Sustainable Rural Economies

Investigating the Investigations II. A Deep Dive into the Numbers, Courtesy of Headwaters Economics

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From page 121 in Haggerty’s “Rethinking” paper, link below.

This post relates to an earlier post with regard to this news story from OPB/Oregonian/Propublica and follows up on 2ndlaw’s question about how the federal payment decrease should be calculated here, I contacted Mark Haggerty from Headwaters Economics. Many thanks to Mark for his help and patience in explaining this complex and arcane world.  At the end of this post is a link to a paper that describes the history and also proposes a solution, so if this post is too much in the economic weeds for you, skip to #4.

Framing the Issue of Comparing Losses:

I don’t really know why the reporters decided to compare losses to counties from Severance+ to those from decreases in federal payments.  If the point was to say “Oregon doesn’t tax timber enough compared to other states,” you don’t really need those specific figures, you would just compare the overall tax structures.

Perhaps the point of comparing them was probably to say “people talked a lot about losing income from the spotted owl changes, but hey look, communities are also suffering from having too much private forestland and the current tax structure for forest products companies.”

So maybe the details of “relative badness” don’t matter.

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Nevertheless, rooting around in the weeds with Mark Haggerty of Headwaters Economics produced the information below.  The bottom line from Mark is:

“So the “loss” on the federal side is overestimated in my opinion. That said, there is no question that the loss is significant under any scenario.

2nd Law asked: “How did you (they) calculate revenue loss from federal lands? Did you include all the safety net and SRS payments that are not directly coupled to timber sales? These payments to local govt tend to vastly exceed the flow of economic benefits from private forest land. And they have lasted quite a while.”

1. Mark Haggerty’s response to 2nd’s question:

“The data I shared with Tony* do include appropriated Forest Service and BLM O&C payments including transition payments beginning as early as 1991 for the BLM counties, NW Forest Plan “owl” payments after 1993, and SRS after 2001.

They also include PILT, an acreage-based formula payment adopted in 1976. Counties must subtract prior-year payments from their entitlement amount, so in theory PILT compensates for declining Forest Service payments. But BLM O&C payments are exempt from the PILT formula and many small population counties are limited by the ceiling in the PILT formula so they are largely uncompensated for declining Forest Service payments. Payments for education are not compensated by PILT, which only goes to county governments.

The problem now, of course, is that SRS still must be authorized and appropriated on a recurring basis and does not appear to be a permanent solution for counties. I have worked with NACO for years on a permanent SRS fix that would increase payments over time by establishing an endowment financed with commercial receipts. It is introduced as the Forest Management for Rural Stability Act (S. 1643) by Senators Wyden and Crapo. “

  • (From Mark) Note that I didn’t do the calculations, the authors did. The data come from the Economic Profile System which is free to the public. You can find it here: https://headwaterseconomics.org/tools/economic-profile-system/. Run the “Federal Land Payments” report for any county in the U.S. EPS includes all the payments listed.

2. And here is one problem with my  (Sharon’s) simplistic “the more federal west side timberland a county has, the more likely they were to be more impacted by federal decreases than by severance+”.

“To answer your question, the data do include the BLM O&C payments. Note that the O&C payments are not distributed to counties based on where trees are cut. The total value of harvests across all O&C lands are allocated to counties based on the relative taxable value of the O&C lands as of 1916. Multnomah county receives by far the largest share of payments on a per-acres basis, but not total because it has fewer O&C acres overall. Forest Service payments are allocated to counties based on their proportional acreage of each PNF. “

  • (From Mark) The O&C formula described is in use when counties do not receive SRS. SRS has a more complex formula (yes, it’s true) that includes historic payments and adds factors for the number of acres of O&C lands in each county, and an economic adjustment based on relative per-capital personal income in each county. Relatively “poor” counties receive higher SRS payments, and vice-versa. The Forest Service SRS formula is the same, except that it uses historic FS payments and FS acres per county.

3. Reasonable people could disagree on ways of calculating “what might have been” given that no one knows.

“Tony estimated “lost” federal payments by comparing the median payment since the NW Forest Plan to the historic median payment in the three decades prior to the NW Forest Plan, a period that included historically high payments in the 70s and 80s. I would not have done it that way. It assumes that without the NW Forest Plan, harvest levels and timber prices would have remained at historically high levels right up to the current year. I don’t know what the actual harvest value would have been, but I don’t think it would have remained the same given structural changes in the economy and specifically in the timber industry. So the “loss” on the federal side is overestimated in my opinion. That said, there is no question that the loss is significant under any scenario.”

4.  Why other economic activities don’t pay the bills. 

I don’t think that this aspect was touched on in the OPB/Oregonian/Propublica article.  “The other thing that plays importantly here is Oregon’s tax revolt in the 90s. Counties remain dependent on timber (severance, property and federal payments) because other economic activities essentially don’t pay the bills. So economic diversification isn’t a real option from a fiscal perspective. Here’s an article I wrote that dives into that issue in some detail: https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/hjsr/vol1/iss40/12/”

Has the Helena-Lewis and Clark got jobs for you

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source: gustavofrazao / Getty

The Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest revised forest plan was released recently and is now in the objection period.  A local newspaper decided to profile the benefits of the revised forest plan to “jobs” – 400 new ones are projected as a result of the revised plan.  As a former forest economist, I know how meaningless the economic analysis of forest plans can be, and this seemed a little far-fetched, so I thought I would take a look at it.

The EIS discloses the number of jobs resulting from recreation, grazing, timber, minerals, transfer payments and Forest Service expenditures.  That last item (which I think is mostly federal employees) makes up about half of the total employment benefit depending on alternative.  Actually, the number of jobs is the same for all of these categories in all alternatives, except for jobs related to timber harvest.  There, the preferred alternative (F) increases the timber jobs by five times over current levels (EIS Table 243, I get an increase of 497 from current levels), while roughly doubling the projected timber harvest volume over that resulting since 1980.  Elsewhere the EIS says, “An estimated 804 private industry timber jobs exist in this multi-county area.”  That doesn’t match the 119 shown in this table, but would mean the Forest would only increase industry employment by 50% or so, but still …  My point is just that this is suspicious and confusing.

The reality is that jobs created by Forest Service outputs are usually a very small part of a regional economy (the total number of jobs in this region is over 100,000, so that the total timber-related jobs is less than 1%) and the actual number of jobs will usually vary because of many factors that that Forest Service has no control over.  This is a good example of stuffing an EIS with information that does not help with the decision, and in fact may confuse it.

Then there is the question of why should we care.  The “regulatory framework” for social and economic benefits (p. 189 of the EIS) provides no authority for “creating jobs.”  (I doubt if there is one for doing something about “poverty levels” either, as Mac McConnell intimated here.)   The “findings required by other laws” included in the draft ROD do not include any related to social or economic growth.   And under NEPA, creating jobs would be a bad thing, since indirect adverse effects “may include growth inducing effects and other effects related to induced changes in the pattern of land use, population density or growth rate, and related effects on air and water and other natural systems, including ecosystems” (40 CFR §1508.8).

Of course, considering a specific effect on a specific industry or employer, might be a reasonable and relevant factor to consider for a long-term planning decision, if it were related to meaningful criteria about the “right” number of jobs and why, and properly disclosed in a record of decision.  I’m just not seeing that here, in this draft ROD:

The Plan also contributes to social and economic sustainability by providing plan components that collectively support an array of public benefits including jobs and income, … (p. 20)

This statement would have been true for any alternative, so the economic analysis contributed nothing.  It’s unfortunate that this was picked out as “news,” giving the wrong message about what our national forests are for, as well as raising questions about what is really going to happen.

More Reflections on the Black Hills and Open Peer Review: Second Guest Post by Frank Carroll

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Thanks to the Norbeck Society for providing links to the Friday videoconference! In case you haven’t been following the different threads , here’s a link to the info, including an agenda and list of speakers. It’s open to the public via the web. It’s from 1-3 MT on Friday May 1. That’s today. Now on to Frank’s second post.

Sharon Friedman writes “One of the interesting things about this paper is the peer review process- internal, external, and stakeholders and the public….I think it’s a great idea to have a variety of perspectives. Some of the most rigorous scientific reviews I’ve seen are when people with different opinions, interests, and experiences on the ground review a paper.”

Our experience with direct engagement of interested and affected publics in forest management began in earnest in 1970 when then-Southwestern Regional Forester William “Bill” Hurst wrote a letter to all hands extolling the brave new world of public involvement in forest management. The idea of direct public involvement didn’t come to Bill in the dark of night. As in our own time, the Forest Service was working hard to remain relevant in the sea of competing public interests, Congressional distractions, and Secretary-level politics that whipsaw the agency in every Epoch from 1895 until today.

The idea was to capitalize on the reputation the Forest Service then had as what authors Clark and McCool described as a “Superstar Agency” in their seminal work, Staking Out the Terrain. Hurst and his peers reasoned that involving the public directly in decision-making would build a cadre of political support that would support Forest Service management into the future and speak for the agency in political fights down the road. After all, people trusted us. Kids wanted to be forest rangers. Lassie ruled the airwaves. Capitalize on all the good will, Hurst reasoned. History will note that Bill’s expectations were earnest in intent, naïve in conception, and not at all what he envisioned in terms of real outcomes. Inviting the public into the agency house resulted in land and resource management planning and all the many iterations of public policy and high drama we have known since 1980 when LRMP really took off and the world changed.

The idea to involve our scientists and their research in what I view as an ill-considered and potentially disastrous, open-ended “peer review” process with any and all hands commenting is a direct descendant of Bill’s effort in 1970 and driven by the same desires that somehow involving the public in our planning and management processes, and, now, in our science and data, will somehow elevate our work. As we learned in 1980 and subsequent years, our shared agency hopes that opening the document to some form of “public peer review” will build a strong political consensus for the report and its conclusions is wrong. It will not. It will, however, compromise Forest Service science in unlooked for ways that may ultimately damage both the data and the scientists. Public involvement in this paper will not change the outcome of future decisions on forest management in the Black Hills in any way.

It’s a hard lesson made harder in the knowledge that “peer review” from all hands was not an idea supported by or even considered by the authors. The principals in this case are useful pawns as various levels of the agency and outside interests attempt to legitimize the conclusions in the report. The thinking is that if enough outside interests (like the Norbeck Society, Forest Service retirees, and others) weigh in and are familiar with the report and its projections, the weight of political power will swing away from the current timber industry in favor of timber volume reductions. For a host of reasons, that will not happen.

Jim Neiman’s monthly electric bill is $30,000, month in, month out, and won’t change barring any unforeseen events. The timber industry including Jack Baker and Jim Neiman support thousands of jobs and hundreds of families in two states. The combined economic clout of a robust and creative forest products industry are critical contributors to well-being in the southwest corner of South Dakota and eastern Wyoming and that industry enjoys the full support of the President, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Chief of the Forest Service, the Regional Forester, Senator Thune, Senator Rounds, Congressman Dusty Johnson, and every community leader who counts across two states.

In addition, the industry has operated in an unbroken cycle of success since at least 1885 providing timber and other forest products for the Hills and beyond. They have continued to do so up to and including this year. When there are blips in production, those blips are products of market conditions, not Forest Service actions with the glaring exception of 2000 when agency machinations gone wrong resulted in zero timber offered or sold. The combined experience of leadership at all levels has been that the timber industry can and does take care of itself using a combination of market forces, entrepreneurial skill and creativity, tenacity, and dedication to sustainable forestry over time.

The report paints a picture that is contrary to our combined experience in Black Hills forestry. The message is not trusted and there is no agreement on potential outcomes or conclusions. In such a situation the status quo will rule the day absent any surety that is should not.

The Forest Service must be highly circumspect in inviting public participation in scientific analyses and agency management, especially when the likelihood is high that public expectations for change from some quarters will not be met. In this case, the status quo will rule coming decisions related to ASQ and that’s OK. The problem is actually self-regulating. Either the timber industry is right and they will continue to use their skill, creativity, and market forces to make a living and provide forest management, or they will fail to do so, also because of market forces quite apart from Forest Service aspirational objectives. Please take heed, RMRS…you may think inviting “peer review” today looks good, but wait until they are editing your text and bar graphs to fit with their personal perspectives…your political scientific reports will frustrate you more than you can know.

In my opinion, the correct focus of the agency should be to compile data, provide analysis of current management and alternatives to it, and work to merge competing interests to the best of their ability. The Forest Service has no business trying to strong-arm the timber industry. A sketchy “peer review” of data and analysis is not helpful.

Additionally, the rise of the use of “unplanned fire in the right place at the right time” and “reintroducing wildfire to fire-deficit ecosystems,” or “forest management by applied wildfire,” has endangered the agency’s moral high ground to try to limit or control proven, traditional, systematic, forest management programs like the sale of federal timber. The timber sale program is a controlled disturbance agent well understood by most foresters. No one knows what the outcome of applied wildfire will be through time. I merely point this out to inform the complexity of the discussion. There is a high level of distrust in Forest Service forest management exacerbated by various attempts to (inappropriately) involve the public, on the one hand, and exclude the public on the other (there has been no public process to disclose the cumulative effects of management by wildfire or “managed fire” as it is called today).

Frank Carroll is managing partner of Professional Forest Management, LLC, PFMc, a full service forestry and grassland consultancy. Frank and partner Van Elsbernd have been working since 2012 to understand and help shape wildland fire policy. Frank is the principal author of the wildfire impact analysis for the Mount Rushmore Independence Day Environmental Assessment. PFMc has helped over 600 clients recover almost $600 million in damages from wildfires across the West. www.wildfirepros.com [email protected]

Another Point of View on the Black Hills Report-Guest Post by Frank Carroll

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I think this is the kind of photo Frank is talking about in his post.
Thanks to Frank Carroll for this guest post! Here’s some background on him. He is another retiree who worked on the Black Hills. Note: this discussion (and the previous thread on the report, and perhaps The Smokey Wire itself) should make you wary about any claims that “Forest Service employees think” or “Forest Service retirees think”. It’s interesting that we managed to live with each other and get along, for the most part, with our range of views.

Frank questions whether the report itself (on LTSY) can entirely answer the question “what, where and when should timber be cut on the Black Hills.” This is the first of two guest posts by Frank.

Russ (Graham), Mike (Battaglia), and Theresa (Jain) have done their usual stellar job as scientists in reviewing the record, compiling appropriate data, applying expert analysis, and disclosing their conclusions and answers to a set of specific questions about maintaining a nondeclining even flow of timber and sustained yield of timber over time. These great scientists were asked how much timber is growing across the forest, how much is available for harvest, and how do those answers line up with the current allowable sale quantity and current timber management plans. They answered fully and to the best of their ability.

They were not asked to assess what the timber market has in store in terms of innovation, new technologies, new wood processing equipment and techniques, the pluses and minuses of various levels of timber industry outputs, or personal and personnel factors, market factors, or political factors that would inform strong direction to the industry from the Forest Service as everyone tries to navigate the future.

As we would hope and expect, our scientists did a solid job of answering a specific set of questions based on a specific set of expectations and assumptions, and did not swan off into territory beyond their training and understanding.

Black Hills Timber Growth and Yield is a solid piece of work and the authors are to be congratulated.

Black Hills Timber Growth and Yield does not comprehensively enlighten our understanding about how to move forward with the timber industry in the Black Hills.

Anecdotal data and our experience show that our timber industry can and will successfully negotiate the challenges of the future and maintain a strong and vibrant presence in the Hills.

The FIA data suggests, because it is not a one-for-one inventory of trees, that our forest is dying faster than it is growing and that the current ASQ is not sustainable.

The timber industry argues that we know we can cut trees and keep a viable forest industry going. We don’t know that we’re actually running out of trees. It’s theoretical. It’s a model. It’s imperfect science, the thinking goes.

In any event, there is not sufficient data and no comprehensive answers to many related questions about factors that influence the success of our timber program that would settle the unsettled question; are we overcutting the Black Hills?

Our choices are to substantially revise our allowable sale quantity to line up with Russ’ report, or to choose the status quo and see what the future brings.

In any event the Forest will abide. Either it will continue to meet the demand for trees or it won’t. We’ll either continue to have a viable and healthy timber industry or we won’t.

The principal players won’t change and the report won’t change their minds. The biological forest is cooperating as it always has and seems destined to continue to grow trees. We don’t know what fires and bugs are planning but it doesn’t matter. It’s a self-regulating system. As the nature and form of forest structure changes, the industry will adapt and change to find new opportunities. The Forest Service must not stand in the way of this natural process of various forces experimenting, testing, and finding a way forward.

We are not in the equivalent of a natural pandemic where we must decide to crash our industry. We can and will maintain as much of the status quo as we can and see what’s in store for us all. We need our industry, our industry needs us, and those are factors Russ, Mike, and Theresa could not assess.

All of this is, or course, my humble opinion having participated in the politics and practice of forestry for many decades.

I am reminded of old photos of the Black Hills at the turn of the last Century. The hills and ridges are denuded of timber as far as the human eye can see, or the camera record. And, yet, here we are.

Congratulations on a report well done.

Frank Carroll is managing partner of Professional Forest Management, LLC, PFMc, a full service forestry and grassland consultancy. Frank and partner Van Elsbernd have been working since 2012 to understand and help shape wildland fire policy. Frank is the principal author of the wildfire impact analysis for the Mount Rushmore Independence Day Environmental Assessment. PFMc has helped over 600 clients recover almost $600 million in damages from wildfires across the West. www.wildfirepros.com [email protected]

Rise of the Grass (and Tree) Roots: Timber Unity’s Side of the Story

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Here’s the “other side of the story” from Julie Parrish, a board member of Timber Unity. Matthew posted a link to the Mother Jones story here.

I feel sympathetic, as I’ve worked on FS projects targeted by dark, or at least gray, money groups with associated media campaigns. In addition, the thought of being responsible, in some way. for every comment made on our own site, The Smokey Wire, is a bit scary, or silly, depending on your perspective. As to the policy, as I followed Washington State’s cap’n’trade initiative, I think it’s a no-brainer to return the tax to the people, and not put it in slush funds if you want it to pass. Atmospheric scientist and University of Washington professor Cliff Maas has a good discussion of that here, so it’s not just folks in natural resources who have concerns about that feature of some cap’n’trade bills.

From Julie:

I think the key takeaways are – there are some very powerful special interests out there, and for two legislative sessions in a row, Timber Unity frustrated their purpose of creating a complex wealth transfer scheme whereby every day working Oregonians would be taxed and the money would launder through the state and back into the hands of a few politically-connected organizations who will be the beneficiary of a cap and trade plan that is shrouded in secrecy as the plan disallows public records once enacted. As a former state lawmaker for nearly a decade, I understand well that when groups like this want to discredit a person or a movement, they do so through a carefully coordinated attack that starts with something like this “report” from Oregon Wild, handed to a local outlet, then rolled to a national outlet, to filter back into local social media and news outlets with “outraged” letters to the editors and Facebook posts/ads spread back again by these same groups.

It’s why I put out a forceful statement calling them on their nonsense and setting the record straight.

Timber Unity page and Timber Unity group discussion are two different things entirely. The main page is forward facing where only admins can create posts. In the group, anyone can post and our moderators (who are volunteers) strive to balance out the right to have free speech at the individual member level with the need to keep our page on topic to issues. If people post things that are incongruent with our stated message and community terms of service, their comments are removed, all the way to a member being blocked for violations of those terms of service. We get that people as individuals have other affiliations to groups on any other topic from knitting to other political groups. We have one mission – protect the jobs and rights to economic security for our members.

In another universe, I used to do online community management for a company I owned and here’s what I learned from nearly a decade of managing large forums (one of my communities had over 300,000 active users)….

1.The words of individuals on any topic do not reflect the words of our board. We operate based on the stated mission and that’s our mission, not any other person’s group or personal agenda.
2. Have community rules from the onset so that you have something to point to when you have to modify people’s posts based on inappropriate things they write or share.
3. People are always going to say or post inappropriate things in a group this size. See Bullet Point #1 again, and delete accordingly.
4. In a group this size, unless the community is policing itself, a board of seven members and a handful of volunteer moderators will never catch every little comment.

But at the end of the day, there are groups and individuals out there who would love nothing more than to be able to point to an article like the Mother Jones one, and make that a definitive authority for the purpose of being able to say in this election cycle where we have candidates running that the people we’re supporting are racists or bigots or right wing nuts. We actually did endorse some Democratic candidates who sought our endorsement as our group is non-partisan. And the diversity of our board cannot be understated – we seek to be a welcoming group to any person, regardless of their beliefs or other affiliations, who wants to stand up with us to protect jobs and kill bad legislative policies that impact the natural resource economy.

And the dark-money special interests are just really pissed off about it, as are quite a few politicians who couldn’t get their pet project bills passed.

And in a separate note she said:

Timber Unity’s board is made up of a majority of women. It is racially and religiously diverse, and several of us have LGBT family members. And our group is filled with veterans who have fought for the right for all of us to have free speech. Board member Todd Stoffel is one of those veterans who served his country, was disabled for his country, and has borne the brunt of this smear campaign.

No different than how Mother Jones is not responsible for every comment left on their Facebook, neither are we responsible for what every one of the 60,000 group members say. Yet we still try to ruthlessly moderate the group with volunteers, not paid staff, and we rely on the community to report things that violate the terms of service. Moreover, when we see things that are beyond the pale, we have blocked people, and even reached out to the state police for advice. So I reject that these left-leaning hypocrites want to hold us to a standard to which they do not hold themselves. Except that in their case, it’s apparently OK to leave hate filled comments about Republicans, people of faith, and even anti-police/law enforcement rhetoric.

To that end, I called the writer of this story out on that on his own hypocrisy. I also asked him why he spared not one sentence for the fact that Timber Unity has its own plan for carbon reduction. Or mention that the person who made our supposedly offensive rally posters is a Hispanic Jew with an African American daughter. His non-answers prove that wasn’t his agenda. His agenda was to paint the people who grow our food, fish our oceans, log our forests, and haul our goods to market as racist haters.

Here’s a link to a local story on Oregon State legislature deliberations, which apparently were incorporating ideas from Timber Unity. Here’s a story about the Governor’s approach and Timber Unity’s response.

Is the Colville “Ground Zero for Privatizing Land Planning in Federal Forests” as in HCN Story?

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The Vaagen Brothers Lumber yard is seen during a tour on Wednesday, June 7, 2017, at Vaagen Brothers Lumber Inc in Colville, Wash. (Tyler Tjomsland / The Spokesman-Review)

Here’s an article from the High Country News, quoting our very own Andy Stahl. This is a great example of a news story in which you can imagine many other ways to deal with the same information and give historical or context from other parts of the country, or government.

First,

Even though Forest Service employees who work on those projects were left out of work, timber sales continued on the Colville National Forest. One reason they were still being processed during the shutdown is that the Forest Service was able to tap into trust funds from past timber sales that are held by individual agency offices, explained Andy Stahl, the executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics.

It seems that other government entities continued during the shutdown based on where their dollars were coming from, according to this news story .

“The NPS currently has funds derived from entrance, camping, parking and other fees collected from park visitors that would typically be used for future projects at parks,” Smith explained in a statement posted to the National Park Services website. “After consultation with the Office of the Solicitor at the Department of the Interior, it has been determined that these funds can and should be used to provide immediate assistance and services to highly visited parks during the lapse in appropriations.”

And of course, as we’ve discussed here previously, there are the many ski areas that were not shut down.

 

And the shutdown isn’t the only reason trained biologists, engineers and habitat planners have to worry about their future working for the Forest Service in Colville. A program pioneered in the Colville National Forest that started in 2013, dubbed the “A to Z” project, allowed the local timber company, Vaagen Brothers Lumber, to hire outside contractors to develop timber harvest plans, making the Colville ground zero for privatizing land planning in federal forests. Last summer, on a tour of the project, which has boosted timber production in the forest, then-interim and now permanent Forest Service Chief Vicki Christiansen touted it as an example of how the agency can embrace public-private partnerships in comments to Capital Press.

When timber-sale planning is outsourced, biologists, engineers and land planners who work for the Forest Service are cut out of much of the process. What’s left is a contracting officer, agency decision-maker and private contractors, Stahl explained. This doesn’t bode well for the federal workers who are typically tasked with writing timber sales and forest plans because agency employees are replaced by consultants, who can do most of the work remotely. Outsourcing the planning of timber management represents a continued trend within the Forest Service of “disinvestment in rural America,” said Stahl.
 

I’m not an expert on the A to Z project, but I’ve heard the Idaho State folks talk about their use of partnership authority (which they seem pretty happy with) and so I don’t know if it’s correct to say that the Colville is “ground zero.” I am curious as to exactly the role of the FS employees- in my experience with “third party NEPA”, it is all reviewed by FS employees. This is not a particularly new trend for developing NEPA documents nor content analysis, anyway. But the general trend in the Forest Service runs back even further. Andy remembers when reforestation contractors were putting government employees out of work (70’s). And then we had no more in-house vehicles and shops. And many remember the inception of the Albuquerque Service Center and how that worked for many women in rural communities. If you were going to look at it from a social justice perspective, the blue and pink collar jobs went away from most FS operations a while ago.

I’m glad Andy raised the issue of disinvestment, though. What do you all think is the best way to keep employees in the most important places doing the most important things with stable or declining budgets?

Pacific northwest collaboratives

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This article is about the fact that the Malheur National Forest hasn’t had a lawsuit in 15 years.

Hannibal said “three to four times the amount of work” is getting done nowadays compared to 15 years ago. Timber sales data from the Malheur National Forest tell a similar story. From 2010 to 2016, the volume of timber cut from the forest more than doubled. The collaboration and a 10-year stewardship contract gets credit for saving the last sawmill in Grant County, Oregon, too.

It also links to the “Collaborative Directory” for the Pacific Northwest Region.

Every national forest in the Pacific Northwest has now aligned with at least one outside “collaborative,” as they are called. The idea is to build trust and get compromises done at the front end of proposed timber sales, thinnings or controlled burns. That way, the work doesn’t get bogged down in litigation or analysis paralysis later.

A Forest Service directory lists 36 collaboratives associated with the 16 national forests in Oregon and Washington state. Some are more successful than others. Brown said the greater presence of endangered species west of the Cascades complicates the work of the groups active in wet-side forests.

It’s interesting to see how many groups are working where, but I just want to highlight that last point.  It suggests to me that addressing at-risk species is the key to successful projects, and that forest plans can and should provide the framework for doing so.  It would be nice to see revised forest plans treat this as an important issue and consider alternative approaches in that context.  On the other hand, there are no references to any forest plans or forest planning (as opposed to project plans and planning) in this document.  What am I missing?

Loggers, Mountain Bikers and a Tiki Bar: Vermont’s New Working Landscape

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Heath Bunnell, a master logger and avid mountain biker, was careful to plan a timber harvest that would preserve the integrity of the Dashney trails near the base of Burke Mountain. Photo Credit: Erica Houskeeper

Thanks to Forest Business Network for this story on People Getting Along… It’s interesting to think about the outlets that provide info on People Getting Along (usually local?) compared to say, national outlets, and how that might form people’s opinions of How Bad Things Are for the environment..

“Forests and tourists can have a symbiotic relationship here in Vermont,”says Langlais. “Whether it’s board feet, miles of smiles, or both, our recreation and forest products economies depend on forests staying as unfragmented, non-parcelized blocks of healthy forest– that’s the point of common interest.”

Managing forests for recreation

The Dashney trails near the base of Burke Mountain, including Trillium and Moose Alley, were part of an active timber harvest by HB Logging over the past few years. Owner Heath Bunnell, a master logger and avid mountain biker, was careful to plan a harvest that would preserve the integrity of the trails. “We harvest in the winter, when the ground is frozen,” said Bunnell, “so it can be hard to know where the trails are running. It’s important to get everyone together in advance to create a clear plan.” Bunnell met with a forester and representatives of the Kingdom Trails Association to walk through the area and develop a plan that laid out very specific routes for the logging equipment. “We try to cross the trail once at a ninety degree angle instead of crossing at multiple points,” said Bunnell. “It makes clean up easier and lessens the impact on the trail. Aesthetically, people don’t want to see a big mess in the forest. They want clear view lines and clean trails.” For the Dashney area harvest, Bunnell cleared a few small areas off the trail where slash was deposited to create wildlife habitat for songbirds, grouse and small mammals. “The fact is, we live in an area where tourism is the number one business,” said Bunnell, “so we have to manage the forests here with that in mind.”

Part of our DNA

And yet, the first business visitors see driving into East Burke is the Timber Resource Group (TRG) on Route 114, a concentration yard where logs are aggregated throughout the winter for eventual transport to mills. As mountain biking season starts up in the spring, Craig Owen, manager of TRG, estimates the yard holds 2.6 million board feet, all of which will be moved out by the end of June by log haulers like Ben Morrison of Morrison Trucking. Further out of town, retired logger Oscar Perkins meticulously stacks 100 cords of firewood into neat walls visible from the road, one of which encompasses an old bike painted bright red. Oscar’s daughter, Heidi, is the organizer of Rasputitsa, a 40 mile mountain bike race held every April in East Burke. “You can’t separate the logging from the biking community,” says Langlais. “The forests are part of our DNA here. We work where we play and play where we work.”

In their own words, tech industry goes political, too

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We recently had a discussion about the recreation industry going political (especially with regard to national monuments), and there have also been posts about the changing economics of rural communities.  Here’s an op-ed from some high-tech entrepreneurs about why they want to be near public lands and about getting involved in their management.

“Public lands provide inspiration for innovation within our companies, they provide the backdrop for employee wellness and they serve as a competitive advantage in our ability to attract and retain talent.”

“Access to open spaces and public lands is what makes our businesses tick. They are not just a means by which we refuel, but are also providing a foundation of solid work culture, creativity, innovative thinking and a spirit of entrepreneurship. There are real benefits that ripple throughout our business model that depend on public lands and our access to vast wild places.”

“There is real data and an undeniable economic argument behind fighting for policies such as full funding and permanent reauthorization for the bipartisan Land and Water Conservation Fund, standing up against the rollback of protections for our national monuments and other public lands, and saving public lands at the doorstep of Yellowstone from industrial-scale gold mining. Montanans should have the right and the opportunity for intentional public engagement in the decisions that are made about our public lands. And now, it’s more important than ever for technology companies like ours, and others, to get engaged.”

My suspicion has been a little more simple-minded.  When you can start a company that ships its products through the internet, and you can locate your business wherever you want, why wouldn’t you go where you want to be?  And then you want to keep it that way.

Headwaters: Lessons from the Timber Transition

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Lessons from the Timber Transition

“Performance is shaped more by current challenges and opportunities in the regional economy affecting all types of communities than it is by changes in the timber industry alone.”

“Counties doing better than average leveraged natural amenities; took an active, collaborative approach to planning; embraced adaptability; and took advantage of access to metropolitan markets.”