We need to stand for the protection of our forest

It’s time for a forest revolution.

I am a peaceful person. I like to sit on my porch and enjoy the company of the trees and my dog. My home is near the Santa Fe National Forest, on land that is forest, too. Like many who live in my neighborhood, I feel the life of the trees, watch them through all their phases and worry about them when the weather gets too hot and dry. We depend on them. Without the forest, life on Earth would come unraveled in many ways.

So why do we need to be revolutionaries? Because our forests, a fundamental source of life, are in imminent danger.

The U.S. Forest Service is engaged in a program of systematically removing the vast majority of trees from massive areas of forest and then burning off new growth regularly and indefinitely. Forest officials say this moderates the effects of wildfire and improves forest health.

Current forest ecology research strongly calls into question whether aggressive tree thinning and burning in our forests actually mitigates wildfire enough to be worth causing such intensive ecological impacts — creating sterile and dry landscapes, degrading and compacting soils, damaging wildlife habitat and building new forest roads that have serious ecological consequences. All this does not improve forest health.

Continual prescribed burns are bad for human health. Our formerly clean air is increasingly polluted by these burns, and many people are suffering from it.

In the Santa Fe area, the Forest Service has proposed to cut and/or burn 43,000 acres of our nearby local forest. Instead of doing full project analysis, an environmental impact statement, as has been done for highly impactful projects in the past, officials are doing a much lesser type of analysis called an environmental assessment. Almost every person who wrote initial project comments strongly urged the Forest Service to complete an environmental impact statement. The vast majority of comments were against the project as proposed.

This project and a much larger project in the Jemez Mountains northwest of Los Alamos are moving forward rapidly. The project decisions are not far off. Once the decisions are made, we will have virtually no say in what is done in our forest.

My saddest vision, which seems well on its way to coming true, is that the Forest Service will just proceed with this draconian alteration of our forest into a “frankenforest” — a barren, ecologically broken forest created according to a human theory that may be proven wrong. And that when the projects are halfway or more completed, and enough people have seen the devastation and have raised an anguished cry, it will be too late.

So instead of sitting on my porch and simply enjoying the natural world, I feel compelled to try to protect it from a potential man-made catastrophe and call for a forest revolution. Along with another peaceful person, I have been compiling information and writing about Santa Fe National Forest issues to bring light onto what is happening to our forest. Our website is called The Forest Advocate — theforestadvocate.org.

We have prepared a quick and easy-toread guide that gives an overview of the impending cutting and burning projects, along with ecological and public health considerations, and how to engage in protecting our forest. It can be read off the homepage of The Forest Advocate. Please take five or 10 minutes to understand the jeopardy our forest is in and what you can do to help. There is still time.

Now is the time to make our voices heard. Join the forest revolution and demand that our forest be genuinely protected.

Sarah Hyden is co-creator of The Forest Advocate.