Often we take for granted a person or thing that we love, until it's too late.
Our beautiful, mysterious forest is now in danger from drought, lowered resistance to disease, like the bark beetle, injury from fire, the removal of healthy trees, underground water and precious elements.
So I need to talk to the US Forest Service, part of the USDA that Lincoln established as 'the people's department' in the 1860's along with the Yosemite Grant Act. The district ranger office, not far from Smith's, has a bright welcoming display of flowers leading to a free variety of pamphlets about the forest, plants, animals, safety, camping and maps. The ranger seems to be a pleasant, intelligent man who can tell us a great deal about our forest and who may truly love it. I have to first submit my noncontroversial questions to his bosses. But Albuquerque and Washington would not permit my interview.
It reminded me of the many government employees, at a local and federal level, who are afraid to speak for fear of retaliation or because of being muzzled by organization policies. It's difficult to solve problems if you can't talk about them. This is a real danger for a country that wishes to be free. So I will go to the forest itself and tell you some of the stories I learned there.
'Yes, little one, I can tell you about our history and my life'. This general area was often under water from 500 million to 200 million years ago. Then dry land, dinosaurs, mammals and pine trees appeared. One million years ago, Musk ox and mammoths drank from the Rio Grande and the volcano mountain settled down.
About 25,000 years ago, human beings were living in New Mexico with sabertooths, mastodons and mammoths. The lava flow ended but can still be seen around Grants.
The oldest well-defined arrowhead in the New World comes from Clovis, New Mexico around 14,000 years ago and was used on the grassland inhabited by deer, bison, camels and horses. Our forest was put in the Forest Reserves in the late 1800's and established as the Cibola Forest in 1931 consisting of the San Mateo mountains northeast of Grants and the Zuni mountains to the west. Our forest is still young. The middle aged Tongrass Forest in Alaska is 800 years old. But the Daintree forest in Australia is really old at 180 million years. Our neighbor, Utah, has the oldest and largest living plant in the world-the Pando clonal Aspen grove - possibly 80,000 years old.
You may think we trees are quiet and beautiful because we want to refresh your soul peacefully, in addition to giving you food, shelter and firewood. But we are constantly at work. For the planet, we clean the air and change carbon dioxide to oxygen. For our neighbor trees and saplings, we maintain a wood wide web to communicate by chemical, hormonal and slow-pulsing electrical signals. For example, if we're attacked by leaf-eating caterpillars, we detect their saliva and send out pheromones that attract parasitic wasps. We send out electrical 220 hertz signals when being cut. Some of us are big old mother trees that have a huge underground network of fungal tubing to send sugar, water, nutrients and distress signals about drought and disease to our saplings and neighbors. For ourselves, when we sense deer saliva, we produce a chemical to make the leaves taste bad. When a human breaks a branch, we make a substance to heal the wound.
If you're willing to learn from us, some of the lessons are: elders are priceless, they care for each other and even the stumps; the healthiest communities take care of each other; cooperation, not competition makes us stronger.