In the paper I posted Friday, Squillace says:
Land use planning cannot succeed unless public land agencies are committed to monitoring the impacts that various activities and events have on land resources, and to adapting the management of those resources to meet the goals and objectives laid out in their plans over time. A robust, transparent, and meaningful monitoring and evaluation program is especially important at the landscape and unit planning levels, since it is at these levels where the broad impacts of planning policies are likely to be best understood. Moreover, experience with adaptive management suggests that it works best at larger scales where there is far more flexibility to adapt to new information. Adaptation might also prove necessary at the activity- and project-planning levels, but appropriate conditions can (and should) be baked into activity- and project-level decisions as necessary to ensure that that the evolving goals and objectives in
the higher level plans are not compromised.
First, “planning cannot succeed without monitoring and adaptation.” First, let’s talk about what success might look like. To me, it’s beyond meeting NFMA requirements. Let’s start with the pieces of NFMA planning.. desired conditions and objectives, standards and guidelines, and land allocations. Success in each of these “plan components” might look different. Land allocation seems to be basically a political call e.g. Wilderness, so is success delineating RW’s to satisfy some and not others? I’d say it’s doing a meaningful deal at the local level that everyone can live with. But there are others, including elected officials that think “more is better.” What is success?
Law profs like Mark tend to be very careful with language. So he says “monitoring the impacts that various activities and events have on land resources, and adapting management to meet the goals and objectives laid out in plans over time.” Also he says “ensure that that the evolving goals and objectives..”. But I’m not sure that plan goals and objectives actually can evolve based on the difficulty of doing plan revisions. Yes, you could amend a plan to change the goals and objectives, but … I don’t think I’ve seen that done. Perhaps one of you has. It seems to me that there are Forest Plans on the shelf or on the computer, and there is the adapting to post-fire, different budget priorities, new recreationists, etc. that goes on every day. Forests do adapt, but not necessarily through formal monitoring in an LMP.
So monitoring DC’s may be difficult, based on how general they are, objectives could be fairly straightforward to measure, but where would you measure “impacts of various activities and events”? I’d think mostly at the project level, because you would design the next project in light of those observations. And if you measure something like wildlife across a broad area, generally biologists aren’t sure what exactly are causing increases or declines (weather? disease? hunters? and so on). That’s why people design research experiments to tease out impacts, e.g. mountain bike impacts and so on.
For those of you who remember Chief Jack Ward Thomas and his and subsequent efforts on monitoring, these discussions will not seem new. Federal agencies “should” monitor their impacts but what, and how, at what scale, and who decides? Here we are with twenty five more years under our belts and we don’t seem any closer to resolving the question. Then there were the “Adaptive Management” areas of the NW Forest Plan, as well as that monitoring plan. I wonder how well that has worked; whether anything found at that scale changed project-level decisions.
It almost seems to me that people are and have been adaptively managing, but it’s the degree of formality/transparency that’s the real underlying issue.
This situation is summed up perfectly when the post says “…not sure that plan goals and objectives actually can evolve based on the difficulty of doing plan revisions. Yes, you could amend a plan to change the goals and objectives, but I don’t think I’ve seen that done.”
Specifically, capitalism in all its many forms seeks to privatize the profits and socialize losses. Whether it’s the Northwest Forest Plan or “reforming” the Endangered Species Act, the people who make the most money off our public lands depend on “market certainty.”
It’s why they’ve long argued for a “no surprises clause” so if their exploitation efforts take a hit to protect an endangered species they want to be 100% guaranteed that once they adjust their investment strategy some other endangered species / management strategy doesn’t come along and make their profit margin even worse.
Even if these changes make our public land more sustainable and beneficial for everyone over time, that’s not how our economic system works and there’s zero tolerance for those who work against short-term profits at the expense of everything else.
In other words as long as capitalism is in the driver’s seat their will never be adaptation to improve management, only adaptation to maximize and defend profits no matter how much damage is caused because saying you protect the environment is something the PR department does, not something that actually meaningfully protects the land because capitalism is way more important than that and doesn’t ever have to give attention to that or be held accountable to that.
It’s why we need to run all these destructive corporate interests off our public lands once and for all end corporate welfare as we know it so the ecosystem can finally start to recover.
On a more practical note, from my experience at Interior, land management agencies like BLM need more training and budget support to conduct effective adaptive management. In my era, O&G companies who were required by the RMP to monitor and provide data (wildlife/habitat) to the BLM were disappointed when BLM lacked the staff capacity (training, people and performance measures making adaptive management an employee priority) to even review the data, much less adapt management to what the data indicated. If you want federal adaptive management to work, employees need the budget to support this labor intensive activity and the training in applied science. “This is what the science tells us and now this is how we turn that information into land management decisions.” Easier said than done.
Lol, more funding for adaptive management? The incentive in real life is quite the opposite.
The less funding for adaptive management, or ESA, or Clean Water Act, etc., the better the status quo can be maintained and the pigs at the trough can keep gobbling up all the resources regardless of how much long-term damage is caused for everyone/everything else.
It’s simple really: The less wildlife funding there is the less problem the greedy exploiters have with wildlife.
Same logic when Trump slowed down Covid testing and argued if we stop doing so much testing the whole pandemic won’t be a problem anymore. It’s total insanity and when it comes to public lands its been institutionalized. Those who sabotage ecological accountability get promotions and those complain about a lack of funding to fulfill the duties they got hired to do get fired for speaking out.
Deane- My understanding is that line items like wildlife and fish habitat are determined by Congress. And yes, when the $ trickle down to the district level and you’re in recreation or wildlife or range or fire or timber, it’s never enough to do what needs to be done. So people complain. Do you have examples of people who complained about funding for their programs getting fired for that? Because I certainly heard a great deal of complaining about budget allocations without anyone getting fired.
The regime that was previously in control has just been voted out and its too soon to understand the latest version. But there was a well documented purge of climate and wildlife protection leadership, as well as all their work/data, not to mention a failed attempt to move BLM headquarters out of Washington DC.
And yes, congressional budget cuts have thus far been the most effective way to ensure ESA listed species and 303(D) listed impaired streams don’t get addressed so resource exploitation is business as usual… Lack of funding is a popular way to nullify laws.
A specific example of someone getting fired is a Washington State University wolf biologist who went public about ranchers intentionally putting cattle on top of wolf dens to encourage the wolves to defend their territory so they could slaughter the wolf pack. That biologist was fired and eventually one a defamation case in court. There’s many other examples like this: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/wolf-researcher-gets-300000-to-settle-wsu-lawsuit/
Conspiracy theories galore. One for every occasion? Seems rather like QAnon, to me.
Are you willing to have a rational conversation Larry, or do you always resort to crass dismissiveness and absurd allegations when people reference specific ways that environmental concerns/protections are marginalized/under-represented in our country?
Your stereotypes do not hold any water, in my 25 years of experience. Yes, there are some individuals who want to put their spin on things but, it’s always better to follow the laws. You assume that every USFS unit wants to go back to the 80’s, with clearcuts and overstory removals. That just isn’t the case, in every Sierra Nevada National Forest. You also assume that the USFS uses the same techniques as private timber companies use. Basically, you are prejudiced against Forest Service employees, assuming their motives and actions are aimed at breaking laws.
Sure, if you have actual evidence, by all means, bring it into the courts. I’m not seeing any evidence from you.
Rebecca, that’s interesting that BLM deferred the collecting of data to the operators, for the FS the collecting itself is a major financial commitment. This strikes me as one of those situations that the FS would handle via a “pilot” taking one or a few units and fully supporting them figuring out how to do adaptive management the best way, then offering the lessons learned to the broader agency (also learning how much it costs and asking for the bucks to fully implement). And then the decentralized agency deciding whether or not to do it.
My view is always “don’t collect data unless you know what you want to use it for and have the systems in place to use it” and the corollary “don’t expect monitoring to tell what you you need a designed experiment to show.”
FWIW I think your experience with adaptive management would be useful input to the current O&G leasing review.
The Federal Register Notice for the Forest Service 2012 Planning Rule (Rule + preamble) uses the term “adaptive management” 44 times. Here’s 3:
“A primary goal of the new rule is to create a framework in which new information is identified
and used to support adaptive management. The Department expects the new rule to facilitate, over time, the increased use of the amendment process to react more quickly to changing conditions.
Monitoring data will be used to inform adaptive management. The requirements in this rule are intended to result in a more strategic use of monitoring dollars, and to leverage those investments where it is feasible and appropriate to do so.
Some respondents felt the proposed rule lacks feedback between monitoring and changes to plan components. Some respondents felt the rule should include accountability measures and explicitly include ‘‘adaptive management’’ requirements rather than just describing a framework
for planning consistent with principles of ‘‘adaptive management.’’”
(My recalled experience was that most agency specialists would much rather monitor than plan, and when there was a shared pot of money for both, planning didn’t usually fare very well.)
Yes, well, stating something (even 44 times) in a reg is different from having it work in practice. I wish it were that simple, e.g., “the intention of this regulation is to speed up planning and make it more efficient, to make better decisions and so on.”
I wonder who the M&E coordinator in DC is and if she/he has any highlights of successful adaptive management we could post here.
“I wonder who the M&E coordinator in DC is and if she/he has any highlights of successful adaptive management we could post here.”
Teacher, teacher, here’s one!
Is there a link?
Yes, see the link at the bottom of page to which I linked above. Here’s the sequel. These two videos tell the story of the Siuslaw National Forest’s adaptive management — policy making rooted in scientific research and monitoring.
I’m a big fan of trying to ‘grow’ a multiple use, old growth forest on the Siuslaw. The ‘benefits’ of clearcutting don’t justify the impacts, IMHO. I think we could ‘mitigate’ the impacts of turning vast acreage into older forests, with limited active management.
Thanks! On my phone I didn’t see the colors for the link.