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Planning for the Future
Recap Of Objectives
The objectives of the Catron County Community Wildfire Protection Plan are:
- Create a county-wide, landscape level plan
- Locate the highest areas at risk from catastrophic wildfire in the County
- Prioritize these areas based on the values of the citizens of the County
- Suggest mitigation actions for the protection of life, property, critical infrastructure and wildlands in the County, based on
- Optimum treatment efficiency
- Lowest treatment cost
- Highest benefit to local economy
- Follow-through to on-the-ground level by developing local Wildfire Protection Plans for implementation of objectives of this County-wide Plan
Implementation/Mitigation
There are 1.3 million acres of Ponderosa pine in Catron County. As an indicator of the amount needing treatment (not proposed as a target) to protect the values held by the citizens of the County, consider that historically about 186,000 acres burned every year just in the Ponderosa pine alone. A further important point is that full accomplishment of fuels and other management objectives is often not feasible in one treatment; areas treated to be within the "natural range of variability" will need to receive periodic burns and/or other treatments to maintain that condition.
Therefore, given the above, the treatment program for the County should include a bare minimum of 40,000 to 50,000 acres per year but 150,000 to 200,000 acres per year would be much more desirable considering the needs identified by this analysis.
Treatment amounts at the lower number run the risk of not being sufficient to prevent catastrophic wildfire. Treatment at the larger amounts of acreage will likely be difficult given the resources available in the County. It will be necessary to optimize the treatment by strategically planning the of location and actions, and by treating the highest priority areas first as much as possible.
Continuity of fuels is an important part of planning the strategic placement of treatments. The mapping of fire threat in the County indicates a less than desirable alignment with prevailing southwest winds, particularly in the southwest quarter of the County where the largest blocks of high fire threat exist. There are opportunities to connect corridors of existing areas of lower fire threat to provide landscape scale breaks in fuel continuity.
A strict adherence to the priorities established by this analysis would not be wise as there are many other factors to consider. For instance during the spring and summer of 2005, as of the writing of this plan, over 100,000 acres of fire use has been accomplished in mostly moderate to low priority areas. Forgoing this opportunity because it was not all in the highest priority areas would have been foolish. Isolating some of the higher fire threat areas by treatment of surrounding lower fire threat areas is a viable option in many cases. In short, each opportunity to treat fuels must be taken advantage of in order to treat as much area as quickly as is prudent to do so.
In general, the first priority is to treat the WUI areas most in need of treatment. Secondly and almost coincident with that priority, is the need to strategically place treatments in the larger landscape that will reduce the potential for very large wildfires. Thirdly, there is a need to restore the remaining areas to a more sustainable condition.
Potential users of the information provided by this analysis are encouraged to use the data bases to the fullest extent. For example the treatment priority for each WUI can be determined by referencing the attribute tables for the WUI priority map. The possibilities are almost endless for ways in which the data can be summarized and displayed. Much of the data will be useful at project and community scale planning levels, especially for the purpose of placing proposals in context of the larger landscape. Environmental Justice
Environmental Justice: The equitable treatment of all people, regardless of race, income, culture, or social class, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies. |
Assuming that income disparities exist within Catron county from neighborhood to neighborhood (Southwest New Mexico Council of Governments, 2004), and given that for purposes of environmental justice (EJ) under the Council on Environmental Quality’s (CEQ’s) Environmental Justice Guidance a minority or low-income population may be defined at the neighborhood level, the following considerations are relevant to environmental justice issues for purposes of inclusion in the CWPP:
- Risk of environmental and human health hazards
- Ecological, cultural, economic, human health, and or social impacts and adverse effects on low-income or minority populations or Native American tribes which are interrelated to impacts on the natural or physical environment.
- Disparate or disproportionately high risks and or effects on minority or low-income populations or Native American tribes
- Consequences of cumulative effects in determining disproportionately high risks and/or effects on minority or low-income populations, or Native American tribes.
Catastrophic Wildfires and Environmental Justice
Early discussions on environmental justice focused on three areas: toxic/hazardous waste, occupational safety and health, and environmental racism (Schlosberg 2003, Cole and Foster 2001, Camacho et. al. 1998, Taylor 2002). More recently, environmental justice discussions and applications have included additional topics such as subsistence, economic, social and cultural issues. According to scholar and anthropologist Ernest Atencio, “Public health impacts from environmental conditions or hazardous waste, or discrimination in the implementation and enforcement of environmental policies, are unquestionably critical problems, but environmental justice is about more than that. It is also about widening the discourse on environmental issues to include the perspectives, values, and concerns of the traditionally ignored populations of people of color and the poor. (2003, emphasis added).
For minority and low-income populations, the risks posed by the threat of a catastrophic wildfire are undoubtedly issues of environmental justice, as previously noted in an earlier analysis:
If, in fact, unhealthy forest conditions are present in the ponderosa pine ecosystem such as “simplification in structure and increased density” (Thal, May 15, 2003), alternatives which prevent or do nothing to return the forest to healthy conditions may pose a disproportionate risk to this low-income and/or minority population by increasing the risk of catastrophic wildfire. An action (or failure to take action) which creates increased risk to the community in question is an environmental justice issue.
Jarratt-Ziemski, Report of 6-2-2003
The threat is not lost on those who live near and subsist in part from those forests that are susceptible to such wildfires (Atencio, 2003). Indian tribal nations, also considered a protected class for environmental justice purposes, are all too often painfully aware of spillover detrimental effects of such wildfires. In fact, the Pomo tribe in California , having experienced such conditions in recent years, became part of a successful lobbying effort to pass new legislation in the summer of 2004, the Tribal Forests Protection Act (PL 108-278). The law provides for collaboration and some co-management authority (in part through stewardship contracting) on Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management lands adjacent to tribal lands for the purpose of addressing tribal interests in reducing threats of catastrophic wildfires on federal ands near their reservations.
Why does the threat of catastrophic wildfire pose a disproportionate risk to environmental justice communities?
- Low income families and individuals are less likely to be able to recover adverse effects on their human health. Income status affects one’s access to and extent of quality health care. Heavy smoke from large wildfires, for example, can easily be more devastating to the poor, who are far less likely to have ready access to the quality medical treatment available to the middle class and more affluent.
- Losses of property, subsistence activities, and or livelihood (e.g. ranching, loss of job in a tourism-related industry such as a housekeeper at a motel) are likely to have a more detrimental effect on low-income populations. For example, for the homeowner in a suburb who loses a home (which may even be a second home or vacation home for example), the loss is important to them, but not as costly in relative terms, as the loss of a home experienced by the low-income person. In the latter case, the loss may represent the total net worth for the low-income person, versus only a portion of the more affluent individual’s worth. Low-income individuals are less likely to have insurance, less likely to have somewhere else to live while trying to re-build. if they are even able to do so. More affluent persons are more likely to have adequate insurance as well as immediate financial resources needed to recover from losses of property than are low-income persons.
- Loss of cultural resources, such as gathering grounds for medicinal or culturally important plants or other resources, as well as traditional physical cultural resources (a particular site, for example) could have devastating effects on social/cultural institutions as well as health for Native Americans in a particular area. (The CWPP indicates there are over 11,000 acres of tribal lands within Catron County).
- The cumulative effects on low-income, minority, or Native American populations are likely to be much worse than for other populations. Loss of home, job, and/or subsistence activities in rural communities, where opportunities for employment are scare to begin with, could result in forced relocation to an urban area with even more dire consequences. Those at the margins of poverty could find themselves worse off should they have to move to an urban location where they could not event depend on subsistence activities to meet their most basic needs (Atencio, 2003).
Who Benefits and Who Remains at Risk?
Given all of the above, an important question to be addressed is how are resources for prevention of and protection from catastrophic wildfires being used? Whose neighborhood and property is being protected first? What populations are affected by which hazardous fuel reduction projects? For example, is property of the middle-class or wealthy persons being protected first, while low-income, minority, and Native American populations remain at higher risk? Additionally, who benefits in other ways from the work done on particular projects? Is hazardous fuel treatment being conducted in such a way as to provide jobs or even firewood, for example to low-income or minority or Native American populations, while simultaneously restoring forests to healthy conditions?
In summary, this list of potential environmental justice issues is certainly not exhaustive, but only identifies some of the most obvious and critical potential environmental justice issues. .
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