Matthew Koehler

The following piece was written by George Wuerthner. – mk

In the coming week or so, Congress will be considering the Farm Bill which has numerous inappropriate amendments for our public forests approved in the House but not in the Senate version. The bill’s fate will be decided in a conference committee between the House and Senate. It is critical that Senator John Tester not support the House bill as written because of numerous anti-environmental provisions that will fail to protect communities and increase fire intensity resulting from more logging.

Among the poison pills in the bill are provisions designed to speed logging in the West under the guise of reducing large wildfires. Not only is logging ineffective at halting large fires which are primarily driven by extreme fire weather/climate, but there are many ecological “costs” to logging including the spread of weeds, sedimentation from logging roads, loss of carbon storage, and disturbance to sensitive wildlife.

The House version of the Farm Bill would reduce the requirement for NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) which protects our public lands from unmitigated logging projects. This will eliminate government accountability.

The bill would also expand the use of “Categorical Exclusions” (CE) to 6000 acres that could lead to clearcuts as large as 9 square miles without any public review. Furthermore, there is no limit on CEs, so the agency could log one 6000-acre block and immediately adjacent log a second or third 6000-acre block.

How big is 6000 acres? A football field is about an acre—so imagine 6000 football fields being cleared of trees.

The worse thing about the proposed House Farm Bill is that these provisions are not based on science, but on flawed assumptions about the effect of logging on wildfires.

Recently more than 200 preeminent scientists signed a letter to Congress finding that proposed solutions to wildfire like thinning forests are ineffective and short-lived.

Worse, such solutions simply do not work under extreme fire weather conditions. With climate change, we are experiencing more extreme fire weather conditions.

To quote from the scientists’ letter: “Thinning is most often proposed to reduce fire risk and lower fire intensity…However, as the climate changes, most of our fires will occur during extreme fire-weather (high winds and temperatures, low humidity, low vegetation moisture). These fires, like the ones burning in the West this summer, will affect large landscapes, regardless of thinning, and, in some cases, burn hundreds or thousands of acres in just a few days.”

The letter goes on to say: “Thinning large trees, including overstory trees in a stand, can increase the rate of fire spread by opening up the forest to increased wind velocity, damage soils, introduce invasive species that increase flammable understory vegetation, and impact wildlife habitat.”

“Thinning also requires an extensive and expensive roads network that degrades water quality by altering hydrological functions, including chronic sediment loads”, the letter states.

It is critical that Senator Tester does not support phony solutions in the House Farm Bill will not work.

Over 38 Senators and over 100 Congressional Representatives signed a letter to Conferees to reject the House provisions. Hopefully, Senator Tester can join with his colleagues and reject this flawed plan for forest mismanagement.

George Wuerthner is an ecologist who has published 38 books including two on fire ecology.

It’s been my observation that many of the pro-logging folks that participate on this blog seem to like and agree with much of what Dr. Jerry Franklin has to say.

Well, today 16 leading experts in forest ecology and management, including esteemed professors Norman Christensen of Duke University and Jerry Franklin of the University of Washington, sent a letter to members of Congress who will conference on the Farm Bill describing their concerns on the Forestry Title of H.R. 2, The Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018, the House of Representative’s version of the Farm Bill.

Here are some excerpts from the letter:

“Many of the House bill’s forestry provisions are not supported by science. For instance, the bill seeks to aggressively expand post-fire ‘salvage’ logging on public lands to prevent wildfire, when in reality post-fire logging occurs primarily for economic reasons and rarely contributes to ecological recovery in the disturbed area. Post-fire logging of dead or dying trees is appropriate near roads where standing dead trees pose a safety hazard but should generally be avoided in areas where maintaining natural ecosystem processes is a priority. However, the House language does not recognize this key distinction.”

“By exempting controversial projects from meaningful evaluation and public engagement, the House farm bill runs counter to basic principles of science-based forest management, including the use of best available science and the application of robust decision-making processes. If they were to become law, the House farm bill’s forestry provisions would result in poorly planned, ineffective and harmful management actions that fail to address the vital need to improve the climate and fire resiliency of our national forests and the safety of our communities.”

More information and details can be found here.

While Trump’s Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke lays the blame for wildfires squarely on “frivolous lawsuits” filed by “environmental terrorist groups” scientists are busily producing more research about wildfires, like this latest study.

Apparently, “environmental terrorist groups” were very active around the year 600 AD and again around 1050 AD.

A PDF of the study is available here.

Abstract

A key task in fire-climate research in the western United States is to characterize potential future fire-climate linkages across different elevational gradients. Using thirty-seven sedimentary charcoal records, here we present a 1500-year synthesis of wildfire activity across different elevational gradients to characterize fire-climate linkages. From our results, we have identified three periods of elevated fire occurrence centered on the 20th century, 900 cal yr BP, and 1350 cal yr BP. During the 20th century, fire activity has occurred primarily in the northern Rocky Mountains, with mid-elevations experiencing the greatest increase in wildfire activity. While wildfires occurred primarily in the SRM region ∼900 cal yr BP, the greatest increase in high-elevations occurred in the NRM at this time. Finally, synchronous wildfires occurred in both northern and southern Rocky Mountain mid-elevations ∼1350 cal yr BP, suggesting a potential analog for future wildfire conditions in response to warmer temperatures and more protracted droughts. We conclude that wildfire activity increased in most elevations during periods of protracted summer drought, warmer-than-average temperatures, and based on modern climate analogs, reduced atmospheric humidity.

Last year, Spokane, Washington went a record-settling 74 days without rain. Parts of Montana went 46 days last year, and 47 days this year, without any rain.

Clearly all the frivolous “anti-precipitation” litigation from “environmental terrorist groups” is having a huge impact on wildfires, right Secretary Zinke?

Below is the press release from the University of Montana, which assisted with the new Forest Service study.

Study: Decreasing Number of Rainy Days in Summer Has Increased Western Wildfire

MISSOULA (August 20, 2018) – The number and size of large wildfires has increased dramatically in the western United States during the past three decades. New research shows that significant declines in summer precipitation and lengthening dry spells during summer are major drivers of the increase in fire activity. This is contrary to previous understanding that the increase is attributable only to warming temperatures and earlier snowmelt.

The research was conducted by a team of scientists from the USDA Forest Service and the University of Montana, funded by NASA and the USDA, and published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper is online here.

The research team contrasted the effects of snowmelt timing, warming summer temperatures and variations in the volume and distribution of summer precipitation on wildfire area burned. They found that summer precipitation totals and the duration of dry spells were the strongest controls on forest wildfire area burned.

“Summer dry periods are tightly coupled to how warm and dry the air is during the fire season,” said Zack Holden, USDA Forest Service scientist and lead author of the study. “Longer windows without rain lead to more surface heating which dries out woody fuels.”

“The maps of declining precipitation help us think about patterns of future drought, which can help us focus work near communities likely to experience continuing declines,” said Charlie Luce, USDA Forest Service research hydrologist and co-author of the study.

“This new information can help us better monitor changing conditions before the fire season to ensure that areas are prepared for increased wildfire potential. Further, it may improve our ability to predict fire season severity,” said Matt Jolly, USDA Forest Service research ecologist and co-author of the study.

The study was conducted as part of a larger project aimed at improving wildfire danger and drought monitoring.

UM hydrology and hydrologic modeling Associate Professor Marco Maneta was also a co-author.

“Decreases in precipitation and the increasing length of dry spells during the summer – a time when crop water demand in the arid west are highest – is not only exacerbating wildfires but could also have serious implications for western agriculture, especially in states highly reliant on rainfed crops,” Maneta said.

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Official Transcript from Trump’s Cabinet Meeting (08/16/18)

PRESIDENT TRUMP: I would like to ask Ryan Zinke, Secretary of the Interior, who I actually watched this morning, as he was giving a rundown on the horrible fires that are taking place mostly in California, and I thought what he said was so true and actually rather incredible. People don’t hear it, they don’t hear it like it is. There are things you can do about those fires before they start, and you wouldn’t have nearly the damage and the problems. We are spending a fortune in California because of poor maintenance and because frankly, they are sending a lot of water out to the pacific to protect the smelt and by the way, it’s not working. The smelt is not doing well. But we are sending millions and millions of gallons right out into the Pacific Ocean. Beautiful, clean water coming up from the north or coming down from the north, and I thought Ryan was great this morning so before we start on a couple of other things we will be discussing today, including very importantly, schools and education, I would ask you to give maybe a little recap of what you said this morning on television.

INTERIOR SECRETARY RYAN ZINKE: Thank you, Mr. President. First, our firefighters, 30,000 of them, are doing spectacular things. They have had six deaths related and we forget that firefighters, while they are on the front lines, their homes and families are in jeopardy, and our hearts and prayers need to be with our front line firefighters that are out there every day. It is a matter of gross mismanagement. There is no question. The density of our forest is historical. If you don’t believe me, believe your own eyes. Go out and take a look at our forest. Take a drive out there and look at the dead and dying timber. It’s been in gross mismanagement for decades but we are burning our forests, destroying our habitat and destroying our communities and neighborhoods by these catastrophic fires of 200,000, 300,000 acres. Thus far, there’s 5.7 million acres of our public lands that have been destroyed at a cost of about $3 billion this fiscal year. Americans deserve to go out and recreate rather than evacuate, so we went out, Secretary Perdue and I went out to California. We are committed to reestablishing sound science, best practices for the greatest good for all of us. But sound, active management, Mr. President, is the path that you have laid, it’s clear. This is unacceptable that year after year, we are watching our forests burn, our habitat destroyed and our communities devastated, and it is absolutely preventable, and public lands are for everybody to enjoy and not just held hostage by these special interest groups. Thank you, Mr. President.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Ryan was saying it’s not a global warming thing. It’s a management situation and one of the elements that he talked about was the fact that we have fallen trees and instead of removing those fallen trees, which get to be extremely combustible, instead of removing them, gently removing them, beautifully removing them, we leave them to burn and actually, in many cases, catch fire much easier than a healthy tree, a healthy growing tree. Could you just discuss that for a second?

SECRETARY ZINKE: Well, Mr. President, we import lumber in this country, yet there are billions of board feet that are on the forest floor rotting. Rotting. And whether you’re a global warmest advocate or denier, it doesn’t make a difference when you have rotting timber, when housing prices are going up, when a lot of Americans are right at the border of affording a house, yet we are wasting billions of board feet for not being able to bring them to a local lumber mill. It is unconscionable we would do that to our citizens. Mr. President, we are actively engaged. Secretary Perdue and I, we went out to California- we are joined at the hip to make sure we actively manage our forests, remove the dead and dying timber, replant diversity of species and on the salvage operations, 5.7 million acres. A lot of that can be salvaged if we get to it in the first year. We are going to do it, Mr. President.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Just to add, just to conclude, especially when Canada is charging us a lot of money to bring their timber down into our country, so ridiculous. [NOTE: In April 2017 President Trump placed a 20.83% tariff on Canadian lumber. – mk] Here we have it. We’re not even talking about cutting down trees. Which in certain areas, we can’t do. We are talking about trees lying on the floor, creating a tremendous hazard and a tremendous fire hazard, and death trap. So, I thought they were great points. Thank you very much, Ryan. Appreciate it.

The National Weather Service in Great Falls, Montana has just posted the following:

“Since July 1, 2018, only 0.01 inches of rainfall has fallen at the Helena Airport. This is the driest period on record from July 1 thru Aug 14th. The map below shows how much of MT has below normal precipitation just in the past 30 days, including in the Helena valley.”

As you can see in the graphic above, many other parts of western Montana have also had the driest 45 day period on record. Missoula has had the 2nd driest 45 day period on record, but that’s only because last year was the driest mid-summer period on record…when all those wildfires burned around Montana due to a “flash drought.”

Anyway, this “driest 45 day period on record” for many parts of western Montana follows a heavy winter snowpack and also record-break springtime flooding in many parts of Montana, including Missoula, the Rocky Mountain Front, Great Falls and Helena areas. In other words, record snowpack and flooding followed immediately by a record dry spell is a pretty good recipe for big wildfires. So we shall see….

So, what’s the solution to a couple of summers of the some of the driest mid-summer periods recorded over the past 130+ years? If and when wildfires burn in the fire-dependent ecosystems of the Northern U.S. Rockies will it be because of “environmental terrorist groups,” as Secretary Ryan Zinke insists?

Most of the forested ecosystem of the Northern U.S. Rockies is comprised of mixed conifer forests, which were born out of, and are maintained, by mixed- to high-severity fire regimes. The notion (spread often by the timber industry and certain politicians) that in the past all the forests of our region experienced frequent, but low-severity, wildfire is just totally not true. In fact, that Dry Montane, open, park-like ponderosa pine forest type makes up a tiny percentage of the forested ecosystem in the Northern Rockies. So, if and when mixed- to high-severity wildfires burn in forests that evolved with mixed- to high-severity wildfires who should be ‘blamed?’ Because we obviously have to blame someone, right?

A friend just sent me this photograph taken this morning in downtown Calgary, Canada. It’s tough to see much of the city because of wildfire smoke from wildfires burning in Canada.

Just the other day Trump’s Interior Secretary blamed the wildfires on “environmental terrorist groups” and claimed we could prevent wildfires if it wasn’t for “frivolous lawsuits” from “radical environmentalists.”

Over the past twenty years, the U.S. Timber Industry and plenty of politicians have looked north to Canada for an example of the type of public lands logging system they’d like to see in America. (Ironically while some of these right-leaning U.S. politicians love the Canadian public lands logging system, that love of the Canadian system doesn’t extend to things like, basic universal health care, where they say we need a ‘uniquely American system’ [in which people and families are bankrupted and destroyed if someone simply gets sick.]) But I digress….

It’s well understood that in Canada the timber industry logs (and essentially controls) vast swaths of public lands.

Since that’s the case, why are there so many wildfires in Canada? Why is it so smokey in Calgary this morning?

Here’s the press release from Alliance for the Wild Rockies…. – mk

“The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals today ruled for the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Idaho Sporting Congress, and Native Ecosystems Council to stop the Lost Creek-Boulder Creek Timber sale in the Payette National Forest in western Idaho,” announced Mike Garrity, Executive Director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies. “We are very pleased that the decision halts the Forest Service’s plan to log approximately 40,000 acres and burn 45,000 more acres in the New Meadows Ranger District.”

“We won today because the Forest Service tried to change existing Forest Plan standards so it could proceed with a massive logging project,” Garrity said. “It’s especially important because Boulder Creek is a tributary to the Little Salmon River and the headwaters of the West Fork of the Weiser River and the area is designated Critical Habitat for bull trout recovery.”

Reversing the district court, the Ninth Circuit Court held that the Forest Service’s decision to approve the Lost Creek-Boulder Creek Project was “arbitrary and capricious” and “constituted a violation of the National Forest Management Act.” Specifically, the Court held that the Forest Service had proposed to manage the forest in a manner that was clearly inconsistent with the Payette Forest Plan and that the agency had improperly adopted a new definition of “old forest habitat” for the Lost Creek Project area. The panel instructed the district court to vacate the Forest Service’s September 2014 Record of Decision and send the proposal back to the Forest Service to comply with the law and Forest Plan.

A Big Win for Taxpayers, Clean Water and Bull Trout

“We also challenged the Forest Service’s failure to reinitiate consultation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for the endangered bull trout” Garrity explained. “But while the lawsuit was pending before the Ninth Circuit, the Forest Service decided to reinitiate consultation for the bull trout over its entire range, including the Payette National Forest. Since that’s precisely what we wanted them to do in accordance with the Endangered Species Act when we took the case to district court, the issue was ruled moot by the Ninth Circuit decision but was definitely a win for bull trout.”

“Additionally, the Forest Service estimated that the project would have cost taxpayers a whopping $12,429,619,” Garrity said. “In essence, the Forest Service decided it was more important to subsidize the timber industry with this huge money-losing timber sale in federally-designated bull trout Critical Habitat than it is to recover bull trout as legally-required by the Endangered Species Act.”

“The principal reason bull trout habitat is trashed on the west side of the Payette Forest is Forest Service mismanagement through logging, road-building and overgrazing,” said Ron Mitchell of Idaho Sporting Congress. “This project continues the Forest Service tradition of irresponsible habitat destruction in spite of the fact that the agency’s former fisheries biologist, Dave Burns, wrote in the first Forest Plan that trout habitat on the west side is 50 percent below habitat capacity. The new roads and clearcutting would have reduced remaining habitat even further.”

“Much of the ‘mitigation’ promised by the Forest Service in the form of road-closures after the logging,” Mitchell said. “But the Payette has no record of successful road closures and no reliable monitoring system. We checked their top ten road closures and eight of them were wide open while the other two were easily driven around.”

“We’re glad the Ninth Circuit agreed with us on this project,” Garrity concluded. “It’s always tough to take the federal government to court. But this project would have cost taxpayers millions of dollars, would have resulted in more sedimentation of vital spawning streams, and resulted in fewer bull trout, salmon, and steelhead for present and future generations.”

Find a copy of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Opinion here.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in the Alliance for the Wild Rockies’ favor in its legal challenge to the East Reservoir logging project on the Kootenai National Forest in Northwest Montana.

“The Court found that the Forest Service violated its own rules for management of grizzly bear habitat“ Garrity stated. The rare and imperiled Cabinet-Yaak grizzly bear population of Northwest Montana has failed to recover to even half of its minimal goal of 100 bears after decades of management, which led to implementation of special management standards aimed to help recovery. However, the Court found that even though the agency adopted the recovery standards, it was not actually complying with them. “This grizzly bear population is less than 50 bears and in really dire straits – the Forest Service can’t just ignore that when it plans massive logging projects in grizzly bear habitat anymore,” said Mike Garrity, Executive Director for the Alliance for the Wild Rockies.

“The East Reservoir Project is huge,” Garrity continued. “But consider that there are already over 22,000 acres of clearcuts within its boundaries. Add to that the 8,845 acres of proposed commercial logging in the East Reservoir project, of which 3,458 acres will be new clearcuts, and the additional impacts to this already heavily-logged area are simply unacceptable for wildlife, water quality, hunting, fishing, and other public recreation and use of this area.”

“In addition to the environmental impacts, the project was a huge money-loser which, by the Forest Service’s own estimate, would have cost taxpayers over $2.5 million to subsidize further degradation of an already-degraded landscape at a time when the federal deficit is exploding,” Garrity explained. “Much of that cost will be to rebuild and maintain an astounding 175 miles of logging roads, build nine miles of new permanent logging roads, add an additional 13 miles of illegal, user-created roads into the legal road system, and open nine miles of previously closed motorized trails. This would occur despite the fact that all the existing science shows more roads lead directly to more grizzly bear deaths and more sedimentation of the spawning streams for bull trout, which are already listed as ‘threatened’ under the Endangered Species Act.

“As most Montanans know, there is incredible pressure from industry lobbyists and politicians to ‘get out the cut’ on our National Forests. But the bottom line is that these National Forests are public lands that belong to all Americans, not just the 1percent or corporate interests. Our federal laws are often the only thing standing between the ‘cut-and-run’ practices we’ve see on private timber lands, and the intact ecosystems we can still find on our National Forests. That’s because federal laws require retention of functioning ecosystems and diverse wildlife and fisheries on our National Forests.

“Simply put, thanks to our federal laws, our National Forests are not commercial logging lots that exist to benefit a single, private industry. In this case, we had to go to court to make this point clear, and the rule of law prevailed,” Garrity concluded.

You can view the Order here.

Longtime readers of this blog will recall that this timber sale has been discussed and debated many times. Here’s a sampling of some previous posts.

I had to chuckle today when I saw this oped co-written by Char Miller and Chad Hanson. Since this blog was established, seems like various folks on this blog have treated Char Miller with respect, while the same folks have treated Dr. Chad Hanson with….well. Anyway, enjoy this piece from today’s LA Times. Below are some snips:

“Responding to the tragic losses of homes and lives in wildland fires in California over the past year, Gov. Jerry Brown announced a “major offensive” against fire, in the form of a “Forest Carbon Plan.” The governor proposes to use $254 million of taxpayer money to double logging levels in California’s forests — to “at least” 500,000 acres a year — and to achieve it, he wants to reduce environmental protections.

Although the governor’s May 10 proposal is ostensibly designed to protect human communities from forest fires and to mitigate climate change, it ignores and misrepresents current science. The Forest Carbon Plan will exacerbate climate change while doing little to protect communities from fire….

A gift to the logging industry, the governor’s proposal will leave communities more vulnerable to wildfire, not less. It will harm forest ecosystems and accelerate climate change. Real success will only come when we advocate solutions that do not demonize nature, but manage our place within its sometimes-fiery embrace.”