Matthew Koehler

With so many participates of this blog living in Oregon, figured this presentation at the Eugene Garden Club on January 11 might be of interest.

The mission of the Coast Range Association is “To build just and sustainable communities that provide for people and the natural world.”

A new analysis released this week by the Center for Sustainable Economy found that:

Timber harvesting is by far the largest source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Oregon. Since 2000, annual emissions associated with removal of stored carbon, sacrificed sequestration, and decay of logging residuals averaged 33 million metric tons carbon dioxide equivalent (mmt CO2-e).Nationwide, logging emits more carbon than the residential and commercial sectors combined.

According to the Center for Sustainable Economy:

The report – entitled Oregon Forest Carbon Policy: Scientific and technical brief to guide legislative intervention – is a synthesis of scientific and technical information about the effects of industrial forest practices on climate change and climate resiliency and a discussion of legislative options for moving forward. It builds on a 2015 report published with Geos Institute that helped lead to a reconvening of the Commission’s forestry task force to revisit their assumptions – published in their Interim Roadmap to 2020 report – that forestry’s effects on climate were an unqualified benefit. Today’s report paints a drastically different story.

More information and context is available here.

Yes, what if. The full article from today’s Missoulian is here, and some interesting snips are below.

“It’s a counter-intuitive result,” said research ecologist Sean Peck. “We put out the fire, but in the long run, there are negative unintended consequences. If we’re putting out all fires under moderate weather conditions, the fire we can’t put out will burn under extreme conditions.”

Peck’s work at the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute on the University of Montana campus recently earned him the 2017 Research & Development Deputy Chief’s Early Career Scientist Award. Since earning his doctorate from UM in 2014, he’s been lead author of nine peer-reviewed journal articles and co-authored another 11.

Much of Peck’s work focuses on wildfire in federal wilderness, including the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex and the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. Forest fires there typically burn without the swarms of yellow-shirted firefighters and red-tailed aircraft trying to suppress them….

“I think outside wilderness areas, we’re selecting for high-severity fire,” Peck said. “It’s like selecting for a gene in corn crops. It’s not done on purpose, but it happens with certain management practices. We’re not allowing fires to burn in non-extreme years. So fires only occur during extreme events. Those fires are the ones we could not put out.”…

Peck’s current work looks at how future climate changes may affect the tempo of fire seasons. He’s testing the idea that we’re likely to see more extreme fire events in the short term, but less severe fires several decades from now as the climate warms.

“We think we may see the spruce-fir forests converted to something else that may be more resistant to fire, like Douglas fir and ponderosa pine,” Peck said. “And at some lower elevations, dry-forest types are projected to convert to non-forest vegetation, grassland or shrub land. Dry forests are barely hanging on now.

“As Montanans, we’ve grown up with certain kinds of forests,” Peck added. “They are going to change. We can accept it, but it will happen whether we want it to or not.”

In the (very dry) summer of 1988 I did an extended Outward Bound trip in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, which for a variety of reasons, changed my life forever.

According to Minnesota Public Radio:

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill Thursday to reopen Superior National Forest land near the Boundary Waters [Wilderness] to mineral exploration and, potentially, to new copper-nickel mines on the doorstep of one of the nation’s most popular wilderness areas.

The bill, introduced by Minnesota Republican Rep. Tom Emmer, would allow a company called Twin Metals to continue developing a potential copper-nickel mine near Ely, Minn., on the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

The bill would restore the company’s mineral leases — which the federal government declined to renew at the end of President Barack Obama’s administration — and stop a two-year study into the effects of mining within the watershed that flows into the Boundary Waters [Wilderness]. That process that could lead to a 20-year ban on mining in the area.

When enduring much longer and drier portages in the Boundary Waters Canoe Areas Wilderness back in 1988 there’s no way my 16 year old self could’ve imaged that year’s later the U.S. Congress would be circumventing our nation’s bedrock environmental laws to make it easier for a foreign company (with a terrible history of environmental violations) to build dangerous sulfide-ore copper mines on the edge of the Boundary Waters Wilderness…but there you have it.

Also this week, the U.S. House passed H.R. 3115, a bill that would require that 6,650 acres of the Superior National Forest be traded to PolyMet Mining for the construction of an open-pit copper-nickel (sulfide) mine. Thousands of acres of irreplaceable wetlands at the headwaters of Lake Superior were valued for exchange at $550 per acre, five times less than what other mining companies have paid. There are currently four lawsuits pending against the land exchange. H.R. 3115 would essentially declare these lawsuits null and void and undermine the Endangered Species Act to ram through the land exchange, bringing PolyMet’s open-pit copper-nickel (sulfide) mine a few scary steps closer to reality.

These anti-Boundary Waters Wilderness bill are just a drop in the bucket. Essentially, unless Congressional dysfunction saves the day, America’s public lands, wildlife and Wilderness legacy will be laid to waste in the next couple of weeks. There are literally too many terrible bills pending in Congress, and certainly being hatched behind closed doors as we speak, to even keep track of them all.

On December 7, 2017 the House Natural Resource Committee’s Subcommittee on Federal Lands will hold a hearing on H.R. 1349, a bill from Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) [Lifetime 4% LCV rating,], which would “amend the Wilderness Act to ensure that the use of bicycles, wheelchairs, strollers, and game carts is not prohibited in Wilderness Areas and for other purposes.”

The text of H.R. 1349 is only one paragraph in length, and based on the wording, ALL Wilderness areas in America would be open to bicycles, wheelchairs, strollers, and game carts.

Here’s some more information and an action alert on this issue from Wilderness Watch:

For over 50 years, the Wilderness Act has protected Wilderness areas designated by Congress from machines of all types. This has meant, as Congress intended, that Wilderness areas have been kept free from cars, trucks, ATVs, snowmobiles, bicycles, and all other types of motorized and mechanized transport.



Unfortunately, a loud contingent of some mountain bikers and an off-shoot mountain biking organization, the Sustainable Trails Coalition (STC), have convinced notoriously anti-Wilderness Congressman Tom McClintock (R-CA) to introduce H.R. 1349, a bill which would amend the Wilderness Act to allow bikes, strollers, wheelbarrows, game carts, survey wheels and measuring wheels in every unit of the National Wilderness Preservation System.

In an especially cynical and disingenuous move, the mountain bikers seem to hide behind people with disabilities in their effort to make America’s wildest places merely a playground for cycling! The mountain bikers list “motorized wheelchairs” and “non-motorized wheelchairs” as the first uses to be authorized in Wilderness under their bill (even prior to the listing of “bicycles”), though the 1990 amendments to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) have clearly allowed wheelchairs in designated Wilderness for more than a quarter-century.

For more information regarding “Fake News” being spread by some mountain bikers, see Five Lies Being Used to Get Mountain Bikes into Wilderness.

You may recall that the STC had a bill introduced last year in the U.S. Senate by the Utah Senators Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee, whose lifetime conservation voting records as compiled by the nonpartisan League of Conservation Voters are just a paltry 9% and 10% respectively. That bill would have opened the Wilderness System to mountain bikes, and also to chainsaws.

Fortunately, last year’s bill went nowhere, in no small part to the actions taken by Wilderness defenders around the country!

Unfortunately, the new bill could very well advance in the current anti-Wilderness Congress, allied with the new Trump Administration that seems hostile to environmental protection. Rep. McClintock, a member of the House Natural Resources Committee, also chairs that panel’s Subcommittee on Federal Lands. This means he is in a significant position of leadership, and could mean that this year’s mountain bike bill might well advance in Congress. McClintock’s lifetime conservation voting record is even worse than those of the Utah Senators, at a barely-registering 4%.

Last year, anticipating the 2016 Senate bill to open Wilderness to mountain bikes, Wilderness Watch spearheaded a sign-on letter to Congress in opposition to opening up the National Wilderness Preservation System to bikes. It resulted in a total of 114 wilderness-supporting organizations from around the nation signing on, clearly showing that the conservation community is united in its opposition to the mountain bikers’ efforts. We are in the process of putting together a similar sign-on letter for 2017.


Now we need your help! Please take a few minutes to urge your representative and senators to oppose H.R. 1349 and all attempts to amend and weaken the Wilderness Act to allow mountain bikes in Wilderness.



At a time when Wilderness and wildlife are under increasing pressures from increasing populations, growing mechanization, and a rapidly changing climate, the last thing Wilderness needs is to be invaded by mountain bikes and other machines!

I just got a heads up that there is a provision in the Interior Appropriations bill that would require the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to give grazing permits to ranchers on any vacant allotment to replace lost grazing opportunities to due to fires or anything else “beyond the permittees control.”

The permits would be issued with the same rules in place as at the time the allotment was last grazed, which may have been decades ago. There would be no NEPA and there are no exceptions for Wilderness.

Folks might not know this, but there are a lot of vacant Wilderness allotments that were never “closed,” they are still on the books as “vacant.” The grazing guidelines clearly prohibit what the requirement in the pending Interior Appropriations bill does, but this new provision may well trump the grazing guidelines. Moreover, the guidelines don’t apply to any of the pre-1980 Wildernesses.

I’m in the process of trying to find more information and will provide it here when obtained.

The U.S. Forest Service has just started releasing detailed soil burn severity maps for wildfires that burned in the Northern Rockies this year. Hopefully some of this information and these maps are shared by the news media and political leaders.

The Inciweb homepage is here.

Individual maps of some specific fires are here.

What’s the take home message from these soil burn severity maps? Looks like the 2017 wildfires burned in a mosaic pattern with lots of unburned, very low, and low to moderate soil burn severity.

SOME EXAMPLES FROM SPECIFIC WILDFIRES:

Only 3% of the acres burned in 45,000 acre Sapphire Complex Wildfires on Lolo National Forest had soil burn severity measured as “High.” Meanwhile, 78% of acres in Sapphire Complex Wildfires on the Lolo NF had soil burn severity measured as “Unburned” “Very Low” or “Low.”

The vast majority of the lightening-caused Park Creek fire was either unburned, or burned at low to moderate severity. Senator Daines, Rep Gianforte and the Montana timber industry – especially Ed Regan, resource manager for RY Timber – blamed this wildfire on a lawsuit by the Alliance for the Wild Rockies. The soil burn severity map for the Park Creek fire is below. Ed Regan complained that the wildfire was going to “destroy” the forest and wildlife habitat. Sorry to disappoint you Ed, but it doesn’t look that way!

Meanwhile, when Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, Ag Secretary Sonny Perdue, Rep Gianforte and Senator Steve Daines toured the Lolo Creek Fire on the Lolo and Bitterroot National Forest – they blamed wildfires on “environmental extremists.” This was despite the fact that there was NEVER ANY lawsuit filed to stop any logging project near the Lolo Peak Fire. Turns out that 66% of the Lolo Peak Fire acres had “unburned” “very low” or “low” soil burn severity, while only 9% had “high.”

More fire severity maps will be posted by the U.S. Forest Service as they become available, so make sure to check back at this link.

Also, two weeks ago I contacted U.S. Forest Service Burned Area Reflectance Classification (BARC) data-producing team to get a satellite-derived data layer of post-fire vegetation condition for Montana wildfires. I was told the U.S. Forest Service no longer releases initial BARC data to the public for “political reasons.” So we will have to patiently wait for that information.

How cool is this? I’ve been meaning to post this for the past week.

From the comfort of your own computer screen you can take a flyover of the 191,000 acre Chetco Bar Fire in southwestern Oregon with the National incident Team!

The thing that strikes me right away is the very clear mosaic pattern of the burned area. In fact, it appears that large chunks of the 191,000 acre fire were completely, 100% un-burned. I’ve always wondered about that dynamic over the past 20 years that I’ve paid close attention to wildfires. If, let’s say 20% of the area within a fire perimeter was totally unburned shouldn’t all that acreage be subtracted from the total burn area? Seems reasonable. Also seems like it never happens, we just continue to add up all the acres within the fire perimeter and say that the wildfire destroyed, or ravaged, or burned all those acres.

CLICK HERE for a “Narrated Flyover of the Chetco Bar Fire from Chetco River to Emily Ridge: September 26th, 2017”

CLICK HERE for a “Flyover of the North Point of the Chetco Bar Fire: Illinois River Corridor & Dead Man’s Bar.”

CLICK HERE for a “Indigo Fire Flyover: September 26th, 2017 by Operations Chiefs Reggie Bray & Barry Schullanberger.” This fly-over includes a good discussion about fire management decisions related to ensuring fire-fighter safety. The Indigo Fire was just north of the main Chetco Bar Fire.

Last night on Montana Public Radio and Yellowstone Public Radio there was a story about Senator Tester’s and Senator Daines’ effort to overturn a U.S. Federal District Court ruling (which was affirmed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court also refused to rehear the case) that they don’t like.

Here’s more information about Cottonwood Environmental Law Center v. United States Forest Service.

The Tester/Daines public lands logging bill (S.605) has been called “just another cynical attack to weaken a key provision of the Endangered Species Act” by the Center for Biological Diversity.

On statewide Montana Public Radio Senator Tester said this:

“But Tester says a new forest management plan can take decades to write. So in the meantime:

‘Everything stops. All the recreational opportunities stop, the tree cuts stop, trail maintenance stops while they redo this forest plan.’”

The public must know that this statement from Senator Tester is 100% not true and doesn’t even contain an ounce of truth.

The truth is that all National Forests in Montana, and across America, are required by the National Forest Management Act to go through a Forest Plan Revision process every 15 years. At NO POINT during that Forest Plan Revision process does “Everything stop.”

At NO point during the Forest Plan Revision process does “All the recreational opportunities stop, the tree cuts stop, trail maintenance stops while they redo this forest plan,” as Senator Tester told Montana citizens.

I appreciate the fact that the reporter talked to someone at the Lewis and Clark National Forest who said revising a forest plan doesn’t stop work. But revising a forest management plan also doesn’t “hamper” it either, as the Forest Service employee apparently claimed.

This isn’t the first time Senator Tester has taken to Montana Public Radio and Yellowstone Public Radio and demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of National Forest Management.

In February 2015 Senator Tester said on Montana Public Radio: “Unfortunately, every logging sale in Montana right now is under litigation. Every one of them.”

That statement was so entirely not true that the Washington Post’s official Fact-Checker (Glenn Kessler) investigated the statement and gave Senator Tester “4 Pinocchios” for telling “a whopper.”

This time, Senator Jon Tester has just told Montana citizens on statewide radio a huge lie about a very basic public lands management process.

Perhaps it was just a mistake, but regardless, Senator Tester’s statement is 100%, entirely not true and his office should immediately issue a correction so that Montana citizens don’t go around thinking that every time the U.S. Forest Service goes through a forest plan revision process that “Everything stops. All the recreational opportunities stop, the tree cuts stop, trail maintenance stops while they redo this forest plan.”

You can read the entire opinion piece from Frank Carroll, co-owner of “Professional” Forest Management out of South Dakota right here.

I find it shocking that the Rapid City Journal would published such a piece. Also, somewhat shocking is the fact that Frank Carroll was the official public affairs officer for the Black Hills National Forest and worked for the U.S. Forest Service for 31 years.

Here’s a snip featuring Frank Carroll’s own words:

“Most of the wood we will use to rebuild after the hurricanes will come from outside of the United States. Why? Because the Alliance Wild Rockies’ Gary MacFarlane and henchman Michael Garrity think the Earth will somehow plummet into the abyss if a few loggers cut a few trees to feed a few sawmills so people can use the dead wood before it rots. And they’re not alone. A whole enviro-terrorist industry is backing them, bringing reasonable use of dead timber to a complete halt in the most devastated areas.

Native Ecosystems Council’s Sara Jane Johnson; Friends of the Swan’s Arlene Montgomery; Swan View Coalition’s Keith Hammer; Wild Earth Guardians’ John Horning; Rocky Mountain Wild’s Tehri Parker; Defenders of Wildlife’s Jamie Rappaport Clark and a host of other bomb-throwers have joined these suits. If you know these people, call them. If not, call anyway. Tell them to just stop it.”