The NWFP: Norm Johnson on the AFRC Podcast on Hits and Misses, And Some Process Riffing by Me

Nick Smith had an excellent (to my mind) interview with OSU Professor Emeritus Norm Johnson, one of the folks involved in the development of the NW Forest Plan.  At first I was a bit skeptical, as I would be all for a formal review of what worked and what didn’t, perhaps led by OSU, and involving the public.  In the interview, Johnson goes over some of the things that were missed or downplayed (e.g. dry forests, Tribes) and suggests remedies. He and Debbie Johnson have written a report on it. Map is above.

But I would like to back up and ask more structural questions.

It continues to be suboptimal to me that we have parts of the FS who do a formal lessons learned for a vehicle rollover, and at the same time for a grand social, economic, and ecological experiment, we have .. not much.  Yes, researchers have studied what has happened via PNW reports like this or this (25 years) (the latter is a review of the science), or this Northwest Forest Plan- the first 10 years (1994-2003) synthesis of monitoring and research results.

Granted that I wasn’t working in the NW then, but I did hear from people working there, the problems with Adaptive Management Areas not being adaptively managed. One associate told me that there was only one academic who could tell the difference between two species that they had to survey in survey and manage.  Which leads me to two questions that might be relevant to future efforts.  I’m going to assume that there will be future efforts. I’m not criticizing what they did, I think everyone does the best that they can do at the time, but going forward, there are broader questions.

As Johnson says- what worked is that the NWFP reserved a great deal of forest, and that was good for NSO and other old growth species.

How Did They Miss This, and What Changes Should be Made This Time?

1.Tribal Involvement Then- Who is Left Out Now?

Are there other groups being left out currently? I understand that that was then and times have changed, so not criticizing the past, just saying in retrospect, the importance of their view are obvious.  Who or what groups are being left out this time?  When I worked in the FS, for example, I often found that the voices of employees who worked with say.. planning… were not necessarily at the table the same way other interests were.  Implementation is a thing.

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2. East-side and SW Oregon Forests Tend to Burn 

That “dry forests” (what we call them now)  behave differently was absolutely known at the time. I remember going on field trips in which East Side silviculturists said “if we do this, these stands will become tinderboxes and then owl habitat will burn.”  Why were their voices not heard or paid attention to?  Certainly, as we can see from the reports, there was a heavily researcher and heavily west-side based locus of researchers. Perhaps it’s the difference between “the best science” and “the best science produced by people studying west-side forests.”

Was it simply because of the old Oregon bias based on lack of universities on the East Side at the time- “if a tree burns up in the woods and no one at OSU has observed it, has it really burned?”

Was it because fuels researchers weren’t there at OSU at the time (disciplinary gap), or they weren’t asked to participate?

Was the scale planned at the time simply too big for important distinctions to be made? What about the folks and forests in SW Oregon and Northern California, which isn’t like the west side or the east side?

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3.  Results and Timing Very Bad for Some Communities

As I recall, and tried to find documentation for, there were also some researchers like Bob Lee who warned of negative impacts (leading to some kind of kerfuffle with Charlie Philpot, the then PNW Station Director.

Here we have at 10 years from Haynes et al abstract…

 The Plan anticipated greater timber harvests and more treatments to reduce fuel in fire-prone stands than have actually occurred. Monitoring showed human communities are highly variable, and it is difficult to disentangle overall growth in regional economies from the impacts of reduced timber harvests on federal land.

And from the first 25 years..

 These findings suggest that many rural communities in the NWFP area have experienced socioeconomic decline since 1994 and that changes to forest management and industry are important factors in the decline. However, the types of social and economic changes are contingent on local history and geography, and thus vary widely across the region.

The way Johnson expresses it.. the economic and social costs were too high, especially in some communities. Did we know that at the time? Or was it ultimately a political decision? Which of course is OK, because trade-offs are best handled by those accountable for handling them.

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4. Did it Resolve the Timber Wars?

I just read the current comments on FOFA by the usual suspect organizations (plus some not so usual), and my answer would be.. no. As Johnson says, many folks are just against timber harvesting or non-commercial thinning.

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5. The Quid Pro Nada Problem With Delineating Acres For This or That

This is a structural problem with any plan.. protected areas are protected from whatever, but the areas supposedly released for other uses may not ever see the “other uses” agreed to.  The same folks who did the deal for a certain number of acres tend to litigate the other uses.  This is probably the source of the problem of the “quo” level of timber harvest never happening, plus the lack of adaptive management in AMA’s. Johnson says in the podcast something like “he knows many people who feel this way.” They don’t seem to be going away, so perhaps some consideration of that fact needs to be built in.

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6. The Future is Hard to Predict So You Need to Adapt More Frequently Than Every 30 Years

They didn’t realize that barred owls would be as much of a problem.  Of course, in 30 years, there are many unpredictable things.. say wildfire technology, or climate change or whatever.  If you realize that and put it into practice, you would have a formal set of goals, and a formal set of structures for changing when things are not working. Not just monitoring them, but making changes.  Not just publishing papers, but designing and implementing and monitoring changes.  It seems like, to some extent, these plans get so complicated that inertia makes those kinds of changes and experiments impossible.

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7. Survey and Manage

This is from Johnson and Johnson in their report.

First, the purpose of Survey and Manage was to help protect species associated with old-growth forests. Under the Proposed Action in the DEIS, old-growth forests will be protected; hence, Survey and Manage, which was focused on old-growth species, is no longer indicated. The default assumption should be that these species are protected under the amended NWFP unless sufficient evidence is developed that shows they are still at risk.

Elimination of Survey and Manage was also recommended in Franklin, Johnson and Johnson letter on the NWFP amendment. My question, in keeping with the theme of this, is “did the people implementing this get a chance to give feedback? Was there a formal feedback mechanism for them? When did thought leaders like N and J figure out that it wasn’t helpful? Did they have access to a formal feedback mechanism? ” I still think that implementers (as I did for various planning rules) need to have a separate team and recommendations from the larger interest group committee-otherwise, in my experience, the implementers’ “lived experience” tends to be downplayed or ignored in developing plans and processes.

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So to me that’s the final answer.. 1) identify and listen to all the voices, 2) choose scale carefully, 3) when implementation problems arise or goals are not being met, have a process to change course.. at least every 10 years, but more frequently if possible.  An effort towards continual improvement is better than no improvement or once every thirty years in my view.  Of course, these are management ideas (meeting goals, improving, testing) and perhaps not addressing this directly is an indirect result of choosing to empower researchers preferentially.

Franklin and Johnson wrote a commentary on implementation in 2014 and this is from the abstract:

While old growth harvest has largely ceased, some key species are still in decline and forest management has been restricted more than intended. Creation of openings, even those based on disturbance processes, has been especially difficult. Some lessons from this experience include the difficulty of adaptive management, the importance of ecological foundations for management, and the need for stakeholder collaboration.

I’m sure those are all accurate observations. My question is, again,  “if these challenges were identified early (as I think they were), how did implementation change to reflect those challenges? Or did the structure permit that kind of feedback and adaptive management? Or didn’t implementers such as agency employees have the political clout to implement changes?

It would be interesting to compare the stated goals and achievements of the NSO effort (if that’s what it was, or was it mostly about “not logging” or “old growth protection”  with an NSO veneer? ), with CASPO and forest plans in California.