The last time I knocked on Luis Torres’ front
door in San Pedro, N.M., he was inside on the phone, talking and
joking in a rapid-fire combination of Spanish and English that made
my head spin. On the other end of the phone was Alfonso Chacon, a
forest contractor featured in this issue’s cover story. The
two were hashing out some of the details surrounding a
tree-thinning project, which Chacon had secured funding for through
the innovative Collaborative Forest Restoration Program.
Chacon had hired Luis partly because Luis shares his deep,
multigenerational ties to the people and land of northern New
Mexico. But he also appreciated Luis’ ability to find his way
through the often-confusing world of land-management agencies,
grant-making and Anglo environmentalists. On my previous visit,
Luis and I visited foundations in Santa Fe and then stopped at the
office of the Forest Guardians, a group that often uses lawsuits
and appeals to stop logging and grazing on public land. There, Luis
carried on an in-depth conversation about ecology that ended with
him inviting the executive director to come up North to meet some
of his friends and walk the land.
It’s no
coincidence that, today, Forest Guardians is collaborating with
Chacon on a forest-restoration project. Luis, who has been on the
board of High Country News for more than a
decade, is one of those people who seems to be able to float across
the kind of cultural boundaries that stop the rest of us in our
tracks.
“If you just hang around Chicanos, you
won’t learn squat; the same thing if you just hang around
with whites,” he says. “I’ve always found that the most
interesting place is in the transition zone where they intersect
— just as the most interesting habitat in a landscape is
where the meadows and the trees come together.”
Luis has
been a community organizer since the 1960s, but his work in
community forestry began in the late ’80s, when he was
employed by an environmental organization — the Southwest
Research and Information Center. He and a fellow staffer were sent
up to the small, largely Hispanic village of Vallecitos, to look
into a severe erosion problem.
“I quickly discovered that
erosion was a secondary problem,” he recalls. “The
community’s real challenge was, ‘What the hell do we do
now that the timber mill is closed?’ “
Over the
next several years, Luis helped organize the Madera Forest Products
Association, which worked on developing a new forestry economy
based on cutting small trees. Some progress was made, but a couple
of years later it hit a snag, when key Forest Service staffers
changed. Not long after, environmental lawsuits from Forest
Guardians and others forced a temporary halt to all cutting on
Southwestern national forests.
Even during those dark
days, however, Luis remained an optimist. And today, he can’t
stop smiling about the collaboration in the woods that writer Peter
Friederici reports on in this issue.
“I was at a meeting
the other day where environmentalists were sitting at the same
table with local Hispanic and tribal leaders, and everyone was
throwing out ideas,” Luis says. “There was a dynamic of joy and
laughter that will last for quite a long time.
“I always
thought it would come to this,” he adds. “But I’m glad it
happened in my lifetime.”
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Life in the transition zone.
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