Matthew Koehler

Oregonians lose hundreds of millions of tax dollars a year subsidizing the forest industry. Enough, says John Talberth, of the Center for Sustainable Economy. Read the full story by Emily Green of Street Roots News.

The Center for Sustainable Economy is calling attention to how taxpayers subsidize one of the greatest contributors to climate change in Oregon – to the tune of at least $750 million per year, according to its analysis.

The Portland-based think tank has determined big timber is topping the list of carbon emitters in the state, finding that industrial logging is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. Last year, researchers at Oregon State University and University of Idaho corroborated those findings.

While state officials have largely ignored these studies, the Oregon Global Warming Commission has been working with the Oregon Department of Forestry on a Forest Carbon Accounting Project aimed at calculating the net emission of carbon from logging once factors such as carbon stores in wood products are taken into account. Their final report is expected in June.

Internationally, nations including the U.S. have agreed to phase out environmentally harmful subsidies. This should include subsidies and tax breaks going to Oregon’s multibillion-dollar timber industry, which is emitting more carbon dioxide than the state’s transportation sector, argues John Talberth, senior economist at the Center for Sustainable Economy – especially considering the sale of Oregon timber is increasingly benefiting foreign investors.

Earlier this year, however, Oregon lawmakers went the opposite direction when they wrote additional tax breaks for the timber industry into their failed Clean Energy Jobs bill, House Bill 2020, in an unsuccessful effort to get support for the legislation from the industry.

During the same legislative session, the Center for Sustainable Economy pushed House Bill 2659, which would have made the receipt of timber subsidies contingent upon good land practices. The bill failed to get out of committee, but Talberth said he believes the bill “has a fighting chance” should it be introduced again in the short session next year.

In the meantime, Talberth’s organization, which advocates for utilizing Pacific Northwest forests for their carbon-sequestering abilities, has taken aim at the timber industry tax subsidy issue.

In May, the center put out a report, “Environmentally Harmful Subsidies in the U.S.,” finding that logging programs in national forests are costing U.S. taxpayers $1.8 billion per year.

Late last month, Talberth gave a presentation in a packed room at outdoor clothing retailer Patagonia’s downtown Portland office on how state and federal subsidies are affecting Oregon taxpayers.

We asked Talberth to break down how the timber industry is costing Oregon taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars every year.

John Talberth: There are three major categories. There are tax breaks – complete exemptions – from property taxes, for example, on standing timber, property tax exemptions for logging equipment, and property tax exemptions for logging roads.

Then there are special rates. Forestland owners pay property taxes at a very reduced rate compared to other landowners.

Then there is a whole category of direct assistance in the form of grants, technical assistance, low-interest loans, cost share assistance, industrial development bonds and money spent promoting wood products through the Oregon Forest Research Institute, one of the timber industry’s favorite propaganda machines.

And then there are the other types of subsidies, like below-cost timber sold off federal land.

We just recently did an analysis; those subsidies nationwide amount to about $2 billion a year.

So when you add it all up, and this is just a partial tally, we’re still in the process of putting out a report on this, it’s over $750 million a year, just in Oregon alone.

Emily Green: So this is a combination of subsidies on private land and federal land that is costing taxpayers in lost revenue and payouts.

Talberth: Correct.

Green: Do private timber companies operating in Oregon need these subsidies to be profitable, or is it unnecessary?

Talberth: I think it’s completely unnecessary. These are multibillion-dollar companies making record profits right now. Not every state subsidizes them, and they’re doing just fine.

I think a lot of these subsidies are doing nothing but shoring up profit margins at these companies that are already high enough. We don’t need to worry about infringing on their profit margins and them going out of business because these subsidies are chump change to them.

Green: There have been some changes to forestland ownership in recent years. I was wondering how that looks in Oregon. Are the companies that are profiting off our natural resources here, are they mostly locally owned at this point?

Talberth: They’re not. One of the most alarming aspects of forest ownership trends over the last 15 years is the loss of locally owned, vertically integrated companies to these international investors.

Right now, the majority of industrial forestlands in Oregon are owned by Wall Street investment organizations and companies, and a growing share of those are foreign investors and foreign companies.

In terms of foreign corporation ownership growth in the United States, the most rapidly increasing share is productive forestland. This is a big concern from a number of standpoints, including the environmental destruction that’s happening on the ground from these companies that are short-sighted, but also in terms of food security and water security. And it’s not just forestland; it’s farmland as well. These companies are moving in and grabbing up U.S. forestland and farmland, and we should all be concerned about that. Not just from an environmental standpoint, but from a social justice standpoint and from a community stability standpoint.

Green: Do you have any idea at this point of what percentage is foreign-owned or which countries are most aggressive in this land acquisition?

Talberth: The USDA Farm Service Agency has pretty detailed accounting of forest ownership in the United States, and we’ve just begun to unpack all that data. But, I know that Canada is a very large investor in U.S. forestland.

(Canada holds 191,635 acres of land in Oregon, according to the Farm Service Agency’s 2017 report. In all, 818,049 acres of agricultural land in Oregon are foreign held, including 555,134 acres of forest.)

Green: At Street Roots, we frequently cover affordable-housing issues, and one thing we’ve heard over and over again, especially in rural Oregon, is that building affordable housing isn’t penciling out because of the high cost of building materials, and part of that is lumber costs. At the same time, we’re in this lumber-rich state, but we’re shipping a lot of our raw logs elsewhere to be milled.

Talberth: We don’t have the quantitative data, but obviously this is just basic market dynamics – if the wood is going to the highest bidder and the highest bidder over the past decade or so has been increasingly foreign markets, Asian markets – and they reached their all-time high about a year and half ago – and it was largely due to the demand from foreign countries.

And this is one of the big problems of having an increasing share of forestlands in the state owned by international investors. They’re looking to use forestland in the U.S. for the export market, and that’s why we have log shortages at our local mills – because a lot of it’s being exported.

Green: Your organization released a report in May that, in part, highlighted how the national logging program is losing taxpayers $1.8 billion per year. How is that possible, if we’re harvesting all these logs off our federal forestlands, shouldn’t that be bringing in a profit?

Talberth: We believe the federal government is under a statutory obligation, and we have yet to press this in court, to make sure that its needs are being managed in a manner that maximizes social and economic benefits to the local communities, and that includes, when it does sell timber, getting a fair return on that timber, not losing money and subsidizing the timber industry.

It ought to be getting all of the cost that the pubic is incurring back, and instead, the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management are selling logs to private mills at a drastically reduced rate that doesn’t even come close to offsetting any of the agency costs.

This is a form of environmentally harmful subsidy that nations around the world have agreed needs to be combatted, and yet, our Forest Service and BLM are prime culprits when it comes to environmentally harmful logging practices.

Green: Are these agreements something the U.S. ever signed on to?

Talberth: Yes, absolutely. The U.S. is party to international agreements like the one brokered at the Rio+20 Earth Summit and participates in programs administered by agencies and institutions such as the Organization for Co-operation and Development and International Monetary Fund that seek to phase out environmentally harmful subsidies. Despite this, subsidies for harmful logging practices are expanding in scale and scope.

Green: The Trump administration wants to increase logging by about 40% on national forestlands. By increasing logging that much, is there any potential for that to begin to make our national forests profitable to taxpayers?

Talberth: First of all, we object to the very idea of using federal forestlands for private profit at all. These are the only places in the country where the public has rights to recreation, to clean water, to wildlife. There are industrial forestlands that are managed exclusively for timber, so it doesn’t make any sense at all to have a commercial timber sale program on public lands at all. But if that program is going to happen, then at bare minimum, the public has a right to getting a fair return from those investments, and we’re not even close.

Green: During your presentation at Patagonia, you said there was a way to “log, but leave the forest behind.” Can you explain how that works and also, wouldn’t this kind of forestry increase building costs even more?

Talberth: In terms of the role of forests in Oregon’s climate agenda and the U.S. climate agenda, we believe two things need to happen. One is the federal public lands and state public lands – even lands managed by counties – should be managed as carbon reserves. We should phase out logging on those lands and let them grow to capture and store carbon.

On private lands, we believe we need to make a transition from industrial forest practices to climate-smart alternatives. Climate-smart alternatives are ways to log a forest and leave canopy behind. So, individual tree selection and patch-cutting techniques – there is a technique called variable density thinning that has been demonstrated – all these techniques are ways to get wood out of the forest but leave the canopy intact and obviate the need for chemical spraying and plantations and replanting – just let the forest regenerate itself.

In the short run, it means we get less volume from the forest, but that’s OK because we’re wasting enormous quantities of wood. But in the long run, these techniques have the potential to actually maximize a landowner’s revenue and add some value to the forest.

Once these forests get bigger and older, and these big trees become the norm instead of small plantation trees, the wood that comes off these lands is actually of higher quality and of higher volume than the wood coming off plantations on an acre-by-acre basis.

Green: Some last-minute subsidies were added to HB 2020 to benefit the timber industry. Is that something you expect to see again if they consider this bill in the short session next year?

Talberth: I think that the political strategy of appeasement, of trying to buy the timber industry’s support, backfired so severely and so catastrophically that legislators will be foolish to try to do that again.

I think legislators just need to focus on the scientific facts and the scientific reality that we cannot continue to have these industrial forest practices in our state, that we need a rapid transition to climate smart alternatives, and that means directly regulating the timber industry as part of any climate bill that’s adopted.

Green: They were doing these giveaways to the timber industry, but the timber industry was completely exempted from the bill to begin with.

Talberth: Yeah, they were completely exempted, and then as a sweetener, they threw these last-minute subsidies to make sure that wood supply wouldn’t be restricted and that transporting logs wouldn’t be more expensive, and yet they still got burned.

Green: Coming back to that $750 million figure that these subsidies are costing Oregon taxpayers: If the state was able to move to some sort of system where the land was incentivized for carbon storage as opposed to timber harvesting, would we be seeing a savings to Oregon taxpayers in any way?

Talberth: There would be a savings. Right now, a lot of these tax breaks and subsidies just need to be rescinded – for instance, the below-cost timbers sales or the tax exemptions for logging roads and logging equipment.

But a portion of the tax revenue that counties would receive as the result of rescinding all these harmful tax breaks should be set aside to reinvest in promoting these climate smart practices, because in the short term – the next couple of decades – we’re going to need to subsidize these practices to help nurture the new generation of forestland owners who know how to do these practices. That is going to cost some money, but it’s well worth it. Getting these practices up and running so that our forests become a major, natural carbon sink – rather than a big source of emissions – is one of the most important investments Oregon can make.

This morning I got an email from U.S. Forest Service Research News, which including a link to this new research from the USFS and partners concerning wildfires in California.

While the research may be surprising to some, it’s not at all surprising to many of us who have said the same thing going back a few decades now. We’ve had perhaps over a hundred debates about this on the blog over the years. Heck, Dr. Jack Cohen’s research documented much of this going back into the 1980s, if not even earlier. Richard Halsey and his California Chaparral Institute have been also talking about these issues for at least 20 years. And those of us who’ve been branded as “environmental terrorist groups” – and blamed for California wildfires by the likes of former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke – have been also trying to get the public and policy makers to understand the dynamics at play for decades as well.

Remember, it’s been very common for politicians from through the country (but especially the West) to use wildfires in California as the reason why we need to dramatically increase logging on our public lands by systematically weakening bedrock environmental laws. While that may make for good politics when people turn on their TV’s and see flames, it doesn’t make for good policy that will protect communities, firefighters and save lives and money.

Most California Fires Occur in Area of Wildland-urban Interface with Less Fuel and More People

Madison, WI, September 24, 2019 – In California, the state with more building destruction by wildfire than all of the other states combined, new research by a U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service scientist and University of Wisconsin-Madison partners found something surprising. Over nearly three decades, half of all buildings destroyed by wildfire in California were located in an area that is described as having less of the grasses, bushes and trees that are thought to fuel fire in the wildland-urban interface, or WUI.

The study by H. Anu Kramer with Forest Service scientist Miranda Mockrin and colleagues, “High wildfire damage in interface communities in California,” notes that a portion of the WUI defined as “interface” and characterized by having more homes but relatively little wildland vegetation experienced half of the building losses due to wildfire but composed only 2 percent of the total area burned by the wildfires assessed in the study. The study was recently published in the International Journal of Wildland Fire and is available at: https://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/58348

California’s expansion of housing within and adjacent to wildland vegetation is not unique; the most recent assessment shows that the WUI now includes about one-third of homes in the United States. As wildfire management has become more complex, costly and dangerous, defining what constitutes WUI and defining more specific types of WUI has become more important as local communities strive to apply resources and policy-decisions where they will be most effective in saving lives and property.

The Federal definition of WUI describes two specific areas: “interface” WUI includes developed areas that have sparse or no wildland vegetation, but are within close proximity of a large patch of wildland. “Intermix” WUI, on the other hand, is defined as the area where houses and wildland vegetation directly intermingle. Both are separate from “rural” areas, which may be characterized by agricultural land and low-density housing and development (less than 1 house per 40 acres).

“Our findings show that WUI areas do experience the vast majority of all losses, with 82 percent of all buildings destroyed due to wildfire located in the WUI,” Mockrin said. “We were surprised to find 50 percent of all buildings lost to fire being destroyed in the interface portion of the WUI, however. Many risk reduction plans focus on natural vegetation fueling fire, but in the interface WUI where so much of the destruction is occurring, we have to consider finer-grained fuels such as wood piles, propane tanks, and cars.”

Study findings suggest that wildfires are still rare in urban areas. The Tubbs fire that struck Santa Rosa, Calif., in 2017 was similar to other California wildfires in that the majority of buildings lost in the fire were located in the WUI; however, the Tubbs Fire was unique in having 25 percent of all destruction occurring in urban areas. In comparison, 4 percent of destruction occurred within urban areas in other California fires. Other recent and highly destructive fires, including the 2018 Carr, Camp and Woolsey fires, included no urban area within their perimeters, exemplifying the rarity of the Tubbs’ building destruction in urban areas.

“Although the Tubbs fire was not the norm, it seems like every fall there is a new record-setting fire in California, with three of the five most destructive fires in state history having burned in the last 5 years and the deadliest California fire (the Camp fire) burning last year,” Kramer said. “These fires are fueled by the homes themselves, landscaping, and other man-made fuels that are seldom included in the fire models that are used to predict these fires. Our work highlights the importance of studying and mitigating the fuels in these interface WUI areas in California where most of the destruction is occurring.”

In addition to solidifying definitions of interface and intermix WUI so communities can address their different attributes in wildland fire planning, researchers suggest that fire behavior models should be revisited.

The study was co-authored by Volker Radeloff of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Patricia Alexandre of the University of Lisbon.

Imagine that. According to some experts, the Trump administration has used fuzzy carbon and climate math to justify their scheme to greatly expand logging of ancient, old-growth forests and road construction within the Tongass National Forest, one of the last remaining intact temperate rainforests in the world.

Adam Aton from E&E News has the full story:

The Trump administration says the Tongass National Forest is America’s best carbon warehouse — so it’s fine to increase logging there.

The Forest Service last week released a draft environmental impact statement for building new roads through the Tongass, a precondition for feeding more old-growth trees into southeastern Alaska’s struggling timber mills. Every 21st-century president has fought over whether to expand or curtail logging in the massive forest. Trump has gone the furthest; his Forest Service last week said the time had come for a final resolution and recommended opening almost the entire area to development.

At stake is the country’s largest forest. The Tongass is among the world’s best carbon sinks, and it’s one of the largest unfragmented ecosystems in North America. Its trees hold about 650 million tons of carbon, which roughly converts to half of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions in 2017.

Trump’s draft EIS says the region plays an “important” role in regulating global climate, and changes in its forests can carry “global consequences.” Those are notable statements from an administration that usually frames emissions deregulation and drilling growth as too insignificant to affect world temperatures.

To justify development in such a critical area, the administration turns to an argument that many scientists reject: Any emissions from logging would be “temporary,” as the timber would sequester carbon in building materials while replacement trees recapture even more CO2. The Tongass’ carbon load has stabilized or possibly even increased since logging peaked in the 1970s and ’80s before declining, according to the draft EIS.

“Potential negative effects on the Tongass may be ameliorated and may be completely reversed with time, reducing or eliminating potential negative cumulative effects on carbon and climate,” the document says.

Beverly Law, an Oregon State University professor whose forestry research is cited in the draft EIS, called the administration’s argument “misinformation.”

Some old-growth trees in the Tongass are more than a thousand years old, so it would take a very long time for the forest to regain such a huge amount of carbon, she said.

“We call it slow in, fast out,” she said in an interview, explaining that emissions from milling and transporting the lumber, along with decomposition of the waste wood, outweigh carbon sequestration.

“We’ve tracked this to landfill, and it’s a significant [amount of] emissions,” she said.

About 500,000 acres of old-growth forest — about 9% of all the trees in the Tongass — has been cut down, but only one-quarter of that has happened since 1990. Some of the region’s lumber mills have shuttered amid the slowdown, prompting the state of Alaska to petition the Trump administration to allow more logging of valuable old-growth trees.

The Trump administration’s preferred course of action would make available another 160,000 acres of old growth, while also nixing prohibitions on roads in 9.2 million acres of the Tongass. The Forest Service said that would happen in accordance with guidelines from the United Nations’ climate authority, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“The management mechanisms applied in all alternatives are consistent with internationally recognized climate change adaptation and mitigation practices identified by the IPCC,” the draft EIS says.

That line baffled Dominick DellaSala, president and chief scientist at the Geos Institute.

“I was one of the reviewers of the IPCC report, and I can tell you: Nothing in that report supports what they’re claiming,” said DellaSala, whose research was also cited in the draft EIS.

The draft EIS warns that Alaska could see an additional 1 to 3.5 degrees Celsius of warming by 2050, but it makes little effort to grapple with the implications of such warming.

“There is considerable uncertainty concerning the exact scope of the effects of climate change on the forests of Southeast Alaska and how best to deal with possible changes to the many resources managed on the Tongass,” the document says.

Climate models show Alaska warming faster than the rest of the country — the changes are already visible — but the Tongass is poised to fare better than its surrounding landscapes, DellaSala said. That could make it an oasis for wildlife that feels climate pressures elsewhere. But destroying habitat by logging and fragmenting the remainder with roads undermines that option, he said.

“Alaska’s going to be in big trouble in the coming century, so why give away the one opportunity to protect those forests that are going to help stabilize the climate?” he said.

Arches National Park is currently full.

When I saw this tweet just now, I was immediately reminded that former Arches National Park Ranger Edward Abbey saw this all coming way back in 1985. Back in 2012, we posted the never-aired Edward Abbey movie-essay. But please watch it again, and see how prophetically – and wryly – Abbey talks about the future of our National Parks: https://vimeo.com/49544042

It should also be mentioned that the “Arches National Park is currently full” announcement comes directly on the heels of the Trump administration opening up all the National Parks in Utah to ATVs, a decision that as made with zero NEPA and zero public notice or input.

As the Salt Lake Tribune reported last month:

The roar of ATVs could be coming to a Utah national park backcountry road near you under a major policy shift initiated by the National Park Service without public input.

Across the country, off-road vehicles like ATVs and UTVs are generally barred from national parks. For Utah’s famed parks, however, that all changes starting Nov. 1, when these vehicles may be allowed on both main access roads and back roads like Canyonlands National Park’s White Rim and Arches’ entry points from Salt Valley and Willow Springs….

Under the rule change, off-highway vehicles could roam Canyonlands’ Maze District and Arches’ Klondike Buffs — as long as they remain on designated routes. In general, ATVs would be allowed to travel roads that are open to trucks and cars.

The directive, which applies only to Utah parks, triggered an immediate backlash from conservation groups, which predicted the move will result in a “management nightmare” for parks already struggling with traffic jams and parking clutter.

Now the park service is inviting a whole new category of vehicle onto park roads, establishing new uses that will disrupt wildlife and other visitors’ enjoyment, warned Kristen Brengel, the National Parks Conservation Association’s vice president of government affairs.

[The directive was issued] after off-highway groups and Utah lawmakers led by Rep. Phil Lyman, R-Blanding, pressured the Interior Department to lift the prohibition….

Lyman is the former San Juan County commissioner who became a political celebrity after organizing an off-road vehicle protest ride though Recapture Canyon, which resulted in misdemeanor convictions, 10 days in jail and a reputation as a public lands warrior.

Adding pressure were UTV Utah and Utah OHV Advocates. According to the groups, Utah is home to 202,000 registered OHVs, or off-highway vehicles, the broad category that includes UTVs and ATVs.

“Despite being one of the largest groups of public land users, and even though the economic benefit of our community dwarfs most other recreational users combined, we often find ourselves discriminated against by decision-makers that head public land agencies,” the groups’ presidents, Bud Bruening and Brett Stewart, wrote in a joint July 29 letter to Bernhardt. “In Utah, this discrimination is particularly acute when it comes to the National Park Service.”

Sorry, Phil Lyman, but you actually don’t “find ourselves discriminated against.” You are not your ATV. Also, I’m willing to bet that every single person in Utah who owns an ATV, OHV or UTV also owns an automobile.

Here’s a link to the full article from the Teton Valley News. Below are the first few paragraphs from the piece.

On Sept. 26, Mountain Pursuit, a hunters’ advocacy group in Jackson, filed a lawsuit against the Bridger Teton and Caribou Targhee National Forest for allowing mountain bike use in the Palisades Wilderness Study Area and ATV use in the Shoal Creek Wilderness Study Area.

In August of 2018, after the failure of the Teton County Wyoming Public Lands Initiative to make a recommendation to the Teton County Board of Commissioners on how to manage the local Wilderness Study Areas, Rob Shaul founded Mountain Pursuit to lobby for ethical hunting, wildlife and habitat conservation, and hunter education.

Shaul represented the general public in the WPLI committee, which formed in 2016 to address the question of management of the WSAs in Teton County. While a few different proposals, including one “middle ground” proposal spearheaded by Shaul, came before the committee, none of the plans received a majority vote and the committee ended its work without finding consensus.

“Through my two-plus years of working for compromise on the WPLI it was impressed upon me that in northwest Wyoming, Industrial Recreation is the primary threat to wildlife, and that those pushing recreation, including the mountain bike and motorized recreation advocates and businesses, were unwilling to compromise to protect wildlife,” Shaul wrote in an email to the Teton Valley News.

In the CBS News series “Eye on Earth,” “CBS This Morning: Saturday” co-host Jeff Glor looked at the debate over what to do with America’s ancient forests. You can watch the entire segment here.

I thought the following part of the news feature was particularly interesting, especially in the context of many discussions on this blog.

When asked why clear-cutting, Payne said, “We’re mimicking what Mother Nature’s done for billions of years.”

“But this looks traumatic for a lot of people when they see something like this,” Glor said.

“I actually look at it quite different,” said Payne. “I think it’s somewhat aesthetically pleasing.”

“You think that looks aesthetically pleasing?”

“I do. Maybe I’m somewhat biased, but when I look out, I see sustainability and rejuvenation,” he said.

“Not every company like yours is willing to talk about their story or take us to places like this. Why do you do it?”

“I think we as an industry have not done a very good job historically of telling our story,” Payne replied.

Timber companies have also traditionally used a practice called aerial spraying, in which chemicals are dropped by helicopter to kill any vegetation other than trees used for lumber.

Glor said, “A lot of people are concerned about spraying.”

“Well, I think people are just not informed well on that subject,” Payne replied. “We use it once or twice in a 50-year cycle.”

“It ultimately flows somewhere, though?”

“No, it doesn’t. No, a lot of times this stuff doesn’t flow off the landscape. The product will adhere to the vegetation that it’s targeted for, and stay there.”

Nancy Webster, who lives up the coast in Rockaway Beach, Oregon, is worried those chemicals seep into her drinking water: “This affects the fish, the wildlife, and we are up against large corporations. To even counter it, we need science and legal help, and it’s really difficult for small communities.”

Today, the situation may be reaching a critical point, because the federal government wants to suspend a public review process, which logging companies say needlessly ties them up in court.

Glor asked Payne, “Should there be a public review process when logging takes place on public lands?”

“Well, we have professionals in place in our federal agencies that are managing these lands, and I think we need to let them do that work,” Payne said.

In other words, he wants groups like Oregon Wild to stay away.

Back in May, we discussed and debated the issue of chainsaws in designated Wilderness following the U.S. Forest Service’s decision to secretively approve “a policy to violate the Wilderness Act by allowing chainsaws to clear obstructed trails in the Weminuche and South San Juan Wildernesses” in Colorado. That USFS decision was followed by a lawsuit from the San Juan Citizens Alliance, Wilderness Watch and Great Old Broads for Wilderness, and shortly after the lawsuit was filed the USFS rescinded their approval of chainsaws in Wilderness.

Over the weekend, Wilderness Watch’s George Nickas penned the following oped in the Durango Herald.

Wilderness represents a commitment to humility
By George Nickas, Wilderness Watch

Bill Worf, the Forest Service’s first wilderness program leader and Wilderness Watch’s founder, liked to tell the story of when, shortly after the Wilderness Act passed in 1964, engineers at the Forest Service Development and Technology Center expressed interest in developing a “silent” chainsaw.

Their rationale was that if the newly passed wilderness bill prohibited noisy machines, a really well muffled chainsaw would pass muster since only the operator would hear it.

Bill told them not to bother – the Wilderness Act didn’t ban motorized equipment simply because it made noise, but rather because it represented a level of technology that was not in keeping with the ideals of the Wilderness Act.

Bill would have known. He served on the Forest Service task force that wrote the regulations and policies for implementing the Wilderness Act. Prior to that, as forest supervisor overseeing the Bridger Wilderness in northwest Wyoming, he had the opportunity to lead wilderness bill author and chief lobbyist Howard Zahniser on a trip into the Bridger.

Bill credited his time with Zahniser with helping him to understand that wilderness isn’t merely an undeveloped recreation area, but a place we accept on its own terms – a commitment to humility and restraint. This means using only the lightest touch when allowing for the public uses (recreation, science, education, etc.) wilderness provides.

Congress prohibited chainsaws because motorized tools are the antithesis of restraint – they allow humans to transform the landscape quickly and easily to meet our ends rather than transforming our own attitudes and desires to accommodate the landscape.

Chainsaws embody the attitude that our convenience, impatience and demands come first, that no place is beyond the reach of our attempts to dominate and control.

Authorizing chainsaws to clear trails, as the Forest Service regional forester for Colorado and Wyoming recently did, for the South San Juan and Weminuche wildernesses, strikes a blow to this foundational tenet of the Wilderness Act.

That’s why Wilderness Watch and our allies challenged his decision in court.

But there’s another reason the decision to allow chainsaw use should concern all who care about Wilderness.

The regional forester’s rationale – not enough trail crews to clear trails the traditional way – was essentially an admission that the Forest Service has failed to maintain an adequately staffed wilderness program. At a moment’s notice, the agency routinely assembles hundreds of firefighters, planes and heavy equipment to attack even a small wildfire, but from its nearly 30,000-plus employees and $5 billion budget, it can’t pull together a handful of trained trail crews to help clear the trails in the Weminuche and South San Juan wildernesses.

Why is that?

About two decades ago, the Forest Service effectively abandoned its wilderness program and outsourced the job to volunteers.

It began by diverting wilderness funds to pay the salaries of desk-bound bureaucrats, putting “wilderness” in their job descriptions to make the transfer seem legit. But the main effort was on creating “partnerships” with volunteer groups to mask that the wilderness program was being gutted.

So today, while many wildernesses have volunteer “friends” groups trying to keep trails open or plug holes elsewhere, the agency’s program of a professionally trained and skilled field-going wilderness force has – to borrow a phrase from Bob Marshall – faded like a south-facing snowbank under a June sun.

The real lesson from the proposed chainsaw assault on the wilderness isn’t that the Forest Service is ignoring the Wilderness Act – that’s hardly news at all.

The most important takeaway is that Forest Service leadership has so decimated the agency’s wilderness program that using chainsaws to clear trails is even being discussed.

George Nickas is the executive director of Wilderness Watch, a national conservation organization dedicated to protecting the lands and waters in the National Wilderness Preservation System, headquartered in Missoula, Montana.

Here’s a press release from WildEarth Guardians about an issue that has been discussed on this blog before.

Santa Fe, NM – A Federal District Court Judge in Arizona ruled on September 11 that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Forest Service have shirked their responsibilities to ensure that Forest Service management activities are making progress towards recovery of the Mexican spotted owl, a species protected under the Endangered Species Act. WildEarth Guardians filed the case in March 12, 2013 over the agencies’ failure to ensure the recovery of the owl by collecting basic information, for more than 20 years, about the status of owl populations across the Southwest.

The ruling halts all “timber management actions” on six national forests in New Mexico and Arizona including all the national forests in New Mexico and the Tonto National Forest in Arizona. None of the 11 national forests in the two-state Southwestern Region have adequately monitored owl populations. The lawsuit originally targeted all 11 national forests in New Mexico and Arizona. However the five national forests in Arizona not subject to the injunction on logging completed new forest plans with new Endangered Species Act (ESA) consultations since the original filing of this lawsuit which led the judge to find that the lawsuit was moot on those forests.

“This decision is about agency accountability, to the public and to the recovery of the Mexican Spotted Owl,” explained John Horning, Executive Director of WildEarth Guardians. “With this decision, the agencies will finally be held accountable for ensuring that all forest management practices help, not hinder, owl recovery.”

As the decision explains, the Forest Service was required to implement a population monitoring protocol for Mexican Spotted Owl since at least 1996. It was expected that, within 10-15 years, management activities such as logging and prescribed burning that the agencies claimed would improve owl habitat, supported by monitoring that would show the species recovery, would enable its de-listing from the Endangered Species Act. Yet, as the decision states, “Over twenty years later, delisting has not occurred, and information about the current [Mexican spotted owl] population is still minimal.”

“The judge’s recent decision constitutes the clearest possible rebuke to this foot-dragging, and recognizes that the Forest Service’s failure to monitor Mexican spotted owl populations has enabled the agency to avoid accountability for its failed conservation efforts,” stated Horning. “Thankfully for these national forests and for the Mexican spotted owl, those days have now finally come to an end.”

The decision requires the agencies to initiate consultation pursuant to the ESA “addressing occupation monitoring of the MSO for recovery.” Because timber harvesting and other related activities may cause irreparable harm to the owl, the court has enjoined timber management actions, including timber harvesting, until consultation is complete. This is necessary, the Court recognized, because “It has been demonstrated over the past 20 years that the status quo will not lead to recovery of the listed species.”

“While the Forest Service finally steps up to its conservation obligations and assesses how its management programs affect the recovery of the Mexican spotted owl as a species, certain timber projects will be paused in light of the judge’s decision,” explained Steve Sugarman, the attorney representing WildEarth Guardians. “WildEarth Guardians has already opened up a dialogue with the Forest Service to assure that this pause will be orderly, and that it will not unnecessarily impede the implementation of projects that are truly necessary for the protection of life and property.”

Read the full article about Red Emerson – the billionaire owner of Sierra Pacific Industries – in Forbes. Here are some snips:

From humble beginnings traipsing through California’s vast forests with his dad to salvaging wood from forest fires, Red Emmerson has built a logging empire by being cheaper and more aggressive than his rivals….Nicknamed “Red” as a teen for his hair color, Emmerson is happy to reminisce about the many fires from which his Sierra Pacific Industries has profited….the feisty tycoon, who runs the business with his two sons, George, 61, and Mark, 58, makes more money from logging after forest fires than any person in America. When the government sells contracts to cut down trees after fires in national forests—a controversial practice known as post-fire salvage logging—Emmerson buys in at a steep discount, often paying one half to one fourth the price for traditional wood….Sierra Pacific has little competition, thanks to a 1990 law that prohibits bidding from any lumber companies that export logs. That eliminates rivals like publicly traded Weyerhaeuser and Rayonier as well as big Canadian firms.

While Emmerson’s resourcefulness has helped him climb into the top ranks of the world’s wealthiest, critics say these riches have come at the expense of the environment and taxpayers. More than 250 scientists signed a letter asking Congress to protect forests from post-fire logging, saying that it “can set back the forest renewal process for decades.” That’s because it strips the land of nutrients, preventing it from regenerating. Not only is the carbon stored in the charred tree trunks not reabsorbed by the soil—worse, it is released into the atmosphere as greenhouse gas.

“It’s a degraded landscape,” says Chad Hanson, a scientist who studies post-fire logging and whose nonprofit John Muir Project has won injunctions against four Sierra Pacific post-fire contracts. “Fire is not the thing that’s creating areas of devastation and wastelands. It’s logging, especially post-fire logging.”

Sierra Pacific rejects the scientists’ analysis, arguing that the process can speed up recovery. “It’s about extracting the value we can from a bad situation,” says a company spokesperson.

Regardless, logging in national forests is costly for taxpayers, says Hanson, who estimates they are on the hook for $1 billion a year, at least $500 million of which is directly related to post-fire salvage. That’s the amount the government pays to build roads to remote areas destroyed by fires and for herbicides the forest service sprays prior to logging to make clear-cutting easier, among other costs. Meanwhile, the federal government pulls in about $150 million annually from selling the timber in national forests, about one fourth of which comes from post-fire logging. “It’s a bad deal financially for taxpayers, but it’s a great deal for the mills,” says economist Ernie Niemi, who has studied the impact of forest management since the 1970s. “It’s very hard to justify any salvage logging. It’s like they’re bandits.”

P.S. Below are some images of what Sierra Pacific Industries’ own private lands look like in the area around Paradise, California.

According to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility:

Washington, DC — A new National Park Service order allowing electric bicycles on park trails violates several federal laws, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) which is threatening to sue any park that implements it. Significantly, the acting NPS Director, who issued the order, did not follow the instructions given by the Secretary of Interior.

On August 29, 2019 Interior Secretary David Bernhardt issued a Secretarial Order directing that all Interior Department agencies, including NPS, take steps allowing e-bikes “where other types of bicycles are allowed.” The specific instruction for NPS was to develop a proposed change in the federal regulation (36 CFR § 1.4) to “expressly exempt all e-bikes… from the definition of motor vehicles.” That proposed regulation is supposed to be promulgated pursuant to the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires public notice and comment.

NPS did not do what Secretary Bernhardt ordered, however. Instead, on the next day, August 30th, acting NPS Director P. Daniel Smith issued a “Policy Memorandum” telling all park superintendents to now allow the use of e-bikes on trails where parks currently allow the use of bicycles. Smith’s memo creates several legal problems, including that Smith –

Cannot overturn a federal regulation by fiat, meaning that any park allowing e-bikes on trails where motorized vehicles are now prohibited would be vulnerable to a lawsuit;
Counseled park superintendents to evade legally required environmental reviews by declaring e-bike openings to be “minor changes” that are categorially exempt from further analysis regardless of actual impacts; and
Lacks authority to issue any such order because he occupies his position in violation of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act which provides that any action by non-compliant officials, such as Smith, have no force or effect.
“Despite this botched attempt, no park may allow e-bikes on backcountry trails or areas outside of developed zones,” stated PEER Executive Director Tim Whitehouse, a former enforcement attorney with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, noting that the Park Service did no analysis of the effects of allowing e-bikes on trails. “PEER is prepared to go to court to ensure that e-bikes stay off any park trail where they were previously not allowed.”

On top of its legal infirmities, Smith’s order contains some troublesome provisions, such as that riders may only use the electric motor if they are also pedaling; motors may not be more powerful than 1 horsepower; and e-bikes may go no faster than 20 mph. In addition, Smith directed national parks to incorporate state and local e-bike rules.

“This ill-advised order would force overworked park rangers to also serve as bicycle cops,” added Whitehouse, pointing to shrinking park ranger force levels even with record visitation. “Smith’s action only underlines the bankrupt state of today’s Park Service leadership.”