Forest Health Cannot Take a Back Seat!
Forest Health Cannot Take a Back Seat!
By Joe Sigg, Arizona Farm Bureau
It’s a little difficult to talk about forest health issues, from a public policy point of view, so soon after the dramatic losses felt during our summer forest fires. As you talk to people it hits on such a personal level, when your life, home, property and livelihood is threatened or lost. Threats of the nature many Arizona folks just went through are beyond comprehension.
So to proceed from the highly personal to discussing public policy, strikes me as very “clinical” and cold, but this was a devastating public loss as well. Have we learned anything? Have we re-acquired common sense?
We know what needs to be done and the public treasury is simply not going to make this happen. The manager of this trust is broke. We need private contractors in our forests who are able to pencil a profit. They need to be able to amortize their investments. We have to promote this. We need to look at the forestry industry and ranchers as part of the management scheme the best lessees and “tenants” we can find.
The federal government does not have the capacity to manage their trust and leaving our forests unattended means they won’t be there in the future. We know what will happen and we can catalogue the costs and we know how to prevent it. There are some issues that simply cannot be addressed, but this is one that can be.
· Salvage operations need to be expedited by fast tracking evaluations and reviews.
· Terms of contracting need to be adjusted for commercial salvage and thinning operations.
· In areas that have burned we need site specific evaluations to determine when grazing can resume.
· We need a thorough review on fire suppression – both as to techniques and how local residents and their equipment might be used as early responders.
· We need to reduce incentives for groups to be rewarded for tying up the legal process of managing our forests. We need to consider reforms to endangered species, NEPA and Equal Access to Justice.
· We need local involvement in how these actions will come about.
· We need to consider how the State of Arizona can use its tax code to encourage investments in facilities and equipment that are used in healthy forest and forest processing operations.
There will be more to add to this list. From time-to-time we are all called upon to step up to leave the place a little better than we found it. Here is an opportunity for all of us.
