ALAMOGORDO, N.M.— Citing high costs, a decades-long timeframe, lack of implementation capacity and needless environmental damage, the Center for Biological Diversity today urged the U.S. Forest Service to immediately begin fuels reduction in New Mexico’s Sacramento Mountains in lieu of a logging project that the agency says would take decades to implement.

The South Sacramento Restoration Project, which spans 140,000 acres of the Lincoln National Forest, involves construction of 125 miles of new roads, logging of nearly 54,000 acres of forest — including the largest and most fire-resistant trees — and using toxic herbicides on thousands of acres each year. Implementation is expected to take up to 20 years. The area contains many Mexican spotted owls, which are protected under the Endangered Species Act.

“The Forest Service is holding critical fuels reduction hostage to a decades-long logging plan that’s so dangerously unrealistic and logistically difficult that it’ll probably never be implemented,” said Brian Nowicki at the Center for Biological Diversity. “We’re calling for action now to thin small trees and reintroduce ecologically beneficial fire to the landscape to protect forests and communities. This is achievable and can start now. The Sacramento Mountains and town of Cloudcroft can’t wait.”

Today’s letter calls on the Forest Service to immediately implement science-based measures to reduce the risk of wildfire. These include strategic thinning of small trees along roads and containment perimeters and prescribed burns to safely and efficiently reintroduce and manage ecologically beneficial fires at landscape scales.

Such an approach would fit within the bounds of the environmental effects analysis that the Forest Service has already approved and, unlike the agency’s dangerously unrealistic plans, it would achieve the goal of immediately reducing fire risk at large scales. Implementation could begin this year.

The Forest Service finalized an environmental analysis of the South Sacramento Restoration Project in March, eight years after first proposing the project.

“For eight years we’ve been working with the Forest Service and other community partners to develop an achievable plan to reintroduce beneficial fire and improve the health of the Sacramento Mountains ecosystem. After all that collaboration the Forest Service is instead forging ahead with an unrealistic plan for 20 years of logging without industry to even implement it,” said Nowicki. “This will all but guarantee that wildfire will burn through this beautiful forest, its dozens of spotted owl nest areas and the town of Cloudcroft. The Forest Service owes the public a realistic, achievable plan to safely restore beneficial fires and reduce fire hazards at landscape scales. That’s what we’re demanding.”