Here’s a link to the E&E news story. I can’t tell if this is really concern about priorities and accomplishments, or some form of political theater, or both.
Agency Chief Randy Moore has told lawmakers he doesn’t think thinning more acreage, by cutting vegetation or lighting prescribed fires or both, is necessarily the best way to show the Forest Service’s progress on that front. What works better in Moore’s view is treating the right acres in the right places, which may not mean much more land area.
That approach, however, isn’t getting great reviews from Republicans. Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), the ranking member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, called the idea “ridiculous” at a recent hearing. He accused the Forest Service of changing the metric to skirt responsibility for treating fewer acres in national forests.
Now, House appropriators are demanding additional information on just what Moore means, putting that request in the report language accompanying the fiscal 2025 Interior spending bill.
Seems like the Chief could report acres for now, and explain in words why those are the right acres. Maybe maps of where projects occurred, and a table of who prioritized them, what was done, and costs? Is it just theatrical bashing, or are there real questions there? We can’t tell from here in the cheap seats.
That bill passed the House Wednesday. The Senate Appropriations Committee marks up its own bill Thursday, after which report language will be released.
The math is daunting for the Forest Service. The agency says 63 million of the 193 million acres it manages are at high risk for wildfire, and last year it treated slightly more than 4 million acres.
Does anyone know where the table is that shows mechanical treatments, PB and Wild Fire With Benefits acres?
That was a record high. Moore touted it in a column posted on the Forest Service web site in November 2023, calling the work progress toward the agency’s initial goal of addressing the 250 highest-risk areas in the West.
“Going into this year, we know we must keep our focus and build upon this accomplishment. With more than 19 million acres still left to treat, this year we plan to exceed last year’s accomplishments as we realize the capacity we built throughout the past year,” Moore said.
However, officials say the total acreage treated will decline in 2024, as will timber harvests for the coming fiscal year — a seeming contradiction that prompted the exchange with Barrasso at the May 17 hearing.‘Where did they get these numbers’
In the House report, appropriators would direct the Forest Service and Interior Department to tell Congress within 45 days how the agencies will report on outcomes beyond acres treated. Whether the language makes it into a final House-Senate measure remains to be seen, and it wouldn’t have the force of law — but failing to follow such directions can put agency heads in trouble with appropriators.
House appropriators said in the report, “The committee believes that using proven, existing, commercially available advanced decision support tools and analytics are important for accomplishing this task and evaluating the real-world outcomes of forest treatments and ensuring Federal investments yield the highest returns in terms of risk mitigation and forest system health.”
This is really confusing because (1) acres treated is not an “advanced decision support tool”, it’s just counting.. acres treated, and doubles and all those problems. We all understand that if you’re going for acres, you might focus on areas that are cheap or easy, and highest priority areas may not be cheap or easy, in fact, they probably don’t involve harvestable timber at all, in many places. (2) Chief Moore isn’t getting rid of counting acres, but adding more info, it sounds like. I’d just prefer that he used words and maps versus some potentially bogus computed numbers, but that’s just me. Maybe this is a communication problem
At the Senate hearing, Moore said he’d welcome a chance to discuss the matter with lawmakers. And forest policy groups said Moore has a point — to an extent.
“Right treatment, right place, right scale, right timing makes sense,” said Nick Smith, a spokesperson for the American Forest Resource Council, representing the timber industry. What doesn’t make sense, he said, is that the Forest Service seems to veer from its own prior messaging.
The agency’s own 10-year wildfire strategy calls for treating 20 million acres of national forests and 30 million acres of other lands.
“Where did they get these numbers and why did they set them as goals if it’s not about quantity and that’s the wrong metric?” Smith said.
To Nick’s point, I think they had to come up with a number, they used what they had at the time, and “the right acres” is a much more complicated question than acres, let alone “conditions have changed to help fire suppression or make forests more resilient.” Communities, Districts, Regions and states are in competition for federal bucks, so we can imagine that any supposedly scientific efforts to prioritize will have winners and losers. Some of us remember many previous efforts in that direction.
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The Justice 40 Initiative- a bit of a sidetrip:
Plus there is the “Justice 40” initiative which conceivably applies to the Forest Service.
For the first time in our nation’s history, the Federal government has made it a goal that 40 percent of the overall benefits of certain Federal climate, clean energy, affordable and sustainable housing, and other investments flow to disadvantaged communities that are marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution.
Last year, the White House issued formal Interim Implementation Guidance directing all Federal agencies to identify and begin transforming their programs covered under the Justice40 Initiative – which agencies are currently implementing.
What kinds of investments fall within the Justice40 Initiative? The categories of investment are: climate change, clean energy and energy efficiency, clean transit, affordable and sustainable housing, training and workforce development, remediation and reduction of legacy pollution, and the development of critical clean water and wastewater infrastructure.
Do fuel treatments count as a “climate change” investment? I think you could argue it either way, depending on how much you wanted access to the buck fountain. Well, it turns out that every agency has to come up with a list of covered programs. Here’s the Forest Service’s list.
Forest Service
18. Abandoned Hard Rock Mine and Orphaned Oil and Gas Well Reclamation
19. Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program∗,3
20. Hazardous Fuels Management*,3
21. Ecological Health Restoration Contracts*
22. Financial Assistance to Facilities That Purchase and Process Byproducts for Ecosystem Restoration Projects*
23. Landscape Scale Restoration Water Quality and Fish Passage*
24. Recreation Sites*
25. Restoration Projects Via States and Tribes*,3
26. Restore Native Vegetation on Federal/Non-Federal Land*,3
27. Revegetation Effort to Implement National Seed Strategy*
28. Climate-related Training
29. Joint Chiefs Landscape Restoration Partnership
30. Reducing Wildfire Risk to Tribes, Underserved, and Socially Vulnerable Communities
31. Tribal Authorities
32. Urban and Community Forestry Program
33. Land and Water Conservation Fund∗ Denotes programs that received funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, P.L. 117-58.
3 These programs and funding line items are listed as covered under the Justice40 Initiative because of the inclusion
criteria set. In practice, these items fund a broad array of different activities, and therefore will likely not be subject
to the development of a comprehensive benefits methodology or reporting.
And of course, the un-ground-truthed, sometimes bogus maps, using data from private actors, that we covered here and here. Might be fun for some GIS students to map where all the $ for those programs went, and if it matches the CEQ/EPA maps.
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I’m glad that Marc Heller interviewed Nick Smith. and Tony Mazzo of SAF.
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I do not know what “lighting prescribed fires” are/means. I would appreciate some help on this. Thank you. A Call to Action [rev. 17.9], page 21, concludes:
“…Let there be no doubt, the health of America’s forests is declining. Wildfires are destroying lives and property, reducing air quality, altering critical wildlife habitat and killing millions of animals
needlessly. Forests in declining health, the impacts of a changing climate, and the expanding Wildland-Urban Interface, has created a volatile mixture that has led to the current national emergency. Now, it is time to step forward with a concentrated effort [5-7 years] and begin to address the 19-20 million acres annually of forests across our country that need some type of restorative action – about 8 million acres each year on the National Forests.”
I agree that the right kind, place and time is a good thing. 20 million acres over 10 years on National Forests [ about 2 million acres each year] will not constitute real, meaningful change even if the 3 “rights” are perfectly met. There has simply been too much neglect [lack of forest maintenance] over the past 30+ years.
Very respectfully,
I am sorry about my previous comment. I saw “lighting” and my mind concluded “lightning.” I have no excuse for my incompetence. I do understand that Rx Fire begins by “lighting” it [the Prescribed Fire]. I just have not personally used that verb in front of Rx Fire before.
Sharon said:
“I can’t tell if this is really concern about priorities and accomplishments, or some form of political theater, or both.”
It’s both. It’s always both.
Hi Michael: I’ve found that age is a great go-to excuse for misreading things these days — and is often responsible in many cases. Lighting is much closer to lightning than lightening, which seems to be the error of choice among younger readers.
The positive result of your mistake is an opportunity to cite a key point in Call to Action. Maybe good to post a few other relevant sections from that document during the current fire season? Jon, for example, cites authorities that support his perspective that a century of fire suppression, rather than 35 years of federal mismanagement, are largely responsible for current conditions. What portion of Call to Action addresses that point, and what authorities can be cited in response to Jon’s assertions?
It would probably be a good thing to total the amount of acres at risk where timber sales are difficult to impossible, for many various reasons.
When each fuels treatment can be counted/replicated from two to six times in FACTS reporting, how the heck do you know what the true acres are?
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna41576
If it were me, I would work on that first. Take a prescription. Is it mechanical treatment and prescribed fire or both? If it’s both, and only the mechanical part is done, count half.
This is good information. I watched the Senate hearing and when Moore brought up that maybe a different metric was needed, it went over like a lead balloon. Politicians like acres, it’s something they can easily understand. If there is a change to “right acres” and it results in a significant reduction in total acres, that will not go over well with the timber industry. Good luck on this one, Chief Moore.
On a slightly different note, we have had one smokey week here in South Dakota, coming from the Canadian fires in British Columbia and Alberta. I did a little checking and in BC, they harvest about 77 million cubic meters/year. I had a hard time converting that to CCF but it appears to be a lot of timber. They have had a pretty consistent harvest level going back to 1975. Before that, it was significantly less. If lots of timber harvesting is the answer and climate change is a hoax, why does it seem like every year lately, we are now getting smoked out from Canada? I grew up in North Dakota in the 70’s and only remember one summer when we had some smoke from Saskatchewan. It does not appear that lawsuits are the issue either. Just curious.
Some of the fires are not actually boreal, though, so there’s that. And the Canadians do super-big boxes in relatively uninhabited country.
I think “timber harvesting” by itself is probably not the thing, it would be “intentional cutting of trees with the intention to help fire suppression efforts and reduce fuels.” Not the same.
It could also be the ultimate result of years of fire suppression… and the Hotshot Wakeup had some stuff last year about problems with the wildfire workforce including pay. So lots of different forces out there.
I agree that generic timber harvesting and intentional cutting for fire mitigation are not necessarily the same thing. However, there are those that say that the timber harvesting in the 50’s through the 70’s and 80’s is what created the conditions back then that prevented the large fires that we have today. I don’t believe they were doing all of that logging back in those days in the interest of fire mitigation, it was simply commercial logging, often of the largest trees that were the least susceptible to wildfires.
I guess the point I was making is that those who say the solution is lots of logging and no lawsuits are the answer to our problems, well that situation already exists. It is in Western Canada. I don’t have a lot of knowledge of what is happening in Western Canada but it doesn’t appear to be preventing us from getting smoked out every summer by them. I know they fight fire differently up there and often use the big box approach. That is probably part of the situation. However, they have had some really bad outcomes in WUI and just had a fire enter Jasper in Jasper National Park.
As you say, the whole situation is complex, it just bothers me when people say if only we stopped the lawsuits and turned the loggers loose, we could solve the problem. I am confident that it is not that easy.
Yup I agree. Oversimplification is not helpful.
Hi Dave: Two points: First, I’ve never heard anyone say “if only we stopped the lawsuits and turned the loggers loose, we could solve the problem.” I do know that one reason we had only one major fire in western Oregon for the 35 years from 1952 to 1987 is because we had a skilled workforce on familiar roads with walk-talkies, pickup trucks, cats, and chain saws and a policy to put out fires ASAP, and especially if you had to work through the night. Some claim that “only old-growth” were being clearcut, but that’s not true, either. The history of railroads and tie mills should be better known. “Turning loggers loose” and “active forest management” are two entirely different animals.
Second, the climate is always changing and people and most wildlife have always adapted. To say that the future can be predicted, and that the predictions are bad, so we need to do what our leaders tell us to do in order to avoid a bad future is politics and religion. The priests used the threat of Hell and collection plates in medieval times for the same reason.
Hi Bob, I follow the “Federal Forest Resource Coalition” and “Healthy Forest, Healthy Communities” and “We the Forest” and others and that is a common theme in these organizations and with the people that follow them. I also track some politicians and what they say in Congressional Hearings. Not all of them, but many do not have a nuanced approach regarding a solution to the wildfire crisis. The common theme is that lawsuits are the problem and we need to let the loggers loose. Of course, I am paraphrasing, but that is the gist.
I certainly believe that there are frivolous lawsuits and that they are part of the problem. I also believe lawsuits are being used as big part of blame because people don’t really want to get into the complexities of the situation.
It was reported that last Monday was the world’s hottest day ever recorded, breaking Sunday’s record. In and of itself, it may not mean anything, but when added up with a lot of other information, it may mean something. I guess I disagree with your point that since the future is unknown, we should not do any planning or take any measures with the information that we have (if indeed that is what you were saying). As they say, hope is not a strategy.
Thanks Dave: I appreciate the thoughtful replies. From what you say, it sounds like “turn the loggers loose” is a general summary that includes foresters, road builders, truck drivers, camp managers, and tree planters working full-time jobs through local forestry businesses like in the “old days.” My thoughts are that priorities should be road and trail maintenance, salvage logging and site prep, careful location and maintenance of trees 150 years of age and older, and much (much) better reforestation planning and plan implementation. Followed by systematic transformation of industrial-style plantations to better considered future conditions.
I also agree with the “hope-in-one-hand” philosophy of dealing with perceived future conditions. My perspective is more one of trust than of hope. The climate is always changing and despite recent (“3+ decades”) claims of terrible weather in the future, I have been dealing with other scientists on this issue since the early 1990s and all of the computerized doom-and-gloom prophesies from that time until now, and none of those predicted fears have come to pass. And I see no real indication — other than promoted through the media and grant applications — that things will change dramatically anytime soon. And if they do, I think we’ll respond accordingly. Light bulbs, TVs, and carbon credits ain’t it.
I think that your priorities are pretty good, unfortunately, timber industry lobbyists and politicians may not totally agree with you. That is how we end up with an emphasis on acres and volume. With regards to addressing the wildfire crisis, it is the equivalent of the body count during the Vietnam War. That didn’t work out so well.
I agree that the whole climate change thing contains a degree of uncertainty and fuzziness. I sure don’t think I have all the answers. However, the truth of the matter is, that whatever consequences there may be for inaction today will not be experienced by you and me, it will be experienced by our children and grandchildren.
I actually think that mindful forest management is the best way to address climate change regarding forests. Healthy, well-thinned stands that have been prescribed burned, require less moisture and if not thinned too heavily, are better prepared for droughts and temperature swings.
“If there is a change to “right acres” and it results in a significant reduction in total acres, that will not go over well with the timber industry.”
I would change that slightly to “significant reduction in commercial timber harvest.” And it is reasonable for those who want more logging to equate fewer acres treated to less commercial logging. The “right” acres for the timber industry are those with big trees on them.
Interesting question on smoke and Canadian fires Dave, I did some looking and found the actual acreage of wildfires are much less than 150 years ago. Here is the link, if I can get it to paste….
https://www.preventionweb.net/news/forest-fires-north-americas-boreal-forests-are-burning-lot-less-150-years-ago.
Good information, Jim. Thanks for sharing. I guess it does make some sense. At the end of the article, they offer some explanations and came up with climate change and the advent of advanced fire suppression systems and methods as an explanation. I think it is worth looking at what is going on in Western Canada because they have much fewer impediments to timber harvesting than we do on our National Forests, and yet they are still having a real wildfire problem.
Dave, I believe our climate is changing, for sure; I’m just not convinced taxing folks silly, crazy impediments to farming, forestry and transportation will do anything except make life harder! I really believe, if folks think about the smoke, mega-fires, wildfires, etc, the biggest change we have is the explosion of people walking around on this planet. Folks are everywhere!
I agree, the response to climate change needs to be well thought out and I have not seen anything so far that I would call well thought out. Politicians do knee-jerk stuff that caters to their base, it doesn’t matter if it will actually make a difference. I also agree that we may have exceeded our carrying capacity as humans!
There is a fair amount of data that shows that you can alter fire behavior (at a large scale) by treating about 30% of the acres, and as you treat more acres, you have to do a lot of them to add any further alteration in behavior (the curve flattens). So yes, there is a lot of theater, but the relationship between acres treated and fire behavior is not linear.