We have some folks at TSW of these varying positions.
(1) No managed fire
(2) Some managed fire if…
(3) Current approach is fine, no changes needed.
There’s much possible territory to discuss in (2). There’s my idea.. to do a stand-down of plan revisions and OG amendments until wildfire amendments are completed for all wildfire-prone NFs. The wildfire amendments would have an EIS, development and maintenance of PODs and fuelbreaks, conditions for managed fire, areas delineated for prescribed fires, and coordination with communities’ efforts, plus public involvement.
What other ideas are out there? Nadine Bailey has some in her comments on the NW Forest Plan on Canva. She explains her views and experiences very clearly and she has great photos.
areas, so that we can work on the communities and areas that are at the highest risk.
The other thing that strikes me is that the NWFP amendment process is going forward without a formal and open lessons learned of what might have gone better with the NWFP. Of course, JWT never meant that to happen, as we see in Nadine’s slide above, and he was a knowledgeable and well-meaning individual. So why did have bad things to wildlife and watersheds and people apparently resulted? Was that actually from the NWFP or from other causes?
What worked well and what didn’t? And, as I’ve said before, why do we have lessons learned for a GS-5 who rolls a four-wheeler, but not for the massively disruptive policy interventions? It’s almost as if the greater the impact to the public, the less we think any kind of improvement is important. Are we afraid to question powerful people? Trust in government= accountability plus transparency plus access. Whoops, sorry about the soapbox.
Back to “what do you think of Nadine’s ideas?” Do you have other ideas?
Well, color me surprised, but I couldn’t agree more that we need to “do a stand-down of plan revisions and OG amendments until wildfire amendments are completed for all wildfire-prone NFs. The wildfire amendments would have an EIS, development and maintenance of PODs and fuelbreaks, conditions for managed fire, areas delineated for prescribed fires, and coordination with communities’ efforts, plus public involvement.” This is essentially calling for place-based strategies.
I do think it’s a leap of faith to assume, without any evidence, that if only the NWFP had been different that the wildfire problem would be just fine and JWT would not have been standing there in 2014 looking at black sticks. The USFS is good at accomplishing fuels treatments that include commercial, but not so good at maintaining treated areas or treating fuels in areas that don’t have much volume or areas that are more than 1/4 mile from a road. This would be the same under whatever plan they operate. I do not foresee any change to the current trend (except that we’ll run out of green forests to burn), without getting better at treating fuels without a commercial harvest component.
I think that that differs by part of the country, for example, I don’t think that this was commercial https://www.vaildaily.com/news/breckenridge-wildfire-cause-fuel-reduction/ Dead lodgepole in Breckenridge.
I thought the “Billions” of dollars the FS received was for treating areas of non-commercial ground. Prioritization of WUI treatments, then moving outward into the general forest area. If there was a robust forest products industry operating in the arid West, conditions would not be so dire, as it relates to wildfire!
As for the question at hand on Nadine Bailey’s list, there is/are multiple “Commandment’s” located across this great land of ours that have been handed down through decades of lessons learned. A few: in Region 2, no managed fire in the beginning of fire season – June 1 through August 30 (or monsoon), Region 3 – no managed fire until monsoon begins; Region 3 begins to become flammable in April, Region 8 – no managed fires during times of high KDBI, etc. Also, risk management when the National Planning Level is “3”, and ascending. Of course there are exceptions, and that’s why most managed fires are approved in the RO.
A couple of observations:
o Nadine’s recommendations re: Rx fire use seem eminently sensible. Do the agencies really not do these things routinely? And if so, why not?
o The agencies do not usually do specific “lessons learned” reports on their land management plans, because it is generally not easy to characterize a plan as a success or a failure. But the Forest Service issues mandatory periodic monitoring reports on each forest plan in effect. The NWFP reports are here:
https://www.fs.usda.gov/r6/reo/riec/
Readers looking for NWFP letter grades won’t find them here, but the reports provide plenty of detailed information on how things did not turn out as planned.
The REO trail seems to go cold in 2013. Would be interesting to know if this virtual office is still staffed in any way. The cynic in me suspects that as Oregon moved from purple to blue the DC folks lost interest in R6 and the NWFP. Perhaps other commenters can disabuse me of this bleak notion!
Thanks for the links, Rich! I looked at this 20 year monitoring that ended in 2015 https://www.fs.usda.gov/r6/reo/monitoring/downloads/socioeconomic/Nwfp20yrMonitoringReportSummarySocioeconomic.pdf
It looked a bit generic. The kind of lessons learned I meant are at the broader and more specific level. For example, I remember colleagues complaining that only one person in the world was able to discern between two closely related species for Survey and Manage. Did Survey and Manage help anything or did it become a pointless process? How did it change between as originally conceived and how it is today?
What about Adaptive Management areas .. did they work as planned (I also have heard not). Why not?
What I’m thinking is that there were good ideas, but also lots of unnecessary overhead and things that actually didn’t work in practice. When it was time to remove hazard trees from roads (do something real) did the NWFP help or hurt or was it irrelevant? Given that the USFWS is now shooting barred owls, did the NWFP work in “saving the owls”? Anyway, if I were Queen, I would start with asking folks around the Region what they hoped it would do and what it actually seems to be doing at this time.
Hi Sharon:
I have been involved with the NWFP since Day 1, having evolved from FEMAT and the Clinton Plan. Here are some excerpts from an editorial I am currently writing on the topic of “hope vs. reality”:
Thirty years ago we had been promised the NWFP would produce good jobs, safe havens for our threatened wildlife, and protect our remaining old-growth trees, but instead we got failed businesses, rural unemployment, catastrophic wildfires, dead trees, and deadly smoke. What went wrong and how to fix?
The NWFP had its beginning 31 years ago, in 1993. President Bill Clinton had held a public all-day meeting in Portland to address the “timber wars” that had been taking place for several years between environmental activists and the forest industry.
Clinton’s meeting resulted in the formation of FEMAT, or Forest Ecosystem Management Team: a small group of like-minded scientists from OSU and UW, and notable for not having any public, Tribal, or industry representation, or involving any social scientists as members — just academic forest ecologists, wildlife biologists, GIS techs, and economists.
Clinton then made the following challenge to FEMAT:
“How can we achieve a balanced and comprehensive policy that recognizes the importance of the forest and timber to the economy and jobs in this region, and how can we preserve our precious old-growth forests, which are part of our national heritage and that, once destroyed, can never be replaced?”
He then described “five principles” he wanted the scientists to consider:
The first principle was to “never forget the human and the economic dimensions of these problems,” that timber sales should be based on “sound management policies,” and “where this requirement cannot be met, we need to do our best to offer new economic opportunities for year-round, high-wage, high-skill jobs.”
The second principle was to protect our forests, wildlife, and waterways for future generations; third was to use sound science and follow the law; fourth was a “sustainable level of timber sales and non-timber resources,” and the final principle was to “make the federal government work together and work for you” and to “insist on collaboration not confrontation.”
I had been hired to do research by one of the lead scientists at the outset of FEMAT, but it soon became apparent we had differences in forest management philosophies. Instead, I was hired by industry to do an analysis of the Clinton Plan and my reasoned predictions of catastrophic wildfires and widespread rural unemployment soon made the cover Jim Petersen’s national Evergreen Magazine magazine. And were then forgotten.
Other scientists — and many experienced forest managers and workers — had similar concerns. Chad Oliver at UW, for example, using different research methods and sources, independently came up with similar predictions. And unlike the FEMAT models that projected vast stands of old-growth, growing populations of rare wildlife species, and good-paying employment in a diverse economy, Oliver’s and my projections were accurate.
Clinton’s five principles were not new: they were based on a proven Forest Service foundation of the 1897 Organic Act; the 1935 10:00 A.M. Policy; and the Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield Act of 1960. The result had been in safe, beautiful forests, thriving wildlife, widespread meaningful employment, new schools, parks, and homes — and only a single wildfire in excess of 10,000 acres for 35 years, from 1952 until 1987.
Spotted owls became an “endangered species in 1990, lawsuits followed, and then catastrophic wildfires, deadly smoke, and rural unemployment ever since. As predicted.
If a return to Clinton’s proven “five principles” or other corrective actions aren’t undertaken at some point, then poor schools, poor jobs, deadly smoke, dead wildlife, ugly landscapes, and continued catastrophic wildfires remain certain. This didn’t have to happen and should have been fixed a long time ago. Long-held opinion.
Bob, I remember some kind of disagreement between the social scientist Bob Lee and Charlie Philpot of the PNW, I think about FEMAT. Does anyone else remember this? It seems like an interesting bit of history. Sadly, Bob’s not around anymore so I can’t ask him.
Hi Sharon: I think I only talked with Bob Lee once and maybe corresponded a time or two, and didn’t know Philpot at all. If anyone would have the details on this, I think it would be Jim Petersen or Chad Oliver. And Jerry Franklin or Norm Johnson. It was an interesting time and the history should be revisited — we’ve been experiencing the aftermath of their actions in the Douglas Fir Region ever since and I don’t think most people realize what a small handful of academics created the NWFP in the first place.
Great idea! Thanks
The 2012 Planning Rule requires that the agency identify “the need to change the plan based on the assessment.” I envisioned this doing the kinds of things you are suggesting, but what I’ve seen so far tends to be vague, and then not obviously used in plan development. It seems like it should also be a focus of scoping since it should also become the “purpose and need” for the proposed action addressed under NEPA (which should then frame the alternatives).
There has been a lot written about the NWFP and a lot of work was done before the current amendment process started. I’m sure that most of that information is available on the NWFP Amendment website. The Federal Advisory Committee public meetings are also available there where a lot of this is also discussed.
REO is still around. It’s only a couple of people, but it still exists. And those people have other jobs, so their REO roles are a collateral duty.
Some regions do well with Rx fire, some do very poorly. I have only worked in 3 regions, so I can only speak to those. The Southwest bags a lot of acres with Rx fire and wildfire managed for resource benefits, but they have a very small commercial industry to fall back on and Rx fire and noncommercial treatments are the biggest tools in the box. The northwest does a poor job with getting acres broadcast burned. It’s typical to drive by numerous 20 year old treatments choked with brush on the way to the next commercial unit. Most of the Rx fire acres in R6 are not broadcast burned, they are piles burned a few years after the commercial and they count each acre as being treated twice (once for the commercial and once for the piles). California is getting much better with broadcast burning. Foresters and fuels staff in R5 have a more progressive attitude toward fire compared to R6, with R6 being 20 years behind in their way of thinking. I think this is partly due to so much of R6 being moist forest and not adapted to frequent fire.
My experience with the BIL money in R6 is that it has not been leading to significant acres of maintenance or non-commercial. There is very little industry capacity for this work and the feds don’t pay people enough to schlep a chainsaw all day on hot steep slopes. It is my understanding some of the forests planned to hire additional fuels crews but they didn’t get enough applications to actually fill the slots. So, without the industry and personnel to do the non-commercial work, the agency is largely planning to subsidize things like cable logging and helicopter logging in areas that were not accessible or didn’t have enough volume without subsidy.
I also see proposed projects largely being planned by foresters that are going after volume, resulting in random acts of thinning, rather than thoughtful projects with a clear wildfire strategy. But, keep in mind that they don’t have the staff or industry capacity to get many acres treated that don’t include commercial, so this makes sense if your goal is to get acres treated and your most reliable tool is commercial.
Shoot, I was recently on a project whereby the fuel breaks that had been planned for commercial were clearly not operational due to slope constraints, no ability to place a road to haul logs, and lack of volume to support even a subsidized cable operation. It’s as though a GS7 on detail from R9 and had never worked in the area planned the entire fuel strategy from their desk in Asheville. There was zero chance they’d ever be implemented and there were better locations nearby to locate a fuel break. I feel like a lot of what I am seeing are just paper exercises to get as many acres as possible on the books to show result to the bean counters, regardless of anyone actually field verifying that the plan is feasible and likely to be implemented. They then take the paper exercise and run it through a pre and post treatment fire model, and abracadabra, things are fixed on paper, the landscape would be resilient if we did the proposed action. I am all about getting acres on the books and to over-plan, but they should be feasible and in the right locations with the right prescriptions.
The REO!?!?…hahaha, yeah, there’s no REO.
Thank you so much for your observations, A!!!
I’m curious though.. it seems as if the existence of a large industry, combined with wet and “quickly growing back brush” conditions are only true of the west side of Region 6. Have you observed the same things on the east side?
If R-3 and other Regions can get non-commercial work done -by having staff and contracting work, I guess- why wouldn’t W side R-6 be able to do the same thing?
There’s plenty of ceanothus and shrubs on the eastside. In my mind, there are three forest types that occur below subalpine on the eastside: lower elevation very frequent fire P-pine with a persistent bunch grass understory, frequent fire dry mixed conifer with an understory mix of grass and shrub, and moderately frequent fire moist mixed conifer with vine maple and shrubs and very little bunch grass. Some areas are dominated by one of these three types, but some areas have quite a bit of moist forest. The areas north and west of Lake Wenatchee would be a good example of areas with quite a bit of some pretty darn moist eastside forest stands with a lot of shrub potential. From what I have observed, treating dry P-pine sites has fairly long lasting effectiveness for fuels treatments, but moist mixed conifer tends to have ladder fuels that bounce back much more quickly.
I have been told that they don’t get bids on the contracts with lots of non-commercial work on the eastside, so staff are reluctant to plan that stuff. Rx fire windows are also pretty short and staff are too wiped out after wildfire season or are training up in the spring during the spring window. WA also has some of the more constraining air quality restrictions in the west.
My opinion is that it is too late to focus on fire policy to save our National Forests.
Here is a CalTopo map from 2000 forward. Scroll around the west.
https://caltopo.com/map.html#ll=47.96746,-120.15043&z=13&b=mbt&a=fire_recent
It would be better to have a map of fires since the mega-fire era started in 1986. I have looked at the maps for the Okanogan-Wenatchee and they get your attention. Unfortunately, as the years go by we as humans forget that wildfires have significant cumulative effects.
Looking at that map would be sobering. We are losing our National Forests and Parks.
It is time to “triage” our public lands and identify those resources that we want to protect from wildfire. This would include the giant sequoia groves, cedar groves in Region One, historical and archeological sites, some Research Natural areas, and other important sites that we would lose in wildfires.
Identify those communities that are threatened by wildfires originating on public land and moving into communities.
The National Forests and other public lands of 1986 are gone for centuries. We need to identify the remnants that are worth protecting and saving for future generations.
After that I would entertain the procedures for saving those areas.
The Station Creek RNA on the Eldorado NF ( https://www.google.com/maps/@38.7707418,-120.1840041,2292m/data=!3m1!1e3?authuser=0&entry=ttu ) was burned over in the Caldor Fire. Judging from the new aerial photos, it looks like it burned pretty well through this ‘protected’ area. However, it is not surprising that this type of forest would burn well, especially after the bad bark beetle infestation during 1989-1992. Nothing was salvaged from the RNA. Additionally, the area is naturally heavy with highly-flammable true fir forests.
I guess this RNA is fulfilling its function, showing us what happens without human forest management. We must agree, though, that human impacts are (and have been) at work within the boundaries of this RNA for decades.
This has been nuts for quite a while. For thousands of years the idea of a “healthy forest” included a safe and healthy human population. Then in the 1980s “Deep Ecology” movement the idea that humans are forest pathogens became popular and Franklin and Spies informed us that a “healthy forest” had a bunch of big, dead trees everywhere, lots of big limbs and logs littering the forest floor, big old-growth trees here and there, and a multi-layered canopy of ladder fuels. And no roads.
This is how you build a bonfire, not maintain a forest. It was obvious to many professionals that this approach — soon adopted by President Clinton, the environmental industry, and opportunistic lawyers and politicians (also mostly lawyers) — would result in catastrophic wildfires, rural unemployment, loss of infrastructure, and millions of dead wild animals. Our predictions have been accurate, but the excuse became “climate change” rather than gross federal mismanagement of our lands. Those of us making accurate predictions were marginalized and joined the unemployed loggers, tree planters, road builders, and foresters while our forests burned. As predicted. Scientifically.