andystahl

We’ve all heard about the dramatic increase in U.S. wildfire acres burned:

Oops! Wrong graph. Here’s the correct one:

Many attribute this trend to increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases. Another factor is how we manage wildland fire, as discussed by two firefighters. Travis Dotson is an analyst at the Wildlands Fire Lessons Learned Center, while Mike Lewelling is Fire Management Officer at Rocky Mountain National Park.

TRAVIS: Overall, what would you say are the biggest positive changes you’ve seen in our culture during your entire career?

MIKE: I think we are more mindful about how we manage fires now. I saw a map side-by-side of all the fires from the early 80s into the 90s and it’s all these little pinpricks of fires. And then you go into the 2000s to now and the footprints are a lot bigger. There’s a lot that goes into that. But I think part of that is not always throwing everything at every fire. Mother Nature uses fire to clean house and it doesn’t matter what we do, she’s going to do it eventually. So whether we put ourselves in the way of that or let it happen is an important decision. I think that, overall, risk management—how we respond to fires—is a significant advance.

TRAVIS: For sure. I’ve seen research showing that the best investment we can make is big fire footprints. That is what ends up being both a money saver and exposure saver down the line as well as an ecological investment, obviously. For so long, large fire footprints were only being pushed from an ecological perspective and now we’re talking about the risk benefits of changing our default setting away from just crush it. There is often an immediate and future benefit on the risk front (less exposure now AND a larger footprint reducing future threat).

“XPRIZE, the global leader in designing and operating incentive competitions to solve humanity’s grand challenges, has announced a collaboration with California Governor Gavin Newsom, to design an XPRIZE competition that would drive innovation and develop hardware able to rapidly detect and extinguish wildfires.”

My entry:

Last week, federal district judge William Alsup told California’s transportation department (CalTrans) that it had given short-shrift to the fate of several old-growth redwood trees that have the misfortune of living beside a coastal highway. CalTrans wants to widen Highway 101 as it passes through a redwood state park, thus allowing passage by extra-long trucks that currently must take long detours on their way to serve Humboldt County businesses.

The trees at issue “are thousands of years old, and can measure 300 feet tall with a diameter sixteen feet wide.” They are, as a practical matter, irreplaceable. Judge Alsup gets that and, if the final decision were his to make, he would choose trees over convenience for bigger trucks. But, as he is the first to admit, it is not his decision to make. With only NEPA processes on which to hang his judicial robe, Alsup makes the most of them!

And why not? Alsup comes from a long tradition of lawyers and judges who believe that environmental protection laws are intended to protect the environment. As a young lawyer, he clerked for Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas during the 1971-1972 term in which Douglas wrote his famous dissent in Sierra Club v. Morton, which kicks off with a citation to “Should Trees Have Standing,” a law review treatise now enjoying a political renaissance.

[In his 1972 dissent, Douglas noted “the Forest Service — one of the federal agencies behind the scheme to despoil Mineral King — has been notorious for its alignment with lumber companies, although its mandate from Congress directs it to consider the various aspects of multiple use in its supervision of the national forests.” Prescient and accurate, as future events proved.]

In Justice Douglas, Alsup had a good mentor who would be proud of his protege’s sound instinct for putting the public interest ahead of a CalTrans bureaucracy beholden to the trucking lobby.

Today President Trump signed the John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management, and
Recreation Act, which, among many other things, designates the Devil’s Staircase Wilderness. At over 30,000 acres, Devil’s Staircase now becomes the largest wilderness in Oregon’s Coast Range.

In the heart of timber country on the southern end of the Siuslaw national forest, the Smith and Umpqua Rivers define its boundaries. In the 1960s, the Forest Service imposed a moratorium on logging between these rivers pending completion of a soil erosion study. Although the study was inconclusive, the logging moratorium was lifted in 1980.

In 1984, when the Forest Service’s tried to resume logging, a federal district judge ruled the agency had violated the National Environmental Policy Act. The so-called “Mapleton” (named after the affected ranger district) injunction, stopping 700 million board feet of logging, was then the largest in U.S. history, surpassed only by the spotted owl lawsuit.

Speaking of spotted owls, Devil’s Staircase is home to the Coast Range’s highest numbers of these rare birds and the site of one of the decades-long spotted owl demographic studies. These studies provided much of the scientific foundation for the Northwest Forest Plan.

Today, in Alliance for Wild Rockies v. Savage, the 9th Circuit ruled the Forest Service violated Kootenai national forest plan standards that regulate road densities to protect grizzly bears.

A Venn diagram would help explain the court’s reasoning, but since I don’t know how to draw one on-line, here’s a silly analogy.

Imagine a two-humped camel that has spent her long life carrying straws. Now old, weak and feeble, the vet advises, “No more straws should be put on your camel or she will collapse and die.” Chastened, the owner counts the straws — 1,000.

To simplify future straw management, the owner decides that from now on he will add and remove straws only from the camel’s small front hump, which carries 20 straws; the other 980 straws being on the large hump.

The owner dutifully keeps a running tally of the straws he adds and removes from the front hump. But, unbeknownst to him, his wife has been surreptitiously adding straws to the camel’s rear. In fact, some of the original 1,000 straws were probably hers, but no one knows for sure because the old straw records are missing.

The next day, the owner puts 6 new straws on his camel and, in an abundance of caution, removes 8, figuring that having only 18 straws on the small hump will provide a safety margin for his aging camel.

A day later, the camel dies. The vet is called. “Why did my camel die?” the owner asks mournfully. “I was careful to never have more than 20 straws on the front hump.”

“There were 1,452 straws on this camel!” exclaims the vet. “I told you your camel could tolerate no more than 1,000.”

“It was a smelly camel, anyway” his wife mutters, as she sweeps up the straws.

Apparently all of it. In an unpublished (i.e., non-precedential) memorandum, the Ninth Circuit affirmed a lower court’s decision that forest fires are emergencies within the meaning of a Forest Service regulation that exempts actions taken in response from NEPA. Plaintiff’s argument that the adjacent National Park Service doesn’t agree and had prepared an EA assessing its future fire response actions was “immaterial.”

Perhaps, someday, the Forest Service will use NEPA to engage the public in planning its response actions to fire. In the meantime, quoting an earlier district court case, “[a]t least in the context of wildland fire suppression, NEPA review can not possibly be conducted at the site-specific level because of the emergency conditions in which the fire occurs, and to allow the agency to conduct site-specific NEPA review after the fire has already been extinguished is contrary to the purposes of NEPA.” California ex rel. Lockyer v. United States Forest Serv., 2005 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 14357, *35, 60 ERC (BNA) 2104.

Based on her Hill appearances this week, it won’t be long until “interim” is removed from Forest Service Chief Christiansen’s title. In yesterday’s testimony before the House Committee on Natural Resources she struck an impressive balance of deference and confidence in responding to members’ questions. Republicans pushed her to “treat” more “at-risk” acres, but haven’t been willing to pay the extra cost to remove more worthless small trees and flammable brush. Chairman McClintock pined for the good old days of the 1970s when the Forest Service cut 10 billion board feet a year, creating much of today’s forest health problems by logging fire resistant old-growth. Christiansen stuck to her script — the FS is doing more fuels-related work and focused on improving planning processes that are within its control.

nb: She also pointed out that recreation is an important source of national forests jobs.

Yesterday, Vicky Christiansen made her first Hill appearance as Forest Service chief, albeit with an “interim” asterisk. Her written testimony focused on fire funding and “active forest management,” aka, logging:

The funding and related work will support between 340,000 and 370,000 jobs and contribute more than $30 billion in Gross Domestic Product. Through the use of tools like the Good Neighbor Authority, with more than 127 agreements in 33 states, 20-year stewardship contracts with cancellation ceiling relief, and other internal process improvements like environmental analysis decision-making (EADM), the Forest Service will move forward to sell 3.7 billion board feet of timber while improving the resiliency and health of more than 3.4 million acres of National Forest System lands through removal of hazardous fuels and stand treatments.

The Forest Service’s FY 2018 Budget is the source for her jobs and GDP data. Here’s what the budget says:

The proposed Forest Service program of work is projected to contribute between 340,000 and 370,000 jobs in the economy and between $30 billion and $31 billion in GDP. A greater share of the economic benefit, up to 70 percent, is anticipated to be generated by resource use effects in FY 2018. While all resource uses are important to the nation, recreation and wildlife visitor use will continue to provide the single largest category of economic contribution.

Guess what she left out of her testimony? Yep, not one word about the importance of recreation and wildlife visitor use.

A couple of months ago, I reported that several west coast wilderness areas remained closed months after their summer wildfires had gone out. I’m pleased to report that the Forest Service has rescinded some of the closure orders in response to FSEEE’s requests.

Last summer, I suggested that cross-laminated timber was unlikely to make a dent in small wood supply. Even at full build-out, the market niche for this engineered wood product is just too small.

It may have just gotten smaller. Oregon State University’s School of Forestry (I’m a proud alum) suffered an “oops” moment in the construction of its new flagship replacement for the venerable Peavy Hall: “A large section of subflooring made of cross-laminated timber gave way between the second and third stories.” The panel “delaminated,” a catastrophic form of collapse not suffered by steel.