Jim Petersen of Evergreen had an interesting post today. I’d like to draw your attention to three things.
1. NWFP argument for an amendment rather than a revision.
“Why is the Northwest Forest Plan being amended instead of revised?
And the answer to Question 3:
· A plan amendment is required to add, modify, or remove plan components or to change how and where plan components apply to all or part of the plan area. A plan revision would create an entirely new plan.
· The amendment approach allows us to keep what is working about the Plan and update those critical plan components most urgently needed to meet modern management challenges within the plan area.
While I think the NWFP FAC folks thought that a revision of the NWFP might be better, but the FS was told the Department preferred a more compact timeline (or so I’ve heard), I take the opposite view of the same FAQ. The second bullet seems to me a perfect argument for why revisions should be exceptions, rather than a scheduled requirement. I think you could make the same argument about almost any plan, including our local 1984 plan.
I’m a plan minimalist. What is in the plan that keeps the FS from responding adequately to important challenges? In fact, that goes back to our ideas (in the 80’s) of a plan as a loose-leaf notebook, readily updated. Opening up every decision or line of print in a 300 page document, for no compelling reason, leading to more litigation and stirring up bad feelings, and spending lots of money on analysis.. I’m not for it.
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2. Role of Experienced Forest Service People in Giving Advice, or Not
But why in heaven’s name was only one ex-Forest Service person named to the advisory committee and why were no agency retirees selected? Collectively, these men and women represent hundreds of years of first-hand, on-the-ground experience. They know what works and what doesn’t.
One retiree I know well said, “From a technical and managerial standpoint, this is a major failure. Execution is a critical part of reviewing a strategy or plan, and yet there was only one person on the advisory committee who had any experience at all to execute the 1990 plan which covered over three states, involving many field and management people from all the Forests over the past 30 years. This makes no sense at all.”
He’s correct. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s 1990 all over again – and it stinks.
Actually I believe Jose Linares is retired, and did work for the Forest Service. Here’s the nomination letter that NAFSR (retirees) wrote for him. At the same time, the “seat” he is filling is due to his membership in “underserved communities outreach organizations.” I doubt that the FS meant NAFSR ;).
But Jim has a more general point. I recall when the “Committee of Scientists” (or as I called them “the Committee of Scientists Plus One Law Prof”) discussed and made recommendations on planning.. no actual planners were involved on the panel, but they could “give input.”
To make something better, it seems to me that you need to understand the nuts and bolts of how it works. Privileging outsiders’ views seems a bit disrespectful of workers. We wouldn’t enlist academics, for example, to do wildfire lessons learned. At the same time, these are ultimately political decisions so you need people to support them that have political power of some kind. I’d try two separate committees- one of employees, and one of outsiders, like houses of Congress only friendlier; give the committees a chance to reconcile the versions and then, for the parts not agreed upon, the Department makes the call. If they weren’t in a hurry they could still try this. Or maybe just a list from the employees of thteir druthers before the process is initiated and a review afterwards with employee comments. By the time it’s an EIS, the idea horses are too far out of the barn IMHO.
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3. Spotted Own/NWFP History Story
I think we need to collect these stories before they are lost in case future historians are interested in the NWFP. So if you have others..
Early in the owl war the long gone National Forest Products Association [NFPA] went looking for a statistician who could review the government’s owl data.
I know this because the late Con Schallau, a brilliant PhD forest economist and member of the Evergreen Board of Directors, called the late Ben Stout, with whom I was well acquainted, to ask who Ben might recommend for the job.
Stout earned forestry degrees from West Virginia, Harvard, and Rutgers Universities. He taught and held administrative positions at Harvard University, Rutgers and the University of Montana, where he was also forestry school dean until 1985.
He was then hired as National Program Manager, Air Quality and Forest Health by the science-heavy National Council of the Paper Industry for Air and Stream Improvement [NCASI] based in Corvallis, Oregon.
Suffice it to stay, Stout was well traveled and well respected in academic circles. Hence, the call from Con. Although Stout did not know him personally, he told Con that NFPA ought to consider Ed Green, a young statistician teaching at Rutgers.
Con hired Green to do the review because, among other things, he hadn’t heard much about the owl wars in the West. Thus, not much risk of bias.
The day before Green was scheduled to fly to Washington D.C. to present his findings at an NFPA press conference, he called Con to say he couldn’t go through with it.
When Con asked why, Green explained that Forest Service Chief, Jack Ward Thomas, had walked into his office unannounced the day before and threatened his untenured career if he released his findings in D.C.
“You’re in the big leagues now, boy,” Thomas had said. “Be careful.”How did Thomas know what Green was doing? It turned out that Green’s boss and Thomas were elk hunting buddies.
About 20 years ago, I flew to Rutgers in Camden, New Jersey to interview Green.
I wanted to know if Thomas had threatened him. He had.
I left Green’s office that day with a copy of his statistical review. It blew the statistical validity of many owl plan assumptions to smithereens.
After Thomas quit the Forest Service, he taught graduate level wildlife biology classes at the University of Montana.
I was living in Bigfork, Montana at the time, so I drove to Missoula to interview him, not once but several times.
I confronted him with what Green had told me. At first Thomas denied it, but he ultimately grumbled that “something like that” had happened.Jack [we were now on a first-name basis] also admitted the daily working notes from the scientists who worked on the Spotted Owl Plan – had been shredded every night – then packed in large black plastic garbage bags and trucked to an incinerator at Boardman, Oregon.
“Why Jack,” I asked. “You were working behind locked doors with guards on the top floors of the 54-story US Bancorp Tower in Portland. Did you think burglars might steal the paperwork in the middle of the night?
“No, I was worried the press might go through the garbage bags on the first floor,” he explained. “Those were very tense times – with a lot at stake.”
Sharon said:
“The second bullet seems to me a perfect argument for why revisions should be exceptions, rather than a scheduled requirement.”
Under NFMA, forest plans must “be revised … from time to time when the Secretary finds conditions in a unit have significantly changed, but at least every fifteen years[.]” 16 USC 1604(f)(5).
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/16/1604#:~:text=be%20revised%20(A)%20from%20time%20to%20time%20when%20the%20Secretary%20finds%20conditions%20in%20a%20unit%20have%20significantly%20changed%2C%20but%20at%20least%20every%20fifteen%20years
That said, annual appropriations riders have for many years stated that no forest plan shall be deemed noncompliant with NFMA solely because it has not been revised in the last 15 years.
The NFMA provision authorizing plan amendments contains no temporal limitation. 16 USC 1604(f)(4).
Thanks for the reminder! Time for revising NFMA! Or wait, maybe that was 20 years ago?. My neighborhood forest plan is 40 years old and we have issues (see Patrick McKay) but not ones needing a plan revision.
True. Also, when efforts were made to rewrite the planning regulations, there was an understanding by many that if plans could be amended more frequently, there would be a more limited “need for change” when it came time to revise them, and it would be easier to do. In order to do more frequent amendments, the process could be made easier and the funding would need to be provided, but neither has happened. The 2012 Planning Rule created a category of administrative corrections, which are simple, but those can’t involve plan components. (There seems to be an effort to dump everything into “management approaches,” instead of plan components, which can be changed without an amendment, but since they are discretionary, this won’t help with the important issues that need to be resolved at the plan level.) Nobody seemed to like my idea of making environmentally protective amendments NEPA-free. And then it always looked to me like funding for amendments had little WO support and required a forest taking money from something else. (I am looking forward to the explanation of why the “conditions in a unit have significantly changed” language doesn’t trigger revision for the NWFP.)
I wonder what was wrong with the spotted owl data. There was a good reason to think they were threatened and history has proven that to be correct.
They weren’t threatened by logging so much as wildfire. When we were kids they were called “hoot owls” and they are the most common brown-eyed owls in North America. Some have spots and some have stripes, but all can inter-breed and produce viable young. The whole thing was an opportunity for the anti-logging “ecologists,” and they have been very successful politically, legally, and financially with this racket. Documented: https://forestpolicypub.com/2013/06/19/spotted-owls-the-spotty-sciences-that-spawned-them-5-questions-2/
As the NAFSR letter notes, Jose Linares retired from the BLM, but before that he had a fairly long career in the Forest Service, including Forest Supervisor of the Siuslaw NF (the Siuslaw is part of the NWFP and is nearly 100% Late Successional Reserve) and Regional Director of Natural Resources for Region 6, which includes wildlife, timber, watershed, fisheries, range programs for Oregon and Washington. As Jose noted at the last FAC meeting, his wife Kathy (now deceased) worked on the NWFP in the US Bank Tower.
The FAC also had an optional field trip before most (if not all) of their public meetings, giving them a chance to interact with Forest Service employees and stakeholders from northern California to northern Washington. Forest Service employees were also involved early on to provide data and other information to the FAC.
So the FAC did not operate in a total vacuum. And several non-Federal FAC members work closely with Forest Service employees and noted that in their remarks during FAC discussions.
There were definitely times to me when some FAC members (especially the academics) seemed out of touch/not up-to-date with current practices and restoration objectives and there weren’t really opportunities to share that information with them during the process.
But once the Draft NEPA document comes out, it will be very important to comment!
I think it is telling that neither of the two wildlife members on the FAC appear qualified on paper to serve in that role for a plan so focused on spotted owls. One of the wildlife reps has spent their career in Idaho and seems to have no spotted owl experience whatsoever, and the other is an attorney with a wilderness advocacy group (really, how did that make sense?). Spotted owl biology and management history are not easy to learn. Biologists with years of forest management experience often require at least a year or two fully immersed in the spotted owl world to understand the complexities of managing the species. Did no one with spotted owl experience put in for the FAC gig?
Thanks for this helpful additional info!
As far as NSO are concerned, the NWFP was successful in ameliorating the primary threats at the time the plan was adopted (i.e., habitat loss from management activities and inadequate regulatory mechanisms). The magnitude of the barred owl problem was not a known when the plan was adopted and the fire trend data the plan developers were using to develop the plan did not point to the wildfire issues we are seeing today. The plan should have been revised at least 15 years ago, given these changes to the baseline were more than evident by 2010.
It is disingenuous to suggest that the plan failed because NSO are trending toward extinction, because the plan was not designed with barred owls or the existing fire effects in mind. If not for barred owls, it would be reasonable to conclude that the moist forest NSO populations would be looking really good now. When a species is trending toward recovery, there is often an ability increase management flexibility.
The reserve system created by the NWFP was an extremely simple concept to put on paper and analyze. If you get rid of the reserve system, the ability to demonstrate that NSO habitat will be provided for becomes much more complicated (see past and recent CSO conservation frameworks, which do not rely on fixed reserves). For section 7 consultations, effects must be “reasonably certain to occur” and the action must “insure” no-jeopardy and no destruction/adverse mod of critical habitat. Demonstrating reasonable certainty of effects and insuring no-JDAM is straightforward with a fixed reserve system in the absence of disturbance. I understand the desire for management flexibility, but flexibility cannot come at the cost of reasonable certainty or the insurance of no-JDAM. The revised NWFP amendment must strike a balance between flexibility and certainty for the effects to be analyzed and be defensible. It is a failure of the FAC that that this elephant in the room has not been recognized.
I like what you said, and I think it leads to a conclusion that the “certainty” of reserves has been reduced by new factors that ignore reserve boundaries – barred owls and fire. However, that doesn’t mean that reserves shouldn’t remain part of the strategy unless science can show that reserves somehow contribute to more barred owls (I don’t think so) or fire (which may be arguable in specific locations). Otherwise, we should be looking at reserves+.
Contrary to some of the scientists that have stated over the years that a fixed reserve system doesn’t make sense in dry forests, I would argue that as a result of the barred owl situation within the NSO range, large fixed reserves are more important than they have ever been, even in dry forest systems. To get the most bang for the buck on barred owl management, it makes sense to have pre-defined areas to target the control efforts and those areas should be centered on the highest quality and most climatically sustainable NSO habitat. Such areas would also need to be accessible and heavily managed with prescribed fire and appropriately placed fuel breaks to minimize wildfire risk.
So is it really a “reserve” if fuel breaks and prescribed fire (and necessary thinning pre pf) are allowed?