Steve Pearce: “I grew up in New Mexico and on our vacations we would drive to Cloudcroft, New Mexico. From the early 1950s, I noticed…”

“I grew up in New Mexico and on our vacations we would drive to Cloudcroft, New Mexico. From the early 1950s, I noticed that there was a place there of thousands of acres where no tree grew. It was in the middle of pine forests in southern New Mexico, and it was always odd to me. It was only after beginning to work in the legislature and learning what makes a forest grow and not grow that I realized that was a forest fire that had occurred in the middle part of the century, and over 50 years later, the soil was still sterile from the effects of that fire. So when my constituents ask me what is a healthy forest, I tell them one that is natural, one that grows up the way that conditions would permit. In New Mexico, a healthy forest, generally, historically, pictures tell us, had about 25 to 50 trees per acre. I like to ask schoolchildren when I go around, how many trees per acre are in New Mexico forests now? On average, we have over 1,500 trees per acre.”