Matthew Koehler

The Sacramento Bee has the full story.

Remember, earlier this year Trump’s outgoing Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke blamed California wildfires on “frivolous lawsuits” from “environmental terrorist groups.”

PG&E has already been convicted in criminal court for a recent deadly tragedy. Could the utility soon find itself as the defendant in a dozen more cases, charged with breaking state laws?

In the wake of massive utility-caused Northern California wildfires, a handful of district attorneys in flame-scarred counties are pondering whether to charge the utility company in criminal court for misconduct.

Cal Fire, the state’s fire protection agency, sent investigative reports to seven counties this summer saying it believes PG&E likely violated state public resources and health and safety laws in 12 blazes.

Cal Fire spokesman Scott McLean said it is up to local prosecutors in Sonoma, Napa, Yuba, Nevada, Lake, Humboldt and Butte counties to make independent decisions on whether to use the fire agency’s investigative conclusions to file criminal charges.

Lots of news about Secretary Zinke’s resignation today. The self-professed “geologist” was rocked by numerous scandals. As harsh as most all of the news coverage about Zinke’s departure is today, I’m going to say that history will judge Zinke even harsher.

As was pointed out in this post, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has invalidated four U.S. Forest Service (USFS) logging projects on the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, which would have clearcut 1,700 acres of old-growth rainforest and constructed about 14 miles of logging roads.

Jon and Andy have shared additional information about this issue over here, so please check that out.

Below is a press release I got from Larry Edwards of Greenpeace. A copy of the ruling is here.

ANCHORAGE – A unanimous verdict of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has invalidated four U.S. Forest Service (USFS) logging projects in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the nation’s largest national forest, ending a ten year legal battle. Greenpeace USA and Cascadia Wildlands filed the suit in 2008.

The decision permanently stops four timber sales that would have clearcut 1,700 acres of old-growth rainforest — habitat that is critical to deer, which are the primary prey of the rare Alexander Archipelago wolf (or “Islands Wolf”), and vital to subsistence hunters. The lawsuit focused on all three — deer, wolves, and hunters.

“But the victory is for more than deer, wolves and hunters,” said Larry Edwards, a representative of Greenpeace and resident of Sitka, Alaska. “It also protects many other kinds of wildlife in those areas, diverse forest uses, and carbon that is stored in the soil, trees and vegetation. As a far-north coastal rainforest, fires are rare and very small here, and as a result the Tongass is world-renown for storing carbon in its soil, trees and vegetation.”
At issue in the litigation was how the Forest Service determined impacts of the logging projects on Sitka black-tailed deer, and consequently wolves and hunters.

The Court concluded that the agency’s modeling of deer winter habitat “does not accurately measure forest structure [and] was too unreliable to be used.” It also said the “USFS failed to explain why it was authorizing the projects despite lower-than-recommended deer habitat capabilities.” (The recommended minimum capability is specified in the Tongass Forest Plan.)
In voiding the agency’s approvals of its four projects, the court noted that in “over a decade of litigation … USFS has been given multiple opportunities to correct flaws in its project analysis and ignored the court’s guidance.”

“The Forest Service was handed a clear message today that it cannot fudge the science in order to give its projects an ‘easy pass’ and sell excessive amounts of timber from a planning area,” said Chris Winter of Crag Law Center, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys. “The Islands Wolf is a rare species in Alaska’s rainforest, and it’s vital that the agency follow the best science on how to protect it and how to provide for the needs of deer hunters.”
“The Forest Service has scheduled two of the projects in our lawsuit to be logged in 2019. The court’s verdict invalidating the decisions comes just in time.” said Gabriel Scott of Cascadia Wildlands.

“The Forest Service greatly overestimated the habitat available for deer, and consequently underestimated the impacts of logging, not just in the four projects in this case but in every one of its timber project decisions made between 1996 and 2008,” Edwards said. “This justified logging which should never have happened. Greenpeace and Cascadia have demonstrated, with the agency’s own documents, that its computer models were flawed. For recent projects the USFS has corrected those errors, but it refused to do so for the earlier ones,” he said.

Together, the four projects would have cut 33 million board feet of timber from 1,700 acres of old-growth forest, and about 14 miles of logging roads would have been constructed.

Attorneys representing the plaintiffs were Chris Winter and Oliver Stiefel of Crag Law Center based in Portland, Oregon, and Rene Voss of Mill Valley, Ca. Plaintiffs are grateful to the McIntosh Foundation for supporting the Islands Wolf litigation, from the beginning.

There’s been a lot of talk (and press) lately about wildfires, public lands logging and fuel reduction, especially related to many statements coming out of the Trump administration, including Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke (who blamed the wildfires in California on “environmental terrorist groups” and “environmental radicals”) and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, who is in charge of the U.S. Forest Service.

The basic narrative from the Trump administration, many GOP politicians and some in the timber industry is that the federal government can’t do any logging or fuel reduction because of environmentalists.

Turns out that, according to the federal government, between FY 2001 and FY 2017 the U.S. Forest Service and Department of interior accomplished approximately 68 MILLION acres of hazardous fuels reduction and landscape restoration. See for yourself right here.

We seriously live in strange times when treating over 106,000 square miles of land over a period of less than 20 years is basically characterized as doing nothing and “hands-off management.”

The full article from the San Diego Union Tribune is here. Below are some interesting snips, featuring the perspectives of Leroy Westerling, a professor and researcher specializing in global warming and wildfire at the University of California at Merced and Char Miller, a professor of environmental analysis at Pomona College (and sometimes a contributor on this blog).

Much of what Dr. Westerling and Miller are saying in this article has also been said by America citizens that Secretary Zinke has labeled “environmental terrorists” and “radicals” while blaming them for wildfires in California. Much of what’s below has also been said by many other ecologists and scientists, such as Dr. Chad Hanson and Rick Halsey of the California Chaparral Institute, who are regularly criticized and attacked by some folks on this blog.

[A]ccording to research scientists and ecologists, wildfire’s increasing toll on life and property in recent years has been overwhelmingly driven by global warming and patterns of development — not the state’s most densely wooded areas.

“The fires that are getting everybody’s attention right now are not about forest management,” said Leroy Westerling, a professor and researcher specializing in global warming and wildfire at the University of California at Merced.

“The major factor is climate change across the west,” he added. “Regardless of fuels management, we just wouldn’t be burning like this, especially in Northern California, in a normal year.”

In fact, few if any of California’s most destructive blazes dating back to the early 20th century have been driven by densely packed forests, according to a review of records kept by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, also known as Cal Fire.

The most devastating and deadly conflagrations have most often resulted from high winds whipping fire through dried out chaparral and grasslands. These blazes often torch sprawling subdivisions that abut undeveloped landscapes, such as the Tubbs Fire did in Santa Rosa last fall.

Even the Camp Fire, which occurred in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, spread on strong easterly winds blowing down from the mountains across heavily logged forests before jumping from house to house. Trees were one of the only things that remained intact after walls of flame swept through the town of Paradise.

Now a chorus of academics and ecology and policy experts have spoken out across the state — from Stanford University to Sonoma State University to University of California at Santa Barbara — calling on regional governments to tighten zoning rules and even consider buying people out of homes in fire-prone areas.

“We’ve got to do something smarter than what we’ve been doing,” said Char Miller, a professor of environmental analysis at Pomona College, who has proposed the creation of flood and fire bonds that would allow local governments to purchase and set aside property in high-fire areas.

“This is very clear. Get people out of there. Go back to the cities and towns and counties, planning boards and zoning commissions and have a very different approach,” Miller added.

You can listen to Jared Blumenfeld’s Podship Earth podcast on Fire Myths here.

According to the bio on the Podship Earth website:

Jared Blumenfeld, was appointed by President Obama to be the regional administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency (2009-2016), he also served as the Director of the San Francisco Department of the Environment, chaired the first United Nations World Environment Day held in the US, and founded the Business Council on Climate Change and Green Cities California. He worked for non-profits including the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) where he helped protect millions of acres for wildlife and held corporations accountable. He thru-hiked the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada. He is a trusted source for environmental stories and appears frequently in the New York Times, BBC, Economist, Los Angeles Times, NPR and other media outlets.

In this episode Blumenfeld interviews ecologist Dr. Chad Hanson of the John Muir Project.

This video was produced in 2007 by the Sierra Sun newspaper and includes a lot of post-fire insights and perspective from Dr. Chad Hanson with the John Muir Project.

A day after President Trump blamed California’s wildfires on a lack of raking, Secretary Zinke told Breitbart that “It’s not the time for finger-pointing” regarding wildfires.

And then literally a few minutes later Zinke said “I will lay this on the foot of those environmental radicals that have prevented us from managing the forests for years … This is on them.”

Not climate change. Not record high temperatures. Not record drought. Not high winds. Not over-development in fire prone landscapes. Not PG&E power lines that sparked the Camp Fire. Nope.

It’s all the fault of “environmental radicals.”

Does anyone know if “environmental radicals” are also the same as “environmental terrorist groups,” whom Zinke blamed for wildfires in California back in August?

“You gotta take care of the floors. You know the floors of the forest, very important… I was with the President of Finland… he called it a forest nation and they spent a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things and they don’t have any problem.” – President Donald J. Trump

INCHES OF RAIN DURING SUMMER (June – Sept):
Helsink, Finlandi: 12″
Los Angeles: 0.2″

DAYS OF RAIN IN SUMMER:
Helsinki: 64
Los Angeles: 2

P.S. If you do live in the wildland-urban interface it is a good idea to rank dry leaves and needles from around your home and remove dry materials from your gutters. Learn more about FireWise steps you can take as a homeowner.

Rick Halsey of the California Chaparral Institute says so many smart things in this TV interview…and, in my opinion, the reporter does an excellent job as well. The segment starts at the 5:33 mark and runs to the 9:10 mark. Blog readers may recall that Rick Halsey has, in the past, been a commenter on this blog and has always offered spot-on perspective on a host of issues, including wildfires and the ecology of the chaparral ecosystem in California. Also, great work by the Center for Biological Diversity to help convince the San Diego County Board of Supervisors to delay decision on approving another subdivision in fire-prone areas.