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Forest Guild Southwest Region Program |
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Challenges · Solutions · Projects
The Forest Guild’s Southwest region encompasses the states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah. The Guild’s Southwest Region supports the organization’s goal of practicing and promoting excellent forestry by building a sustainable forest-based economy, developing future forestry leaders, practicing ecological forest restoration, and training and educating forest workers and landowners.
| | Major Challenges in the Southwest- Forested landscapes need ecological restoration due to more than a century of fire suppression.
- High workers’ compensation insurance rates limit the ability of contractors to bid on and win federal fuel reduction contracts.
- Inconsistent supply of federal forest restoration and thinning contracts hampers a viable forest industry.
- Low income, rural, and minority populations are vulnerable to catastrophic wildfires.
Meeting the Challenges: Practicing and Promoting Excellent Forestry ^
- Community Forestry
The Forest Guild’s community forestry program reaches out to forest workers in rural communities to engage them in excellent forestry. The program’s overarching goal is to promote a viable small-scale timber economy that can meet the forest restoration needs of the region’s public and private lands. Small businesses that provide forestry services and manufacture value-added products have a stake in excellent forestry: the people are connected to the land, and they know that if the forest is healthy, it will sustain them indefinitely.
- Ecological Forestry
The Forest Guild’s ecological forestry program works with public, private, and non-profit partners to demonstrate forestry that is ecologically responsible and supported by good science. The Guild supports forest restoration that goes beyond reducing forest fuels and actually restores ecosystem function. Some examples of the Guild's work on ecological forestry in the Southwest are available here.
- Public Policy
The Southwest Region’s public policy program works to educate Congress and other decision makers about the importance of forest restoration funding, incentives for small scale woody biomass utilization, continuation of landowner assistance programs, and programs that keep working forestlands working.
Southwest Region Projects ^ - Forest Worker Safety Certification Program
Extremely high workers compensation rates in New Mexico represent one of the greatest barriers to local businesses being able to win fuel reduction and wildfire hazard reduction contracts. The Guild continues to build on past success in improving safety and the availability of insurance in New Mexico. More
- Forest Guild Youth Conservation Corps
Each year the Guild provides youth training and an introduction to natural resource management through the successful Youth Conservation Corps program. More
- Collaborative Forest Restoration
Though the Collaborative Forest Restoration Program (CFRP) , the Guild has expanded forest restoration in New Mexico by providing multiparty monitoring and other technical assistance to communities and by implementing forest restoration projects including:
- Technical Assistance to Forest-Dependent Communities and Businesses
The Guild provides direct technical assistance to communities in forest worker training, forest product business development, and collaboration with land management agencies. Productive working relationships and increased community capacity benefit everyone—and restore degraded forests.
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Forest Wisdom Issue 14
Forest Wisdom #14 (fall 2009) explores issues related to managing forests for wildlife and biodiversity. Articles range from restoring meadows to maintain rare butterfly habitats in the forests of western Oregon, to safely returning fire to highly fire-dependent forest ecosystems in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, to identifying forest management objectives for a small group of “focus species” whose habitat needs are representative of a wide range of other wildlife in the forests of Maine. Though focusing on a wide variety of wildlife, all of the articles share a common goal of restoring and maintaining forest ecosystem health in order to provide a natural habitat for native species.
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