During his most recent comment, greg nagle requested a discussion on O&C Lands, and particularly the Wyden proposal and the SW Oregon tree sitters, as an apparent way of avoiding further discussion on Eugene-based eco-terrorism. Naturally, the sitters are also Eugene-based. They are protesting a BLM timber sale in accordance with the recently-released Wyden Plan,  featuring “ecological forestry” — a forest management model devised by university professors  Jerry Franklin and Norm Johnson, failed parents of the earlier “New Forestry” model and 1/2 of the “Gang of Four” Spotted Owl and Clinton Plans for Northwest Forests proponents. Those plans, and their consequences, have been discussed elsewhere on this blog.

The American Forest Resource Council came out in opposition to the Wyden Plan in part because it: “mandates the use of forestry principles developed by Dr.’s Norm Johnson and Jerry Franklin — The Pilot Projects where these principles have been used were limited in size; treated very few acres; focused on restoration forestry and weren’t sustainable in drier forest types. They were also litigated by environmental groups, so there’s no reason to believe this won’t continue without legal certainty.”

http://www.orww.org/Awards/2013/SAF/Wayne_Giesy/Giesy_Plan/AFRC_Newsletter_20131127.pdf

The following re-post demonstrates the accuracy of the latter concern, as described by Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) and environmentalist’s regards (according to the Comments video links) of “Norm ‘n Jerry science.” The link to the original post is here:

http://earthfix.opb.org/land/article/tree-sitters-dont-buy-logging-designed-to-mimic-na/

The Comments are worth reading, too, and not just for watching the video links — particularly (to me) one that was just posted as I was writing this — and already one of my all-time favorite blog Comments:

Merryl Eng
• 24 minutes ago

I am Joshua Eng’s Mom. It does not look safe. for him to be sleeping & living in that. tree he needs to come home & get a job where he can his bills & not family who cannot afford it pay it for him

Tree Sitters Don’t Buy Logging Designed To Mimic Nature

Dec. 23, 2013 | OPB

CONTRIBUTED BY:

Amelia Templeton,

Tony Schick

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IMAGES:

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• Stationed on wooden platforms and rope lines 100 feet in the air, members of the group Cascadia Forest Defenders are protesting what they claim is a clear cut of native forest. The logging is part of a pilot project designed to mimic nature. credit: Amelia Templeton
• The White Castle timber sale near Roseburg, Ore., by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has pitted environmentalists against forestry professors in a new debate over the management of Pacific Northwest forests. credit: Amelia Templeton
• Ground camp: Josh Eng, right, prepares to climb up a fir tree with fellow protesters (from left) Brian Garcia, Shannon Wilson and Kate Armstrong. The group is protesting a plan to log at the site. credit: Amelia Templeton
• Kate Armstrong climbing up to tree camp. She and her fellow Cascadia Forest Defender protesters are concerned about a plan to log 120-year-old forests on O&C Lands. credit: Amelia Templeton

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Stationed on wooden platforms and rope lines 100 feet in the air, members of the group Cascadia Forest Defenders are protesting what they claim is a clear cut of native forest. The logging is part of a pilot project designed to mimic nature. | credit: Amelia Templeton | rollover image for more

MYRTLE CREEK, Ore. — Last year, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management sold the rights to log a small grove of Douglas firs to a private company called Roseburg Forest Products.

Roseburg bid more than $1 million for the trees, and planned to start logging this fall.

Then the tree sitters showed up.

Stationed on wooden platforms and rope lines 100 feet in the air, members of the group Cascadia Forest Defenders are protesting what they claim is a clear cut of native forest. But the scheduled logging is also part of a pilot project designed by Northwest forestry professors to mimic nature.
The professors’ plan has become politically popular and is a key component of bills proposing new management for Oregon’s O&C Lands — a checkerboard of parcels in Western Oregon named for the Oregon & California Railroad that once owned them. Those on both sides of the protest say it’s potentially the first battle in the next big debate over how to manage Northwest forests.

• Read: Wyden’s O&C Forest Bill Attempts To Balance Logging And Conservation

The site in question, known as the White Castle timber sale, lies about 19 miles east of Myrtle Creek, at the end of a narrow gravel road curving up a forested ridgeline and covered with ice, boulders and fallen trees. The forest here started growing 120 years ago after a fire burned through this area, west of Crater Lake. It’s native forest, never been cut before, but it’s not “old growth” forest.

“When I first got here, I was so excited that I spent a good week or two, just in the tree. It’s wonderful,” said Josh Eng, a 29-year-old with a pointy, black beard who has spent much of the past nine weeks living on one of the tiny platforms.

Josh Eng. Credit: Amelia Templeton.

Eng, taking his turn stationed in the tree, answers to the nickname Turtle when fellow protesters shout up to him from the ground camp. That camp includes a tent, a kerosene lamp, and a milk crate full of science fiction novels from the Eugene Public library.

“The books are extremely important because we have minimal entertainment out here except for ourselves,” protester Brian Garcia said.

To reach Turtle and the heart of the group’s tree camp requires buckling into a climbing harness and using sliding knots called prusiks to climb inchworm-style up 100 feet of rope.

The wooden platform at the top is just big enough to sleep on. Buckets of food and water hang from the branches nearby. It rocks gently like a boat as the top of the fir tree sways in the wind.

“Yes, always keep connected. Two points of safety,” Eng said. He remains clipped in, even while he sleeps.

Watch: Tree Sitter Josh Eng Climbs To A Platform

This high up, Eng figures he’ll be very difficult to arrest. So far, he says, nobody’s tried to remove him from the tree. Or, rather, no people have tried to remove him.

“I do have a squirrel that kind of comes around at night, and yells at me and throws things,” Eng said.

Eng’s arch nemesis in this conflict, apart from the squirrel, isn’t necessarily Roseburg Forest Products, or even the BLM. It’s a pair of forestry professors: Norm Johnson at Oregon State University and Jerry Franklin at the University of Washington. The two have a long track record in conservation.

Kate Armstrong, a 21-year-old University of Oregon student and part of the protest, said they see the pilot project as a clear cut under the guise of science.

“I think that it’s a shame that they would call themselves scientists and call themselves conservationists or environmentalists who care about the forest, but who would put their names on such a bogus project that is so obviously to me just playing into what the logging industry wants to have happen,” Armstrong said of Johnson and Franklin.

Norm Johnson. Credit: Amelia Templeton.

Johnson, who said he knew White Castle would be controversial the minute he set foot there, has visited the protesters and said he’s taking their comments to heart.

“I could see how disappointed they were in me,” Johnson said. “Yeah, that’s hard.”

Johnson said this timber sale isn’t your grandfather’s clear-cut. The pilot project is a demonstration of something called a “variable retention harvest.”

“The approach we’re taking is trying as best we can to emulate the development of a wild forest,” he said. “We’re not trying to replace it with a tree farm. ”

Several years ago, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar asked Johnson and Franklin to help the BLM develop timber harvests that would be profitable while serving an environmental purpose. The professors drew inspiration from a wealth of new research, published in the years after the Mount St. Helens eruption, on the importance of so-called early seral habitat that develops after natural disasters like eruptions, windstorms and large wildfires.

• Read: Does Mount St. Helens Have Lessons for an Oregon Logging Experiment?

In the variable retention harvest Johnson and Franklin developed, the largest, oldest trees on a site don’t get cut down. About a third of the standing and fallen wood is left untouched, while the rest gets logged. The site is largely allowed to recover naturally, with foresters replanting a minimal amount of species like fir, cedar, and hemlock. After a few years, a meadow of grasses and bushes and berries will start to grow in place of the forest.

“There are many creatures that like to live in openings. Say mountain bluebirds, or salamanders,” Johnson said.

This moment just after the destruction of a forest, when young trees compete with bushes and grasses for sun is called an early seral ecosystem. It can last for 30 years or more, until the conifers grow tall enough to block the light. Studies show as much of 35 percent of the landscape in the western Cascades used to be early seral habitat, but that’s now fallen to as little as 2 percent.

“The diverse early seral stage is actually rarer than old growth right now,” Johnson said. “We are very short of it.”

Johnson and Franklin’s idea: mimic nature, and create a few more rural jobs in the process, has proved popular with politicians. Oregon Senator Ron Wyden has introduced a bill that would use Johnson’s technique to significantly increase the amount of timber cut on public lands in Western Oregon.

“We worked with the best scientists in the Northwest to make these harvests as ecologically friendly as we possibly could,” Wyden said in a recent press conference.

Near White Castle timber sale on O&C Lands east of Roseburg, Ore. Credit: Amelia Templeton.

Johnson calls the harvest rate set in Wyden’s bill modest, allowing logging on 2 or 3 percent of the 2.6 million acres of the BLM’s O&C lands in the first decade. He says logged areas would be given roughly 100 years to grow back into forest.

“I would be less comfortable with it if the harvest rate was much higher,” Johnson said.

But the Cascadia Forest Defenders are not alone in criticizing the idea.

“Jobs, logs and early seral forest can all be attained without wrecking more mature forests,” Doug Heiken of Oregon Wild wrote in comments submitted to the BLM. “There is 20+ years of young stand thinning to do and significant new reasons NOT to conduct (regeneration) harvest in mature forests.”

Trees older than 80 years contain clearer wood of a higher value, though, said Scott Folk, Vice President of Resources at Roseburg Forest Products, which can be used in a wider variety of higher grade products.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management says moving forward with the logging pilot project is critical. And it is in the process of closing road access to the ridgeline to try to force the tree sitters to move on.

“We want to be respectful of the protesters, and respectful of their right to protest the sale,” said Steve Lydic, Field Manager with the BLM in Roseburg. “But there comes a time when the timber sale purchaser also has the right to harvest wood they have purchased.”

Back on the ridge east of Roseburg, tree sitter Josh Eng says the fact that logging here could become a blueprint for other harvests on public lands makes him all the more determined to stop it.

“This is a very beautiful place. And it would be a real heartbreaking thing to see it go the way of a variable retention harvest,” Eng said.

© 2013 OPB

Here is a link I just received to a wonderful repeat photography project using Osborne photographs on our National Parks: http://www.nps.gov/fire/wildland-fire/learning-center/panoramic-lookout-photographs.cfm

This website was completed as part of a Masters degree from Quinnipiac University by Tina Boehle, whom some of you might know from her work as information officer on the Sour Biscuit Fire — which became part of the Biscuit — with a Type II incident management team. She is currently a Communication and Education Specialist, Division of Fire and Aviation, with the National Park Service in Boise, Idaho.

This is one of the particular methods (and datasets) that Larry, John Marker, others, and I are proposing to use in our study of the 2013 Biscuit Complex and Rim Fires, and, in this instance, particularly within Yosemite and the Stanislaus NF: https://forestpolicypub.com/2013/12/07/douglas-complex-rim-fire-paired-wildfire-economics-study-proposal/

This is an excellent tool for studying wildfire events and results over time. For those of you with an interest in this method that is not restricted to National Parks — but is restricted to western Oregon — here is a related repeat photography project I have been working on from time-to-time over the past few years that also uses Osborne photographs as a beginning dataset: http://www.orww.org/Osbornes_Project/

Greg Nagle came across this essay by Robert Leo Heilman that he asked me to post here. Heilman has been called one of the best writers in Oregon, and the following prose demonstrates why. He lives in Myrtle Creek, Oregon, just about an hour south from me on I-5, but I have never met him before (that I know of), and when I called on the phone to get his permission to post this, it was probably the first time we ever talked. Greg and I disagree with a few of Heilman’s assertions, but I think we are in agreement as to the quality of his work and his ability to capture the essence of much of treeplanting in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970’s and early 1980’s. Heilman agreed to the post, but with the request that I provide a link to his own blog, which contains this writing and several more of similar quality and insight: http://robertheilman.wordpress.com/

THE MAIN THING

The main thing is to have a big breakfast. It’s not any easy thing to do at 4 AM, but it is essential because lunch won’t come for another seven or eight hours and there’s four or more hours of grueling work to do before you can sit down and open up your lunch box.

The kids on the crew, 18 year-olds fresh out of high school, sleep in the extra half-hour and don’t eat until the morning store stop on the way out to the unit. They wolf down a Perky Pie, a candy bar and a can of soda in the crummy, good for a one hour caffeine and sugar rush. They go through the brush like a gut-shot cat for awhile and then drag ass for the rest of the morning.

But if you’re a grizzled old timer, in your mid-twenties, you know how to pace yourself for the long haul. You’re exhausted, of course, and your calves, hips, arms and lower back are stiff and sore. But you’re used to that.

You’re always tired and hurting. The only time you feel normal is when you’re on the slopes, when the stiffness and fatigue are melted off by the work. It gets worse every morning until by Saturday it takes hours to feel comfortable on a day off. Sunday morning you wake up at 4 o’clock wide awake and ready to stomp through downtown Tokyo breathing fire and scattering tanks with your tail.

Your stomach is queasy but you force the good food into it anyway, a big stack of pancakes with peanut butter and syrup, four eggs, bacon and a pint of coffee. There is a point when your belly refuses to take any more. Saliva floods your mouth and you force back the retching, put the forkfull of food down on the plate and light another cigarette.

It’s dark outside and it’s raining, of course. They aren’t called the Cascades for nothing. It’s December and the solstice sun won’t rise until eight, three hours and a hundred miles from home, somewhere along a logging road upriver.

Rain coat and rain pants, hardhat, rubber work gloves, cotton liner gloves and a stiff pair of caulk boots stuffed with newspaper crowd around the woodburner. All the gear is streaked with mud except the boots which are caked with an inch-thick mud sole covering the steel spikes. The liner gloves hang stiff and brown, the curving fingers frozen, like a dismembered manikin’s hand making an elegant but meaningless gesture.

Mornings are slow. It’s hard to move quickly when your stomach is bloated, your body is stiff and, despite the coffee, your mind is still fatigue-foggy. You have to move though or miss your ride and lose your job. You try an experimental belch which doesn’t bring up too much half-chewed food with it and relieves the pressure.

The laxative effect of the coffee would send you to the toilet but your ride to town is due soon, so you save it for later. Better to shit on company time anyway, squatting out in the brush. It gives you a pleasant break, a few minutes of hard to come by privacy, and it pisses Jimboy, the foreman, off, since, being a college boy and therefore trained to worry about what people think of him, he could never bring himself to actually complain about it.

Lester the Rat taught him that lesson the first week of the season. Les had just planted a seedling and straightened up and turned his back on the slope to empty his bladder. The foreman glanced back to see him standing there with his back turned and staring idly across to the opposite slope.

“Hey, Gaines, get back to work! Let’s go!”

The Rat turned to face him and shook the last golden drops off. He smiled pleasantly, showing a mouth full of crooked snoose-stained teeth. “Sure thing Jim.” he said mildly, “You bet.” None of the professors up at the university had ever mentioned anything like that and Jimboy blushed delicately while all up and down the line the crew snickered.

Jimboy makes more money than you do and doesn’t work as hard, which is bad enough. But he’s also afraid. It’s his first winter on the slopes and he’s not used to riding herd on a gang of brush apes. He also wants to make a good impression on his boss, the head forester, so he tries to push his eleven man crew into ever greater production. He sees himself as a leader of men, a rugged scientist overseeing the great work of industrial progress.

Everyone tries to get his goat so that, with any luck, he’ll amuse us some day by breaking out in tears like Tommyboy, the last foreman, did. “You guys are just animals.” Tommyboy had sobbed, setting off a delighted chorus of wolf howls and coyote yelps. It was the highpoint of the planting season and a considerable source of pride for the whole crew.

KAMIKAZES

There’s a flash of headlights and the crunch of gravel in the driveway. Mighty Mouth awaits in his battered old Ford. You pull up your suspenders and start slapping your pockets: tobacco pouch and rolling papers, matches, bandanna, wad of toilet paper, pocket watch, jack knife, store stop money– all there. You put on a baseball cap and a plaid woolen overshirt and gather up your gear: caulks, extra socks, rubber gloves, cotton liners, hard hat, rain gear, coffee thermos and feed bucket and step out into the rain.

There’s nothing to talk about on the half hour drive down the creek and downriver to the mill. You know each other too well by now, riding and working together twelve to fourteen hours a day– two moonlit rides and a picnic lunch every day– for three winters. The Mouth holds a beer bottle between his thighs into which he spits his chew as he drives.

You roll a cigarette and listen to the radio and peer out through the windshield watching for the twin reflection of deer eyes ahead. The road is narrow and winding, the roadside brush thick, and you never know just when a deer will step out or leap, windshield high, in front of you. Every day, somewhere on the drive, you see at least one fresh deer carcass on the road. Headlights dazzle the deer and usually they stand there frozen in their tracks before leaping aside at the last moment. Sometimes they leap towards the headlights though, always a suicidal move for the deer, but, like a kamikaze pilot, they can kill too.

CRUMMY TIME

The mercury arc lamps light up the mill with a weird, hellish orange glow. Steam rises from the boilers and there’s a sour rotting smell everywhere. The huge metal buildings bristle with an improbable looking tangle of chains and belts and pipes. There’s a constant whistling, clanging and screaming of saws and machinery coming from them. Bug-eyed forklifts and log loaders crawl around the half-lit yards, mechanical insects scurrying to keep up.

Through the huge open doorways you can see the mill hands at work in their tee shirts, sorting out an unending river of lumber and veneer into neat stacks. The mill workers sweat like desperate dwarves. They make more money than you and stay dry but you feel pity and contempt for them. The poor bastards stand in one spot all night, moving to the computerized lightning rhythm of conveyors instead of their own human speed. The cavernous interior of the mill sheds seem as cramped as closets compared to the open mountain slopes.

You work for the mill but not in the mill, on a company reforestation crew. Most of the company land is planted by contract crews, but the mill runs a crew that plants land that the contractors won’t touch– too steep or too ravaged, too old or too brushy for them.

Acres away, beyond the log pond, past the five story tall walls of stacked logs, next to the hangar sized heavy equipment repair shop, is a small refrigerated trailer full of seedling trees in waxed boxes. Each box contains 600 trees in bundles of fifty.

Mudflap and Sluggo are helping Jimboy load tree boxes into the back of a four wheel drive crew-cab pickup. They are young, straight out of high school, and eager to get a promised job in the mill come spring– if they “work hard and show up every day”, of course. So, they help load trees and ride with the foreman every morning.

You transfer your gear over to a mud covered Chevy Suburban crummy. If you’ve ever ridden in one you know why they’re called crummies. The rig is a mess, both outside and inside. The seats are torn, the headliner is gone, the ceiling often drips from the condensed breath of it’s packed occupants. But you have a great fondness for the ugly thing. It is an oasis of comfort compared to the slopes.

We spend a large part of our lives roaring up and down river powered by its monster 454 V-8. Of course, none of this travel, or crummy time, as it’s called, is paid time. Only the forty hours per week on the slopes earns us money. The other 10-20 hours of crummy tedium is not the company’s concern. Together with the half hour lunch, also unpaid, we spend 11-13 hours a day together for our eight hours’ pay. All winter long we see each other more than we see our wives and children. We know each other intimately after so many cramped hours. We bicker and tease each other half-heartedly, like an old bitter couple, out of habit more than need.

ARITHMETIC

The ten of us plant about 7,000 seedling trees every day, or about 700 “‘binos” apiece, enough to cover a little over an acre of logged off mountainside each. It gets depressing when you start adding it up: 700 per day= 3,500 per week= 14,000 per month= 56,000 trees in a season for one man planting one tree at a time.

Maybe you’ve seen the TV commercials put out by “The Tree Growing Company”: Helicopter panoramas of snow capped mountains, silvery lakes and rivers, close ups of cute critters frolicking, 30 year old stands of second growth all green and even as a manicured lawn and a square-jawed handsome woodsman tenderly planting a seedling. The commercials make reforestation seem heart warming, wholesome and benevolent, like watching a Disney flick where a scroungy mutt plays the role of a wild coyote.

Get out a calculator and start figuring it: 700 trees in eight hours= 87.5 trees per hour, or 1.458 trees per minute– a tree punched in every 41 seconds. How much tenderness can a man give a small green seedling in 41 seconds?

Planting is done with an improbable looking tool called a hoedag. Imagine a heavy metal plate 14 inches long and four inches wide, maybe five pounds of steel, mounted on a single-bit axe handle. Two or three sideways hacking strokes scalp a foot square patch of ground, three or four stabs with the tip and the blade is buried up to the haft. (Six blows 700 times= 4,200 per day. At 5 lbs. @ that comes to 21,000 pounds of lifting per diem and many planters put in 900-1200 trees per day.)

You pump up and down on the handle, breaking up the soil, open the hole, dangle the roots down there and pull the hoedag out. The dirt pulls the roots down to the bottom of the hole, maybe 10 or 12 inches deep. You give it a little tug to pull the root collar even with the ground and tamp the soil around it with your foot.

The next tree goes in eight feet away from the last one and eight feet from the next man in line’s tree. Two steps and you’re there. It’s a sort of rigorous dance, all day long– scalp, stab, stuff stomp and split; scalp, stab, stuff, stomp and split– every 41 seconds or less, 700 or more times a day.

700 trees eight feet apart comes to a line of seedlings 5,600 feet long– a mile and some change. Of course, the ground is never level. You march up and down mountains all day– straight up and straight down, since, although nature never made a straight line, forestry professors and their students are quite fond of them. So, you climb a quarter mile straight down and then back up, eat lunch and do it again.

The ground itself is never really clear, even on the most carefully charred reforestation unit. Stumps, old logs, boulders and brush have to be gone over or through or around with almost every slash hampered step. Two watertight tree bags, about the size and shape of brown paper grocery bags, hang on your hips rubbing them raw under the weight of the 30-40 pounds of muddy seedlings stuffed inside them.

Generally, what’s left of the topsoil isn’t deep enough to sink a ‘dag in so you punch through whatever subsoil, rocks or roots lie hidden by the veneer of dirt.

It’s best not to think about it all. The proper attitude is to consider yourself as eternally damned, with no tomorrow or yesterday– just the unavoidable present to endure. Besides, you tell yourself,it’s not so bad once you get used to it.

OUTLAWS

Tree planting is done by outcasts and outlaws– winos and wetbacks, hill billys and hippies for the most part. It is brutal, mind-numbing, underpaid stoop labor. Down there in Hades, Sisyphus thinks about the tree planters and thanks his lucky star every day because he’s got such a soft gig.

Being at the bottom of the Northwest social order and the top of the local ass-busting order gives you an exaggerated pride in what you do. You invade a small grocery store like a biker gang, taking the uneasy stares of lesser beings as your natural due. It’s easy to mistake fear for higher forms of respect and as a planter you might as well. In a once rugged society gone docile, you have inherited a vanishing tradition of ornery individualism. The ghosts of drunken bullwhackers, miners, rowdy cowpunchers and bomb tossing wobblies count on you to keep alive the 120 proof spirit of irreverence towards civilization that built the west.

A good foreman, one who rises from the crew by virtue of out-working everybody else, understands this and uses it like a Marine DI to build his crew and drive them to gladly work harder than necessary. A foreman who is uncomfortable with the underlying violence of his crew becomes their target. It is rare for a crew to actually beat up a foreman, but it has happened. There are many ways to get around a weak foreman, most of which involve either goldbricking or baiting. After all, why work hard for someone you don’t respect and why bother to conceal contempt?

BAG-UP

The long, smelly ride ends on a torn up moonscape of gravel where last summer’s logging ended. No one stirs. You look out the foggy windows of the crummy through a grey mist of Oregon dew at the unit. You wonder what shape it’s in, how steep, how brushy, how rocky, red sticky clay or yellow doughy clay, freshly cut or decades old, a partial replanting or a first attempt. The answers lie hidden behind a curtain of rain and you’re not eager to find out.

The foreman steps out and with a few mutterings the crummies empty. Ten men jostle for their equipment in the back of the crummies. The hoedags and tree bags are in a jumbled pile. Most planters aren’t particular about which bag they use, provided it doesn’t leak muddy water down their legs all day, but each man has a favorite ‘dag which is rightfully his. A greenhorn soon learns not to grab the wrong one when it’s owner comes around cursing and threatening.

It’s an odd but understandable relationship between a planter and his main tool. You develop a fondness for it over time. You get used to the feel of it, the weight and balance and grip of it in your hand. Some guys would rather hand over their wives.

The hoedag is a climbing tool, like a mountaineer’s ice axe, on the steeper ground. It clears the way through heavy brush like a machete. You can lean on it like a cane to help straighten your sore back and it is the weapon of choice when self-defense (or a threat) is needed. It allows you to open up stumps and logs in search of the dark gold pitch which will start a fire in a cold downpour and to dig a quick fire trail if your break fire runs off up the hill.

The foreman hands out the big waxed cardboard boxes full of seedling trees. The boxes are ripped open with a hoedag blade and the planters carry double handfuls of trees, wired up in bundles of fifty, over to the handiest puddle to wet down their roots. Dry roots will kill a tree before it can get into the ground, so the idea isn’t purely a matter of adding extra weight to make the job harder– though that’s the inevitable result.

300-400 trees get stuffed into the double bags, depending on their size and the length of the morning’s run. If the nursery hasn’t washed the roots properly before bundling and packing, the mud, added water and trees can make for a load that is literally staggering.

No one puts on their bags until the boxes are burnt. It is an essential ritual and depriving a crew of their morning fire is, by ancient custom, held to be justifiable grounds for mutiny by crummy lawyers everywhere. Some argue that homicide in such a case would be ruled self-defense, but so far no one’s ever tested it.

The waxed cardboard burns wonderfully bright and warm. A column of flame fifteen feet high lights up the road and everyone gathers around to take a little warmth and a lot of courage. Steam clouds rise from your raingear as you rotate before the fire like a planet drawing heat from its sun. It feels great and you need it, because once the flames turn to ashes you’re going over the side.

“OK. Everybody get loaded and space-out.” The Mouth calls out. You strap on your bag, tilt your tin hat and grab your ‘dag. You shuffle over to the edge of the road and line up eight feet from the man on each side.

IN THE HOLE

The redoubtable Mighty Mouth, the third fastest planter, plants in the lead spot and the men behind him work in order from the fourth to the eighth fastest men. It is a shameful thing to plant slower than the guy behind you. If he’s impatient, or out to score some brownie points with the boss, he’ll jump your line and you plant in his position, sinking lower in the Bull-of-the-woods standings. Slow planters get fired and competition is demanded by the foreman.

There are many tricks to appearing to be faster than you really are–stashing trees, widening your spacing, pushing the man behind you into the rougher parts while you widen or narrow your line to stay in the gravy–but all of these will get you in trouble one way or another, if not with the boss then, worse still, with the crew.

The two fastest planters, the tail men, float behind the crew, planting two to ten lines apiece, straightening out the tree line for the next pass. They tie a bit of blue plastic surveyor’s tape to brush and sticks to mark the way for the lead man when he brings the crew back up from the bottom.

The notion is to cover the ground with an eight foot by eight foot grid of trees. If mountains were graph paper this would be easy, but instead, each slope has its own peculiar contours and obstacles which throw the line off. Each pass, if it follows a ragged line, will be more irregular than the last pass, harder to find and follow. It is difficult enough to coordinate a crew strung out over a hillside, each planter working at a different rate, going around obstacles such as stumps, boulders, cliffs and heavy brush, without compounding it by leaving a ragged unmarked line behind for the next pass.

CUMULATIVE IMPACT

It’s best not to look at the clearcut itself. You stay busy with whatever is immediately in front of you because, like all industrial processes, there is beauty in the details and ugliness in the larger view. Oil film on a rain puddle has an iridescent sheen that is lovely in a way that the junkyard it’s part of is not.

Forests are beautiful on every level, whether seen from a distance or standing beneath the trees or studying a small patch of ground. Clearcuts contain many wonderful tiny things– jasper, agate, petrified wood, sun bleached bits of wood, bone and antler, wildflowers. But the sum of these finely wrought details adds up to a grim landscape, charred, eroded, and sterile.

Although tree planting is part of something called reforestation, clearcutting is never called deforestation, at least not by its practitioners. The semantics of forestry don’t allow that. The mountain slope is a “unit”, the forest a “timber stand”, logging is “harvest” and repeated logging “rotation”.

On the work sheets which foresters use is a pair of numbers which track the layers of canopy, the covering of branches and leaves which the living trees have spread out above the soil. The top layer is called the overstory, beneath which is a second layer, the understory. An old growth forest, for example, may have an overstory averaging 180 feet high and an understory at 75 feet. Clearcuts are designated by the phrase “Overstory: Zero”.

In the language (and therefore the thinking) of industrial silviculture a clearcut is a forest. The system does not recognize any depletion at all. The company is fond of talking about trees as a renewable resource and the official line is that timber harvest, followed by reforestation results in a net gain. “Old growth forests are dying, unproductive forests– biological deserts full of diseased and decaying trees. By harvesting and replanting we turn them into vigorous, productive stands. We will never run out of trees.” the company forester will tell you. But ask if he’s willing to trade company-owned old growth forest for a reforestation unit of the same acreage and the answer is always “No, of course not.”

You listen and tell yourself that it’s the company who treats the land shabbily. You see your frenzied work as a life-giving dance in the ashes of a plundered world. You think of the future and the green legacy you leave behind you. But you know that your work also makes the plunder seem rational and is, at it’s core, just another part of the destruction.

More than the physical exhaustion, this effort to not see the world around you tires you. It takes a lot of effort not to notice, not to care. You can go crazy from lack of sleep because you must dream in order to sort out everything you see and hear and feel during the day. But you can also get sick from not being truly awake, not seeing, feeling and touching the real world.

When the world around you is painful and ugly, that pain and ugliness seeps into you, no matter how hard you try to keep it out. It builds up like a slowly accumulating poison. Sometimes the poison turns to venom and you strike out, at work or at home, as quick as any rattlesnake, but without the honest rattler’s humane fair warning.

So you bitch and bicker with the guys on the crew, argue with the foreman and snap at your wife and kids. You do violent work in a world where the evidence of violence is all around you. You see it in the scorched earth and the muddy streams. You feel it when you step out from the living forest into the barren clearcut. It rings in your ears with the clink of steel on rock. It jars your arm with every stab of your hoedag.

THE LONG MARCH

“War is hell.” General William Tecumseh Sherman said, because, unlike a Pentagon spokeman, he was in the midst of it and could not conceive of something so abstract as “collateral damage”.

“Planting sucks.” we say, because unlike the mill owner who signs our paychecks, we slog through the mud and bend our backs on mountain slopes, instead of reading progress reports on reforestation units. Like infantry we know only weariness and hopelessness in the face of insanity.

“The millions of trees that the timber industry plants every year are enough to plant a strip four miles wide from here to New York.” the foreman tells us.

Our hearts sink at the thought of that much clearcutting but Madman Phil, the poet, sees a vision. “Forward men!” he cries, “Shoulder to shoulder we march on New York. The American Tree Planter! Ever onward!”

Someone starts it and then the whole crew is humming The Battle Hymn of the Republic while, in our minds, we cross the Cascades, the Snake River Valley, the Rockies, the Great Plains and onward, ever onward, a teaming, faceless coolie army led by Walt Whitman, Sasquatch and Mao Tse Tung, a barbarian horde leaving a swath of green behind us “from sea to shining sea”.

“Oh God!” Jimboy moans, “You guys are crazy.”

History: Left Bank #4, Gotta Earn A Living, Hillsboro OR, 1993: Northwest Passages, A Literary Anthology of the Pacific Northwest from Coyote Tales to Roadside Attraction, Sasquatch Books, Seattle WA 1994 (extract); Overstory:Zero, Real Life in Timber Country, Sasquatch Books, Seattle WA 1995; Oregon State Library, Talking Book and Braille Services, Salem, OR  (audio book edition) 1996; Earth Island Journal, Vol. 12, No. 1, San Francisco, CA  (excerpt) 1997; Earth First! Journal, Eugene, OR, February 1997 (excerpt);The Anchor Essay Annual, The Best of 1997, Anchor Books, New York, NY; Word #1, Waldport OR 1998

Old-growth Douglas-fir and ponderosa pine, South Umpqua River headwaters, Douglas County, Oregon, April 19, 2010. Photo by B. Zybach.

Recent discussion on this blog has centered around the desirability of managing forest trees on the basis of their diameter, their age, or their basal area for a given location. Some of that discussion has included age classes of 150 and 300 years as points of departure. This photograph illustrates some of these concerns and was first published in an article on forest restoration I wrote last year and also posted to this blog: https://forestpolicypub.com/2012/04/04/8829/

This is a typical stand of trees in the upper South Umpqua River basin that I documented in a 2010 research study of 125,000 acres of forestland, mostly contained in the Umpqua National Forest. Our research focus was to determine forest conditions for the area for the ca. 1800 time period that preceded white contact in the basin. The larger old-growth trees are estimated to be more than 300 years of age, and the younger invasive conifers are in two basic age groups: the 30-inch to 40-inch second-growth trees are less than 150 years old, and the smaller understory and roadside poles are probably 20 to 40 years of age.

In 2009 there were two sizable stand-replacement crown fires in the study area: the Boze and the Rainbow fires, totaling about 15,000 acres between them. Prior to these two events, there was no evidence of any other crown fires of this magnitude at any other time since 1800; i.e., these types of fires were unprecedented during historical time. Other large-scale wildfires in the area, such as the 2002 Tiller Complex, were noticeably spotty and only crowned in certain locations — mostly younger plantations in that instance.

Several thousands of acres of this type of condition were found and documented in the study area. The old-growth stem count was about 5-15 trees per acre, while the invasives (I know Sharon doesn’t like this word, but I don’t know what else to call them in instances such as this) totaled about 100 stems or more an acre. These trees are having two deleterious effects on the old-growth that are being “preserved” for wildlife habitat (which was notably more present, diverse, and abundant in the remaining Indian prairies and meadows): 1) they were competing directly with the older trees for sunlight, water, and nutrients; and 2) they were making crown fires such as the Rainbow and Boze now possible. Either way, they pose a very powerful threat to the remaining old-growth in the landscape.

The decision to passively manage these trees has resulted in an increasing threat to the health and survival of the old-growth for the reasons just stated. Suddenly opening them up from competition increases the risk of windthrow due to lower stabilizing branches having been shaded out long ago. Many of the remaining old-growth have become top-heavy as a result. However, based on my observations of the past 50 years, if the competing vegetation were removed, the large majority of the remaining trees would survive and benefit almost immediately (“about 5 years”) by the removal of competition — and at a potentially good profit, with numerous rural jobs, useful products, and greatly improved wildlife habitat for many other wildlife species, including understory shrubs and forbs, ungulates, carnivores, birds, and insect pollinators.

To try and use an homogenized diameter screen or age limit in managing this stand would be a waste of time. I think the same is true for a basal area approach. Common sense states the obvious: use it or lose it. If some animal species prefer this type of situation, then they will have to contend with a diminishing resource because of the problems just stated. My thought is to actually preserve, via active management, as many of the remaining precontact trees and stands as possible.

Those are my experiences and opinions, though, and there has been little scientific research in regards to these situations. Other thoughts?

Part 4 in a series: https://forestpolicypub.com/2013/11/10/dellasala-hanson-248-more-scientists-concerned-about-salvage-logging/

Don’t log or replant the Rim Fire burned area

Monica Bond and Richard L. Hutto

Published 4:54 pm, Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Native trout on the headwaters of the Blue River, Lane County, Oregon, August 24, 2013. How do salmonids respond in the years following a catastrophic wildfire? Photograph by Aaron L. Zybach.

If some of the regular readers here have wondered why I haven’t been too active the past several weeks, this post contains one of the reasons — I have been trying to put together a formal multi-agency/multi-county/multi-landowner research study based on an earlier posting: https://forestpolicypub.com/2013/09/25/calculating-the-true-costs-of-wildfire-the-douglas-complex/

This effort has mostly resulted in a lot of time on the telephone, email discussions, and meetings up and down I-5. The following proposal is one result, and it was sent to obtain USFS research access to Stanislaus Forest lands within the Rim Fire boundaries, and to obtain BLM research access to O&C Lands inside of Douglas Complex boundaries. Both requests are in their final stages of processing (the fires only ended a short while ago), but things are looking fairly positive in both directions, and formal approval is expected sometime in the next week or so. After that, depending on what we are told and whatever other feedback I get from this draft proposal, I will put together a final version for project fundraising purposes. As the proposal makes clear, the sooner start-up amounts can be raised, the better, and it is fairly critical that 5-year study plots be established in early spring with emergent vegetation.

This is a pretty long post to read online — although that works great for skimming — so I have also uploaded a PDF file for those (like myself) who are more comfortable reading a printed version: http://www.nwmapsco.com/ZybachB/DRAFT/Douglas-Rim_Proposal_20131202.pdf

Any and all comments will be very much appreciated, on any or all of this. Steve Wilent’s drone posting made me realize that I had left them off the list. Maybe this could be a good test operation for the drones the USFS already has available, or for the Amazon drone to perform seasonal repeat photography functions after the plot locations have been established. If there were a way to involve Google Earth as collaborators in the project, so much the better. These are semi-serious ideas for conducting environmental research as transparently and as safely and efficiently as possible, by using modern technology, Internet communications, and current environmental problems — such as wildfire mitigation.

Other thoughts?

Paired Wildfire Study: The Post-fire Effects of the 2013 Douglas Complex & Rim Fires

of Western Oregon & Northern California.

 DRAFT Proposal

December 2, 2013

Bob Zybach, PhD

Program Manager, www.ORWW.org

General Description: Problems and Opportunity

This is a proposal to systematically examine and compare the biological, ecological, and economic effects of the actions taken on fire suppression and post-burn salvage and restoration activities on two major wildfires of the 2013 fire season: the Douglas Complex in western Oregon and the Rim Fire in northern California. Measures would be for five years. The term “action” in this sense can include thoughtful decisions to do nothing in some circumstances.

Catastrophic-scale wildfires have become increasingly larger, more costly, deadly, and dangerous during the past quarter century, perhaps beginning with the Silver Complex in 1987 and the Yellowstone Fires of 1988. This increase has been attributed to passive federal management policies that have been adopted during the past 40 years in regards to wildfires and wildlife habitat, drought, population expansion, diminished budgets and/or to climate changes related to anthropogenic global warming. Whatever the cause or causes, it remains obvious that these unprecedented problems are not likely to be resolved or significantly diminished in the foreseeable future unless corrective management actions are taken.

The 2013 Rim Fire in northern California and the Douglas Complex of southwest Oregon offer an ideal opportunity to test and evaluate the various management actions taken by private landowners and by key federal agencies in reaction to these types of events. This is primarily because of the landscape-scale patterns of diverse land ownerships that were directly affected by the fires, by the differing methods used to manage the fires, and by the various practices and decisions that will be implemented as a result of ownership and resource management differences in policies, budgets, and objectives.

This study proposes to combine the opportunity offered by pairing coincidental large-scale wildfire burn patterns in varied ownership and forest type landscapes with emerging technology in order to conduct a fully transparent documentation and analysis of pre-fire and post-fire actions and effects. Digital photography, GPS receivers, GIS mapping, and modern Internet communications will be used to identify and compare which types of management actions prove most effective in reducing wildfire risk and damage, and which types of actions prove most effective in mitigating wildfire damage once it has taken place. The study is intended to be inexpensive to establish and maintain so that it can be easily replicated in other areas subject to large- scale wildfires; and can also be readily integrated into the “first response” activities of wildfire managers and BAER (Burn Area Emergency Response) teams to the benefit of resource managers and the interested public. Most cost efficiencies are primarily due to the use of modern technology and related reductions in field study costs and to independent scientific oversight.

Background

The Douglas Complex started on July 26 and was fully contained by September 3, having burned 48,000 acres of O&C Lands: a checkerboard arrangement of square-mile lands managed alternately by the USDI Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and by several private and industrial forestland owners. The Rim Fire started August 17 and was fully contained by October 24, having burned 257,000 acres of the USDA Stanislaus National Forest (USFS), USDI Yosemite National Park  (NPS), and Sierra Pacific Industries (SPI), a major industrial forestland owner. It was the third largest wildfire in California history, and the largest ever in the history of the Sierra-Nevada.

Suppression costs totaled $127 million for the Rim Fire, while the Douglas Complex formed a major portion of the 100,000+ acres and the $122 million spent on wildfire suppression costs by Oregon Department of Forestry (ODF) during the 2013 fire season, This was the first time that more than 100,000 acres of state-protected lands had burned in Oregon wildfires since 1951, during the last of the Tillamook 6-Year Jinx fires, and the most ever spent – by a wide margin –by ODF on suppressing wildfires.

Suppression costs are typically the only wildfire-related dollar amounts listed or discussed in the public media to describe the magnitude of large-scale wildfires. However, we estimate that total costs and losses from these fires are likely to be 10 times, or more, greater than suppression costs alone (Zybach, et al. 2009a; Zybach, et al. 2009b); and with much of this cost within the first five years. That is, ODF and Rim Fire suppression costs in 2013 are only about 10% of an estimated $2.5 billion in possible short-term and long-term damages caused by these fires. If these figures are anywhere close to accurate, then it is important for citizens, taxpayers, and their political representatives to become aware of the scope of the problem when establishing budgets or making policies. Of course, this is also important information for landowners and resource managers when making decisions regarding the management of a wildfire, or of its aftermath.

The basic idea for this proposal was first suggested by Paul Bell, of ODF, to Wayne Giesy, Oregon Websites & Watersheds Project, Inc (ORWW), in late August; at the same time John Marker and I were also integrating it into the articles we were preparing for the October Society of American Foresters (SAF) The Forest Source (Marker and Zybach 2013) and the Oregon Fish & Wildlife Journal (Zybach and Marker 2013). The focus of those articles was to help educate the public regarding the true scope of wildfire damage, and to do it in terms we can all understand: Plain English, dollars and land-based photographs. Since then, every effort has been made to contact and share information with key individuals and agencies needed to begin and to complete this proposal, as well as with fellow scientists Bob Alverts, Carl Johannessen, Frank Lake, Mike Newton, Tom Sensenig, and Peter Stine as reviewers and advisors.

In addition to the names just listed, other individuals who have been kept informed or have been actively involved in discussing and/or contributing to this proposal include current and former BLM employees Jerry Perez, Ed Shepard, Mary Smelcer, and Robin Snider; current and former USFS employees Bruce Courtright, William Derr, Euell Flanders, Larry Harrell, Zane Smith, Richard Stem, and Ted Stubblefield; political representatives Marcia Armstrong, Tim Freeman, and Doug Robertson; Jim Geisinger of Associated Oregon Loggers; and Nancy Hirsch of ODF

Need for Study

There is a growing need and a present opportunity for a comprehensive, interdisciplinary study of long-term economic, biological and ecological effects of large-scale wildfires in the western US. There are specific needs for better information in regards to human health and safety during a wildfire, changed resource management risks and opportunities following a wildfire, and long-term assessments of cumulative costs and damages — including positive effects — for these types of events. There is also a growing demand for public transparency in the use of taxpayer dollars to fund scientific research. This proposal is specific to those needs and concerns.

The study would specifically benefit managers and rural residents within, adjacent to, or in close proximity to federal forestlands. Additional beneficiaries would be resource managers, researchers, students, teachers, and the interested public via inexpensive, comprehensive, and transparent conducting of applied science research via Internet communications (Zybach 2008; Zybach and Alverts 2013). The potential for more specific benefits can be readily identified for the following categories:

Human Health and Safety. What are the medical and economic effects of wildfire smoke and wildfire risks to personal health and safety? These effects are fairly well known during the course of the fire, but long-term effects have only recently been seriously considered. This study would not focus on these issues directly, but would track the work of others and maintain comprehensive links and PDF articles and reports of current information readily available on the project website.

Resource Management Value. What vegetation patterns are most apt to burn during a wildfire and which are least likely? Under what types of conditions for each? Which vegetation patterns are improved or rejuvenated by wildfire? Which are significantly changed? What practices prove best for meeting management objectives following a wildfire? Where is time and money being wasted? These types of questions, of course, are of interest to resource managers confronted with wildfire risks and/or damages. These are also precisely the types of questions being addressed by this study; further, they are being considered at nearly 100% sampling on a landscape-scale.

An short-term benefit of this study would be the potential for integrating BAER documentation of a large-scale wildfire – and specifically the locations of any BAER projects prior to and immediately following any mitigating actions that are taken – as an effective and inexpensive way to monitor the results of management actions and decisions made during and immediately following such wildfire events.

Scientific Value. This study is intended to develop and provide a comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and transparent dataset that can be queried by a wide range of scientific disciplines. Research topics might reasonably include: comparative analyses of forest management actions; forest type responses to wildfire; evaluations of fuel loads and types; impacts to soil types and productivity; weather conditions and topographic factors in wildfire behavior; fish and wildlife mortality and population responses; short-term and long-term wildfire economics; air pollution measures and mitigation; human health effects of wildfire smoke, and etc. Further, there is direct interest in combining such queries with current technologies, such as digital imagery, remote sensing, GPS, GIS, and Internet communications. The value of such topics and datasets to statisticians, website designers, and modelers is also apparent.

Educational Value. The educational value of having scientific methodology and information readily available online for student research projects, reports, and discussions is obvious. The fact that this study focuses on a wide range of disciplines — including botany, economics, fish and wildlife, fire ecology, history, forestry, etc. — adds to its value, as do the opportunities for integrating mathematics, writing, speech communications, and website design with the teaching of these topics. Similarly, self-education and homeschooling are benefitted by access to this data via the same project websites.

Political Value.  In terms of political value, this research would provide elected officials ready access to comprehensive data regarding two major wildfires of current and long-term management and budgetary importance. There should be much practical use in considering and establishing future policies and management directives in regards to wildfire mitigation and risk reduction by having direct access to significant environmental information that is easy to obtain and to understand. The potential for full public transparency and successful collaboration between affected agencies should also have a very positive political importance, and achieving these objectives at a relatively insignificant cost to taxpayers might also be considered a political value for those supporting this proposal.

General Budget and Short-term Funding Needs

A systematically designed interdisciplinary study of long-term ecological, economic and biological effects of wildfire over a wide range of land ownerships – at least to the degree that is being proposed here — has never been done before. This is due in large part because the technological capabilities of Internet communications, digital photography, remote sensors, GIS, and GPS receivers have only recently come into common use; and at reasonable costs with consistently improving quality and reliability. As such, making specific estimates of some intended operations can be difficult or impossible; rather, every effort is made to present projected costs at a level that can be conducted as economically and efficiently as possible, while still maintaining basic research objectives: one of which is to conduct this study as openly and as cost effectively as possible.

A basic assumption of this proposal is that current data-gathering techniques can be significantly improved via this study and adopted to good advantage at little or no additional cost as standard operating guidelines by BAER, beginning as early as the 2014 fire season. Internet display of landscape-scale baseline conditions and subsequent research findings would be comprehensive, timely, stable, easy to navigate, and accomplished largely via the use of pictures, videos, dollars, tables, graphs, and Plain English – and again, at a relatively insignificant cost when compared to methods currently used to inform and/or engage the public on the topics of federal and state wildfire and forest management.

Oregon Websites and Watersheds Project, Inc (ORWW) has supplied all funding to develop this proposal to date (12/1/2013). This document is being prepared in part for the purpose of generating initial start-up funding for this proposal: $15,000 for baseline landscape-scale photo-documentation for the Douglas Complex; $45,000 baseline landscape-scale photo-documentation for the Rim Fire; and $10,000 for design and construction of a permanent ORWW educational website to publicly share the results of these efforts. Proposed funding sources for these initial costs would ideally include the specific agencies, counties and/or landowners most affected by the fires. If these sources prove insufficient, then other affected agencies, organizations and/or potentially interested foundations and individuals can be approached. Time is of the essence, however, and the sooner photo-documentation can take place, the better, in that salvage logging, hazard tree removal, and winter weather have all impacted initial burn conditions.

A more detailed description of each of these three initial steps is included in the following pages, and their completion would include Bob Alverts as a research associate on the Douglas Complex and Larry Harrell and Euell Flanders as research assistants on the Rim Fire. The ideal solution for several of the remaining study measures would be for them to be undertaken – and information freely shared – by county and/or agency biologists, hydrologists, economists, GIS techs, and other experts and specialists already familiar with these locations and already budgeted for their time and equipment. If these resources were not made available, necessary fieldwork could be conducted by skilled volunteers, graduate students, and/or qualified contractors, which would have entirely different budgetary considerations.

When compared to the cost of fire suppression alone, however, much of significant wildfire and forest management value could seemingly be accomplished within existing agency budgets by relatively minor seasonal adjustments in field assignments of a few individuals and vehicles and by using other existing equipment. Agencies directly affected by these events include BLM, Cal-Fire, EPA, GAO, NOAA, NPS, ODF, USFS, and USFWS. Affected counties include Douglas, Josephine, Mariposa, and Tuolumne. A collaboration of these entities to openly gather and share information would quite likely produce more useful and scientifically credible results as well as potentially reduce study management and operations costs.

In addition to establishing baseline landscape scale conditions and a public website for the two burns, a number of seasonal measures would need to be set up and maintained to measure changing primary production, fish populations, stream discharge volumes, and TMDL of affected streams and representative plot-size documentation of understory, shrubland, and grassland responses to the fires and to subsequent management actions. These plots should ideally be established in late winter/early spring 2014 and be maintained 3- 4 times annually through the life of the study, scheduled to end December 31, 2018. Wildlife habitat, endangered species, and terrestrial vertebrate populations would also be accounted for, but methodology for doing so is variable and needs to be determined. Findings in regards to these measures would be entered into appropriate GIS layers and routinely uploaded and displayed on the project website, unless the information is deemed too sensitive or not allowed by law.

Greater details regarding the methods for establishing plots and for acquiring each of these measures and some estimated costs for implementing and completing them are given in the following pages. There has been no attempt to summarize total estimated costs for the reasons given above but, again, they are intended to be as modest as possible and total costs of the entire study over a five-year period are highly unlikely to be more than a few dollars an acre at most. The bulk of the study’s cost is incurred during the first year by documenting baseline conditions, creating a website, and establishing plot-scale photo-points. Subsequent years will mostly involve revisiting these locations on a seasonal basis, documenting changes, and adding that information to the existing datasets and the website for comparative analysis and other purposes.

Information about this project would be mostly accomplished via the website and by periodic newsletters and/or press releases to key audiences and media. Website maintenance and updating costs are generally well known and inexpensive when compared to mailings, publications, or other methods of sharing information. Peer reviews of methods and findings would likewise be public and could be enhanced at any time by making the website interactive and allowing public participation in the review and analysis processes. All project materials appearing on the web could easily be copied and used in other locations, such as agency websites, for presentations, and/or for purposes of research and education.

The cost of doing this needed research in a completely transparent fashion is relatively minimal, thanks in large part to major improvements in computer technology and Internet communications during the past several years, as stated. Scientific objectivity and credibility are critical to public and political acceptance of the findings. There is some concern that if this research were headed by an industrial group, or perhaps even by a single university, there would be perceptions of bias and the resulting findings could be disregarded or dismissed accordingly. Likewise, similar problems typically exist with a single government agency taking the lead. ODF would be a reasonable choice to head such a study in Oregon, but they have no budget for research. Douglas, Josephine and Tuolumne are the most affected counties, and BLM, EPA, NOAA, USFS, and USFWS are the most affected federal agencies. An ideal result would be to have several or all of these entities collaborate on funding and completion of this proposal.

Detailed Description & Proposed Methodology

This proposal has eight key points that are dependent upon establishing baseline data as quickly and as accurately as possible, so that changes in vegetation, erosion, stream flows, and fish and wildlife populations can be better measured and considered following these two events. Existing data are highly desirable, but not critical, to the success of this proposal, which is focused on the short-term and long-term results of various land management practices intended to mitigate the effects of large-scale forest wildfires. Relevant scientific literature, historical maps and photographs, and informative news articles would all be integrated into the analysis process and made readily available (if not protected by copyright or policy) via the project website as they are acquired and used.

Here are the proposed eight steps for completing this project:

1. Comprehensive documentation of baseline landscape-scale conditions of the burn area and its perimeter via digital photography using GPS-referenced photo points and GIS mapping.

Catastrophic wildfires occur on a landscape-scale basis — in this instance, 48,000-acres and 257,000-acres. It is important to look at mitigating strategies and results on a similar scale in order to be practical. Typically, this can be largely accomplished via existing road systems and trails to lookout towers and designated viewpoints, as well as old logging landings, road pullouts, and many new perspectives revealed by the burned landscape. Landscape scale photography requires complete access to all rocked roads around the perimeters and throughout the burned areas, some hiking trail access to key photo-points, and seasonal access to select vegetation plot and stream measurement locations.

This step would follow the methodology we have developed via ORWW and NW Maps Co. in our B&B Complex, Owl Ridge Trails, Upper South Umpqua headwaters, and Coquelle Trails projects, beginning with our transition to digital video and photography (rather than scanning and 35 mm. film) in 2003:

http://www.orww.org/B&B_Complex/Repeat_Photography_Grid/index.html

http://www.orww.org/Reports/Owl_Ridge_Trails/

http://www.orww.org/Rivers/Umpqua/South/Upper_Headwaters_Project/Maps/index.html

http://www.orww.org/Coquelle_Trails/Methodology/index.html

It is important to note that each of these websites is intended to be dynamic and to be built through time — depending on available funding and student interest – but that 100% of all photographs (typically 2000 to 4000 per project) remain filed and archived and readily available whenever they might be needed. For this project, photo documentation would be given a much higher priority for organization and display due to the focus and objectives of the study. The desired 85%-100% sampling targeted for comprehensive landscape-scale coverage would have ideally been completed as the fires were being contained and before winter storms set in (a suggested BAER-type project for future large-scale catastrophic events of similar magnitude), but still should be completed as quickly as possible, with areas currently being logged for salvage and roads being cleared of hazard trees given the highest priorities.

This process should be repeated at the conclusion of the five-year study period, and perhaps more frequently at key locations if conditions warrant. Following the conclusion of this study these photographs will likely remain valuable for repeat photography purposes for many decades to come — similar to the informational and research value Osborne photographs and early maps and aerial photos have at this time.

2. Systematic selection of a statistically significant number of permanent plot locations established to measure seasonal plot-scale changes in surface vegetation and in stream channels.

Permanent plot-scale repeat photography points should be systematically established and documented in early spring, as vegetation is first emerging, and follow the methods developed by Fred Hall in eastern Oregon (Hall 2001; 2002). These methods continue to be practiced and maintained by Bob Alverts, who has taken responsibility for Hall’s long-term photo-plots and has agreed to participate in this project as both advisor and field research associate.

Unrestricted road and trail access would be needed immediately, once funding is obtained to do baseline landscape-scale photographic coverage. Access to select vegetation plot and stream measurement locations would be needed beginning in spring, 2014, and continue seasonally (generally 3-4 times per year) until fall 2018, when research is expected to be completed. Landscape-scale photo documentation is referenced by GPS coordinates, but establishment of vegetation and stream plots may require rebar stakes to secure water temperature devises and to locate plot-scale repeat photography photo points.

Alverts and I have estimated that it will cost about $25,000 to establish and document – and track online — representative permanent plot locations for both streamside monitoring and for understory plant assemblages in order to measure their responses to post-fire management actions (including decisions to do nothing) for the Douglas Complex. Costs, of course, would be significantly less to revisit these locations and document changes in the future, once they have been established. Although the Rim Fire is more than five times larger than the Douglas Complex, it is likely that per acre costs to establish permanent plots will only be two or three times greater ($50,000 to $75,000) due to much of the NPS land being largely inaccessible to such research, and because streamside erosion is less of a factor in areas that have been impounded and do not have anadromous fish populations. Too, gaining research access to SPI lands, which are privately owned, may be problematic. However, it is also very probable that much valuable information already exists and will continue to be gathered by San Francisco Water and Power and other Metropolitan Utility Districts that have been affected by the Rim Fire and its aftermath. It would also seem that much or all of that information is publicly available and could be integrated into the project website with little difficulty or cost.

3. Establishment of a network of stream temperature measuring devices that can track variations in water temperature on an hourly and daily basis during spring through fall seasons.

The work by Mike Newton and others in measuring stream temperatures, streamflow, primary productivity, and fish volumes is generally well known and documented (e.g., Newton and Cole 2005). Perhaps the best known regional efforts in these regards have to do with the paired watershed studies conducted in western Oregon during the past decade, which had their beginnings in 1959, and in which Newton has been a principal contributor in recent years:

http://watershedsresearch.org/watershed-studies/

Newton recommends that stream temperatures be recorded with devices such as Onsett Tidbit thermistors, which are set to record at half-hour intervals for 24-hour days, from late May until early October, set in enough water to not go dry.  This should result in 48 measurements a day to the nearest 0.1^o C.  Newton claims the Tidbits have enough capacity to collect data for a year and cost about $105 each ten years ago, but now may be down to about $30-35, maybe less, in recommended lots of 100 instruments.  He also says they are not much bigger than a thumb and need to be anchored (“wired”) to a chunk of rebar, or something similar, and flagged so they can be readily relocated. He further says that 100 of these devices, with 10-20 in a main-stem stream and the rest at quarter-mile intervals in all fish-bearing tributaries, would give a good picture of the entire system affected by the Douglas Complex. Newton recommends using a major stream as the focus — selected among streams that have unburned headwater reaches of over a mile (if possible) — and several unburned miles downstream, with Tidbits every half mile or so.

This network should be easy to establish on the Douglas Complex — whether private landowners agree to research access or not — due to the checkerboard arrangement of BLM lands (and assuming BLM permits access for this research to take place). Depending on locations, the cost of distributing these devices across the landscape cannot be very great; probably less than the estimated $3500 or so needed to purchase them. The Rim Fire is another matter, due to reservoirs and lack of anadromous fish runs, and this information may already be in the process of being gathered, or is largely irrelevant when compared to erosion or other factors associated with water quality.

4. Seasonal measures of stream flow volumes at select locations; perhaps in conjunction with temperature measuring devices and/or streambank monitoring plots described above.

Newton suggests using the method practiced by him and Elizabeth Cole to measure discharge several times each summer in each study reach of the streams (Newton and Cole 2005), recording temperature every 300 feet, looking at (and documenting) everything from down logs, by size, to pools and riffles/glides every 10 feet, where depths were measured every foot of width to get cross-sections for computing volume. Mean molecule velocities were determined by standing 100 feet apart, with the upstream person dumping an amount of salt into the stream, while the downstream person measured conductivity of the water until it was below one-hundredth of the amount at its peak. Eleven measures of cross section in each 100 feet allows computation of volume. Volume times average velocity equals discharge — and determines the average time for all molecules and not just the center of stream. Newton suggests doing discharge measures a minimum of three times per year: June, mid-July, and late August, about a mile apart along the main-stem of the study area and also along the lowest quarter-mile of each major tributary.

These types of measures are quite likely already in place in many areas where drinking water, power production, and reservoir management are factors, and/or may be better collected and managed by affected agencies. Structural aspects of streams can be better documented with digital photographs taken from established plot locations as described above, so the main feature of these measures is water volume, and there may be easier methods for achieving this than those described by Newton – in any instance, it is principally the cost of revisiting these locations that is an issue, rather than the cost of actually taking needed measures.

5. Systematic seasonal measures of primary productivity and salmonid populations in the years following this disturbance.

Methods to measure primary productivity and fish volumes will hopefully be conducted by the agencies themselves and the need for special surveys or permits is unknown. This methodology should be determined by fish biologists and statisticians, and should be the same used to measure primary productivity as used to measure salmonid numbers and volumes. According to Newton, measurements should be taken at least four times annually, based on cubic-meter plots taken in both burned and unburned sections of the main stem, and with at least one measurement grid in each fish-bearing tributary.

These methods have been tested and perfected by participants in the paired watershed studies linked above, and potential costs can probably be obtained from those sources. Again, such measures are likely to be of greater importance on the Douglas Complex than the Rim Fire for reasons given above.

6. Seasonal and occasional documentation of terrestrial animal use, including descriptive and quantifiable changes in designated “critical habitat” conditions following the event.

This measurement would be dependent on local pre-fire “critical habitat” determinations within the study area, and can be measured and compared by repeat photography grids and GIS technology. Measures and documentation of terrestrial animal occupation and populations within the study area would, again, ideally be accomplished by affected agencies, and with information (except for endangered species, perhaps) being freely shared with other study participants.

7.  Creation, population, and regular updating of an independent and fully transparent ORWW educational website with stable, easy to navigate, and comprehensive content that thoroughly documents the study’s methods and findings.

A primary value of this research is that it is fully transparent and available to the public and to resource managers as it is being conducted. The methodology is not limited to a single experiment, but rather designed to develop a number of useful and complementary datasets that can be queried from a wide variety of perspectives. Limitations include the current need for funding sources, potentials for missed or poorly documented data gathering opportunities, and possible agency concerns regarding public access to certain research findings.

The primary outreach strategy has been described above. ORWW has a 17-year history of stable, easy to navigate educational websites and all findings will be published on a website devoted specifically to this study. Periodic news releases, popular articles, and social media will also be used to direct interested individuals to the website. Land managers and others interested in this work will be able to readily access all findings – except those legally protected, such as cultural artifacts or rare plant species – in the same manner as the interested public.

At any point in time, if sufficient interest and funding are available, the website can be elevated from an essentially archival function to an interactive design specifically adopted for purposes of public input, peer review, and/or educational projects:

http://www.orww.org/Wildfires/Biscuit/Civic_Science/index.html

Upon completion of the project in fall 2018, the website would be maintained by ORWW and any potential mirror sites indefinitely, but all interactive functions, if they have been installed, may be eliminated at that time.

8. Cumulative “cost-plus-loss” values attributed to this event, from 2013 through 2018.

These evaluations can be tracked from multiple sources by using the referenced wildfire-economics.org website (Marker and Zybach 2013; Zybach and Marker 2013). This methodology has been presented to national and state audiences and received good reviews, but this study would constitute the first real test of this approach:

http://www.wildfire-economics.org/

In addition to costs and losses attributed to wildfires, this method would be expanded to include quantifiable benefits of these events as well. Ideally, these numbers would be tackled by agency economists and/or university professors, with their results being made publicly available on the project website. If the website were made interactive, then a public testing of the “one-pager” would also be possible, as well as open discussions of the methods and results used and found by others – including media and political representatives — with an interest in wildfire economics.

Although this website has not been entirely completed, it does contain a very useful PDF reference library through 2009, containing several excellent files specific to this topic:

http://www.wildfire-economics.org/Library/index.html

In sum, if this proposal is going to be adopted, in whole or in part, the most critical component to get started is a comprehensive series of GPS-referenced landscape-scale panoramas and locational photographs. These can typically be gathered at a rate of 5,000 acres or more per day (about 300 photos, on average), and which process would not have to be repeated for five years. Processing the photos for Internet display could be done at any time, but usually the sooner after completing fieldwork, the better, both for reasons of accuracy and efficiency. Stream cleaning, salvage logging, hazard tree removal, and winter storms have already impacted conditions in many locations following the fires, and those areas most affected should probably be documented first. This involves formal permission to perform research on O&C Lands from BLM in Oregon, and on USFS and NPS lands (and hopefully SPI properties) in California. Current limitations are formal permissions and funding.

Of secondary concern, but similar importance, is establishing permanent repeat photo-plot locations along streams and in representative forest, shrub and grassland types, to be used for the duration of the five-year study. The ideal time to do this would be in the late winter or early spring 2014, as emergent vegetation begins to show, with many locations being able to be determined off-site, via maps, consultations, and the completed landscape photos inventory. It is hoped that coordination of stream, fish, and terrestrial wildlife population measures can be accomplished largely via existing expertise and budgets, and those conversations would have to begin as soon as initial research permissions and funding can be obtained.

The website can be created at any point, but the ideal time would be at the beginning of the study as a place to display and share the initial landscape-scale photographs of the study area, as well as access most available references to the fires via a comprehensive and organic PDF reference library: similar to those included in several of the links above.

Application of Research Results

Research methods could be used almost immediately by the BAER program to document and monitor the specific results of decisions and actions taken during the 2014 fire season on future large-scale wildfires. Retrospective assessments of past actions for the 2012 and 2013 fire seasons could also be performed, with an emphasis on economics and success for attaining desired effects. This study could be used as both a test of this idea and, if it is successful, as the basis for an instructional report or manual for use on other past and future wildfires of significant size.

Expected results and other findings will be presented as they are obtained via easily accessed and navigated Internet communications. There are two points of emphasis: 1) to document and measure the ecological, economic and biological effects of differing wildfire mitigation actions taken by a wide variety of private and public landowners and resource managers in response to large-scale forest wildfires; and 2) to transparently present these findings in terms that can be readily understood by the general public: land-based photographs, videos, dollars, maps, tables, graphs, and Plain English.

It is anticipated that this information – and the methods by which it is made available – will also be of great value to the public and their elected representatives in helping to make political decisions regarding wildfire management and mitigation, and by resource managers in considering and implementing decisions regarding the treatment of future large-scale wildfires.

Qualifications of Principals

As principal investigator of this proposal, it is important potential funding sources and research collaborators know my qualifications. In these regards, the links given above, written works listed in the Reference section, and my online CV should be generally sufficient:

http://www.nwmapsco.com/ZybachB/Curriculum_Vitae.htm

Of more practical value for this study are my twenty years of experience operating a reforestation business with 15 to 40 full-time employees for most years, with crews typically operating in two states at a time for most months of those years, resulting in more than 80,000 acres of successfully completed reforestation projects, with a typical annual budget of several hundred thousand dollars. By contrast, management of a project of this size and nature is more nearly similar to the completion of my PhD research, which focused on western Oregon catastrophic wildfire history and included the area currently covered by the Douglas Complex (Zybach 2003).

John Marker, Mike Newton, and Bob Alverts are well known in the fields of forest and rangeland ecology, wildfire management, and forestry and have cumulatively held notable research and management positions with the US Forest Service, Society of American Foresters, and Bureau of Land Management through much of their respective careers. Their individual credentials are generally well known and readily available through multiple sources. All have agreed to serve as technical advisors on this study and all have made significant contributions to this proposal. In addition to this combined expertise, I have coauthored five of the works referenced in this proposal with either Marker or Alverts, and Alverts and I are also poised to begin locating and documenting photo-plots throughout the Douglas Complex so soon as access permission and funding can be obtained.

Research assistants Larry Harrell and Euell Flanders would conduct photographic fieldwork for the Rim Fire portion of this proposal under my direction. Both men are former USFS employees with extensive forestry experience in and near the study area, and both are located near the Fire boundaries. In addition to their more general backgrounds in forest management, Harrell is a professional photographer with knowledge of local endangered bird populations, Flanders has experience as an hydrologist, and they both have past experience working together: all excellent attributes for this type of study.

It has not been determined as to who will establish and monitor fish and stream data, but Mike Newton has agreed to serve in an advisory capacity in this regard. It is hoped that federal and state agencies directly affected by these events — including BLM, Cal-Fire, NOAA, NPS, ODF, USFS, and USFW – will collaborate in gathering and sharing data for this project, particularly in regards to streams, fish, and wildlife.

Finally, ORWW would be placed in position of being both a public clearinghouse and a reference library for data generated by this study, a role that perfectly fits its stated Mission, Goals, and Objectives, established in December 1996:

http://www.orww.org/Mission.htm

ORWW is a 501 c(3) educational nonprofit corporation that has been funded by local businesses, individuals, foundations, associations, tribes, counties, and other organizations who share its vision and concerns. It has been continuously online since it was launched in January 1997 and has had more than 3 million visitors since that time, with more than 100,000 additional visitors to its ORWWmedia YouTube video channel. The original design of the ORWW website has been slightly refined through the years, but its original postings and URL addresses have remained constant and online from the time they were first posted. More than half of the website has been constructed by Oregon students and teachers, varying from second-graders to graduate students.

In addition to purpose, stability, navigability, and reach of its website is the fact that ORWW has pioneered in use of digital photography, GPS-referenced photo-points, GIS cartography, and Internet communications in documenting large-scale post-fire and pre-fire forested landscapes, beginning with the B&B Complex (linked above) in 2003. This study offers ORWW an ideal opportunity to further refine its methods as well as expand its boundaries and continue its stated purpose and mission.

In conclusion, both ORWW and I are entirely independent of any of the agencies, schools, or other organizations mentioned in this proposal and have no conflicts of interest in those regards. Our intent is to conduct this study as openly and as honestly as possible, presenting information as completely and as unbiased as we are capable to resource managers, elected officials, students, teachers, and the interested public.

References

Hall, Frederick C. 2001. Ground-Based Photographic Monitoring. General Technical Report PNW-GTR-503, USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, Portland, Oregon: 340 pp.

http://www.orww.org/Rivers/Umpqua/South/References/Hall_2001.pdf

Hall, Frederick C. 2002. Photo point monitoring handbook: Part A – field procedures. General Technical Report PNW-GTR-526, USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, Portland, Oregon: 48 pp., 2 parts.

http://www.orww.org/Rivers/Umpqua/South/References/Hall_2002.pdf

Marker, John and Bob Zybach 2013. Beyond Suppression and Property Loss: Calculating the True Costs of Wildfire. Commentary, Society of American Foresters (SAF), The Forestry Source, October 2013: 11.

http://www.nwmapsco.com/ZybachB/Editorials/2009-2013/SAF_Forestry_Source/Marker-Zybach_20131000-11.pdf

Newton, Michael and Elizabeth Cole 2005. Linkage Between Riparian Buffer Features and Regeneration, Benthic Communities and Water Temperature in Headwater Streams, Western Oregon. Chapter 3 IN: Productivity of Western Forests: A Forest Products Focus. General Technical Report PNW-GTR-642, USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, Portland, Oregon: 81-101

http://www.esipri.org/Library/Newton_Michael/Newton-Cole_2005.pdf

Zybach, Bob and Robert Alverts 2013. ESIPRI Environmental Sciences Peer Review Guidelines. Technical Report No. 1, Environmental Sciences Independent Peer Review Institute, Inc. (ESIPRI), Port Townsend, Washington: 155 pp.

http://www.esipri.org/Guidelines/

Zybach, Bob and John Marker 2013. The True Costs of Wildfire & The Douglas Complex. Oregon Fish & Wildlife Journal, Vol. 35, No. 4: 31-37.

http://www.nwmapsco.com/ZybachB/Articles/Douglas_Complex_2013/Zybach-Marker_2013.pdf

Zybach, Bob, Michael Dubrasich, Gregory Brenner, and John Marker 2009a. U.S. Wildfire Cost-Plus-Loss Economics Project: The “One-Pager” Checklist (online version). Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center and US Wildfire Cost-Plus-Loss Economics Project:  9 pp.

http://www.wildfire-economics.org/Library/Zybach_et_al_2009a.pdf

Zybach, Bob, Michael Dubrasich, Gregory Brenner, and John Marker 2009b. U.S. Wildfire Cost-Plus-Loss Economics Project: The “One-Pager” Checklist (academic version). Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center and US Wildfire Cost-Plus-Loss Economics Project:  20 pp.

http://www.wildfire-economics.org/Library/Zybach_et_al_2009b.pdf

Zybach, Bob 2003. The Great Fires: Indian burning and catastrophic forest fire patterns of the Oregon Coast Range, 1491-1951. PhD Dissertation, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon: 451 pp.

http://www.nwmapsco.com/ZybachB/Thesis/Zybach_PhD_2003.pdf

Zybach, Bob. 2008. Conceptual Design Strategy to Create a Cooperative Interactive Educational Website for the Post-Biscuit Fire Management Study. Unpublished report. Oregon Websites and Watersheds Project, Inc. and USDA Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station, Corvallis, Oregon: 12 pp.

http://www.orww.org/Wildfires/Biscuit/Civic_Science/References/Zybach_2008.pdf

This came in on Halloween from our noted environmental scientists (and environmental activists), Dominick DellaSala and Chad Hanson and a number (248) of interesting cosigners. Apparently this is Part 3 in a Developing Series: https://forestpolicypub.com/2013/09/27/osu-forestry-saving-our-planet-by-letting-us-forests-burn-and-rot/

Press Release

MEDIA ADVISORY – October 31, 2013

Contact: Dominick DellaSala, Chief Scientist, Geos Institute  541/482-4459 x305 or 541/621-7223

In an open letter to the U.S. Congress, 250 scientists request that Congress show restraint in speeding up logging in the wake of this year’s wildfires, most notably the Rim fire in the Stanislaus National Forest and Yosemite National Park.

The scientists raised concerns that currently proposed legislation (HR1526, which passed in the House in September, and HR3188, now before the House) would seriously undermine the ecological integrity of forest ecosystems, setting back their ability to regenerate after wildfires.

The letter also pointed to the numerous ecosystem benefits from wildfires and how post-fire landscapes are as rich in plants and wildlife as old-growth ecosystems.

Click here to see the full text of the scientists’ letter to Congress.

Click here for a Nov. 2, 2013 Associated Press article about the scientists’ letter.

Here’s how the Associated Press handled this, (with author unidentified, but likely based in southwest Oregon):

Scientists oppose two logging bills in Congress

Two firefighters watch trees burn while battling the Rim Fire near Yosemite National Park, Calif., in August. (The Associated Press)

The experts say two measures pushed by pro-logging interests ignore a growing scientific consensus that the burned landscape plays a critical role in forest regeneration and is home to many birds, bats and other species found nowhere else.

“We urge you to consider what the science is telling us: that post-fire habitat created by fire, including patches of severe fire, are ecological treasures rather than ecological catastrophes, and that post-fire logging does far more harm than good to the nation’s public lands,” they wrote in a letter mailed to members of Congress Friday.

One bill, authored by Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., would make logging a requirement on some public forestland, speed timber sales and discourage legal challenges.

The House approved the legislation 244-173 in September and sent it to the Senate, where it awaits consideration by the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. The White House has threatened a veto, saying it would jeopardize endangered species, increase lawsuits and block creation of national monuments.

Hastings, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, said wildfires burned 9.3 million acres in the U.S. last year, while the Forest Service only harvested timber from about 200,000 acres.

Hastings’ bill includes an amendment by Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., which he also introduced as separate legislation specific to lands burned by this year’s Rim Fire at Yosemite National Park, neighboring wilderness and national forests in the Sierra Nevada.

“We have no time to waste in the aftermath of the Yosemite Rim Fire,” McClintock said at a subcommittee hearing in October. “By the time the formal environmental review of salvage operations has been completed in a year, what was once forestland will have already begun converting to brushland, and by the following year, reforestation will become infinitely more difficult and expensive.”

The Rim Fire started in August and grew to become one of the largest wildfires in California history. It burned 400 square miles and destroyed 11 residences, three commercial properties and 98 outbuildings. It cost $127 million to fight.

Members of the House Natural Resources Committee remain optimistic the Senate will take up Hastings’ bill before the end of the year, said Mallory Micetich, the committee’s deputy press secretary.

“We have a lot of hazardous fuel buildup, and it will help alleviate some of the threat of catastrophic wildfires,” she said.

The scientists see it differently.

“Just about the worst thing you can do to these forests after a fire is salvage-log them,” said Dominick DellaSala, the lead author of the letter. “It’s worse than the fire itself because it sets back the recovery that begins the minute the fire is out.”

DellaSala, chief scientist at the conservation group Geos Institute in Ashland, Ore., was on a team of scientists that produced the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s final recovery plan for the spotted owl in 2008.

Many who signed the opposition letter have done research in the field and several played roles with the U.S. Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife Service in developing logging policies for the threatened northern spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest.

“Though it may seem at first glance that a post-fire landscape is a catastrophe ecologically,” they wrote, “numerous scientific studies tell us that even in patches where forest fires burned most intensely, the resulting post-fire community is one of the most ecologically important and biodiverse habitat types in western conifer forests.

“Moreover, it is the least protected of all forest types and is often as rare, or rarer, than old-growth forest due to damaging forest practices encouraged by post-fire logging policies.”

Recent discussion on this blog has regarded the restrictions governing recent and proposed changes in planning for our National Forests. Some concern has been raised that current regulations have veered far from the intended path of the original founders of the National Forest System. The “Organic Act of 1897,” for example (30 Stat. 34-36; codified U.S.C. vol. 16, sec. 551), stated that the purpose of the forest reserves was for “watershed protection and timber production.”  The Act further states (note: the following quotes, bold texts, and legal citations are mostly courtesy of the “Family Guardian” website):

“…but it is not the purpose or intent of these provisions of the Act Providing for Such Reservations to authorize the inclusion therein, of lands more valuable for the mineral contained therein and for agricultural purposes, than for Forest Reserve purposes…”

Settlers were allowed to cut firewood, fencing and building material, and mining and prospecting were specifically authorized within forest reserve boundaries, but grazing was not mentioned. Statutes at Large, vol. 30, p. 36; U.S.C. vol. 16, sec. 478 provided that nothing in the act would “prohibit any person from entering upon such national forests for all proper and lawful purpose, including that of prospecting, locating and developing the mineral resource thereof . . . such persons must comply with the rules and regulations covering such national forests.” The section also provided that the Secretary of the Interior to “make such rules and regulations . . . as will insure the objects of such reservations, namely, to regulate their occupancy and use and to preserve the forests thereon from destruction.”

Less than one month after passage, the General Land Office “promulgated regulations” that allowed grazing in reserves. In 1896, restrictive Forest Rules regarding sheep grazing were challenged in United States v. Tygh Valley Co., 76 F. 693. The Forest Rules were upheld on the basis that closely herded sheep were damaging the resources; (see also Dastervignes v. United States, 122 F. 30; 1903; and Dent v. United States, 76 P. 455, reversing 71 P. 920; 1904.) According to Colorado Judge Ethelbert Ward, The Legal Aspect of the Grazing Problem, these were essentially civil cases by injunction to prevent damage to property “and would apply as well to the individual as to the United States. They are founded on the law of the land, and do not depend on rules and regulations.” (Forest Service Law Office Correspondence RG 49, Drawer 16, National Archives.)

The grazing system devised by the Bureau of Forestry in 1902 issued the first grazing permits for sheep. A circular issued by the department of Interior on January 8, stated livestock on the forest reserve would receive preference in the following order: 1) Stock of residents within the reserve; 2) Stock of persons who own permanent stock ranches within the reserve, but who reside outside of the reserve; 3) Stock of persons living in the immediate vicinity of the reserve, called neighboring stock and 4) stock of outsiders who have some equitable claim.

So, we can see from the outset that the Forest Reserves were intended entirely for “watershed protection” and “timber production” — excluding all lands better suited for agricultural and mining purposes — and the principal issue of the day seems to have been livestock grazing. Is any of this still relevant today in regards to current National Forest planning efforts?

We can also see a very specific attempt to define “local” in regards to pre-automobile livestock owners; was that perspective still accepted during the construction of the 1905 “Use Book”?

The following article and photographs were published earlier this month in the LA Times and received virtually no public commentary. A few days ago an environmental group, Natural Resources Defense Council, released a study in which it was claimed that more than 200 million Americans were subjected to wildfire smoke in 2011. USA Today reported this news under the headline “Wildfire Smoke Becoming a Serious Health Hazard”: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/10/24/wildfires-smoke-climate-change-harm-health/3173165/

Is human health just one more reason to restore regular prescribed burns to fire-prone forests, shrublands, and grasslands in the western US?

Trees burned by the Rim Fire in the Stanislaus National Forest. The Rim was the largest Sierra Nevada wildfire in more than a century of record keeping. (Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times / September 13, 2013) Scientists call for more controlled burns in West’s forests By Bettina BoxallOctober 3, 2013, 4:14 p.m.

“Fire policy that focuses on suppression only delays the inevitable, promising more dangerous and destructive future forest fires,” wrote the authors, who include Scott Stephens of UC Berkeley, James Agee of the University of Washington, William Romme of Colorado State University and Thomas Swetnam of the University of Arizona.

The authors also made a couple of suggestions that are bound to be more controversial than stepping up managed fire rates.

Some forest lands may be so fire-prone, they wrote, “that building should be prevented, discouraged or removed” through regulation, insurance rates or tax incentives.

They also said significantly more federal money for restoration work could be available if state and local authorities picked up more of the firefighting tab in wildland areas bordering development.

In ponderosa pine and mixed-conifer forests that are adapted to frequent wildfires that burn at low and moderate severity, Stephens said the past century of fire suppression and logging has set the stage for more damaging blazes.

Timber harvest removed most of the largest, fire-resistant trees, while the government’s anti-fire policies promoted dense regrowth and fuel buildup. Now rising temperatures are lengthening the fire season.

“Those forests are so vulnerable,” said Stephens, the paper’s lead author. A key concern is that more severe wildfires in a warmer, drier climate can kill such large patches of conifers that the tree seed bank is lost, thwarting forest regeneration and leading to permanent conversion to shrub fields.

Land managers need to conduct widespread prescribed burns and manage wildfires to reduce forest fuel loads, the authors said.

National parks and a few national forests with huge, remote wilderness areas in Arizona and Idaho have done that. But in many California forests, large-scale managed burn programs have been hindered by air quality regulations and concerns about endangering neighboring rural communities.

If it’s not possible to conduct extensive managed burns, then mechanical thinning of smaller, dense tree growth can help, Stephens said. “This is not,” he emphasized, “cut the big trees.”

The still-smoldering Rim Fire in the Stanislaus National Forest and Yosemite National Park is an example of the kind of fire the authors are concerned about. The largest wildfire to burn in the Sierra Nevada in more than a century of record keeping, the Rim killed big forest patches thousands of acres in size.

Stephens, who conducts research on plots in the Stanislaus, recently  returned to a spot where he had earlier come across towering pines and incense cedar several hundred years old. He wanted to see whether the big trees had survived the Rim’s flames.

“I got to the exact plot,” Stephens said. “Unfortunately all the trees died. It was really a kind of sad day.”