Rising some 9,000 feet above the desert between the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Cortez are the old growth forests of the Sierra San Pedro Martir. The forests' days may be numbered, however, as California's timber industry eyes their "pumpkin" trees (worth $3-$4,000 each) and a new law allowing local ejido farmers to sell logging rights to their land. PNS commentator Elisa Adler works on and writes about rural and environmental issues in Mexico and the United States.

California's timber industry -- reeling from reductions in the annual allowable cut in this state -- has its eyes on Baja California's old growth forest where looser governmental restrictions could make for easy cutting and higher profits.

Just last month, loggers and road builders from northern California began carving out new road into Mexico's Sierra San Pedro Martir forests just south of Ensenada in Baja California. An outcry from environmentalists on both sides of the border alerted SEMARNAP, the government agency responsible for natural resource management, which has suspended all work until further notice citing reported irregularities. But given the remoteness of the area and the lack of publicity, environmentalists fear it is only a matter of time before the work resumes.

At least three companies from northern California have been working through Mexican brokers for more than two years to gain access to the Sierra San Pedro Martir National Park and adjacent ejido lands (communally held land established after the Mexican revolution). Local informants say that a U.S. company has paid each ejido member $1,000 in exchange for logging rights on ejido lands.

A Louisiana Pacific mill four hours north of the sierra in El Sauzal, near Ensenada, stands ready to receive the logs and convert the centuries old trees into board feet for a fraction of the cost it would take to do the same on the other side of the border. The mill could ship the high quality, old growth lumber north to the U.S. where its estimated value is 100 to 1,000 times more than the value of the un-milled logs.

Critics of the timber industry's plans say industrial logging will destroy the Sierra San Pedro Martir, a last remnant of the open and majestic mixed conifer forest ecosystem that has long sustained itself through natural fire. They claim that the extreme fragility of the erosive, granitic soil will make regeneration impossible in the island-like range whose crest rises more than 9,000 feet above the desert between the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Cortez.

For California's timber industry, the trees that make up the forests of the Sierra San Pedro Martir hold a special appeal. Old growth Jeffrey pine, sugar pine, white fir, and incense cedar have been preserved by frequent ground fires in towering, open stands reminiscent of the Sierra Nevada forests a century ago, before the U.S. Forest Service adopted fire suppression as a forest management strategy.

Unlike the Sierra Nevada, where decades of fire suppression together with an aggressively efficient extraction of the biggest trees has created a dense and younger "crop" of trees, almost every tree in the Sierra San Pedro Martir is a big tree, a logger's "pumpkin" worth $3-$4,000 each. The forest itself is for the most part "virgin," entered only by the one dirt road which climbs from Highway 1 to the Mexican National Astronomical Observatory, constructed on the crest of the range.

If allowed to continue, the road building will open the way for ever-increasing pressure to log the range. So far, logging has been approved only on ejido land, but astronomers from the observatory claim the U.S. road building crew is actually working alongside the national park and has already committed several boundary violations. Since no two maps describing the area are the same, it's unlikely that a quick clarification of just where logging is to be permitted will be forthcoming.

For decades, Mexican law protected the ejidos as public lands. That law, combined with the lack of roads in Mexican forests and technological inefficiency, precluded any major threat of destroying the forest for its trees. But a change in Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution during the presidency of Salinas de Gortari for the first time allowed ejiditarios to sell their forest land to private industry.

When the eighteen-wheeler logging trucks with U.S. plates start grinding down the mountains loaded with Sierra San Pedro Martir's monumental trees, some Mexicans in the agricultural fields below may start to worry about what will happen when it rains. The sierra is the watershed and irrigation source for the agricultural lands below, and logging and subsequent erosion could bring the mountains to the sea.

Some 60 members of the Kiliwa tribe still practice hunting and gathering in the sierra and could be negatively effected by logging activities. And endemic fresh water trout, Baja California's largest population of big horn sheep and various rare or endangered plant and animal species will also be affected, according to U.S. and Mexican biologists.