The catastrophic blazes that thrive in eastern Arizona’s thickly forested yet arid landscape have a way of fizzling once they jump from the dense national forests to the Apache reservations, and that’s not by chance.
On a scorching summer day with fire danger at the extreme level, forestry superintendent Michael Gutierrez and his crew spent the morning chain-sawing the overgrown junipers surrounding Seneca Lake on the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation.
Soil conservationist Paul Buck discussed his experiments in fighting tough alligator juniper using the terrestrial version of the herbicide Round-Up, and forest manager Dee Randall explained how the scrubby trees could be converted into slabs and sold for furniture as part the tribal timber business.
Such wildfire prevention techniques might alarm environmentalists, but the San Carlos Apache have their own agenda: Keep the forests healthy, protect their sacred sites, and bring back the plants and grasslands that flourished before the reservation was established in 1934.
“The Apaches believe the health of the people is tied to the health of the land,” said Mr. Randall. “We want the reservation to look the way it did in the pre-reservation days. Everything we do is just to help us get a more healthy forest. That’s the whole goal.”
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2 comments:
Dave T: Say what you want, the American Indians are hands down, the only group of people that can and should tell others how to live in harmony with the land.
Yeah and they did not believe that the land should be OWNED in anyway too . You take an entire continent away from a people sure they are going to figure out how to preserve what they are given. The rest of us should be so resourceful.
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