The Forest for the Trees

New Mexico’s best tool for restoring forests after catastrophic wildfires sits in a few greenhouses just below a half-burned hillside in the small farming community of Mora. Sun soaks in while fans whir and sprinklers run intermittently over roughly 300,000 seedlings waiting to be planted in burn scars throughout the Southwest. The sprouted tips of ponderosa pines reach just a few inches high. Two walk-in coolers hold the largest seedbank in the region.

As wildfires burn bigger and hotter after a century of fire suppression, rising temperatures and increasing drought, they char landscapes and leave few living trees from which forests can resprout. But even with intervention, the number of seedlings available falls far short of what the Southwest needs. Replanting just the most severely scorched areas of the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon wildfire could require at least 26 million seedlings. At the current pace, generations would pass before those blackened woods were forests again.

So state and federal funding are convening to add to the John T. Harrington Forestry Center with the New Mexico Reforestation Center, looking to bring that future to within a single human lifetime. The proposed addition would see 152,000 new square feet of greenhouse space and boost the annual seedling crop to 5 million. State staff, elected officials, US Forest Service staff, FEMA representatives, and Xochitl Torres Small, deputy secretary for the US Department of Agriculture, gathered at the greenhouses on April 16, the two-year anniversary of the Hermits Peak and Calf Canyon fires igniting, to acknowledge the losses and celebrate this new opportunity.

The Hermits Peak and Calf Canyon wildfires, which merged to become the largest in state history, started from prescribed burns in the Santa Fe National Forest, which the USDA oversees. The Forest Service has since overhauled practices for those burns, but Torres Small’s remarks made clear that the agency understands it has work yet to do.

“The Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon—it doesn’t say enough to say it was a tragedy. The impact it had on livelihoods, on people, and on forests is enormous,” Torres Small said. “I can’t overstate how deeply sorry USDA is for what happened.”

She spoke to a crowded room at the forestry center lined with posters on the history of how Southwestern forests reached this precarious place when it comes to wildfire. Colonists ended indigenous use of fire on landscapes, Smokey Bear gave wildfires a bad rap even though they’re often part of healthy ecosystems, the “thinning gap” left forests thick with so many trees that fires easily leap from understories they helpfully clear out to tree canopies where they become harder to steer from homes and other infrastructure. Now, bigger fires create bigger, lingering problems.

Long after the fires have gone out, risk and damage continue, said Dylan Fuge, acting Secretary of Energy, Minerals, and Natural Resources, as water and soil without vegetation to hold it in place runs off into roads, houses, and acequias every time rain falls. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham was expected to attend the event, but was unable to make it. In her stead, Fuge said: “While we can put a dollar figure on the damage, we recognize the human cost is incalculable.”

Financial help from FEMA has been slow, with many residents still waiting. The fire has changed lives and transformed livelihoods, Veronica Serna, a Mora county commissioner, told SFR. In this reforestation center, she sees a chance to restore some of those work opportunities for young people.

“We need this desperately,” said John Barley, who ran a sawmill and grew Christmas trees on 4,000 acres outside Mora, 3,000 of which burned. He’s since replanted 400 seedlings on those acres, but it’s a small step toward recovering a viable business.

The new reforestation center will be run through a partnership with New Mexico Highlands University, New Mexico State University, University of New Mexico, and New Mexico’s Forestry Division.

Joshua Sloan, associate vice president of academic affairs in the forestry and the reforestation center with New Mexico Highlands University, has already begun training more seed collectors, a first and often over-looked step toward filling more greenhouses. Just last year, those collections doubled the seed bank’s holdings to about 7 million. But even if every seed sprouted—and they won’t all—they would cover just 20,000 acres, not even 10% of what burned in Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon.

“And that doesn’t include any other fires, or any future fires,” said Owen Burney, director of the Harrington Forestry Research Center. But this center specializes in replanting after fires, even researching nursery practices to better-prepare seedlings for life outside, Burney said to questions during a greenhouse tour about whether seedlings could even survive in severely burned areas: “This research is what we do—we plant in burned areas.”

A Nature Conservancy study tallied New Mexico’s total need for reforestation effort at nearly 2 million acres—and that was before the 2022 record-breaking wildfire season. Ramping up to producing 5 million seedlings a year will move as quickly as the money does, Burney said, but the goal is to green up an additional 40 greenhouses in the next three to four years. Not every acre of Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon will be replanted, but clusters of planted trees will, in a few decades, begin to spread their own seeds.

“We’re giving it a little bit of a push start,” Burney said, “and then it takes off.”

The $32 million in federal and state funds allocated so far for this center may cover just one-quarter of the estimated costs. For the rest of the money, Laura McCarthy, New Mexico’s state forester said, the state is going to FEMA for a notice of loss.

“The USDA has committed to making New Mexico whole, and part of that making us whole is replacing our forests,” McCarthy said.

Whatever percentage FEMA contributes to funding the center’s construction will be matched in the percentage of seedlings dedicated to restoring the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon fire scar until that need is met. Then, seedlings will be available for other burned areas around the region.

“The work that comes from pain that’s occurred here can have a dramatic impact on fire recovery across the Southwest,” Torres Small said. “When it comes to rebuilding, the hardest part of rebuilding is trust, especially when our relationships have never been perfect when it comes to the USDA and New Mexico. And yet every year, we plant, and every year, we show up to do the work to try to make that relationship better.”