Pointless at this point?

Judge issues order lifting federal suspension of logging sales

Phil Taylor, E&E reporter

Published: Thursday, October 17, 2013

A federal judge in Oregon today issued a restraining order blocking the Obama administration from enforcing its earlier suspension of timber sales during the government shutdown.

The order by Judge Owen Panner of the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon came the same day the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service directed regional staff to begin allowing timber contractors to resume operations with the shutdown over.

The order follows a lawsuit filed this week by the American Forest Resource Council and three wood products manufacturing companies in the Pacific Northwest that argued the administration’s suspension of timber sales during the 16-day government shutdown was illegal (E&ENews PM, Oct. 15).

Tom Partin, president of AFRC, today said the judge did not rule on the merits of the suspensions but issued the order so individual contractors do not have to wait to receive approval to return to work.

“It will take a few days to get those out to the folks in the forest,” Partin said. “We greatly appreciate the judge’s [temporary restraining order] today.”

The industry had argued in the lawsuit that the suspensions were illegal because the supervision of logging activities is not “critical” and therefore activity should have continued in the absence of appropriations.

It remains to be seen whether any companies will file breach-of-contract claims against the government for lost production during the shutdown, which came at a critical time for loggers after the wildfire season and before the onset of November rains.

Here is a post from another blog demonstrating: 1) the lack of media attention to such a significant event in the Age of Global Warming, and 2) the growing power of bloggery in communicating and discussing important ideas and events in this Age of Internet Communications. 1152 comments and counting!

The Blizzard that Never Was – and its Aftermath on Cattle and Ranchers

http://dawnwink.wordpress.com/2013/10/08/the-blizzard-that-never-was-and-its-aftermath-on-cattle-and-ranchers/comment-page-19/#comment-2411

October 8, 2013 by dawnwink | 1,152 Comments

The worst blizzard in recorded history of South Dakota just swept through the state. Tens of thousands of cattle are predicted dead and the much of the state is still without power. The Rapid City Journal reports, ”Tens of thousands of cattle lie dead across South Dakota on Monday following a blizzard that could become one of the most costly in the history of the state’s agriculture industry.”

The only reason I know this is because my parent’s ranch, the setting for Meadowlark, lies in the storm’s epicenter. Mom texted me after the storm. “No electricity. Saving power on phone. It’s really, really bad….” She turned on her phone to call me later that day. “There are no words to describe the devastation and loss. Everywhere we look there are dead cattle. I’ve never seen so many dead cattle. Nobody can remember anything like this.” Author of several books and infinite numbers of articles, Mom said, “I can’t imagine writing about this. I’m not going to take photos. These deaths are too gruesome. Nobody wants to see this.”

I searched the national news for more information. Nothing. Not a single report on any of major news sources that I found. Not CNN, not the NY Times, not MSNBC. I thought, Well, it is early and the state remains without power and encased in snow, perhaps tomorrow. So I checked again the next day. Nothing. It has now been four days and no national news coverage.

Meanwhile, ranchers on the plains have been dealt a crippling blow the likes that has not been experienced in living memory. The Rapid City Journal continues, ”Silvia Christen, executive director of the South Dakota Stockgrowers Association, said most ranchers she had spoken to were reporting that 20 to 50 percent of their herds had been killed. While South Dakota ranchers are no strangers to blizzards, what made Friday’s storm so damaging was how early it arrived in the season. Christen said cattle hadn’t yet grown their winter coats to insulate them from freezing wind and snow. In addition, Christen said, during the cold months, ranchers tend to move their cattle to pastures that have more trees and gullies to protect them from storms. Because Friday’s storm arrived so early in the year, most ranchers were still grazing their herds on summer pasture, which tend to be more exposed and located farther away from ranch homes.”

In addition to the financial loss, when a rancher loses an animal, it is a loss of years, decades, and often generations within families, of building the genetics of a herd. Each rancher’s herd is as individual and unique as a fingerprint. It is not a simple as going out to buy another cow. Each cow in a herd is the result of years of careful breeding, in the hopes of creating a herd reflective of market desirability, as well as professional tastes of the rancher. Cattle deaths of this magnitude for ranchers is the equivalent of an investment banker’s entire portfolio suddenly gone. In an instant, the decades of investment forever disappear.  It is to start over again, to rebuild, over years and years.

Cattle have a very real money amount that ranchers and their families depend upon. This is also true of acreage and the size of a herd. This why you never, ever ask a rancher, “How big is your ranch?” or “How many cattle do you have?” These are the equivalents of, “So, how about you tell me the amount of money in your bank account?” With these losses, it is up to the rancher to divulge, or not, the number of head lost. It is not polite to ask, again the equivalent of asking, “So, how much money just evaporated from your bank account?” People outside of the ranching world often ask these questions with the best of intentions. They have no idea how these questions are experienced by the rancher.

People have asked me, “What can we say then?” On this occasion, a heartfelt, “I’m sorry for your loss,” goes a long, long way.

Here are two excellent pieces, written by local newspapers, on the loss and devastation to the living landscape:

Tens of Thousands of Cattle Killed in Friday’s Blizzard, Ranchers Say The Rapid City Journal

October Blizzard Taking Toll on Livestock, Ranch Radio KBHB

To ranch is not a job, it is a life. In Meadowlark, which takes place on my parent’s ranch, the main character, Grace, studies the economic situation of the ranch, “By lamplight, Grace pored over the columns of numbers that represented the ranch. The sound of the pencil against the paper rose from the page and drifted into the corners of the room. She studied rows and numbers, written and erased, then written and erased again…This was all this ranch was to the bank: Expenses and income—the quantities of the former far outnumbering those of the later.

Nowhere was there space for the things that represented the ranch’s true value. Headings such as Life, Hope, Dreams, and God-It’s-All-We’ve-Got did not exist. Nor was there room for Memories, Legacy, and Blood-and-Sweat. No item reflected the scent of the prairie grass after a summer rain. No place for the times Grace had rocked James and prayed that the land would sustain him through a lifetime. “

The prairie is a place of extremes, where the weather and land always take primacy, because they must. In Meadowlark, Grace writes in her journal, “The beauty. The bitterness. Not a land of mediocrity but of stunning beauty and brute force.”

The prairie experienced a summer of beauty, with rain we hadn’t seen in years. The prairie was lush with grass and cattle fat and glossy in the pastures. Now, we experience the brute force of the prairie, with tens of thousands of cattle dead and ranching families and communities left reeling. All of this death and destruction from The Blizzard that Never Was.

Mom just wrote, “As the days warm, more and more carcasses are exposed. So many have lost so much.”

I invite you to lift prayers and light to the people and animals of this region. When I told Mom there were so many people sending love, she said, “We feel it. It helps.”

If you’d like to leave your words of encouragement and prayers in the Comments section if this piece, I will make sure they get to those who most need to hear them now.

To subscribe and receive Dewdrops in your email, please enter your email address in the box under “Follow this blog via email” or click on the ‘Follow’ icon in lower right-hand corner of the blog’s screen and ‘Confirm Follow’ in the email you receive. To return to website: www.dawnwink.com

I don’t know if this has been discussed, it was filed a year ago so maybe I’m just late to the party. It’s certainly an aggressive litigation effort that’s definitely not from one of the “usual suspects”. Here’s the link, the first place I saw it was on CBD’s website so here it is, I’m sure it’s available elsewhere too if you don’t want to patronize their site:

http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/public_lands/forests/pdfs/industry_lawsuit_8-13-2012.pdf

A few enviro groups have joined in on the USFS side as defendant-intervenors (something about politics makes strange bedfellows…?)

I haven’t yet waded through all the relevant documents. But basically, the FFRC et al (a consortium of forest industry groups) is very unhappy with several provisions of the 2012 Planning Rule, as I read it they believe that:

1) They believe that the Planning Rule, 36 C.F.R. §219.8(a), creates an unprecedented new requirement that every forest plan “must provide for social, economic, and ecological sustainability.” (in other words, they don’t like that “sustainability” language)

2) They claim that the Rule violates MUSYA by unlawfully mandating extra-statutory “ecosystem services”, in  addition to the five statutorily-designated purposes of national forests. They say that providing “ecosystem services” is not a permitted purpose of national forest management under MUSYA.  As I understand it, they feel that these goods and services are traditionally viewed as free benefits to society, or “public goods” – wildlife habitat and diversity, watershed services, carbon storage, and scenic landscapes, for example.

3) A big one: They claim a violation of NFMA by unlawful mandate to maintain viable populations of plant and animal species of conservation concern before meeting multiple use objectives.

4) Another big one: they claim the Planning Rule unlawfully limits decision-making information by requiring decision-makers to “use the best available scientific information for every forest management decision.”   This one sounds kind of goofy at first glance, I think their (debatable) point is that scientific information shouldn’t be allowed to trump “commercial information” (I’m a little vague on what that is, exactly).

Anyway, thought I’d post this, it seems to fit into previous discussion on the “greatest good” in forest planning. The case is still going on (well, probably on hold right now for fed shutdown), they still hadn’t finalized the full briefing schedule as of a couple weeks ago.

Today the timber industry sued the closed-down federal government because — drumroll, please — it closed down.

The outcome of the lawsuit isn’t in doubt. What’s more fun is to speculate on whether it takes the Oregon judge longer than the 40 minutes it took the Chief Judge in Colorado to throw her case out. Corollary question: Will the federal courts shut-down before the case is decided?

Here’s an interesting essay on pay and working conditions — and a deficit of respect? — for federal wildland firefighters. It also mentions a proposed the Wildland Firefighter Protection Act. http://wp.me/a3AxwY-45f

Stand up for wildland firefighters

By Lindon Pronto/Writers on the Range

Federal wildland firefighters make up the single largest professionally trained firefighting force in the world. We staff fire engines and earthmovers, work from helicopters and jump from planes, and move as 20-person, well-coordinated crews of “ground pounders.” We also put together incident management teams to manage many kinds of relief efforts.

Our teams have dealt with emergencies like Sept. 11, 2001, in New York City and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. But on paper — for bureaucratic reasons — we are not called “firefighters.” Instead, we are called forestry and range “technicians.”

To us, that distinction is a longstanding joke that’s not remotely funny. The failure to recognize who we are and what we do comes at a great price.

Few Americans see a green fire engine for what it is, have any idea what hotshot crews face on the fireline, or have even heard of helitack. Even those closest to us may not fully grasp the long shifts we endure or the risks we take. But we love what we do; anyone who doesn’t soon decides that the commitments are too many and the sacrifices are too great.

The dangerous conditions encountered in wildland firefighting, combined with the rush of adrenaline and a sense of duty and brotherhood, are exactly the reasons we love our jobs. We not only accept these aspects of our work, we live for them! There are, however, other aspects of the job that are harder to accept, particularly for those who rely on the work to support families. Few Americans realize this, but federal firefighters are treated and paid considerably less well than our counterparts in private, city and state agencies. 

For example, many non-federal firefighters are guaranteed hotel rooms and 24-hour pay when they’re working away from home. Federal firefighters, though, usually sleep in the dirt, like convict crews, and we are not paid for more than 16 hours per day on incidents.

Federal firefighters regularly work 112-hour workweeks for two or three weeks at a time, yet we are not compensated for at least one-third of that time. The nickel-and-diming we face goes further: Firefighters are often required to staff fires overnight without pay, and lunch breaks are seldom paid. On prescribed fires, hazard pay is not given even though we are required to carry emergency fire shelters with us. 

These and other discrepancies in treatment and pay contribute to dismal retention rates among federal agencies. Millions of dollars are wasted annually to hire and train new firefighters, though many will leave as soon as they’re offered fire jobs with better hours, benefits, pay and pensions.

Federal firefighters are generally hidden from public view. We are stationed in the outdoors, and we are (happily) grimy, dirty, smelly and hairy during those 16-hour shifts on the fireline. The media are seldom permitted to enter our hazardous work zones. Unfortunately, this low profile means that our job is easily misrepresented and misunderstood. The public remains ignorant about who we are and what we do. As wildland firefighters, our faces and stories rarely make the news — unless we die on the job.

The problems we face should be illuminated, but constructive dialogue is hampered by the old-school “can-do” work ethic — coupled with the “shut-up-and-do-your-job” mentality. The lack of public awareness means that our working conditions remain the same, and the problems I’ve described here go unreported, and therefore unresolved. 

Still, some stalwart supporters and lobbyists have fought for decades to improve our pay and working conditions. This year, for the first time, seasonal firefighters were given access to health benefits. A recent bill introduced in Congress would address some of the other issues I’ve described, but the Wildland Firefighter Protection Act (H.R.2858) is unlikely to be signed into law if no one knows about it. That’s why I’m breaking my silence on the subject: I hope that public pressure and support for federal firefighters will carry this proposed legislation into law. Here’s a way to stand with federal firefighters: http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/wildland-firefighter/?source=search

It hurts not to be recognized for the hard work we do, and to be denied the benefits and financial support systems that other “real” firefighters automatically receive. We have no shortage of personal pride in our work, but that pride often appears to be unshared by our own government, elected officials and the public we serve.

• Lindon Pronto is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He has been a seasonal wildland firefighter for six years; the opinions he expresses here are his own. He lives in Auburn, California.

Here are opposing viewpoints by Andy Kerr — mentioned in an earlier comment by Larry — and by Jim Geisinger, long-time head of Associated Oregon Loggers. I have known of both men for nearly 25 years and have sat through presentations and had conversations with each. I will admit to a strong bias here, based partly on the positions of each person, but mostly what I perceive to be their character. Jim I have always found to be truthful, straightforward, honest, and humble; my experiences with Kerr have been mostly the opposite and one of the key reasons I have had little to do with him (except read some of his stuff occasionally or read the captions under his picture in the newspaper) for the past two decades. Also, I really dislike very much that he presents himself as a “conservationist” when he is far more an “obstructionist” than anything else. Regular readers here have heard my Animal Farm thoughts on the preservationists who hi-jacked the conservation label several years ago (Andy being a leader in that department, too), but Kerr isn’t even a preservationist — more like an opportunist with his eye out for photographers and loose change. Based on personal experience, I don’t think he is a very honest or ethical person either, and will leave it at that. With that being said (I know several of you here are not big fans of logging either), please try and keep an open mind when considering these two opinions. BZ

Despite timber supplies, future is bright for Oregon loggers