Another link from Nick Smith:
Guest Essay – NEPA as a Scapegoat
Excerpt:
This essay was sent to us by a long-time US Forest Service employee in response to comments I made yesterday on the Lookout Livestream. It addresses some of the structural problems crippling the US Forest Service, and provides their perspective on major changes they experienced across their career on the Lassen National Forest, in Northern California.
While I certainly would agree that NEPA, like probably any government process, can be streamlined, I also believe that NEPA has become a scapegoat to direct attention away from more fundamental issues within the agency.
The reason I feel this way is that I know how productive the Lassen was during the Quincy Library Group (QLG) period. Forest employees were working their asses off trying to meet annual targets that were legislated to meet, but the morale was high and the Forest was productive, much more productive than now.
Yep. That just about covers the bases. It is very worthwhile reading.
I worked on the Lassen from 1986 to 1988, as a Temporary Employee, in my first timber job. Overstory Removal was the name of the game, back then. I was appalled that we were cutting ALL the big ones.
On my next Forest (the Eldorado), we also had similar changes in management direction, due to spotted owls. However, those next 4 years were spent salvaging beetle-killed trees over the entire Ranger District.
I do think a lot of us Temporary Employees became jaded, and changed careers. The Lassen had some policies that limited my potential to become a permanent employee. Congress didn’t want to fund permanent positions for such jobs.
My first job out of forestry school was on the El Dorado, and I marked a lot of very large trees over 4 seasons as a technician. And didn’t agree with much of the “timber mining.” It was purely “get out the cut,” not silviculture in most cases. I complained a bit, which may be one reason I didn’t get the permanent job I wanted. My next job was as a choker setter/knot bumper for a small logging outfit, and I worked in sales I had helped mark. There were a few one-log loads, and lots with 3 or 4 logs. I’m glad those days are long gone.
Thanks for the link, Steve! What do people think about the prescribed fire idea?
“The issues are many, and complex, but the agency seems to have largely lost its relevance in land management. An agency can not have relevance if it does not have resolve. The agency can’t keep trying to perpetuate the myth that it is still a ‘can do’ agency. The agency needs to acknowledge failure and then take meaningful steps to address the issues that have caused the failure. As long as those in leadership continue to profess optimism about the agency or who still work to perpetuate the myth, it will continue to decline. It is much easier for USFS leadership to point a finger of blame at something external to the agency, like the NEPA process, than to point that same finger at itself.
One fundamental change I can think of that would help the current situation is for the agency to abandon its annual timber volume accomplishment targets and instead focus primarily on accomplishing prescribed fire. The silviculture-first approach to management, with prescribed fire as a followup or secondary treatment, that has always been the agency’s approach, is obviously not working. And by continuing regarding prescribed fire only as a followup or secondary treatment the agency may never truly address and resolve the issues that prevent greater use of prescribed fire.”
But accomplishing prescribed fire very often must be preceded by fuels reduction, where there’s too much fuel to use Rx fire safely. That can be done with or without a commercial harvest; revenue from the a commercial harvest in theory helps pay for the fuels work.
FWIW, I recently talked with the owner of a logging outfit in the central Sierras who is doing mostly fuels reduction, including log sales to mills and — this is cool — selling some of the small-diameter material to a company that makes animal bedding and (as either small logs or chips) to a power plant that produces much of the electricity used in that county. That’s a model I’d like to see used elsewhere.
When I was a young sprout, when I lived in Lakeview, I used to get shavings for my horse free in big piles from Lakeview Lumber. I later found that somewhere around there was a uranium tailings pond. And so it goes, uranium is coming back and folks are charging for animal bedding…”plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”
I was in a webinar yesterday on grants and agreements, and they pointed out that receipts from (if I recall, will post when I get the recording) some grants don’t go to the Treasury but go to more restoration work. Which is great except that it could be argued that it transfers big log lust to the grantee from the FS.
I think Zeke’s most important point is the lack of personnel to carry out NEPA work. The increase of funding to grow the fire program took money away from other resource areas, especially recreation, but timber too. The lack of certain specialists, such as archeologists, create pinch points for getting the necessary work done to complete environmental analyses. When I was still working, we would go through a budgeting/project prioritizing process every year. The forest had one archeologist and one part-time assistant and often the process would determine that they needed to work 800+ (sometimes over 1,000) days in a single year to get the work done to support NEPA for priority projects.
A few comments on Zeke’s opinion on abandoning timber targets and focusing on prescribed burning. First, timber targets drive projects. Timber targets include both commercial and non-commercial work, such as timber stand improvement work. If commercial timbering dries up, so do local mills (already has in many areas), which then narrows the tools available to manage forests. Additionally, my understanding is that the most effective land management projects to reduce fire intensity/severity is a combination of thinning and prescribed fire, not prescribed fire by itself. In fact, many areas have to be thinned first before they are burned due to the density of the fuels. Thinning may or may not involve removing commercial grade timber. There is no one size fits all kind of thing.
Also, don’t most forests in the West have prescribed fire targets? This is part of the problem too. I believe there is a lot of pressure applied from above the forest level to meet prescribed burning targets. This in turn may lead to taking chances that can result in escaped burns.
As for employee morale…. My understanding is funding and the bureaucracy around hiring are having some of the biggest impacts on employee morale – that is based on what I am hearing from employees with a sample size of just one national forest though.
Losing the timber industry isn’t “losing tools,” at least not the tools we need for legit ecological restoration. The agency desperately needs to get over its unhealthy co-dependent relationship with the timber industry, timber targets, and timber sales. There is so much work to do, and timber sales are not the best way to do it.
Just a quick comment about the effectiveness of Rx fire vs. Rx fire + thinning. Yes, all the studies I have seen find that Rx fire + thinning is more effective than Rx fire alone (but not all that much more effective, just a little bit, see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037811272400197X).
Regardless, I think Rx fire vs. Rx fire + thinning is an unfair comparison. In the case of Rx fire + thinning, the site received two treatments, not one, and the treatments often occurred a few years apart. A single entry Rx burn kills some live vegetation, which generates fuels. A second burn would treat the fuels generated in the first entry. For this reason, a fair comparison would be two Rx burns in the same time period as the application of Rx fire + thinning.
What I’ve gotten out of these discussions and papers is that burning is what counts. If you can’t burn without thinning, then you thin because you want to burn, not because it adds to the effectiveness.
I recently spoke with Gila NF timber staff Gabe Partido who talked about the common use of fell/skid/deck contracts as segue to sale of roundwood in decks to local buyers. I hope this is becoming standard practice while FS has money available to do stewardship work. They bid on per acre basis, avoiding speculative purchase of stumpage. Mills (small and large) can focus of producing wood products, while small loggers (forest stewards?) can get paid directly with strong incentives for efficiency, while avoiding getting “pinched” between agency and industry,
Jim, I wonder why that’s not more common? I’d like to hear more about it. Do they auction the material from the decks (like mills bid on the material in a certain number of decks?). What happens if no one wants it (what are commercial firewood markets like)? Would you be willing to find out more and write a post?
This is a great paper and points many of the problems in today’s USFS. It should go one step further and discuss how the agency got where it is. The administration is much more involved in running the agency than in the past. This includes personal action to change the cultural nature of the agency and people who are seen as lets get it done types are not necessarily picked and certainly they have no concern for producing usuable raw material in any form. Again well written paper and a good start to getting at the real culprits. And NEPA is still a problem
I don’t like paying loggers to log on National Forest Lands; IRSC’s in particular when it comes to merch timber! Having IRSC’s for non-merch, fuels reduction, or any other host of cultural treatments (pre-commercial thinnings, for instance) is a fine use of that authority. However, some sense of identifying the need and end result should always move the stick forward; that’s not the case in every situation.
As for the Gila, they have a very small timber shop and program; back in the day, the RO timber staff ask me (A-S) to do their timber program for them. As performance appraisals came around, the RF asked me why we overspent timber by $600,000? We ran about 5 million per year in our timber program so I didn’t even think much about it. Well, the RF was furious; he asked me specifically “why”, so I told him to ask his staff – I don’t work for free! 🤣🤣.
Also, if the FS doesn’t support and promote those who get things done, it will certainly not end well….