My View: Off-highway vehicles at odds with forest health
By Thor Sigstedt
Santa Fe New Mexican
September 14, 2007
The forest and our relationship to its ecology will determine our economy. As we enter the age of “Nature Deficit
Disorder,” a storm is brewing; most of us don’t know the difference between a rat dropping and a piñon nut!
I have heard many local, private foresters — people who actually use the forest, love it and work with it — tell us in
meetings that we need decent roads so they can get in and thin, hunt, harvest and graze. They are involved in the most
important part of our economy, and they are teaching their children how to care for and love the forest. That is our job
as humans, in order to protect the wealth it gives back when we behave ourselves and are part of the forest.
The off-highway-vehicle issue, which pits off-highway-vehicle recreationalists against other users of public lands, is
absurd compared to this!
A nature-educated child can read the weather and get out of the forest in minutes (which is often all the time there is
to react to weather changes on such dirt roads as those on Glorieta Mesa.) “Outsiders” driving off-road vehicles
(trucks, cycles, all-terrain vehicles, etc.) for recreation would learn that lesson the hard way. Saving them would
become a full-time job. Driving recklessly through a pothole creates a moment of fun and a much bigger pothole to fix.
What we need is a culture dedicated to forest health, dirt-road driving knowledge, and good, extensive small-scale
access to the forest for the people. The roads and trails are there; a whole economy could be created to protect and
preserve them.
The Forest Service begged us at a recent meeting at the Eastern Region Firehouse to form a group to clean up the garbage
on the mesa; If we can think about doing that, we can also manage the forest in many other ways. The best thing that
happened at the meeting was that a rancher was able to explain to an off-roader that spinning out in a tank — a bowl-
shaped earthen berm that collects and stores runoff water — destroys the vegetation that prevents its collapse. And
“collapse” is a good description for what we are veering toward as we allow the forest to become a playground for
recreational drivers with no attachment to the land and, yes, even just hikers and “enviros” (who often miss this point
themselves and eschew working there).
If we are not working with it and improving it, our rights to use it need to be curtailed. Like water rights, if we
don’t properly use them, we lose them.
So let’s carefully thin, piñon pick, hunt, carefully graze and even clean up the garbage. (It has occurred to me many
times that the act of throwing trash on the land has been a way to protest and keep people out in a weird, passive-
aggressive way). When we’ve accomplished these things, we might earn the right to allow some outsiders in, on our
healthy forests’ terms.
Healthy forests maintained by generations of young people who have learned how to work and play in them will keep us
rich and prevent “collapse.” The way we enforce all this is to be a part of the land and to have our values intact and
to know the difference between this and that. Let’s not kill the wild turkey that laid the turquoise egg!
Thor Sigstedt lives on a 40-acre “homestead/forest” at the base of Glorieta Mesa, where he raised his children,
practices controlled grazing with his donkey and manages the forest and creek there since 1979.
GlorietaMesa.org
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