Toward a Fuel Treatment Zone of Agreement: Looking for Your Ideas

I’m working on a project for a conference in July.  My goal is to understand the views of environmental groups who are successful at influencing policy, either via political clout or via litigation, and to see whether there is a zone of agreement that could be imagined.  The goal being to increase the pace and scale of “restoration” (including fuel treatments) which is supported by all recent Administration, and to have such groups support the efforts at the least, or to help, at best.

I’m interested in getting feedback on my proposal and will touch base with The Smokey Wire as the project goes forward. Questions at this stage are below.

Here’s part of the writeup I did for a proposal.

“Some groups seem to support prescribed fire, but not mechanical treatment of fuels. While developing markets for woody material seems key to funding this work through time at the scale required, some organizations do not support these efforts. In some cases, they may think that those markets would ultimately lead to environmental degradation (pers. comm.). Many national groups are also active in efforts such as Wilderness legislation, and these designations would have impacts on suppression actions, as well as fuel treatments and, in some cases, the use of prescribed fire.

Where timber industry is active, we seem to have an endless conflict that is reminiscent of the old Timber Wars. Litigation holds up projects. Republicans want to streamline. Democrats argues that the methods used are bad, and that the R’s are in the pockets of the timber industry and want to destroy federal lands and so on.   Some scientists chime in with “logging won’t stop fires” and we’re off to the “talking past each other” races.

Meanwhile, other states without a history of Timber Wars simply want to develop some uses for material removed in mitigation efforts so that they can offset some costs, and not release carbon and particulates from burning piles. They may feel their views and needs are not seen at the national level because at that scale, the partisan framing of the issue has sucked all the oxygen (so to speak) out of the policy room. And the fact that Coloradans, New Mexicans, and Californians would like these markets for the material can’t ignite, or fan the flames of partisan factionalism.

To move into the future as we manage fire in a changing climate, we need to identify where we agree, and find national policies that suit both the Timber Wars and the market-free parts of the West.

For the purposes of this paper, I will focus two different kinds of groups. First are the litigators, and second, the national influencers who help set Administration policy and lobby Congress, which tend to be large national environmental groups. I will select five groups in each category.

For example, in the group of litigators would be Wild Earth Guardians, the Center for Biological Diversity, NRDC and others.

In the group of influencers would be the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, Defenders of Wildlife and others.

First, I will conduct a literature review on previous studies of these groups, and see if there has been any work done on their views on fire management. A preliminary review for this proposal has so far yielded nothing relevant.

Second, I will review the organizations’ websites for information on their views. For litigators, I will also use their comments on proposed projects to help understand their views.

Third, based on the website (and project comment) information, I will develop a series of questions and conduct interviews with key people in each organization. These interviews will include questions like “what are your concerns about current and future fire management?“ “do your concerns differ for private and federal lands?” “what does your organization currently contribute to discussions and implementation  of fire management policies?” and “what would it take for your organization to support interventions including mechanical fuel treatments, prescribed fire, and developing markets for small-diameter material?”. Other interview questions will be based on information found in the website review.

Fourth, based on these interviews, I’ll suggest some innovative policy ideas to be outlined in the paper.

So what groups do you think I should select and why? Have you run across any documentation of groups’ opinions? Have you seen any studies that examined views of environmental groups on this topic? Any other thoughts?

15 thoughts on “Toward a Fuel Treatment Zone of Agreement: Looking for Your Ideas”

  1. We need to publicly marginalize the extremists on BOTH sides. It is sad that people believe the lies of the extremists, blocking beneficial projects. One side says that cutting trees equals greed and destruction. The other side says that eco-groups “stopped all logging 30 years ago”.

    Reply
    • Try contacting the National Wild Turkey Federation about its work in New Mexico, the Bluewater and Zuni Mountains Stewardship projects on the Cibola National Forest. Back in 2017 when I visited the project areas, Scott Lerich, National Wild Turkey Federation (NWTF) senior regional biologist, said that the center for Biological Diverstiy was an important partner — they supported these large projects. Thinning, fuels, commercial timber sales. etc.

      You might also contact James Youtz, US Forest Service Region 3 Regional Silviculturist (Arizona, New Mexico). He told me, “We’re doing 20,000-acre projects, 50,000-acre projects.” He may be retired by now.

      Reply
  2. Supporting collaboration in any form is environmentally destructive.
    Taking the middle ground as you want to do is absurd and gets nowhere. Even including industry is a grave mistake.

    Reply
    • Preservationists don’t want any part of those awful “C-Words”… (Collaboration, Consensus and Compromise) It is important that we tackle them in that order, too. Republicans want limited collaboration, partisan consensus and rapid compromise. Democrats want equal opportunity for collaboration, consensus on ‘alternate’ forms of management, and partisan compromise.

      Personally, I think it would be a good thing to first do what everyone agrees is a good thing. We can always deal with the more controversial issues later.

      Reply
  3. The National Forest Foundation might be a group to talk to on this topic. They have participated in some interesting projects in Arizona involving prescribed fire and others treatments.

    Reply
  4. The Sierra Nevada Conservancy seems to have a good handle on what the Forest Service is successfully doing in those National Forests. With their status as a California State agency, they seem to have some credibility to what they advocate. They also have some State money behind them, to go that extra mile.

    Reply
  5. When you say: “My goal is to understand the views of environmental groups who are successful at influencing policy, either via political clout or via litigation, and to see whether there is a zone of agreement that could be imagined.”

    My first reaction is that in every discussion we’ve had you’ve been 100% bulletproof / dismissive of new science and research that supports the forest protection viewpoints of environmental groups. You’ve proven so loyal to the ‘logging is only way to pay the bills’ rhetoric of the USFS that you’re much like a fish that’s unaware of the water you swim in. And what you’re really saying, as well as how environmental litigants will react to what your saying is “how can I further undermine what little legal victories enviro groups have been able to achieve?”

    When it comes to forest thinning to prevent fire look at Paradise, CA. The entire landscape around this town of 27K people was intensively managed under the fraudulent claim of addressing fire suppression and fuels buildup. After the Camp Fire moved through even their downtown burned to the ground and the number of people who could still live in that town a year and a half late was reduced to 2K people. Three years later that population has barely doubled.

    As George Wuerthner yet again posted today the same truth that you will deny to you’re in your grave:

    “Active forest management including thinning and prescribed burns may make people feel good, but it is largely ineffective in protecting communities. What drives all large blazes are specific weather conditions that include drought, high temperatures, low humidity, and most importantly, wind. If you do not have such extreme fire weather conditions, you will not get a large fire. Indeed, most of all, wildfires self-extinguish because the weather conditions are not conducive to spread.” http://www.thewildlifenews.com/2021/05/17/ca-fire-budget-misguided/

    I can see you rolling your eyes already… Because science that doesn’t support more logging is not valid science in your peer group’s echo chamber. Specifically:

    “A study in Yellowstone National Park between 1972 and 1987 allowed 235 backcountry fires to burn without suppression. Of these blazes, 222 never got larger than 5 acres, and most were an acre or less. And all 235 self-extinguished without any suppression efforts.

    Another review of wildfire in the Rocky Mountains found that between 1980-2003, a total of 56,320 fires burned over 9 million acres. About 98% of these fires (55,220) burned less than 500 acres and accounted for 4% of the total area burned. By contrast, 2% of all fires accounted for 96% of the acreage burned. And 0.1% (50) of blazes were responsible for half of the acres charred.” http://www.thewildlifenews.com/2021/05/17/ca-fire-budget-misguided/

    And I know you’ll deny it, but the only thing your rhetoric is interested in preserving the unsustainable status quo, which is making money by getting the cut out. It’s the hill you’re willing to die on and you’re barely even conscious of how much this clouds your thinking. Or as the saying goes: “when all you got is a hammer, everything look like a nail.”

    I recommend you don’t waste your time preparing anything for this July event. You aren’t fooling the enviro litigants by saying you want to “better understand” them. You’ve shown in your every reply in these comment discussions on here that your mind is closed and you don’t want to understand anything other than:

    “to increase the pace and scale of “restoration” (including fuel treatments) ” which translates to not restoring the ecosystem, but restoring an unsustainable logging agenda with more rhetoric to justify more logging to further degrade those ecosystems in ways that does absolutely nothing to prevent catastrophic wildfire and everything to turn a barely recovering forest landscape into more money right now regardless of how much more severe the long term damage to the ecosystem gets created in the process. Specifically:

    “California’s largest fires in recent years—including the Creek Fire and August Complex in 2020 and the Camp Fire in 2018—burned through large vegetation management project areas in national forests and on private or state lands. None of these “fuel reductions” stopped the blazes. And worse for communities, a number of studies have found that “treated” lands burn with higher severity than natural landscapes. All of this suggests that the emphasis on “active forest management,” whether prescribed burns or thinning, does not work on the very fires we hope to contain. Indeed, there is evidence that logging/thinning can enhance fire spread by opening up the forest to greater drying and wind penetration.” http://www.thewildlifenews.com/2021/05/17/ca-fire-budget-misguided/

    Reply
    • You’re not convincing anyone with your trollish cherry-picking. Both the Creek Fire and the Rim Fire didn’t have any strong winds during the first several days. Both fires had documented examples of “column collapse”, resulting in HUGE rates of spread. There isn’t very much Forest Service land around Paradise, and some of that land went untreated since the previous wildfire. Additionally, some of that land was untouched, at all.

      Sadly, some people want to point at private logging practices, using them to blast Forest Service management. Same old story for preservationist types, and no workable solutions of their own.

      Reply
      • Come on Larry, really? Cherry Picking? References to fire statistics from tens of thousands of fires over many decades in Yellowstone and in the Rockies is cherry picking? Are you serious?

        And how about your references to back up the claim that 380K acres burned in the Creek Fire had huge rates of spread without wind? Where’s your references? A simple chart of daily rate of spread as relates to wind speed would suffice. Oh that’s right, you don’t have the time to back up your dishonest claim with a valid reference. And yes. I admit it would take a lot of searching and false equivalency making to come up with a reference that backs your grasping at straws claim. Meanwhile every fire commander who calculates rate of spread of their fire for the day does so with calculations primarily based on average wind speed. Didn’t you ever study wilfire management protocols?

        Then you reference the Camp Fire in your rationalization that forest service logging is somehow different or better than on private land and that bad management on private land gives the forest service management a bad rap?

        So 88 people died in Paradise on Nov. 8th because of a wildfire that “started Nov. 8 within or near the Forest Service boundary, burned 153,336 acres.” https://www.redding.com/story/news/2018/11/11/trump-blames-state-fires-but-many-worst-federal-land/1971196002/

        And you blame all those deaths and more than 20K people permanently displaced from their town by scapegoating private land logging that’s giving USFS logging a bad name just because they happened to be downwind of a fire on USFS land? How opportunistic of you to make all that loss of so many loved ones push your strawman arguments.

        Have you no sense of basic decency or honesty? The point that y’all are so desperate to ignore is catastrophic fires are weather driven events, not fuel driven events and allowing forests to keep growing in the same way they’ve been growing for millions of years is not safe?

        And the only reason “preservationist types have no workable solutions” is because folks like you and Sharron are hell bent on fraudulently discrediting and undermining any legal victory that threatens the unsustainable status quo of forever logging and never letting the original moisture holding, wind slowing original forests to return without logging it to death, which is what they do on private lands, its just that the USFS is more encumbered and slower. Reminds me of cops saying they only have a few bad apples that kill black people and they’re being unfairly discredited when the truth is there’s only been 7 cops convicted out of 16K deaths caused by cops since 2005.

        You must have a hard time sleeping at night and have to get up out of bed ridiculously early with a belief system as dishonest as yours, that’s for sure!

        Reply
        • “And the only reason “preservationist types have no workable solutions” is because folks like you and Sharron are hell bent on fraudulently discrediting and undermining any legal victory that threatens the unsustainable status quo of forever logging and never letting the original moisture holding, wind slowing original forests to return without logging it to death, which is what they do on private lands, its just that the USFS is more encumbered and slower. Reminds me of cops saying they only have a few bad apples that kill black people and they’re being unfairly discredited when the truth is there’s only been 7 cops convicted out of 16K deaths caused by cops since 2005.”

          I defy you to find a quote of me supporting clearcut forestry as the de facto logging technique to use. Here you are, again, using private logging as an example of what the Forest Service does. Here you are, again, accusing me of supporting private logging techniques. Here you are, again, calling me “dishonest”.

          It is easy enough to look up what the weather was, in a specific area, on a specific day. Did you? (I did!) There is also an awesome picture of the Creek Fire, with its column going absolutely straight up, for 10’s of thousands of feet. It is also no surprise that, after 3 or 4 days, the winds did come up and complicate things further, besides the massive fuel loads, dead trees and steep terrain. PLUS, there are many micro-climates, where elevational winds come into play (sinking cold air from high elevation).

          Nowhere have I said that thinning projects could ever stop every wildfire. Right-wingers often say that, but not me.

          Reply
  6. Sharon,

    I’m sure you could get some excellent “enviro” leads and perspectives from Matthew Koehler, as he often provides some valuable counter-points to pro-logging articles published on “The Smokey Wire;” I always appreciate his conservationist viewpoint, along with a few other contributors here.

    mike

    Reply

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