity to local needs, statistics show that northern New Mexico has continued to slide into poverty, joblessness, and welfare dependency, while timber harvest on its national forests becomes more and more controversial. After centuries "at the end of the world," New Mexico's forests and foresters face the challenge of sustaining both cultural and biological diversity in a context in which recreation demands dwarf all other uses. Forest Trust Director Henry Carey has spent many years working on national-forest issues in this rough-and-tumble country, both for the Forest Service and for various alternative forestry operations. Carey recognizes the importance of human habitat, focusing on the quality or condition of natural resources seen as a home for humankind. In this outlook, Carey feels that he follows in the footsteps of Leopold. Many in New Mexico agree, although some, like Taos-based forest activist Joanie Berde of La Communidad, would like to see the Trust play a more direct role in monitoring what she thinks are poorly planned and executed timber sales on the Carson.

Before founding the Forest Trust in 1984, Carey worked with the Forest Service and with the John Muir Institute, always seeking to improve relations between the local people and a sometimes heavy-handed Forest Service. With a flair for computers and a master's degree in forestry from Colorado State University, Carey became one of the authors of the Santa Fe National Forest's first plan. He also cultivated a relationship with the Ford Foundation, whose social-justice programs have invested in the area's human resources for many years. Ford was already funding local anthropological and sociological research in the 1960s, trying to find a way to put some natural-resource legs under communities as poor as any in the country, working in concert with the War on Poverty's Office of Economic Opportunity. In keeping with this long and honorable tradition, Ford is presently funding a Forest Trust project for Forest-Based Rural Development Practitioners. With the War on Poverty consigned to the ashheap of history, Ford and Forest Trust continue to try to seek a solution through sound forestry to local economic and resource-management problems. Henry Carey is a reserved person who speaks softly and carries a battery of big sticks. When he was a student at Santa Fe's St. John's College, he noticed increasing problems with trail access from the rapidly growing city of Santa Fe into the nearby national forest. With both land prices and living costs skyrocketing, and with their communal lands gone, large Hispanic families found that their remaining private land had become prime development property. The new owners did not look kindly on continued public use of traditional trails. Carey wisely made private-land management and landtrust work part of Forest Trust's agenda. One result was that a bitter local dispute was resolved to everyone's satisfaction, with Forest Trust holding and administering trail-access easements across private land to public land. Forest Service spokesman Ed Collins said, "Working with Henry has been a pleasant experience. I have nothing but good things to say about the Forest Trust."

In addition, Forest Trust holds conservation easements over some 6,000 acres of forested land, and it manages some 40,000 acres under contract to private owners in places ranging from Virginia to Hawaii. It also owns and manages its own forested acreage.

But the heart of Forest Trust's work is in the rural communities that ring northern New Mexico's federal forests. The irony of the situation is that the Forest Service deserves more credit than blame. Decades before the invention of politically correct attitudes, the Forest Service stuck to its guns and followed Leopold's famous prescriptions about the welfare of the land. It was obvious to everyone but the members of the Alianza that centuries of communal exploitation had been hard on the health of regional forests. Carey's challenge was to right old wrongs done to the land and to the people.

In 1986, Forest Trust received grants from the Ford and Arca Foundations to open the Mora Forestry Center in one of the toughest, most impoverished areas in New Mexico, a place where federal foresters wore sidearms and traveled in pairs. The Center teaches forestry, property management, fire-fighting, and business skills to 20 adults and young people each summer. Trainees also receive job counseling and help in resume writing. As interns, they get credit from nearby Luna Vocational Technical Institute, named for the family of Estella Luna Leopold. Often there is a transition to employment with the Forest Service. Interns may qualify for apprenticeships and permanent positions with the Mora Center's work crew, where they can also develop business and supervisory skills. Crew wages come from the Ford Foundation when necessary, but mostly they come from contracts. Carey says, "We're trying to help the Mora community. The people we train are typically disadvantaged. We give them marketable skills." Crews from the Mora Center do contract work for the U. S. Forest Service, private landowners, and the U.S. Soil Conservation Service. The work ranges from erosion control, tree thinning, and trail building to timber-stand inventory. These seasonal activities fit in with a way of life called "multiple employment," where people juggle different part-time jobs.

The Mora Center does more than provide skills to widen the work spectrum. It also introduces interns to the values of natural resources, teaching them about environmental management and environmental ethics. Antonio Medina is the director of the Mora Valley Clinic. He said, "I have a very positive feeling about what the Mora Center is doing. It is contributing to the community in a positive way." Carey added, "We recognize that the health and integrity of the forest are intimately involved with the wellbeing of surrounding communities." As Santa Fe grows, so-called "Santa Fe-style" architecture demands environmentally acceptable wood products in the form of vigas (big weight-bearing crossbeams) and latillas (saplings used to fill in between the vigas). Building on the success of the Mora Center, Forest Trust conducted a market analysis to see if the production of vigas and latillas could be a profit maker. "It has always been considered a marginal industry," Carey said. "We don't feel that way."

Forest Trust's database lists large landowners, mill owners and operators, contractors, and lumber yards. Users target consumers and competitors, seek out niches, and discover markets beyond the local area. Forest Trust also assists local small-scale timber producers in obtaining access to Forest Service timber, helping producers become familiar with complex road and contract management specifications.

Carey said, "The situation in northern New Mexico provides a clear example of the conflicting forces of rural poverty, corporate development, cultural dissolution, and resource depletion. Significant opportunities exist to enable the community to improve the management of local forest lands and to benefit from forest-based sources of income, while at the same time maintaining self-determination and the integrity of the unique natural and cultural environment."

Jan-Willem Jansens is putting such high-sounding talk to work. He inherited the Forest Trust's Community Forestry Program from Marco Lowenstein. Before he went on to another project, former Peace Corps forester Lowenstein told me, "Environmentalists traditionally have concentrated economic development efforts on surveys showing the value of wilderness, recreation, and wildlife. We have yet to create tangible jobs for forest-dependent communities. Until the environmental community addresses the employment needs of rural people, the timber industry will remain the 'good guys' in the eyes of laborers and community leaders."

Jansens' Community Forestry Program fills the economic-development vacuum, especially in the area of helping small wood-products manufacturers explore new markets. Forest Trust's wood-products brokerage helps family-owned operations sell Southwest-style building materials. These small, under-capitalized operations are inefficient by modern industrial criteria, even though the inefficiency increases job opportunities. On the other hand, labor-intensive timber harvest can encourage site-specific, environmentally sensitive timber removal.

The brokerage's first-year sales put more than $6,000 into the rural economy. Twenty people and a horse shared this income during the slow winter off-season. Subsequent seasonal sales have continued to improve.

Jansens' typical clients are a third-generation logging family, salvaging blow-down after a big commercial operator finishes a shelterwood cut. Working wordlessly, two brothers carefully select, cut, limb, buck, and yard straight spruces. Another brother hand-peels the logs that become the cream-colored vigas essential to the beauty of adobe-based architecture. Frozen trees spit pitch as the hissing drawknife severs bark from wood. Brown-gray poles turn to white as shavings pile on the forest floor. A flatbed truck waits to carry the finished product down the mountain. The low murmur of a story told in the peculiar accents of local Spanish is the only human sound in the silence left by chainsaws and skidders. Each viga is a work of art. Soon they will grace homes rising in Santa Fe.

The shootout of the 1960s ended in a draw. Former Alianza leader Tijerina still visits northern New Mexico now and again. But thanks to hardworking locals, Forest Trust, the Ford Foundation, and forest supervisors like John Bedell (formerly of the Carson), no one fires at the forestas anymore, and no one fires the forests. In a rare success story, Forest Trust has put good old-fashioned "trust" back into forestry.

The Forest Trust can be contacted at: P.O. Box 519, Santa Fe, NM 87504 (505-983-8992).

CONFERENCE SEEKS NATIONAL POLICY ON RURAL DEVELOPMENT

Many federal agencies share responsibility for rural economic development. But some of the most effective and cost-efficient approaches to forest-based rural economic development have come from small, nonprofit organizations with close ties to the communities in which they work, and a practical understanding of the kinds of assistance that will result in strong, self-supporting rural communities that are both economically viable and environmentally sustainable over the long term. Forest Trust has taken the lead in establishing and maintaining a national network among such organizations.

However, the public agencies and the nonprofit groups are reaching the limits of what they can accomplish in forest-based rural economic development without more effective cooperation with one another. Recognizing the need for a national policy in this area, AMERICAN FORESTS' Forest Policy Center (FPC) has agreed to serve as Forest Trust's Washington-based partner. It will work to establish and facilitate dialogue between key policymakers in Congress and the Clinton Administration and local-level practitioners to form the framework for a national, forest-based rural economic development policy.

According to Al Sample, director of the Forest Policy Center, "The capabilities and strengths of public resource management agencies and nonprofit forest practitioner groups, and the nature of the challenge in forest-based rural economic development, provide the basis for a partnership that will advance the goals of both types of organizations and the communities they serve." To help achieve this end, the Forest Policy Center and the Forest Trust are cosponsoring a conference in Washington, DC, on January 19-21, 1994, to promote public/private partnerships for forest-based rural economic development. Conference headquarters is the Hotel Washington at 515 15th St. NW. The Ford Foundation has provided support. Space restrictions will limit the number of participants, but a record of the conference will be made available to anyone interested.

Tom Wolf's environmental history of Colorado's Sangre de Cristo Mountains will be published this coming fall by the University Press of Colorado.