Rivals Seek Accord on Environment

With the sawmill closed, jobs scarce and their ranches under environmental attack, Catron County residents began circling the wagons and sighting their rifles.

The County Commission went so far as to pass a nonbinding resolution in 1994 that said every resident living in the county in the heart of the Gila National Forest should have a gun.

The siege mentality troubled Dr. Mark Unverzagt, who feared that Catron County had become an unhealthy place to live. When people began asking his clinic to X-ray packages for explosives, he sought help from the New Mexico Center for Dispute Resolution in Albuquerque and Melinda Smith, a mediator who had worked with street gangs.

The Catron County Citizens Group was born. In the four years since, there’s a transformation. Ranchers, loggers, forest rangers and environmentalists now sit down monthly to informal potluck suppers and formal meetings, discussing the issues that divide them in a search for common ground.

“All the fear and the anxiety and stress really started to abate,” Unverzagt said.

Since the Mexican spotted owl was listed as a threatened species in 1993, forest timber sales have dwindled. Almost every sale was met with an environmental challenge if not a lawsuit. On one occasion, loggers found metal spikes in trees designed to sabotage sawmill blades.

Through its negotiations, the Citizens Group has arranged the first timber sale on the Reserve Ranger District in four years, a small 125-acre forest-thinning project. And it won a significant price reduction for that sale and maybe other sales in the Arizona-New Mexico region.

The Citizens Group also is discussing other initiatives to salvage jobs from what’s left of the local timber industry--including a co-op clearinghouse called the Wood Yard for skinny trees that are sprouting in meadowlands.

Despite the spirit of cooperation, Citizens Group meetings still get emotional. But Smith reports “great levels of diplomacy,” respect and self-control among members.

“I think people are quite happy with some of the outcomes--the fact that there is a reduction in tension, a growing trust among the people involved,” she says.

Many issues remain unresolved, but “people are talking to each other and having a useful dialogue. I don’t think that was happening before,” says Dr. Ben Daitz, who teaches with Unverzagt at the University of New Mexico medical school.

Bob Moore, a forest consultant who moderates the monthly meetings, says it remains a slow, painstaking process. When somebody tries to speed up, somebody else slows down.

For instance, when the group succeeded in getting the 125-acre, 350,000-board-feet Apache Timber Sale offered, the Forest Service began an enthusiastic assessment of other possible forest-thinning projects. It came up with a potential list totaling 90 million board-feet over 10 years.

The assessment stunned the environmentalists.

“We get heartburn when they propose to log 3 million board-feet. For them to think they can get away with 90 million is outrageous,” said Kieran Suckling of the environmentalist Southwest Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, Ariz.

Todd Schulke, Suckling’s delegate to the Catron County Citizens Group, was confronted with Suckling’s comments at the next potluck. Schulke supported Suckling, saying he’d nearly been fired over the unexpected proposal.

Conservative rancher Hugh B. McKeen interceded: “I got roasted here one night, and it’s not a good feeling. Todd comes to the meetings. If he’s coming this close to getting fired, how are we gaining anything?”

And as progress inches forward on the timber front, trouble breaks out on the ranching front. A just-signed agreement between the Forest Service and environmentalists was the hot topic at Monday’s meeting. Ranchers “feel they have been sold out,” Moore says.

The Forest Service agreed April 16 to ban thousands of cattle from national forests in response to lawsuits from the Southwest Center in Tucson and Forest Guardians in Santa Fe claiming riverbanks in Arizona and New Mexico were damaged.

Despite lingering differences, Reserve District Ranger Mike Gardner says the word is out about the negotiations. He and other members of the Citizens Group recently visited Arkansas and Montana to tell the Catron County story.

“So where I think Catron County has been historically known for its radicalism--on both sides,” Gardner says, “now we’re being known more and more for our collaborative efforts.”