Growing up here in the mountains and the forests, in the rivers and the snowstorms has been a childhood of joy, laughter, exhilaration, and discoveries.

When I was little, the forest, to me, was a place to play, create and imagine.

Now that I'm older, I understand that these trees are always growing too, trunks spiraling up and up and up, now a canopy shading me as I find my path forward.

We are the children of these forests and it now falls to us to protect their future with love, listening and reverence.

Taos, a small town carved into the magnificent forests of the southern Rockies.

We grew up here skiing, hiking, biking, fishing.

The magical moments that make our childhood.

Hi.

I'm Carlos Miller, president of the True Kids 1 Youth Council.

And we, the Youth Council, are concerned about the future of our forests.

And by future, I mean 15 years from now.

We've reflected on the memories that made our childhood in these forests magical, then spoke to experts to hear their perspective on what we can do today to make sure that we have amazing, fabulous forests in the future.

When I think about growing up in the forest, the first thing that comes to mind is being at my grandma's house and climbing the trees and just feeling connected to nature.

Looking back at growing up in the forest, I think of spending the summer camping with my family, playing around and running around the sticks.

I remember getting to go on hikes in the mountains and building fairy houses out of sticks and leaves and pine cones and just feeling so happy and really connected to nature.

I think about going on hikes with my family, swimming in lakes, mountain biking, jumping in leave piles, and sledding in the winter.

Exploring with my friends and family and watching tadpoles all day and sledin the pond winter.

in my backyard.

An amazing experience I remember is going Christmas tree hunting with my family.

When I think of my childhood growing up in a forest, I remember how every hike wasn't just a hike.

It was an adventure with my sister.

We'd make up stories as we crossed the logs, and every little mushroom was probably a fairy house to us.

One thing that stood out for me while thinking about my childhood and growing up in the forest is how I use my imagination the most at that time, and I spent all day, every day, running through the sagebrush.

And since I've spent less time in the forest, I feel like a part of my life has gone missing.

When I think about the future of our forests, a word that comes to mind is afraid.

Concerned.

Open-minded.

Saddened.

Uncertain.

Depleting.

I'm worried that someday the beauty of our forests will burn, and we won't get to experience the amazing changing of colors and the beautiful greens.

On one side, I'm apprehensive about our future because of the damage we've already done to our environment and our home.

But at the same time, I'm optimistic because future generations and current generations are educating themselves more on the ecosystem and what we can do to help preserve our forests.

So I think for future, more people will be willing to help the environment.

Before we talk about wildfire, I want to impart an important concept: the idea that our forests are stressed.

Our forests in New Mexico are stressed because of a historic drought, coupled alongside fire suppression that has kept the understory with a lot of competition, a lot of straws of the drink making drought even worse because there's less resources for too many trees to take.

Fire is sorta like precipitation.

It can come in all shapes and sizes, and it can come at different times of the year, and it can come in different volumes and different intensities.

So in our neck of the woods, historically, a lot of our forests were evolved to really want and need what we call low severity surface fire.

That's fire that's usually started by a lightning strike and creeps along the ground.

And that's the kind of fire that maintains balance in that ecosystem, maintains a balance of types of plants, maintains the kinds of food that's available not just for mammals, but also insects and birds and everything in between.

So in those same systems where low severity surface fire is the norm, if you have a really, really intense, really massive fire that nukes out the entire forest, suddenly those species that were evolved to a different flavor of fire don't really know where they fit into that new system.

When I look at this forest, I can see the fire already.

It's just waiting for the spark, if you will.

I'd be lying to you if I told you I wasn't afraid of catastrophic stand replacing wildfire.

However the spark is lit on the Forest Service acre, there's the risk of the fire spreading across that boundary to private lands.

The consequences have been massive.

I think the way I describe it is we've created a massive time-bomb, and we're having to very delicately dismantle it.

Our mantra was incorrect, where, “fire has to be suppressed.” And actually, that's the condition that we're confronted with, which is the threat of mega fires.

It is a different kind of fire that we're seeing on the landscape.

One of the things that I have found working in these mega fire landscapes, where these fires have been so catastrophic, is that Mother Nature is super resilient, and there are a lot of things that happen after the fire in terms of watching the grasses come back, watching the shrubs sprout, watching the birds come in.

You start seeing pieces of that landscape you can't see when it's covered with forest.

Now, in 1991, I was on a fire on the Boise National Forest.

At that time, my boss told me, write this fire down.

It's going to be the largest fire you've ever been on.

It was 100,000 acres.

Now, if you go walk areas of the Hermits Peak Calf Canyon scar this year, 12 months after that fire caused so much destruction and devastation on that side of the hill, it's just nothing but abundant wildflowers, re-sprouting aspens there's a ton of wildlife in there.

I mean, to be honest, I don’t think there’s a future of our forests the way things are going now, because there is no cultural perspective, there is no historical reality that's being brought into the current day practices.

So for me, the question shouldn't be, what can community do to be more involved?

It's, when are these institutions who have really good funding, more funding than the community, really stop and analyze what has to change in our policy procedures to assure the silenced voices, the people that have been dispossessed from the land, the relationships, the people that have never been really respectfully included in the decision making processes, what needs to happen for them to be involved?

I think the most important thing to think about the forests and the future is that we understand the complexity of forest health, and that we understand that it's imperative, like some of our speakers today said, to take action right now, even though we don't have all the science and we maybe don't have all the person power that we need to do the treatments.

I hope that people can understand that they are part of the ecosystem and that they are able to live with fire and to build adapted fire communities to where when a fire comes, “Hey, great, there's a fire,” and it just goes on through and everything's fine, or we have minimal loss of resources, whether it be soil, water or timber.

And it's going to take understanding, education.

Humanity would not be here if it wasn't for fire.

And we all love fireplaces in the winter.

So it's not that it's something new, but it is a new relationship with it on the land, to take care of the land.

I'd like to move us away from thinking about landscapes in a static way, thinking that there's a static, ideal condition, but adapt our land management so that we are thinking about the landscape as a dynamic thing, so that it can be more resilient to these disturbances, which are a part of the ecology here.

The irony in us trying to adapt to a new climate and to manage our forests in a way that our forests can adapt to a new climate, also requires that we embrace fire as a tool.

And there's a tremendous, very long, ancient history of humans coexisting with fire.

It's going to hurt a little bit to get the planet where it needs to be, and our ecosystems where it needs to be, and build on the work that everybody has done up to this point and continue to carry it forward, because that's going to give you your water, that's going to give you your forests, that's going to give you your rangeland, and that's going to help your life in the long run.

I remember a couple of years ago, when me and my best friends went skateboarding in the back roads behind my house, and it started to rain.

So we threw our skateboards under a little mailbox and we decide to go for a hike.

We walked a couple miles back behind my house to the nearest mountains, and we just kept walking up until we could see the entirety of Taos.

And it was really beautiful, and it was just a really great experience because we all got closer and it was a beautiful view.

Our purpose has never changed, you know, it's about forest restoration, it's about watershed restoration, and it's about wildlife preservation.

What we like to do and look at is restoring the forest, rather than just cutting all the nice, pretty trees for logging.

We actually go in and look at damaged trees and we take those out.

Something that's genetically not good, if it's got a fork in it, and we restore it for the animals, we restore meadows for the health of the trees that we leave.

So we're very selective on what we actually take and what we leave.

We will leave large, old trees o purpose so they can reseed.

We work kind of hand-in-hand with the Forest Service.

And we'll go in, we'll do thinning projects that lets it go so you can get, some of the smaller trees gets a chance to really flourish, clears some of the ground, increases habitat for wildlife, and decreases fire intensity for when it does happen.

A tree is harvested probably a year in advance to keep some stockpile in the yard.

We cut the trees out in the woods.

And then we come in and skid them, limb them, deck them.

Semi comes in, loads them up, brings them down here to the sawmill.

And then we can normally get them on the sawmill within a day or two.

So the whole process, maybe a week.

It's changed quite a bit.

35 years ago when we first started, we did a lot of stuff by horse.

So we actually would skid with a horse, we actually would load trucks with a horse, and now we, you know, it's mechanized.

We want our community to be prosperous, so we want to make sure that our forests are healthy, because we have healthy forests, we have healthy watersheds, we have a healthy community.

A tree only has a certain lifespan.

And after that certain lifespan, it just falls, it becomes a fire hazard.

And so at a certain point, you have to be able to log, or you have to remove those trees that are beytheir lifespan.

If it's not taken care of, we've seen areas where if we don't take care of it, Mother Nature’s going to do her job and she's going to take care of it in a lot more of a devastation than we could ever imagine.

This area was not a thinning project or a cutting project or a logging job that we did.

We did not select these trees.

Mother nature did.

So two years ago in December, we had a snow squall that came in, and high winds, and completely devastated the area.

A lot of trees were uprooted and broken and, this is kind of what's left.

So we've been able and we've been allowed to come in through private property with contracts, and part of the Forest Service to come in and actually take out some of the trees that were down to help with the fires, so that the material doesn't go from standing to on the ground, which now creates a whole new fire hazard.

Fire was one of the biggest mitigators of healthy forest, and now we put out fires instead of letting fires burn, because more and more people have moved to those areas.

Our forests around the area continue to need work.

You know, we just had a huge, catastrophic fire in the Mora area, Las Vegas area, the Sipapu area.

And, you know, and as you go back in there, you can see the work that our forests needed.

You know, a lot of those fires could have, the mitigation on a lot of them fires could have been helped by having some kind of work done within that forest.

There's always areas where fuel breaks so if a fire does get around, it can only spread so far before it hits a fuel break.

Our forests bring a lot to us.

It's not just about the timber that comes down to make boards or firewood.

It's about watersheds, it's about animals, it's about sustainability for especially communities like ours, that we are in the forest.

The ultimate goals, we don't look at today or tomorrow, we look at 10 years from now, 50 years from now, 100 years from now, what are we leaving behind in the forest?

Treating our forests and managing them is a good thing.

And it's a good thing for the economy, for our communities, and it's a good thing for wildlife, it's a good thing for the forests, it's good all the way around.

I'm Mia Barela.

I'm a member of the True Kids 1 Youth Council and a junior at Taos High School.

For my entry into the future of our forests, I chose to focus on insect infestations.

The first expert that I discussed this topic with was Andy Graves.

He spoke about the ips beetle, otherwise known as a bark beetle.

Can you tell me a little bit about what the piñon ips beetle is and what it does?

Sure, so the piñon ips beetle is a bark beetle, and a bark beetle is a group of cts that bores into piñon trees by boring through the bark, and then it feeds on the foam inside the tree where it mates, and then new bark beetles come out and they attack trees nearby.

Why does that matter?

It matters because when there's times of drought or the trees are unhealthy, the bark beetles can start to have unwanted impacts on the forest.

Like killing a lot of trees.

And how might this beetle influence the future of our forests Say in, like, 15 years?

It could really reduce the amount of trees that are in the landscape, and that could impact people's view of the areas around their home, the forests, the flow of water.

And how does climate change affect the way that this beetle acts?

One, we have more erratic droughts, which means that the trees are unhealthy because they're not receiving water in the time of year when they need to receive water, and then another one with warmer climates and prolonged or extended summer periods, the beetle has the opportunity to have more generations per year, which means it can reproduce and attack more trees in the year because summers have become er and hotter.

It's been here for eons, millennia, millions and millions of years it's been associated with this.

When we have tree die off, it can look quite traumatic to people who see it, because you see a forest of green trees, and then you see these little pockets of orange and red trees, and it's sort of like looking at a Christmas tree.

You can see all the ornaments on the tree, but in reality it's not very much of the forest.

It's a natural part of the forest.

And when those trees are attacked by bark beetles, then wood borers come in, then other types of boring insects.

The tree falls down, it eventually becomes soil and an area for the next tree to grow.

Look at insects and diseases like slow fire, slowly working across the landscape, picking off the trees that are unhealthy, creating pockets for areas where new trees can grow, taking out the older trees, unhealthy trees, trees that may have been struck by lightning, and creating space for new trees to grow.

And without those insects and diseases killing the trees and bringing them, we wouldn't have any soil left.

And what we would have would be a forest, densely packed, of all dead trees.

And the beetles are helping indicate what parts of the forest are unhealthy, and maybe where we need to be managing and how we need to be managed.

And I've heard people say, you don't want to create a forest, you want to mimic what the forest has already created because the forest knows what it's doing.

The next expert I discuss this topic with was Jack Carpenter.

He spoke about the Douglas-fir tussock moth.

Can you tell us a little bit about what we're seeing here?

What has happened here is damage from the Douglas-fir tussock moth.

Just looking at their growth form, the size, and the way the branches are, they're probably 100 years to 125 years old.

That's what bothers me about seeing the moth in here, is these trees have been here a long time.

Do you think warmer temperatures affect the moth in any way?

The only thing that could affect is that the winter temperature’s warmer.

Cold temperatures, below zero for a week or ten days, will wipe the bug out.

Once the moth eats the needles off of the tree is the tree kind of dead or can the tree still come back?

The tree still has buds for next year's growth.

If they can come out and we don't have a big infestation two years in a row, a lot of trees can survive.

And there's other bugs, that infest the forests and eat the trees.

Why is the moth different?

This one, it just happens kind of out of the blue.

You don't expect it, then all of a sudden you see it, and the damage it does is so great.

So the forest is dynamic, changes all the time.

And how does fire interact with the way that the moth behaves?

The result is if fire doesn't get it, insects’ build up and take the forest, and they thin it out.

If we lose all the trees that are standing here, what do we do with them?

If we let them fall, that's when your fire danger goes up.

The larva's dropping from the top of the trees.

If we had light ground fires, a lot of the little small trees wouldn't be here.

You'd have the big trees.

So when they start dropping down, they go in the ground.

Most of the larva, if they hit the ground, the ants will kill them.

The moth has always been here, but we just didn't see it.

They'll be around, we'll have insects.

If fire doesn't kill the forest, insects and disease will do something if humans don't get in and do some treatment.

What type of treatment can be done?

Take a lot of the ones that are susceptible out, take the white fir out, the Douglas fir out, and then the fir here, the moths hit the ground.

If we lose all these trees, come back in five years and you'll see something different.

There'll be trees here.

The trees don't change a lot, but the whole thing is dynamic and changing.

And do you have any advice or a message that you want to give to the youth?

My message to the youth: get outside, leave your computers and your tablets and everything in the vehicles and take a walk and look at what's around you.