Month: April 2011

Forest Biomass Carbon- Letter vs. Letter

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David Beebe said, in a comment here on this previous post:

“Perhaps vested interests aren’t the best sole source for getting to the heart of the science on this matter without at least including contrasting conclusions coming from perhaps more objective sources?

For instance, http://216.250.243.12/90scientistsletter.pdf”

Now I know some but not many of these “vested interests”. In fact, Jim Burchfield has posted on this blog. As far as I know, all scientists have vested interests in getting research funds. And if you know a lot about something, (say a bird species), you tend to think they are pretty important; hence you are never very objective. Maybe we ought to give up the mythology of the objective scientist and just slog through the claims and counterclaims using logic and practitioner knowledge and see how far we get.

So let’s examine the knowledge claims in this letter.

1. Replacement of fossil fuels with bioenergy does not directly stop carbon dioxide emissions from tailpipes or smokestacks. Although fossil fuel emissions are reduced or eliminated, the combustion of biomass replaces fossil emissions with its own emissions (which may even be higher per unit of energy because of the lower energy to carbon ratio of biomass). Agreed.

2. Bioenergy can reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide if land and plants are managed to take up additional carbon dioxide beyond what they would absorb without bioenergy
This isn’t the clearest statement. Plants will grow and absorb carbon. If the previous plants are removed and used for bioenergy, new plants will grow and absorb carbon equivalent to that released when the previous plants are burned. Are we saying the same thing here? Not sure.

3. Alternatively, bioenergy can use some vegetative residues that would otherwise decompose and release carbon to the atmosphere rapidly. I would add possibly “even more rapidly through fires.”
4. Whether land and plants sequester additional carbon to offset emissions from burning the biomass depends on changes both in the rates of plant growth and in the carbon storage in plants and soils. OK.

6. For example, planting fast-growing energy crops on otherwise unproductive land leads to additional carbon absorption by plants that offsets emissions from their use for energy without displacing carbon storage in plants and soils. Agreed but not many acres around that are unproductive but would also grow energy crops.

7. On the other hand, clearing or cutting forests for energy, either to burn trees directly in power plants or to replace forests with bioenergy crops, has the net effect of releasing otherwise sequestered carbon into the atmosphere, just like the extraction and burning of fossil fuels.

The other letter did not talk about replacing forests with bioenergy crops, or clearing forests. If it is thinning, that carbon would be released anyway when the suppressed trees ultimately die. I am not following this logic for thinnings, or for dead trees. If we take dead trees, they are replacing fossil fuels and the place they vacated will be sequestering carbon. By getting the dead guys out, they are also opening places for new plants to re-sequester faster.

These seem to be the main questions:

1. What biomass are you taking off the acres?
2. What would happen to the carbon if you didn’t remove some biomass?
3. What would happen to the carbon if you removed the biomass but didn’t use it for energy?
3. What is the difference if you did use it for bioenergy?

Let’s use an example.

You are doing a thinning in ponderosa pine to “restore to HRV” and/or for fuels reduction.
You can use the trees for energy to replace fossil fuels OR you can put them into wood products OR you can pile them and burn them.

If you put them into wood products, the carbon will be released more slowly than in the woods. But you would be using the gas for heavy equipment and transportation and electricity (coal?) at the mill, more transportation to the Home Depot, etc. However, at the Home Depot it would replace boards from Canada, which might presumably have the same gas to extract from the woods, maybe hydro for western mills (don’t know) and possibly more transportation.

If you put the trees into bioenergy, you would still have to haul somewhere or chip and haul. But should this be compared to, say, extracting natural gas? There seems to be plenty of hauling associated with that, including heavy equipment drilling, compressors, etc. Or our old friend coal. Say, on an open mine there are huge pieces of equipment moving overburden and coal around (see photo above) (compared to how much for a skidder per energy unit) , and it goes on a train to the power plant, if you are in Wyoming, at least.

In fact, the more you think about this (in our region, we are being litigated on both coal and natural gas impacts currently, but not bioenergy) the more it makes sense to not consider carbon any differently from any other environmental impact.

It makes sense to me to line them all up (carbon, particulates, development impacts, etc.) and then make the judgment about what is the best energy source .

A carbon-o-centric view of energy sources might be good for some things (like setting up carbon trading), but not so good for others (deciding on the least expensive, and impactful energy technology that helps put jobs in rural America, and lets us control our own energy destiny).

Twenty Years of Forest Blogging

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It was 1989 and the “timber wars” were raging. Having failed to gain voice on any important issues in the Forest Service via traditional channels, a few of us joined with Jeff Debonis to form a non-profit called the Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (AFSEEE, later FSEEE). We adopted a three-part mission: to speak up as concerned citizens, to organize, and to protect whistleblowers. Not long thereafter, I began to blog as a Forest Service employee on government time. Not a blog, really, but an email list, that I later named Eco-Watch. I simply passed along forest policy-relevant materials to a rather large email list. By 1992 I began to compile a feedback list of comments and “comments on comments,” that I passed along via my mailing list. The list caused quite a stir in the Forest Service Intermountain Region leadership team, and maybe “higher up.”

Eco-Watch and I somehow managed to be a topic of conversation at many a Regional Leadership Team meeting. Interestingly, the “leadership team” was pretty much split, with a lot of the members supporting my attempt to open up communication via email. Deputy Regional Forester Bob Joslin once told me, paraphrasing: “If [the Regional Forester] mentions your stuff once more time, the next message is going to come from my inbox. … I don’t agree with all you write, but do believe that we [the Forest Service] need to discuss these things.”

I remember numerous tense meetings with my boss, the Regional Planning Director, about feathers that were being ruffled, not only by my emails, but also by my being on the board of that nonprofit organization FSEEE. It got worse once I became president of FSEEE’s board. I once told our Planning Director that if the Regional Forester had a problem with my being a part of FSEEE, I would gladly have lunch with him to discuss it—but that I did not talk about my FSEEE role at work since it was an exercise in free speech as a citizen, not as a public employee. As FSEEE board members and Forest Service employees we knew we were walking a fine line with the FSEEE stuff. Another time I was asked to talk to our Director of Information Systems about the email list. So I did, and he told me that the Forest Service email system had been set up for multi-way communications (after a proposal for top-down communications had been batted about, then batted down by either the Department of Ag or the Forest Service). He also told me he was not going to be a “DG cop” [the DG was then the Forest Service’s computing platform]. He also wanted to know more about FSEEE. He was curious about our daring venture.

Eco-Watch
By 1992, I began to send out follow-up comments and “comments on comments” to my email lists. Eco-Watch was born. The rough and rocky road that connected me to both the Forest Service and FSEEE was paved, in part by my Listserv. And finally near the end of the FSEEE-friendly Clinton Administration, I got approval to take Eco-Watch to the next phase, making it into a Forest Service-blessed Policy Dialogues Forum, via Hypernews. With Mark Garland’s help we put all my email listings on the internet, along with emergent policy dialogue threads. The tracks of this era still reside on the Forest Service servers, here, with numerous broken hyperlinks. Sadly, all the policy dialogue threads are lost, although I did manage to salvage most of them and have them on my own Forest Policy site as Eco-Watch [retaining much of the character of the old site, but linking to “discussion threads” of the past, rather than to ongoing discussion forums]. During this same era we tried to get Mark Garland’s Forest Service in the News to be a partnership between FSEEE and the Forest Service, even a three-way partnership adding in a timber industry group. That discussion was a non-starter. Mark continues to this day with his Forest Service in the News, hosted by FSEEE.

Eco-Watch Policy Dialogues Forum ran from 1999 until its demise in the Spring of 2005—right in the middle of the Bush/Cheney Administration War Games /Homeland Security—when the chant was “If you are not with us. You are against us.”

Why did the Forest Service drop its love affair with Hypernews? I don’t know, but suspect it had to do more with Homeland Security paranoia, than with FS internal politics. But maybe it was simple paranoia over Internet viruses, etc. All I know is that one day the forums were dead, and so too with all other forums that were being hosted on Forest Service Hypernews software. My inquiries into the matter led me to an odd dead end—something like, “It was just too hard to maintain the software.” I still believe that similar software powers many internet forums today, and maybe even Wiki sites. But I let it go. After all, we were at war in the wake of the Sept. 2001 World Trade Center bombings.

Forest Policy – Forest Practice
Early in 2005 I threw together a real blog, Forest Policy–Forest Practice, subtitled ‘A communities of practice weblog.’ My goal was to emulate what others had done by then, in other fields far from natural resources—to engage practitioners in policy/practice dialogues. I reached out to a few old friends and let it fly, this time on my own dime and on servers that couldn’t be shut down by FS bureaucrats, whether by design or by neglect.

We started out OK, but never got it up to steam—just couldn’t muster the participation needed to make it a strong platform for “voice.” Maybe it was me, being my usual flaky self, not getting anything “real” going. But I think not. I think that it was just too new, and some of the “academic” friends I courted were too busy with traditional meetings, publications, trade associations, etc. to be bothered with blogs. Oddly, there are still very few, maybe only one, active discussion blogs on forest policy.

A few of us did kept the discussion alive for several years, but it just wasn’t the “in your face” immediate gratification that the email list or the Hypernews forums had been. I tried a few other things, like a blog tied to Adaptive Forest Management, a theme I continue talking about today. On another blog I chronicled the rise and fall of what I like to call “Planning cast up as Environmental Management Systems” or “EMS cast up as Planning.” Among other things I unveiled in my Forest Environmental Systems blog was a clever little powerpoint about why bureaucrats don’t want to “mess with anything”. Policy wonk Ron Brunner told me that it was the best example ever of why bureaucracies can’t change. The EMS/Planning love affair was short-lived, and the blog only ran for about a year.

A New Century of Forest Planning
Today a few of us are blogging forestry and forest policy, under the guise of “forest planning” here. It will prove interesting to see if/when the Forest Service joins other agencies that allow/encourage many blogs and wikis, by individuals or groups. But it doesn’t seem likely just now.

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I continue to cross-walk to my earlier blogs, but realize that they are pretty much just a place where I store stuff. I also continue to blog matters at the confluence of complex systems, wicked problems, politics, finance, economics, and ecology at Ecology and Economics: a cross-disciplinary conversation and Economic Dreams-Economic Nightmares. Mostly I just dabble at the edges, and continue to hope that more folks will jump in to re-frame politics, science, and public administration in the US and around the world.

Biomass and Carbon Accounting- Two Letters and a Powerpoint

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Found these on the Society of American Foresters Policy website here. First, there’s a link to a powerpoint by Al Lucier on biomass and carbon.

Then there are two letters to the House and Senate, signed by a group of scientists, including this quote:

A consortium of research institutions has, over the last decade, developed life cycle measures of all inputs and all outputs associated with the ways that we use wood: a thorough environmental footprint of not just managing the forest, but harvesting, transportation, producing products or biofuels, buildings or other products, maintenance and their ultimate disposal. 4 Results of this research are clear. When looking across the carbon life cycle, biomass burning does produce some fossil fuel emissions from harvesting, transportation, feedstock preparation and processing. These impacts, however, are substantially more than offset by eliminating the emissions from using a fossil fuel. Sustainable removals of biomass feedstocks used for energy produce a reduction in carbon emissions year after year through a reduction in fossil fuel emissions far greater than all of the emissions from feedstock collection and processing. When wood removals are used to produce both renewable materials as well as bio-energy, the carbon stored in forest products continues to grow year after year, more than off-setting any processing emissions while at the same time permanently substituting for fossil fuel intensive materials displacing their emissions.

Finally, biomass power facilities generally contribute to a reduction of greenhouse gases beyond just the displacement of fossil fuels. The use of forest fuels in a modern boiler also eliminates the methane (CH4) emissions from incomplete oxidation following open burning, land filling, or decomposition which occurs in the absence of a higher and better use for this material. Methane is a 25 times more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. In contrast, the mining of coal and exploration for oil and gas release significant amounts of methane and other harmful pollutants into the environment. Any modeling to examine the impact of carbon-based fuel sources must account for all of these impacts.

Now, think about the scientists who signed this letter and the analytical suggestions in the Angora lawsuit for NEPA. Perhaps lawsuits, as well as scientific papers, would be best informed by a vigorous public debate over knowledge claims.

Angora Restoration- Much Ado About Relatively Little

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Watershed Tour of Angora Fire (photo by Steven McQuinn)

Today this story was in the AP “Burned forest value central to Tahoe logging fight.”

So far, I have seen it in a Bellingham Washington paper and the San Jose Mercury News. I wonder about the timing, as the lawsuit was filed in February (11th?) as per this press release.

As with all vegetation management lawsuits, I hunted around to get the acreage of the project. It was a bit hard to tell from the article since it seemed to be focused on “why fire is good” but not so much on “why whatever the project is proposing is bad.”

I found the EA and DN here, and the appeals here.
I decided to take a look at the John Muir Project appeal decision since those folks were interviewed in the AP story. Here is what that appeal decision says about the project (my apologies for the quality of Adobe to blog conversion):

Alternative 2 includes activities on approximately 1,416 acres of the approximately 2,700 acres on National Forest System lands. The modification included:

Hand thinning and piling/burning will be used instead of aerial logging approximately
447 acres where slopes are over 30%.

The prescription will change in Units 1, 3, 6, 8 and 11 to remove 16 inches and less live
trees and 20 inches and less dead standing and downed trees (See final EA Figure 2-2).
Piles would primarily include woody material 14 inches and less. The portion of tree
boles over 14 inches would be left on the ground.

Alternative 2, as modified, includes the following activities:
Fuel removal of standing dead and downed wood and thinning of live trees on
approximately 1,411 acres.
Within the 1,411 acres:
o 6 acres of conifer removal for aspen stand enhancement;
o approximately 77 acres of treatment proposed in wildlife snag zones (39 acres in
SEZ; 38 ac Subdivision);
o 13 acres of conifer removal for meadow restoration/aspen enhancement in the
Gardner Mountain meadow.

A ground-based logging system on up to 964 acres (including 13 acres of Cut-to-Length
mechanical thinning in Gardner Mountain Meadow) located in areas with slopes under
30%.
New construction of new roads (up to 7.7 miles) and landings to facilitate fuel removal.
Reconstruction or opening of existing roads, trails, and landings to facilitate fuel removal.
Decommissioning/restoring 1.9 miles of road and 16.7 miles of trail.
Existing and new landings and staging areas would be utilized to facilitate removal of
fuels for ground-based operations.
Reconstruction of 1,200 feet of Angora Creek.
Treatment of the following noxious weeds: bull thistle, field bindweed, St. John‘s wort,
tall whitetop, and oxeye daisy.

But here’s my favorite appeal point..(I couldn’t easily find the appeal itself, so I am assuming that the appeal point was accurately summarized; if anyone can point me to a copy of the appeal, I will post it here.)

Contention A: The CO2 emissions from the Angora project will have a significant impact on climate change. (Appeal #10-05-00-0102-A215, pp. 12-13)

I’m hoping that something got lost in translation between the appeal and the appeal decision.

Will Anyone Miss NFMA Planning?

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At midnight tonight, NFMA planning ceases to exist. All forest planners will be furloughed. No more collaborations, assessments, EIS writing, model-building, monitoring, or map-making. Will the sun still rise on Monday morning without NFMA planning? Will the deer still browse and the birds still sing? Will trees still grow, die, burn, and rot without planning to guide them?

Tune in next week to find out.

Roger’s Advice for Scientists Testifying before Congress

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These are from a post by Roger Pielke Jr. on his blog here, I thought they also might be relevant to our sorts of science.

What are the lessons here for experts who testify before Congress?

I can think of several:

1. Decide what your role is. Regardless of which party invites you, decide whether you are there to defend that political party’s views (on science or policy) or if you are there to share what you know about questions for which you have expertise. These are not always the same thing.

2. Appreciate that statements that you make in the media that cherrypick, emphasize extremes (on any side of an issue) or otherwise go out on a limb could set your scientific colleagues up for difficulties in the future when they are asked to defend those statements in a political setting. At that point, the scientist being asked to defend the dodgy statements may face a trade-off between scientific accuracy and political solidarity.

3. Speak for yourself and let others speak for themselves. This is of course can be very difficult when participating in a shared campaign, either for action or a perspective. Even if you are not actively participating in that campaign you may be forced to render a judgement on it, e.g., “Ms. Scientist the IPCC consensus says X, what do you think?”

4. Recognize that when incorrect statements are made in a public setting, the consequences for you as an expert will be much higher than for politicians. That is just the way that it is. The consequences for folksy, grandfatherly Ralph Hall of being wrong will never be as significant as for a scientist testifying before him. So always be able to defend claims that you make.

5. Stick to your area of expertise when testifying as an expert. This seems obvious but is routinely violated.

6. Finally, it should be obvious that a decision to accept an invitation to testify is a political act. No, it does not mean that you shared the political agenda or scientific views of those who invite you. But it does mean that your participation in the process will be more thoughtful and more effective if you have considered your role in the political process, and especially your stance on advocacy versus arbitration. The risk of not thinking these issues through is of course a greater likelihood that you’ll simply be a stage prop in a political theater.

On sea level rise, the statements made by Holdren in 2006 to the BBC as AAAS President and environmental activist were far less measured and responsible than his statements made in 2009 and 2011 on the same subject as science advisor to the president before Congress. The difference — which I attribute as much to setting as to any changes in the science of sea level — helps to illustrate the difference between an expert who seeks to use science selectively as a basis for political advocacy and one who wishes to faithfully arbitrate scientific questions for policy makers. While these roles are not necessarily mutually exclusive, typically a choice must be made.

What Do We Know About Carbon and Wildfires?

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One of my ideas for this blog was to be a place where we could share information and learn about topics from others who know more- as well as share alternative framings of an issue.

One topic that recently came up in my office relates to carbon and wildfires. (Yes, the other main topic of interest is the “orderly government shutdown.”)

Is it simply that there is vegetation, and soil, and that ultimately no matter how severe the fire, everything will grow back, the soil will redevelop, and it will be carbon-neutral? Or are there other ways of thinking about this?

In many parts of the country, people like to thin pine trees to either create “historic” conditions, to reduce fuels and change fire behavior (to protect communities), or to decrease stocking so that pines will remain healthy, especially in a potentially warming environment, or all of the above. Many of the carbon discussions seem to be about what happens if you thin trees and either sequester them in various kinds of products, or use them to replace fossil fuels- and how that relates to the carbon you might have released by burning up the stand.

So my question is whether conditions that keep fires from being intense enough to destroy carbon in the soil, are “good” for climate mitigation.

Some of this may relate to timing. Like soil will “grow” back unless something has happened to make that impossible. But if it takes 1000 years, by which time we will have decarbonized our society, should we still count it? Obviously it’s easier to know about replacing trees than replacing soil. Or understanding the damage that fires can do and what it takes to reverse it. Or understanding how changes in climate will affect future development of soils and vegetation.

Here’s one paper I found by Bormann et al. Here’s another one by Hurteau et al.

Desired Future: Whose Desire? What Future? Why?

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The idea of a “desired future” is found frequently in Forest Service NFMA and NEPA discussions/writing. I decided to see if I could find out where the idea of “desired future” and “desired future condition” come from. It sort of shows up in the 1979 NFMA Rule, mainly w/r/t wildlife populations, but gains a major toehold on FS thinking in the 1982 rule:

Sec. 219.11 Forest plan content. The forest plan shall contain the following: … (b) Forest multiple-use goals and objectives that include a description of the desired future condition of the forest or grassland and an identification of the quantities of goods and services that are expected to be produced or provided during the RPA planning periods

And it has been a part of FS thinking ever since. I can understand back in 1982 that the Forest Service wanted to remake America’s national forests into something foresters would desire, while zoning out Wilderness, Wild and Scenic Rivers, and other “set-asides”. So the idea of “desired future” made sense, at least to foresters who were running the Forest Service back then, some of whom were desirous to see the allowable timber cut increased from 11 to 33 billion board feet.

But to continue to use the language in the 2011 proposed NFMA rule is a different matter. The focus these days is not on increasing “allowable cut,” but instead on restoring ecosystems resiliency. But there is still a hint of what author David Ehrenfeld called The Arrogance of Humanism, 1981 at work here. At least I think so. That is why I’ve advocated for simple scenario planning instead, in part to avoid what I believe to be a “desired future” trap. For an article length view, see Thomas Stanley’s Ecosystem Management and the Arrogance of Humanism, Conservation Biology, 1995 (pdf)

Let’s leave a couple of inquiry questions: Is the idea of “desired future” even needed in forestland adaptive management? Why does this language persist in NFMA rules.

[Update, 4/6/11: I noticed this AM that the Draft NFMA rule refers to "desired condtions" (219.7 (d)) instead of "desired future," or "desired future condition(s)" but the meaning appears identical, at least to me.]

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Related: In Search of Our Desired Forest, John Rupe, NCFP, 2/18/2011

It’s Complicated: Forest Management’s Wicked Problems

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Most people view the problems of forest management from the narrow perspective of their own interests. They understand that there are “many great interests on the National Forests which sometimes conflict a little,” as Gifford Pinchot described the situation a century ago. While we must honor specific interests, the Forest Service’s charge under Organic Act of 1897 stewardship framing, then broadened and altered by subsequent law is more complex. It is never as easy as getting folks together to sit across a table and working out a “forest plan.”

The Forest Service came into being at the end of a very rapacious period in American history. Hence the emphasis on “reserves” in the Organic Act , and later in the Weeks Act of 1911. The public lands had been attacked by many as the so-called settlement of the American West proceeded after the Civil War. It was perceived and used as a “commons” and plundered and burned in too many places. That caused the public outrage that led to the forest reserves.

After successfully bringing the reserves into the national forest system, Gifford Pinchot wanted to regulate all forest practices in the US. Pinchot could not achieve his dream, and the private lands were over-cut for a long time. Even Weyerhauser, where I worked for a summer in the late 1970s—and deemed the “Best of the SOBs” by Forbes magazine, knew but were reluctant to admit in public that their “fee lands” were being cut faster than their “High Yield Forestry” tree farms could replace the volume being cut and milled during that late period of the US housing boom. There would be a “gap.” And sure enough, just as soon as their and other private land owners “gaps” appeared the pressure mounted to cut the national forests. And cut they did, until the environmentalists, working public attitudes/pressures/law shut it down, amid great angst for locals particularly in the Northwest.

As the timber wars raged, more people with new-found affluence were using the national forests and more conflicts emerged between recreationists and cattle and sheep grazers on the national forests. And there were two emergent back-country recreationist movements that were destined to clash one with another: the “primitive back-packers” and the “ATV/OHV users”. In addition, primitive canoe, kayak, float boat enthusiasts were clashing ever-more with commercial outfitters and motorboat enthusiasts, not to mention personal watercraft. And then there were Wilderness advocates clashing against motorheads of all ilks. The wars were on.

Amid this upwelling of controversy, the US Congress penned the Renewable Resources Planning Act of 1974. But before the ink dried on that law, timber cutting on the national forests, clearcutting to be precise slammed to an immediate legal halt via a lawsuit on the Izaak Walton League. Then under a panic to reopen clearcutting on the national forests, the National Forest Management Act of 1976 was born, and so was forest-level planning. But there was little in either the RPA nor its amendment the NFMA that was destined to settle the controversies. The controversies were the stuff of wicked problems in public forests as noted first by Allen and Gould in 1986.

So here we are more than 30 years after NFMA, with the same controversies raging, overlaid by more people wanting more (and different) things from the national forests, more people living much closer to the national forests, global climate change controversy, species loss controversies that stem from more people (and roads/dams/power lines/energy corridors/etc.) across the landscape and from more stress on both “sources” (resources) and “sinks” (particularly air and water sheds where pollution is dumped)added in, etc..

And all the while the Forest Service continues to pretend that forest planning, pretty much as designed in the late 1970s, but having dropped economic rationality in favor of ecological rationality, will somehow save the day. Or at least that’s how I read the Draft Planning Rule (pdf)

It is my feeling that the only path forward that will afford any chance to allow forest users to sit across tables and talk seriously about prudent use of individual forests, watersheds, or mountain ranges, is for their to be some means to continue to discuss, debate, and develop policy for “broader scale” issues that will set boundaries on discussions of use and conservation at “local scales,” including but not limited to the national forest-scale.

That is why I continually suggest that an Adaptive Governance approach be developed in the NFMA rule. It could as well be developed apart from the NFMA rulemaking process. But until and unless it is developed, there is little or no chance that national interest groups will allow for the type across-the-table “use discussions” that more local interest groups advocate. This conclusion is not mine alone. Consider this from 1999, subtitled Making Sense of Wicked Problems:

What is the answer then, to these complex (wicked) problems? How do we organize ourselves to deal with diverse values and expectations about sustainable forest management? Shannon (1992) asserted that the answer lies in the notion of informed governance. That is, we need places where people can learn, question, debate, and come to an informed judgment of what choices are best (FEMAT 1993). In Coming to Public Judgment , Yankelovich (1991) determined that the most critical barrier to making effective and informed choices in a complex world is the lack of forums in which the process of “working through” value differences and preferences can occur. There is growing support among natural resource professionals that a public dialogue must be an integral part of achieving social and political acceptance of forest practices (e.g., Bengston 1994, Clark and Stankey 1991, Shepard 1992). Regardless of value differences, if people are to come to an understanding of, if not agreement on, the problems and choices that confront public lands management, it is likely to be in public forums where open and honest discussion can occur. Unfortunately, from their research on adaptive approaches to forest management, Stankey and Shindler (1997) conclude that such forums are most notable by their scarcity. (emphasis added)

Anybody want to explain to me where I (we) have got it wrong?
[Note this post was precipitated by this comment. Thanks Brian]