The sustained yield forest management act and the roots of environmental conflict in Northern New Mexico

Abstract

Recent research on environmental conflict in New Mexico has focused on racial and ethnic conflict between environmentalists and Hispanic loggers as a means to explain the trajectory of environmental struggle and the failure of Hispano/environmentalist coalitions opposing Forest Service management policies. This paper seeks to extend this explanation by considering the constraining role of federal legislation, institutional management and commercial resource exploitation that limited opportunities for Hispano/environmental collaborative challenges to federal resource management arrangements. I analyze the foundations of sustained yield forestry on the Carson National Forest in northern New Mexico though a focus on the legal construction of sustained yield policies and the practices of implementing sustained yield on the Vallecitos Federal Sustained Yield Unit, a special timber production sub-unit of the Carson. The paper illustrates how the deployment of sustained yield forestry in New Mexico produced not only conditions of production favorable to commercial timber operators, but also established a complex and contradictory regulatory environment that effectively constrained collaborative efforts between environmentalists and small-scale loggers in their efforts to construct alternative futures for resource management in the region.