The Sociological and Ecological
Consequences of Managing Piiion Woodlands
William d e ~ u ~ s '
In the program, the title for this presentation is "The
sociological and ecological consequences of managing piiion
woodlands," but I think I had better correct that. While I very
much want to know what those consequences might be, I must
confess I don't, and I seriously doubt whether anybody does.
Certainly the history of the piiion woodlands shows we have
not understood them yet.
What I'd rather do than speculate about consequences is to
talk about the point of view one might adopt in approaching the
woodlands and in becoming a student of those consequences.
Whether you are a manager, researcher, or user of woodland
resources, the perspective from which you approach your work
will be vital to whatever success you ultimately enjoy: so let's
talk about perspective.
Often these days when we discuss piiion we talk about the
need to restore the health of an ecological system that has
suffered from human activities. Clearly, restoration is a major
theme of this conference, and it is important not least because
a healthy piiion-juniper community can provide valuable benefits
and support considerable human use provided that use does not
exceed the ecological limits of the resource. A fine writer of a
decade or so ago, Rene Dubos, stated in his final book, The
Wooing of Earth, that "the recycling of degraded environments
is one of the most urgent tasks of our age." I suspect that most
of the people involved in this conference would agree with that
proposition in regard to the piiion-juniper woodlands of the
Southwest.
To the extent we are involved in the rehabilitation - the
healing -- of the land, we are all, in a way, doctors and therapists.
What I would like to suggest is that as we approach our work
of healing like doctors, by first taking the hippocratic oath. It
tells us, "First, do no harm." Unfortunately, this is not as easy
as it sounds. Environmental history, like the history of medicine,
provides many examples of cures that were worse than the
disease they were supposed to correct. For example, land
managers early in this centuIy conceived of a grand way to
stabilize eroding river channels, stream banks and hillsides. With
'
Senior Associate, The Convervation Fund, 1517 Don Gaspar;
Santa Fe, New Mexko 87501.
enthusiasm they imported a hardy and all-but-indestructible tree
from Asia and planted it in those erosion-prone m a s . In many
cases the tree accomplished its mission of stabilization, and it
certainly flourished.
It has since spread through the west like a prairie fire and
has become the dominant vegetation along many southwestern
watercourses, where it outcompetes our native cottonwood and
willow vegetation. As you know, I am spealung of salt cedar or
tamarisk, which today is the bane of southwestern riparian
communities and ranks one of the most pernicious and
problematic plants in the region
If only the importers of tamarisk had thought more broadly
and conservatively about what they intended to do. If only they
had resolved, "First, do no harm."
There are many other examples of this kind. In every case
they illustrate that people rarely can predict the full range of the
consequences of their actions. Therefore we must resolve, all
the more emphatically, "First, do no harm."
This is part~cularlyimportant for federal land managers. I
have worked closely with people in the Forest Service and BLM
and have high regard for both agencies. Generally speakmg,
however, these folks remain in a given post only a few years
and then move on As a result, very few of them stay in place
long enough to see any but the earliest effects of what they do.
They escape having to live with the consequences of their
actions.
Worse, it is exactly because their time is limited that they
often feel obliged to get maximum results as soon as possible.
They get paid for doing things. So they do as much as they can.
Most of us are effective at persuading ourselves that the good
of our wok is as good as our intentions. Unfortunately this
almost never the case. In fact, I submit to you that outside of
catastrophic outbreaks of evil, like that presently afflicting the
former Yugoslavia, good intentions produce as much damage to
land and society as bad intentions do. Let me give you an
example of this with regard to pifion-juniper woodlands. The
fuelwood co-ops on the Carson and Santa Fe National Forests
in the late 60's and early 70's grew out of the very best of
intentions. The National Forests played midwife to these
programs which also received support, I believe, from the Office
of Economic Opportunity, the lead agency waging the "War on
Poverty."
The idea was to bring land-based economic activity to poor,
rural communities whose people had very little access to
good-paying cash jobs. The need for such help had been amply
dramatized by the Alianza's socalled "Courthouse lla~d"in
Tierra Arnarilla. It so happened that the inception of the wood
co-ops also coincided with the new availability of affordable
gasoline-powered chainsaws and four-wheeldrive trucks. The
co-ops and these new tools enabled local people to harvest piiion
and juniper wood and market it collectively So folks went out
and cut literally thousands of cords of green piiion and juniper
and loaded the wood on trucks and semi's, and those truckloads
were hauled to urban centers like Denver, Colorado Springs, and
Albuquerque.
The p r o m produced some good short-term employment
for people in rural communities, and the value of the cash they
earned was great--it repaired the roof, built the bathroom, paid
for mother's operation, maybe paid for a child's education. These
were important benefits. But the negative effects of the program
were perhaps greater, and their consequences more enduring. In
cutting those thousands of cords no thought was given to the
effects on the land: no thought was given to the obvious high
grading of the piiion juniper stands, as only the largest trees, the
ones biggest and quickest to cut and load were taken: no thought
to the vast numbers of new roads and truck trails that were
developed: no thought of consequences on soil distmbance and
not even any thought of the availability of future fuel wood
supplies for the people who live in the local ma,the very people
who were cutting the wood for coop and who were cutting their
own future wood supply and selling it to people who would not
need it nearly as bad as they themselves would over the long
haul.
The wood coop faded away often as a result of management
problems and increasing inertia and as the result also of the fact
that easy wood was harvested and sold. Even so, heavy use of
PJ woodlands continued. The oil shocks of the early 70's, which
drove up the price of propane, played a role, as did the ever
more widespread availability of chainsaws and
four-wheeldrives. People tended to select only the trunks of
trees leaving behrnd the branches, but it used to be the other
way mund. People used to go into the woods with wagons and
cut just the branches-leaving the trunks alive and healthy, and
continuing to grow. The old way was fundamentally sustainable:
the new was devastating.
In about 1976 I became interested in the management of the
pifion juniper woodlands as a result of buying a horse. I rode
that horse everywhere and saw a lot of country around the
village where I lived south of Penasco. Everywhere I went I
saw the stumps of freshly slaughtered piiIon and juniper trees,
and I would see branches and tops, representing a lot of perfectly
good fuel wood, lying on the ground
Along with Jeff Kline and Juan Lopez from the neighboring
village of Las Trampas, I became very concerned about the
progressive devastation of the woodlands. We spoke with staff
of the ranger district and asked two questions: do you know
with some level of assurance how much annual growth of fuel
wood, that is to say of green piiion and juniper, occur on the
district' And secondly, do you know how much piiion and
juniper is being removed from the district each ye& We figured
the answers to these questions would provide the starting point
for managing the woodlands for sustained yield. We had been
told that in the land of many uses evexytlung was managed for
sustained yield.
Unfortunately the Forest Service managers had no idea what
the answer to either question might be. We pressured them to
find out and they did some sampling here and there to count
the number of piiion stems per acre: then they calculated how
many p f i n acres they had: then they subtracted the slopes over
30% and after crunching the numbers came up with an estimated
yield of 250 cords per year--for the entire Penasco Ranger
District of Carson National Forest.
As to how many cords of wood were actually being cut,
nobody ventured a guess, but there was a box at the ranger
station filled with stubs from all the he1 wood permits that had
been issued in 1976. Nobody had ever bothered to tally them
We asked permission to do so, and permission was granted. Our
count showed that 1,700 cords had been permitted to be
harvested in 1976--againstthe growth of about 250 cords. Think
about that. Sound's like a progmm for the liquidating of a
resource. And probably the situation was worse than the figure
indicate. The growth rates assumed for piiion were probably
high, and the cut was probably greater than the permits indicated
because many woodcutters didn't bother to get a permit. Even
if you got a permit for 3 cords, did you stop at 3 or did you
really get 4?
In any event, we had a great imbalance. Another thing we
learned from our permit tally was that about 95% of the permits
were issued to people from villages within the boundaries of the
ranger district. In other words, there was little truth to the
widespread idea that "outsiders" were mainly at fault for
over-harvesting.
The great thing about the Forest Service was that, once good
data was available, it acted. Chuck Bazan was the District
Ranger and he initiated a series of public meetings in villages
on the district to discuss the pifion situation. Those public
meetings were an example of the Forest Service at it's veIy best.
As with most public meetings, there was a lot of griping, but
Bazan and his team handled it well. People said, if things are
this bad, why didn't you start doing things about it sooner-why
didn't you begin regulating this? Why didn't you begin some
controls? Veterans of the Forest Service's range program
appreciated some of the irony of the situation because they had
been working to establish appropriate controls on m g e use for
decades--and without local support. But irony aside, at the
meetings on fuel wood harvest, the people did an amazing thing.
They accepted the information they were given, and said they
were willing to change their use of the woodlands.
The Forest Service presented alternatives: there could be a
lottev for a limited number of permits: permits could be
distributed on a fmtcome-fmt-served basis: the Forest Service,
or a community committee might try to prioritize neediness
among the aged, the poor, etc. The people gave a clear answer.
They said they didn't want to prioritize or have lottery or adopt
a system of any kind. They said that if everybody could not
have equal access to p e n fuelwood, then nobody should. Let's
just shut the whole thing down, they said, let's stop cutting green
pifion and juniper stove wood. And that is what happened. Not
long ago I talked with a friend who used to work in the wood
co-ops. He spoke of those days with deep regret. "We all thought
it was the right thing to do," he said, "but look at what we lost:
nut harvest, game habitat, erosion, wood for the future."
As managers, as people who would heal the land, we need
to approach our work with a deep sense of humility. We know
predicted models are almost never right. A recent article in the
journal Science [April, 19931 questions whether science is
capable of building reliable models for sustained yield--the
authors say it has never done so in the past. The obstacles are
many: models never adequately accommodate the natural
variability of ecosystems: still less do they allow for the
influence of rarely accommodate human greed and avarice.
I'd like to suggest that we not put all our faith in science but
learn to depend more on our own moral fiber. I would like to
suggest that as we try to rehabilitate the pifion-juniper
woodlands, we first ask ourselves, what are our blind spots?
What are we missing;? What are we not taking into account?
We can never answer these questions fully but we may get
some thoughts, some conservatism, some humility. Our blind
spots are almost always madold but they are almost never
manifest. We need to seek them diligently so that first, we do
no harm.
Further, I submit, we should subject all projects to the
following test-especially if we will not be around to see the
consequences. We should ask, would I do this on my own land?
Would I use my own money to do it? Will I be able to live
with consequences of these actions if they turn out differently
from what I now predict? Would I be willing freely and openly
to accept responsibility for those consequences? If the answer
to all those questions is yes, then that will be a program we will
all want to applaud.