Sharon

Introduced Species Found on Two-Thirds of FIA Plots in Northeast, Midwest

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Introduced Species Forestry Source June 2013

I think this is interesting; nice work by Steve Wilent in the Forestry Source so here goes:Introduced Species Forestry Source June 2013. Below is an excerpt.

I recently talked with Schulz to learn more about the inventories as well as her and Gray’s findings and what they tell us about introduced plant species. What follows is a portion of that conversation.

Were you surprised that two-thirds of the plots had at least one introduced species?

Yes, at first it was a big surprise. And then when we started looking at what species were coming out as introduced. When you’re dealing with thousands of plots and tens of thousands of species, you
need to go to a database to sort things out and find which species are introduced and which are native. We used the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s Plants Database to look for introduced species.
We had to narrow the field, because there are many species that are natural in some areas and introduced in others. We tried to be conservative in determining which were the introduced species.
And there are many species that people aren’t aware are introduced, such as the grass timothy, which is easily recognized, and other benign species like common plantain. They are indeed introduced
species, but not every introduced species turns out to be a nasty ecosystem transformer.

Many of the ones that do become transformers started off as introduced species, and sometimes they sit around in the environment for quite a while before something happens—some sort of disturbance—
that lets them start to gain ground and become more successful. It can be many years before they are recognized as being a species that may be of concern.

A couple of thoughts..I think she highlights that there are “bad” non-natives and “OK” non-natives. Non-natives are labelled “bad” for a reason. Which fits in with Lackey’s point in his paper here.

or example, in science, why is it that native species are almost always considered preferable to nonnative species? Nothing in science says one species is inherently better than another, that one species is inherently preferred, or that one species should be protected and another eradicated.
To illustrate, why do most people lament the sorry state of European honeybees in North America, a nonnative species that has outcompeted native bee species? Yes, our honeybees are nonnative, what many people would label as an invasive species, but people value their ecological role.
Conversely, zebra mussels, another common, but nonnative species are nearly universally regarded as a scourge. Where are the advocates of this species? Even with increased water clarity, no cheerleaders.
Or, what about North American feral horses — wild horses — mustangs! This is another nonnative species, but one that enjoys an exalted status by many. Would you want to be the land manager tasked with culling the ever-expanding population of this invasive, nonnative species?
Values drive these categorizations, not science.

But more pragmatically, there are many non-natives around. Any public money directed to their eradication (in my view) should be based on criteria including how “bad” they are specifically, to what; and (not inconsequentially) the likelihood of some kind of specific success.

Scientific Assertions That Muddle Ecological Policy- Bob Lackey

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lackey 2013We have posted other work by Bob Lackey here before (you can search in the box to the right).
Scientific Assertions and Ecological Policy – Keynote – Lackey is a keynote address presented at the 58th Annual Meeting of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, Montreal, Canada, May 29, 2013.

It’s all worth reading, as Bob’s work usually is. Still, I felt the need to extract something to pique your interest, and given the planning directives and rule discussion about plans needing to promote “ecosystem integrity”, I thought that this second assertion is relevant. Here’s one of a series of posts on the concept of “ecosystem integrity” and how it is used in the new planning rule and directives. (Recursive question: if you don’t use the “best science” in developing a rule about how to develop plans, then can you require it in the plans themselves? How can you do the “best science” based on a “not best science” concept? Perhaps a judge will illuminate this apparent contradiction when the time comes…

What happens is that if you think that this is a fact (“natural” is best), then you just need scientists to tell you how not to change them from what they used to be. You also need armies of scientists to study exactly how things “used to be” because even though the climate was different then, and Native Americans were impacting the landscape, somehow that will tell us .. something.. about what we “should” (normative) do in the future.

If it’s simply a values choice, then scientists can be helpful about figuring out how to get there, or reducing negative impacts, but they are not in the driver’s seat. Since I was trained by the “helpful to society” school of science and not the “we know more than the rest of people, so we should tell them what to do” school of science (this came later), it’s not a big loss to me. Because people might even listen to scientists more if they trusted us not to be following their own agendas. IMHO.

Second Scientific Assertion
Now let’s move to a second scientific assertion that needs to be hauled to the nearest landfill, and the sooner, the better:
“Natural ecosystems are superior to human altered ones.”

Who says that natural ecosystems are superior to human altered ones?
This assumption is so pervasive, so commonplace, that some scientists just take it as a self-evident fact.
Perhaps even some in this room.
Let me illustrate how this assertion actually plays out in the scientific enterprise.
From the perspective of a scientist, think about the question of whether or not to dam a river to produce electricity. There is absolutely nothing in science that implies that an undammed river is more, or less, valuable than that same river dammed to generate electricity.
Free flowing rivers, and dammed rivers, are different ecologically, most definitely different, but neither is better or worse until a policy preference is endorsed, until a value judgment is applied.
Applying value judgments, choosing between competing policy preferences, is beyond the scope of science.
But is it common for science to be biased toward the unaltered state of ecosystems, toward natural? Most scientists will answer unflinchingly “no way” — or perhaps “well, at least not my science.”
Let me counter with some data.
For many years, I have surveyed students who take my graduate level policy class. They complete a survey on the first day of the term, a survey to determine inherent policy bias. The result?

There is absolutely no question that, among these students at least, all with bachelor’s degrees and many with master’s degrees in some field of science, there is a strong feeling that natural ecosystems are inherently superior, just somehow better than human altered ones.

Further, most of these students describe unaltered ecosystems as “healthy” and highly altered ecosystems as “degraded.” The implied conclusion: a “healthy” ecosystem is clearly in better shape than a “degraded” one. And further, human alteration is a bad thing, perhaps necessary for providing food or shelter, but still not really a good thing.

Therefore, my conclusion, the term ecosystem “health” presupposes that natural is preferred to human altered. But, and we scientists need to remember this, whether society wants a fish community dominated by Chinook salmon and alewives, or one dominated by lake trout and ciscoes is a policy choice, informed by science, yes, but a policy choice nevertheless.”

Supremes Take On Sierra Nevada Forest Planning..

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Here’s a link and below is an excerpt.

On Monday, the court agreed to referee the dispute pitting environmentalists with the Portland, Ore.-based Pacific Rivers Council against the U.S. Forest Service over decision-making that dates back to the second Bush administration. While the specific case involves 11 Sierra Nevada forests, the eventual outcome could shape everything from who gets to file lawsuits to the scope of future environmental studies.

“Definitely, throughout the West, this could have huge impacts on the moving of projects forward,” Dustin Van Liew, executive director of the conservative Public Lands Council in Washington, D.C., said in an interview Monday.

One key question confronting the court will be whether environmentalists have the “standing” to sue against a general forest plan, as opposed to a specific project proposal, by virtue of their making recreational use of the national forests. To gain standing in federal court, individuals must show they’ve been injured or face imminent injury.

A second major question is how extensively detailed the Forest Service must be when preparing overarching management plans, such as the one governing the 11 Sierra Nevada forests.

“The only role for a court is to insure that the agency has taken a ‘hard look’ at the environmental consequences of its proposed action,” Pacific Rivers Council’s attorneys said in a legal brief, adding that “agencies cannot take a ‘hard look’ unless they have reasonably identified the consequences of their actions.”

Underscoring the case’s potential significance, the Public Lands Council and the affiliated National Cattlemen’s Beef Association secured Supreme Court permission Monday to file a brief opposing the environmental group. Many more briefs, from both sides, are sure to come.

The court’s decision to hear the Sierra Nevada case, sometime during the 2013 term that starts in October, means that at least four of the court’s nine justices agreed to reconsider a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision from last year in which environmentalists prevailed.

In that 2-1 appellate court decision, the 9th Circuit panel concluded the Forest Service in 2004 failed to adequately study the effect of dramatically revised forest plans on Sierra Nevada fish populations.

“The Forest Service provided no analysis despite the fact that the 2004 (plan) allows much more logging, burning, road construction and grazing,” Judge William A. Fletcher wrote for the appellate panel.

Has anyone actually looked at what they did write about fish? Seems like if they wrote “enough” about everything else in the document they would have also written about fish “enough”.

Funny that Judge Fletcher says that the 2004 plan “allows” more burning, as if that was a bad thing.. prescribed as opposed to wildfires?

Of course, I am not a believer in hypothesized future effects of unknown projects in unknown numbers, of unknown kinds with unknown mitigation requirements in unknown locations…

“My first Sierra Nevada backpacking trip was to the Mineral King area in 2000, during which time I also fished,” Pacific Rivers Council Chairman Bob Anderson, a South Lake Tahoe resident, said in a court declaration used to establish injury and standing. “I plan to continue these activities as long as the management of Sierra Nevada national forests does not prevent me from doing so.”

Of course, forest plans require actual projects to be “management” that could have environmental impacts of the kind Mr. Anderson is concerned about.

This follows a bit of the ocean liner vs. flotillas of dinghies discussions about NEPA documents. As NEPA documents grow in size and area covered, they are increasingly functions of assumptions made about what might happen, and move further from physical reality (“might-could” NEPA). That makes them both easier, and more important, targets for litigation. The idea of humungo-NEPA makes the ultimate disposition dependent on the vagaries of random sets of judges determining what is “enough,” and or small sets of people at DOJ and for groups working to settle. The nexus of decision making moves further from the area impacted, and from those familiar with the actual land and people most impacted by the decisions. I don’t think that that’s a good thing.

Lipsher: Mountain homes find insurers reluctant

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In this Saturday, June 23, 2012 photo provided by Darrell Spangler, a firefighter works the scene of a home being consumed by flames in Estes Park, Colo. (AP Photo/Darrell Spangler)
/>In this Saturday, June 23, 2012 photo provided by Darrell Spangler, a firefighter works the scene of a home being consumed by flames in Estes Park, Colo.
(AP Photo/Darrell Spangler)

Don’t know if this is broader than Colorado, from the Denver Post this morning. Here’s the link, below is an excerpt.

Last summer, insurers in Colorado paid out an estimated $449.7 million in wildfire claims. This year, many are saying they no longer want to take on the risk, even for loyal policyholders like the Littles, who have worked extensively to create a “defensible space” cleared of flammable vegetation that buffers their home from the surrounding forest.

Although the insurance companies in Colorado paid out $1.37 for every $1 in premiums collected in 2009 (the most recent year for which figures are available), it’s not as though they are not still wildly profitable. The net income of U.S. property-insurance companies grew to $33.5 billion in 2012, up from $19.5 billion in 2011, according to the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America.

Interestingly, wildfire insurance claims amount only to about 2 percent of all property-insurance payouts nationally. Hurricanes and tropical storms chew up 44 percent, followed by tornadoes at 30 percent.

But recognizing a sharp rise in large-scale weather-related disasters — if you doubt the effects of climate change, just look to the insurance companies’ actuarial tables for proof — the nation’s second-largest insurer, Allstate, last year moved to get out of catastrophe insurance altogether.

Because of a series of bad wildfire seasons, on top of the costly hailstorms that routinely tear up roofs in these parts, Colorado has joined the nation’s top 10 states in terms of disasters, according to Carole Walker, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Insurance Information Association.

That means premiums have risen sharply in many cases, policies have been dropped outright in others, and some areas are considered so risky that insurance companies have placed moratoriums on new policies.

(Local governments only now are beginning to take note when crafting zoning rules for new residential development along the forest boundaries and considering restrictions or requiring defensible space. One positive out of the insurance companies’ skittishness is that they increasingly are requiring property owners to clear out defensible space and use fire-resistant construction.)

Some disaster-stricken states — including California, Texas and Florida — have seen the availability of affordable property insurance dry up so much so that they’ve resorted to government-backed plans.

Colorado hasn’t reached that point, yet, but it’s obvious that insurance companies want only to maximize profits rather than provide, you know, policies that would actually insure property owners in the case of catastrophic loss.

Amy Bach, executive director of the non-profit United Policyholders, a consumer advocacy group, said it’s not unusual for insurance companies to overreact to catastrophes by sharply increasing premiums or axing coverage, but options remain in the insurance marketplace.

“People wonder: ‘How is this fair? I paid money to this insurance company for so many years, and I finally need it, and now that I need it, they’re dropping me,’ ” she said. “There’s just no law that forces insurance companies to take on customers they don’t want. My message is don’t be loyal to the insurance company, because they’re not going to be loyal to you if it’s not in their economic interest to do so.”

Calls to several of the largest insurance companies about their approach to wildfire coverage went unanswered.

The Littles ultimately were able to acquire a policy from a different company for only a couple hundred dollars more annually, one that actually sends out private firefighters to douse their home in a fire-resistant gel in the face of an encroaching wildfire.

Note: in case you haven’t been following the relationship of climate change and insurance companies, check out this post on Roger Pielke, Jr.’s blog or just search for Munich Re. There’s considerably more to this than meets the eye.

Water, Climate Change, Thinning Trees and “Logging Without Use”

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In the news clips this morning, I ran across this piece about Chief Tidwell’s recent testimony that:

America’s wildfire season lasts two months longer than it did 40 years ago and burns up twice as much land as it did in those earlier days because of the hotter, drier conditions produced by climate change, the country’s forest service chief told Congress on Tuesday.

“Hotter, drier, a longer fire season, and lot more homes that we have to deal with,” Tidwell told the Guardian following his appearance. “We are going to continue to have large wildfires.” …

Climate change was a key driver of those bigger, more explosive fires. Earlier snow-melt, higher temperatures and drought created optimum fire conditions. …

“This is a product of having a longer fire season, and having hotter, drier conditions so that the fuels dry out faster. So when we get a start that escapes initial attack, these fires become explosive in that they become so large so fast that it really limits our ability to do anything.” …

The above was from an article here (from the Guardian in the UK that also says Americans are increasingly building homes in “the wilderness”), that also says:

“It’s hard for the average member of the public to understand how things have changed,” Tidwell said.

“Ten years ago in New Mexico outside Los Alamos we had a fire get started. Over seven days, it burned 40,000 acres. In 2011, we had another fire. Las Conchas. It also burned 40,000 acres. It did it in 12 hours,” he went on.

Climate change was a key driver of those bigger, more explosive fires. Earlier snow-melt, higher temperatures and drought created optimum fire conditions.

Say it ain’t so, Tom.. tell us you were misquoted.
Really? In ten years we are seeing the difference? Due to climate change? Perhaps the weather was different between the two fires… or the status of the fuels.. or perhaps some fire suppression strategies were less effective.. Who is writing this stuff? Chief Tidwell is right… if quoted accurately..it is very hard for this member of the public to understand his points when they seem..not valid.

So I don’t understand the landscape of partisanship, but Hot Air appears to be a partisan blog. Nevertheless, they had a link to this article, which is of more interest. I looked up the authors and one had Yale F&ES credentials and the other D administration credentials.

I don’t know about the hydrology of it.. what I think is interesting is that the authors want to remove trees but kind of write off the timber industry as a way to do it.. because..

So how do we unlock the nexus to replenish the Earth? A century’s accumulation of dry fuel in public lands makes it too expensive and risky — for people, property, habitats or carbon emissions — to unleash prescribed fires throughout our 16-million-acre ponderosa tinderbox. Mechanical thinning generates popular distrust as long as timber industry chain saws try to cut “high grade” valuable mature growth to compensate for less profitable small-diameter “trash trees.”

Happily, a lumber mill’s trash has now become a water user’s treasure. Thirsty downstream interests could organize to restrict thinning to scrawny excess trees simply for the purpose of releasing the liquid assets they consume. Western water rights markets value an acre-foot at $450 to $650 and rising. So rather than compete with forests for rain and snow, private and public institutions could invest $1,000 per acre (average U.S. Forest Service price) to cut down fire-prone trash trees, yielding at least $1,100 to $1,500 worth of vital water. To reduce fuel loads and increase runoff, the water-fire nexus pays for itself.

It’s up to silviculture folks to say how many big trees need to go in a thinning. I don’t know why it’s OK to write off an entire industry who can help pay for this, and the authors seem to be assuming that all the trees that need to be thinned are “trash”. But as we see from Larry’s photos, in a stand of big trees, thinning smaller trees means that they are still big “enough” to be commercial. We could even call this attitude “logging without use” (remember “logging without laws”).. stands need thinning but using the trees is not good. Frankly, I just don’t get it.

Anyway, I think the op-ed is well worth reading in terms of making the case for treatment. I don’t know if their hydrologic statements are accurate, but I think it’s worth thinking about the idea that you could blame fire suppression, and dense stands and drought for some of the increase in fires, and not just climate change.

First, the past century of fire suppression has resulted in roughly 112 to 172 more trees per acre in high-elevation forests of the West. That’s a fivefold increase from the pre-settlement era.

Second, denser growth means that the thicker canopy of needles will intercept more rain and sSecond, denser growth means that the thicker canopy of needles will intercept more rain and snow, returning to the sky as vapor 20% to 30% of the moisture that had formerly soaked into the forest floor and fed tributaries as liquid. But let’s conservatively ignore potential vapor losses. Instead, assume that the lowest average daily sap flow rate is 70 liters per tree for an open forest acre of 112 new young trees. Even then, this over-forested acre transpires an additional 2.3 acre-feet of water per year, enough to meet the needs of four families.

Third, that pattern adds up. Applying low-end estimates to the more than 7.5 million acres of Sierra Nevada conifer forests suggests the water-fire nexus causes excess daily net water loss of 58 billion liters. So each year, post-fire afforestation means 17 million acre-feet of water can no longer seep in or trickle down from the Sierra to thirsty families, firms, farms or endangered fisheries.

SFI, FSC, CSA and LEED III

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Yesterday I was out on an SAF field trip to Waldo Canyon..to look at the fire. Hope to get to share photos of that in the next few days. I would like to reiterate the question I posed in post II of this series…

Jay said:

In a state like WA or OR, you have to reforest after a regen harvest, but if you own 50,000+ acres and just cut 40% of your landbase over several years, how sustainable is that for local mills in the coming years (many now severed from a source of timber), ecological processes and organisms dependent on later seres or successional stages of forests? How is that sustainable for workers and communities when so many harvests were crammed into such a short period of time that labor/contractors had to be imported from outside of the community, only to leave when the cutting is done .

Now my read of any standard (SFI, CSA and FSC) is that cutting 40% of your landbase within several years would not meet the criteria. If we knew what company that was, maybe we could investigate how SFI treated it.

I am still curious and I think it might be interesting to run this one to ground.

Also, I tried to reply to Jason’s comment, but discovered that we had exhausted the number of comments. So here is his comment again and my reply.

Jason’s comment:

Superficially, SFI’s board mimics FSC’s 3 chamber system. From the SFI website:

“SFI Inc.’s 18-member multi-stakeholder Board of Directors comprises three chambers, representing environmental, economic and social interests equally… Board members include representatives of environmental, conservation, professional and academic groups, independent professional loggers, family forest owners, public officials, labor and the forest products industry”

http://www.sfiprogram.org/about-us/sfi-governance/sfi-board-members/

But look who is on their BoD in the environmental sector: The Conservation Fund, Bird Studies Canada, Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences, Ducks Unlimited Canada…not exactly a who’s who of the environmental community.

The social sector has two forestry academics, a state forester, a family forest owner and a guy from Habitat for Humanity Canada. Nothing wrong with that, but not notable for diversity or independence from the forest industry.

SFI appoints its directors from within. FSC’s BoD is elected in open elections by its membership — and membership in FSC is open to all. SFI has no membership.

Now to be fair, the conservation community has, by and large, spurned SFI, although there was a time when SFI tried reaching out to the major environmental groups to try to get them involved. Also, there was a period in the aughts when representatives from The Nature Conservancy and Conservation International served on the SFI BoD, which at that time was called the Sustainable Forestry Board or SFB. In the end, however, they left. I remember a key staffer from TNC saying that for a while they thought they could improve SFI from within sufficiently to justify their involvement, but that hope faded with time.

I think most of us hope that the forest certification wars won’t continue forever, and that at some point there will be some sort of rapprochement if not a merger. At the moment, though, that day seems a long way off.

I found Jason’s comment very interesting from a variety of perspectives. First of all, “the conservation groups listed are “not exactly a who’s who of the environmental community.””

1. Now, first of all, I think that we might all have our own roster of what environmental groups have the characteristics we prefer. It might be interesting for the folks on the blog to talk about their faves and why. There being a “who’s who” kind of implies that there is a generic feeling on the quality of environmental groups. I have read Bevington’s book on what some of the grassroots groups think of the big groups (not that the grassroots groups would like SFI any more than the bigs).

Now, I have been at the end of campaigns in which some of the groups said things which weren’t strictly speaking, true in my opinion. I acknowledge that culturally some groups throw things at an opponent, hoping some stick (that is how legal briefs are written). But do they really believe all the assertions? Do they go with the flow of their peers? Does the accuracy not matter in pursuit of “larger” goals?

As to the Sierra Club, I would be up for an open discussion with the public of certifying federal forests. I am not so much for behind the scenes working without giving the public the chance to talk about it ( a la NEPA-like process). If what I hear is true, of course.

2. It sounds as if some of the environmental groups may have withheld their support from SFI because they are aligned with FSC. I think we’re talking about chickens and eggs here. If these groups think they can do the best deal they can get with FSC, that’s fine. But then to say that it is a sign that SFI isn’t good enough because those groups don’t support it … SFI would have to allow even fewer things than FSC does, plus there would be even more drama.

3. I guess I am having a hard time with “The social sector has two forestry academics, a state forester, a family forest owner and a guy from Habitat for Humanity Canada. Nothing wrong with that, but not notable for diversity or independence from the forest industry.”

I guess I am having trouble with the idea that Habitat, forestry academics, and a state forester can’t be “diverse” or “independent from forest industry.” Jerry Franklin is a “forestry academic.” Most of the academics I know don’t get any money from the forest industry, so I don’t know what exactly you mean, unless it’s “growing up in an environment in which you know people who work for the forest industry.”

If I were TNC, I wouldn’t be on the SFI Board because the whole SFI vs. FSC thing generates more heat than light and TNC seems to be fairly good at prioritizing for practical conservation. Or the risks aren’t worth the rewards. Who knows? But it may or may not be based on any real problems with SFI as currently configured and managed.

“Walkable” communities driving Western mountain housing market

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The south main neighborhood in Buena Vista, Colorado.
The south main neighborhood in Buena Vista, Colorado.

Travis’s post reminds me of this story in the Denver Post business section a few weeks ago, which was deep in my pile of “to be posted.”

Here’s the link to the Post story.

Here’s an excerpt:

BUENA VISTA — Homes within walking distance to shops and restaurants are forecast to drive the housing markets and economies in mountain communities of the interior West as the recession’s effects wane.

That’s according to a recent study of high-country housing trends over the past decade by the Sonoran Institute, a nonprofit public-policy group that advocates for better management of growth in the West. The group’s 60-page study — “Reset, Assessing Future Housing Markets in the Rocky Mountain West” — shows that while homebuyers are willing to pay an average of 18.5 percent more for a house in a walkable mountain neighborhood in the Rocky Mountain West, the supply of homes in or near downtown commercial areas is too small.

“There is growing demand for walkable neighborhoods, and it’s an untapped market opportunity,” said Clark Anderson, director of the Sonoran Institute’s Western Colorado Program.

Looking at homebuying trends in six Western mountain communities from 2000 to 2010, including Eagle, Buena Vista and Carbondale, the group identified a number of trends driving demand for what it called “compact walkable neighborhoods.”

Younger residents are entering the homebuying market and able to work remotely from hamlets formerly occupied by agricultural or service-sector workers. Older people are retiring in the hills and often downsizing. Household incomes are getting smaller and so are household sizes. Limited land supply in recreational mountain valleys is fueling buyer and municipal interest in denser housing projects.

“These are trends that are happening in small communities, large communities, resorts, towns and cities across the Rocky Mountains. Consumer preferences and choices are creating a different-looking housing market from what we have known in the past,” Anderson said.

The Womb of Time: Bill Cronon, Teddy Roosevelt and a Sustainable American Future

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SONY DSC

The following is a guest post by Travis Mason-Bushman

During the first week of my tenure as an impressionable Student Conservation Association intern in the R10 Regional Office’s cube farm back in fall 2010, I was subjected to a mandatory screening of The Greatest Good, the Forest Service’s centennial documentary. In that film lies one of the reasons I ultimately chose to pursue a career with the agency – the summative words of William Cronon:

The work of the Forest Service can and should and must continue into the 21st century and beyond. Because in a way, the issues that this agency has been struggling with since its creation are at the very core of what it means to be a human being on the planet and what it means to build a sustainable human society. And it is the struggle, not just of the United States. It’s the struggle of humanity.

Maybe sappy – check that, combined with the rousing music and soaring visuals, definitely sappy. And yet Cronon’s words rang true. As Jack Ward Thomas noted earlier in the film, we are a species on this planet and like every species, we have to exploit our habitat to survive. We cannot have zero impact on the land. Sarah Gilman is right to point out the hypocrisy trap of NIMBYism, which has too often loomed in the background of environmental debates – “as long as you don’t drill next to my house, I don’t care.” Arguments that we shouldn’t log a single stick from the national forests run headlong into the fact that we do need lumber, we do use paper, we must utilize trees – and if we don’t produce what we use and instead export our environmental damage elsewhere, it is little but NIMBYism writ large. There is and must be a place for sensible, sensitive resource production.

But I was struck by the angry, dismissive responses to Matthew Koehler’s comment that “I, for one, don’t continue to insist on Americans continuing to live as we do now,” as if it is somehow an American birthright to profligately use and abuse the planet’s finite resources far out of proportion to our numbers. This is the true entitlement crisis: the belief that we are entitled to exploit and use up every resource we can possibly get our hands on or our drilling rigs into.

A growing number of Americans, and particularly those of my generation, are recognizing that what modern humans have been doing – “our way of life” – is entirely unsustainable. There is not oil enough on this planet, forest enough on this planet, carbon capacity enough on this planet, for humans to live exactly the way we lived for the last 100 years for the next 100 years. Infinite growth on a finite planet is, quite simply, impossible.

Does that mean we have to go back to the Stone Age? I don’t think so. But does that mean we might rethink decisions about our way of life that were made in the last 50-100 years, often without a full understanding of their impact on ecology and resources? Does that mean we should perhaps reconsider what we need and what we want? Does that mean we ought to view our activities as a species through a much longer frame of perspective? Yes, yes, and yes. (A rare acceptable use of the Oxford comma.)

As I have been fond of pointing out in interpretive talks at the Tongass National Forest’s rapidly-retreating Mendenhall Glacier – perhaps the Forest Service’s single most frying-pan-in-the-face obvious example of climate change – I don’t own a car. In fact, I’ve never even possessed a driver’s license. I biked to work every day, rain or shine (and if you know the Tongass, it was mostly the former.) That has been a conscious decision, that I will be one less internal combustion engine on the roads of the United States. And I am far from alone – studies have shown, time after time, that Millennials are driving 20% less than our parents did at similar ages. Cost, convenience, environmental sensibilities, culture – for all those reasons and more, my generation is car-sharing, using transit, walking, biking and generally using any number of forms of transportation that are far more energy-efficient and less carbon-dependent. We support high-speed rail, view climate change as a real threat and are eschewing suburban sprawl that has consumed precious land and energy.

Will these changes alone solve our collective human challenge? Of course not. But they are, unmistakably, a sign that my generation recognizes that challenge – the challenge of adapting a way of life left to us by a generation apparently unwilling to confront the limits of geology and ecology that we are rapidly approaching. We must be wise stewards of our natural resources, because these are all we have or will ever get. We must have concern for the planet’s ecosystem, because there is but one in the universe.

And yet this view of a planet with limits, a civilization built for the long run, is hardly new and ought not be controversial. After all, it found one of its most eloquent defenses nearly 100 years ago from one of the men responsible for creating the Forest Service in the first place:

The “greatest good for the greatest number” applies to the number within the womb of time, compared to which those now alive form but an insignificant fraction. Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations.

That man, of course, was Theodore Roosevelt. And it is to his view of the “greatest good” which I believe our future society must adhere – one that considers most important not profitability next quarter or GDP growth next year, but the ecosystem’s next decade and the climate of the next century.

Travis is a Tongass National Forest SCEP trainee/Pathways intern/whatever they’re calling us this week, and worked for the last two summers as a ranger-interpreter at the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center. He just completed a master’s degree in recreation at Indiana University, with his thesis being a study of visitor experiences and interpretive outcomes at Mendenhall Glacier Recreation Area.

The Efficacy of Hazardous Fuel Treatments: Report from Ecological Restoration Institutet

by

waldo photo from report 19

Here’s a link to this report. There are many good photos in the report in addition to the one above. You can click on the photo above to enlarge it.

Have the past 10 years of hazardous fuel reduction treatments made a difference? Have fuel reduction treatments reduced fire risk to communities?

● Using an evidence-based approach to objectively evaluate the relevant literature, researchers found
that for the forest ecosystems that were examined, the evidence suggests that restoration treatments can reduce re severity and tree mortality in the face of wildre, and also increase carbon storage
over the long-term.

● Studies that use the avoided cost approach to examine the cost of re demonstrate that treatments result in suppression cost savings.

● Modeling studies that evaluate the effectiveness of fuels treatments in terms of changes in wildland
re size, burn probabilities, and re behavior demonstrate that fuel treatments applied at the proper scale can influence the risk, size, and behavior of re therefore reducing suppression cost.

● Modeling also demonstrates that where treatments are sucient to change dynamic re behavior, suppression costs are reduced.

● Modeling demonstrates that fuel reduction treatments are eective at reducing re behavior (severity) where implemented, and can successfully reduce re risk to communities. However, it also shows that fuel reduction treatments that occur at broader scales would have bigger impacts on the overall reduction of crown re. Perhaps most importantly, the results show that WUI-only treatments result in areas of unchanged crown re potential across the untreated landscape, therefore leaving it vulnerable to large, severe, and expensive (mega) landscape-scale re.

● Although few studies exist on the topic, fuel reduction treatments signicantly enhance the price of adjacent real estate, whereas homes in close proximity to a wildre experience lower property values.

The executive summary is on pages 4 and 5 and an easy read.

Here’s one news story I found about it.. in the Deseret News, others?