Greetings from the Chair
John Harrington
Well another busy field (fire) season is slowly coming to an
end. I hope all had a productive and
safe season. As Don indicated in the
Spring Newsletter, I am going serve out the remainder of Don’s term as the
Section Chair. I have asked Gabe Partido our past-Chair to
serve as an interim Chair-Elect for this period. As you may recall, two of my big goals when I
ran for Chair were to look at recruitment and retention of members in the Society
and, second, to see how the section can build upon its efforts to provide
continuing education to its membership.
Regarding the first, I have asked Frank Roth of the Forest Service in
Regarding the second goal, providing the continuing education
of the Society’s members the advances being made in all aspects of forestry can
be mind-boggling. I feel the Section can
be very effective in getting advances out to our membership in a timely manner
to continue to allow us to be the best in our fields. This effort will require our entire
membership’s participation. Over the
course of the next 18 months (and beyond) I will be encouraging the membership
to take a leadership role, where they can, to improve upon our successful
efforts such as the bi-annual conference with AMPF and to explore new ideas to
improve our professional educational activities.
Lastly, we need to be thinking about the future leadership
in the Section. Myself
and four other members of our Section were able to attend the Society’s
Leadership Conference this past May. The
Southwestern Section was one of the best represented sections at the
conference. With this in mind, we need
to start considering nominating people for Section leadership positions, both
the elected positions (Chair-elect, Secretary, etc.) and the non-elected
positions such as committee chairs. In
the near future you will be receiving a call for nominations for the elected
positions. Please consider your peer SAF
colleagues and yourself as potential candidates. Taking on such a responsibility is hard work
but the rewards far exceed the effort.
Please feel free to contact me via e-mail at joharrin@nmsu.edu if you have any comments
regarding these or other issues regarding the Society. I look forward to hearing from or meeting all
of you in the near future. John
Council
Notes, September 2004
Marlin
Johnson, District IV
Many
of us will soon be going off to
Council
met in June absent President John Beuter who was
absent due to a lingering illness. (See
the Commentary in the July/August Journal about the nature of John’s
condition.) We were led by Vice
President John Helms.
Each
Council member gave a brief report of activities in their respective
Districts. At the end of these reports,
President-elect Helms noted several challenges worth sharing among State
Societies. (These challenges are for YOU, not just your State Society
Chair, not “someone else,” but YOU. They are:
1) Students –
encourage state societies to involve students as full partners; give them real
roles by including them on panels, as speakers, etc.
2) Partnerships
– encourage the annual meetings to be developed in connection with other
resource professionals to attract new members.
3) Membership –
State societies should become proactive and develop specific plans for
recruitment. I sent some ideas on this
to your Chair and Chair-elect; hopefully we will see some action on this front
before the end of the year.
4) Encourage
development of policy regarding local and regional positions; tie these to
national policies whenever possible.
Become influential and active at the state level.
5) In public
education, emphasize teacher training and work with media to indicate we share
public values.
6) Use the
Strategic Plan as a basis for strategic thinking about how to allocate
resources and as a framework to make choices among priorities.
7) Look for
creative ways to secure funding at the state and local level.
8) Each State
Society should, as a minimum, submit one nomination for national awards
yearly. We have plenty of members who
deserve it; let’s get this one done!
9) Have Fun! SAF will not be a viable Society unless we
have fun together.
Of the many other items we dealt with, I will
mention a few key ones. We agreed that
for 2005, we will limit Fellow nominations to one per State Society. This is due to the fact that the number of
fellows has gone well above the five percent limit that had been set. We are also asking the Professional
Recognition Committee to audit the Fellow process to ensure integrity, and to
make recommendations regarding any changes needed for future years.
Council
heard about a highly successful 2004
Council
approved selection of very deserving recipients for several National Awards in
several categories. However, see #8
above; I know you have folks who deserve nomination for some of these and I
sincerely hope you will get some nominations in for next year. Since the time for these nominations comes
very soon after the new year, it is time now to be
thinking about who you would like to see nominated. Pass your thoughts along to your Nominating
Committee, State Chair, or better yet volunteer to help them prepare a
nomination. Drop me an e-mail anytime at majohnson02@fs.fed.us.
See you in
SWSAF Fall Meeting set for October 22-23 in Eagar,
AZ. (More info will
follow.)
Marvin Brown and H. William Rockwell
Jr., 2004 Candidates for SAF Vice-President All members should have received their
ballots by now and hopefully most of already voted. This is your say in the future of SAF! So read over the candidates’ bios and
position statements and VOTE.
Milo Larson, 2004
SWSAF Candidate for Fellow
Milo served as a silviculturalist
for much of his career at the Region,
The Northern Arizona Chapter has focused on
reaching out to foresters across our large region and making connections with
students in 2004. Attendance was high at
the April chapter meeting, held in Show Low, showing that foresters in the
CONTACTS: You can reach us at Pete.Fule@nau.edu (928/523-1463), Denver.Hospodarsky@nau.edu, or Patty Ringle
Pringle@fs.fed.us (928/527-8285).
The New Mexico Chapter will be having its
October meeting on October 16th, from 10:00 a.m.- 2:00 p.m. at the NMSU Mora Research
Center in Mora, New Mexico. A barbecue
lunch will be provided. New Mexico Tree
Farmers will also be invited to this meeting.
Contact: Mr. Mark Loveall at mloveall@nmsu.edu or by phone at 505/387-2319
ext. 13 by October 12.
The
Fall 2004 meeting schedule and speakers will be:
Thursday,
September 23
Speaker: Don
Thursday,
November 18
Speaker: Elizabeth Davison, Director UA Arboretum
Contact:
Jim Klemmedson (Treasurer) one week prior to meeting
at 520/297-2849 if you plan to attend so that lunch arrangements can be
finalized.
CFE Credits Offered On-Line
SAF Offers CFE On-line for Journal of Forestry Quiz. The 2nd Quarter, 2004 Journal including
April/May and June Journal of Forestry, 2 CFE Credits - Category 1 can
be earned by reading the Journals and taking the quiz. The cost is $20. You get credit for keeping up with the
profession, it’s more affordable than travel to meetings and it supports the
Society. For complete information on SAF's On-Line CFE Program go to:
http://www.safnet.org/commerce/jofcfequiz.cfm
|
Description |
Previous Count |
New |
Reinstate |
Resign/ Purged |
Tran In |
Tran Out |
Current |
|
|
7 |
|
|
|
|
|
7 |
|
|
125 |
|
|
23 |
|
1 |
101 |
|
|
123 |
2 |
|
11 |
|
1 |
113 |
|
Palo Verde Chapter |
36 |
|
|
|
1 |
1 |
37 |
|
Northern |
46 |
|
|
13 |
|
|
33 |
|
|
37 |
|
|
|
|
|
37 |
|
|
374 |
2 |
|
47 |
1 |
3 |
328 |
|
|
Goals |
Purged 2004 |
Purged 2003 |
Purged 2002 |
|
14,998 |
1,355 |
(1,825) |
(1,954) |
(1,854) |
* Each year, at the end of
June, SAF members who have not yet paid their membership dues are deleted from
the active membership database. Many
state societies, divisions, and chapters have made a valiant attempt to contact
and retain their "delinquent" members. However, despite our efforts, 1,816 members
have now been dropped from the SAF rolls for nonpayment of 2004 membership
dues. In an effort to further understand
why some members do not renew their memberships, the national office sent a
letter and a survey to all purged members in July.
NM Forest & Watershed Health
Draft Plan Available The Draft New Mexico Forest & Watershed Health Plan represents many
months of work in planning sessions and town hall meetings to develop major
policy recommendations toward a fully coordinated approach to ecological
restoration of
The New Mexico Forest & Watershed Health Planning
Committee represents the wide variety of government agencies and citizen
stakeholders and experts involved in ecological restoration efforts across
http://www.emnrd.state.nm.us/forestry/NMForestHealthPlan/.
The contract is the first, large,
10-year stewardship contract in the nation and is significant due to its
emphasis on large-scale forest restoration activities that result in healthier
forests, enhanced rural development, and the utilization of previously
unmarketable small diameter trees. The contract is for an estimated treatment
of approximately 5,000 to 25,000 acres per year over the 10-year term of the
contract. It facilitates the development of a woods products industry better
suited to market the excessive number of small-diameter and some larger trees
on the national forests. Such trees have been removed in the past by a series
of smaller thinning contracts and the resultant slash or woody debris was
usually treated by burning. The new contract will result in the smaller trees
being used for various uses such as in a power-generation, lumber and manufaturing of wood pellets. This would reduce the need to
burn such material in the forest, and result in a cost reduction to the
taxpayer. The Forest Service described the desired conditions in the Request
for Proposals and carefully evaluated each proposal to determine the one that
best meets the desired condition.
“I’m pleased with the Southwestern
Region and the
“The forests of the Southwest are in
dire need of thinning, and stewardship contracts will provide a much needed
mechanism by which large tracts of land can be treated resulting in increased
protection of communities and improved health of our precious forests,” said Harv Forsgren, Regional Forester
of the Southwestern Region. “A stewardship contract allows for the costs of
removal of small trees, residue and slash to be exchanged for the value of the
excess trees that are removed. The goal is to find uses for all the wood fiber
and by doing so, reduce the amount of wood burned in the forest, reduce
treatment costs and provide jobs in the local communities.”
The Apache-Sitgreaves
National Forests, which comprises a significant portion of the largest
contiguous ponderosa pine forest in
“Most of the lands treated under
this contract are in the wildland-urban interface and we hope to reduce the
number of trees closer to what grew there historically when fire managed the
forests,” said Elaine Zieroth, Apache-Sitgreaves NFs Forest Supervisor.
“We have to reduce the number of trees across the forests on a large scale so
that the threat of catastrophic fire will be minimized, and the remaining trees
can better resist drought and insects.”
“Stewardship contracting provides
the flexibility to leverage with the best price per acre available,” added Forsgren. “We’re extremely pleased to be able to utilize
this initiative, because it benefits the forest, the contractor, the
establishment of new woods products industries and the community.”
Nationally, the USDA Forest Service
and Interior Department agencies are using the tools of the President’s Healthy
Forests Initiative and the Healthy Forests Restoration Act to treat and restore
record numbers of acres. This year, the agencies plan to treat more than 3.7
million acres – more than a million acres more than were treated last year and
three times the total acres treated in 2000.
Roundtable on Sustainable Forests Launches Multiple Perspectives
Project. On August 31, the Roundtable issued a call
for papers to solicit manuscript proposals for its Multiple Perspectives
Project. The project's objectives are to engage a diverse array of people in
discussions of forest sustainability, to communicate important messages that
emerge from the evaluations of the National Report (issued by the Forest
Service see: http://www.fs.fed.us/research/sustain/)
by different stakeholder groups, to enhance mutual understanding of the
multiple dimensions of forest sustainability, and to highlight data needs that
must be addressed to better understand the trends and conditions of our
forests. Proposals are due
2004 Wildland Fire Year Below
Average
|
2004 Fire Year Comparisons through |
||
|
|
2004 Actual |
Historical Average |
|
Fires |
3,105 |
3,955 |
|
Acres |
300,436 |
320,853 |
|
Large Fires |
41 |
97 |
|
Incidents with Team(s) Assigned |
8 |
14 |
Body Language of a
George Duda
The ‘Body Language of Trees’ is a concept brought forth by
Claus Mattheck & Helge Breloer, University of
Karlsruhe, Research Centre, Germany. “The Body Language of Trees, A Handbook for
Failure Analysis,” ISBN 0 11 753067 0, describes how individual trees
outwardly exhibit physical characteristics, portending of probable failure.
Similarly, the ‘Body Language of a
Superimposing our perceptions of what a forest should be and
how it should behave perpetuates the ever-increasing silence of the forest. The
‘Body Language of a
In Claus Mattheck’s words, “The
gnarled oak into whose bark you whispered your childhood secrets, can kill you.
The lime tree whose soft leaves you laid on your beloved’s lips can today be
the tree of your misfortune, and the poplar whose rustling you enjoy in your
latter years can destroy your snug retirement home or your last retreat even
before natural death has overtaken you.”
Dr. Mattheck’s words can easily
include those dark qualities of a ‘silent’ forest. It can kill you, it can be
your misfortune, and surely it can destroy your retirement home. The “Beauty
and the Beast” as described by Terry Foxx talks about the forest as the beauty
and catastrophic fire as the beast. Today, the beauty is really the beast in
disguise patiently waiting to kill again.
Let’s listen and help break the silence. There’s so much
more to hear.
Forester’s Log:
Land Lessons
© Mary Stuever,
August 2004
Years ago when some of my
Pueblo friends would tell me stories, they would advise me that there was a
season—a specific time of year—when I could share these stories with others,
and the rest of the year, when thunder might be listening, we would keep these
stories safely snug in our hearts.
Now that it has been raining
for several weeks, and it seems clear the monsoon season is well entrenched,
and leaders at Fire Management are no longer staffing large weekend patrols to
prevent the next “Big One,” I feel I can safely tell another kind of
story. This one is about fire.
I work on the largest burn
that has occurred in the Southwest Region.
The Rodeo-Chediski Complex started in mid-June
of 2002 on the lands of my employer, the White Mountain Apache Tribe, in
east-central
Within the fire perimeter on
the tribal lands, roughly 120,000 acres of the roughly 276,000 acres of tribal
lands involved, experienced low fire severity, and admittedly, may have even
benefited from the fire. When I first came to this project I was told that
“anywhere” I saw green trees, there had been some kind of forest management
activity in the area’s history. Being a
skeptic, I have carried my “management activity map” with me rather regularly
in the burn area to test this theory.
Limestone Fire Tower is a good
place for the story to start unfolding. Jutting
up on a ridge several miles from the reservation/national forest boundary, the
fire tower not only serves to host a spotter who cries alarm when wildfires
start, but over the years, Limestone Camp has hosted crews of firefighters, who
when not fighting fires, worked diligently at thinning the forest. A large prescribed fire was conducted here a
year before the big burn, and in the 80s much of the area was thinned. Around
the tower where most of these activities occurred, there is a forest of tall, green
pines, and rich carpet of grasses, wildflowers and shrubs.
From the lookout tower, more
lessons can be learned. To the northwest along the reservation boundary there
are large islands of green, and these patterns on the landscape match the
thinning and prescribed burning project maps.
Directly to the west and southwest there is another anomaly to the
treeless eroded slopes that dominate the burn.
Here trees occur in clumps, sometimes isolated, sometimes not, and that
area deserves closer inspection.
Last week I took a group of
Navajo middle school students there to observe these lessons. In a region known as White Springs we found
some beautiful stands of large, yellow bark pine that had missed being
destroyed, as well as several other canyons, ridges, and slopes that seem to
have escaped the wrath of flames.
Pulling out the management map we learned that flames were really a
major part of the story. The Carrizo
Fire of 1971 had burned much of the area and timber salvage harvests followed
in the years after that fire. A portion of that area had burned again during
the White Springs Fire of 1996. The
resulting mottled mosaic of forest now represents an area that has experienced
three major wildfires in the past quarter-century.
There are other areas of
reservation lands within the Rodeo-Chediski burn that
I am happy I do not know well. On the
map, the layers of timber sales, thinning projects, and prescribed fire in the Chuckbox and Bull Flat areas are tangled and complex, but
happily we will not be adding rehabilitation projects to that management
history. Though the fire did burn
through these areas in 2002, the “damage” is minor and these areas do not
require additional erosion control or reforestation assistance from my program.
The story of this land will be told by others as graduate students from a
neighboring university tease apart the evidence to see how forest management
impacts fire severity.
The stories this land tells
are complex and fascinating, with the major lesson being about the need for
extreme care with ignition sources during certain times of the year. On the reservation this year, we take a deep
sigh of relief that, at least temporarily, knocking on wood, we have escaped
this fire season without having another major wildfire. As the rains pour down,
and access restrictions are lifted throughout the region, it is time once again
to tell the other “fire” stories; the stories, that if heeded, one day might
guide us back to living within a healthy forest landscape.
Southwest
Sustainable Forests Partnership Workshop, October 20-22, Eager, AZ
‘Transitioning After Sunset…and Still Sustaining Our
Forests’
An optional tour and open house at
the Forest Energy wood pellet plant
is scheduled for Wednesday morning. The
plant is located just 3 miles east of Show Low on Highway 60. The plant is about a 40 minute drive from
Eagar, where the formal workshop will commence in the afternoon.
The workshop will be at the Eagar
Community Room of the
Al Hendricks, Arizona State Land
Department and a member of the Southwest Sustainable Forests Partnership
Steering Committee, will serve as the agenda host for the workshop. Wednesday topics will include: Forest Health & Rural Economies: One
State’s Perspective on Addressing
Materials, Products & Markets by Arizona State Representative
The workshop starts with a continental
breakfast at the Eagar Community Hall.
Topics continue with a presentation on the Industries of the Future Program in New Mexico with Renee Parker of
the New Mexico Energy Office sharing how her state is adapting this
program. This is followed by a panel
presentation called Getting Materials Out of the Forest & into the Market with talks by:
Dennis Becker, Pacific Northwest Research Station; Deb Larsen, NAU; Dan Len,
Forest Service; and Larry Potts, Warm Springs Forest Product Industries. In the afternoon a
A continental breakfast well be served in the display room of the Eagar Community
Hall. The morning topics will feature: Processing Materials--How Can We
Improve? This is a panel discussion
moderated by Chuck Peone, Fort Apache Timber
Company. Sue Levan
of the USFS National
In the afternoon there will be an Optional Tour of Greer Area Restoration
Sites. After a short break, bag lunches will be
issued and participants will be bused to nearby
The afternoon tour with the Southwest Sustainable Partnership will also
be part of the official SAF Southwest Section Fall 2004 meeting. SWSAF Banquet and Social will be Friday
evening followed by a Saturday morning technical session.
Registration information for the SWSAF Fall 2004 meeting will be posted
shortly on the SWSAF website and registration packets will also be mailed to
the members.
Southwest Section website can be found at: http://www.for.nau.edu/swsaf/
Newsletter Contact Information:
The next Sky Islands
Forester will be published in November 2004.
Chapter and committee reports will be greatly appreciated.
Wanted: Foresters who are interested in writing a
regular column in the newsletter on Southwestern forestry. Many possible topics include; forest history,
southwestern silviculture, ecology, fire, book
reviews, forest policy and editorials. Once or twice a year.
Thanks to
John Harrington, Marlin Johnson, George Duda, Mary Stuever, Pete Fule’, Mark Loveall and Mike Borens for their
contributions to this issue.
Send articles, letters and
announcements to:
Craig Wilcox
225 W. 100 S.
or send
e-mail to:
*Would you prefer to receive your
newsletter by e-mail? You would save the Section money and receive it sooner
and in color with hyperlinks!* Or by both routes. Drop
me an e-mail and let me know.
Sky
Society of American Foresters
c/o Craig Wilcox
HC01 225 W. 100 S.