The Washington Post has the full story. Unfortunately, the article doesn’t mention the fact that Montana Rep Ryan Zinke – Trump’s Interior Secretary nominee – also voted yes on this provision.
House Republicans, led by Utah’s Rep. Rob Bishop, are preparing to change the way Congress calculates the cost of transferring federal lands to the states and other entities, a move that would make it easier for members of the new Congress to cede federal control of public lands to state officials.
The provision, included as part as a larger rules package the House is slated to vote on this week, has attracted relatively little attention. But it highlights the extent to which some congressional Republicans hope to change the way public land is managed now that the GOP will control both the executive and legislative branch starting Jan. 20.
Under current Congressional Budget Office accounting rules, any transfer of federal land that generates revenue for the U.S. Treasury — whether through energy extraction, logging, grazing or other activities — has a cost. If lawmakers wanted to give land-generating receipts to a given state, local government or tribe, they would have to account for that loss in expected cash flow. If the federal government conveys land where there is no economic activity, such as wilderness, there is no estimated cost associated with it.
But House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Bishop, who backs the idea of providing state and local officials with greater control over federal land, has authored language in the new rules package saying any such transfers “shall not be considered as providing new budget authority, decreasing revenues, increasing mandatory spending or increasing outlays.”
Rep. Raul Grijalva, Ariz., the top Democrat on the Natural Resources Committee, sent a letter Tuesday to fellow Democrats urging them to oppose the rules package on the basis of that proposal.
“The House Republican plan to give away America’s public lands for free is outrageous and absurd,” Grijalva said in a statement. “This proposed rule change would make it easier to implement this plan by allowing the Congress to give away every single piece of property we own, for free, and pretend we have lost nothing of any value. Not only is this fiscally irresponsible, but it is also a flagrant attack on places and resources valued and beloved by the American people.”
Because nothing quite says “I should be Donald Trump’s Interior Secretary” like Ryan Zinke’s 2011 Christmas card, complete with assault rifle, dead wolf, axe and oil derrick.
According to the Washington Post: “the fossil fuel industry is enjoying a remarkable resurgence as its executives and lobbyists shape President-elect Donald Trump’s policy agenda and staff his administration. The oil, gas and coal industries are amassing power throughout Washington — from Foggy Bottom, where ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson is Trump’s nominee to be secretary of state, to domestic regulatory agencies including the departments of Energy and Interior as well as the Environmental Protection Agency.”
Based on the number of Cabinet and upper Administration picks over the past few weeks it would not be a stretch to say that President-elect Trump is essentially building an America government for big oil and resource extraction industries, run by big oil and resource extraction industries.
Just yesterday, President-Elect Trump made his nomination of Montana Rep Ryan Zinke to head the Department of Interior official. If you care about America’s public lands, wildlife and wilderness heritage, the person in charge of the Dept of Interior is a big deal. After all, the Dept of Interior manages 1/5 of the entire land base in the U.S., 35,000 miles of coastlines and 1.76 billion acres of the Outer Continental Shelf.
If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Ryan Zinke would be in charge of 70,000 employees and the following federal agencies and bureaus: Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, National Park Service, Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Geological Survey.
In my capacity as director of the WildWest Institute I issued the following statement yesterday:
Rep Ryan Zinke has an established track record of being pro-coal, pro-fracking, pro-logging, anti-science and anti-endangered species act when it comes to managing America’s public lands and wildlife. This has earned Zinke an environmental voting record of 3% from the League of Conservation Voters and a National Parks voting record of just 9% from the National Parks Conservation Association.
Let’s also not forget that Rep Zinke was just hand picked by President-elect Donald Trump, someone who is clearly assembling the most anti-environmental, anti-public lands, pro-oil and gas and pro-wall street cabinet and administration in U.S. History.
To think that Congressman Ryan Zinke is going to be a strong advocate for America’s public lands, our national parks and fish and wildlife species – and not just do the bidding of his boss, Donald Trump and campaign contributors in the resource extraction industry – is simply delusional, and not being honest with the American public.
Simply because someone has stated that they would not sell-off, or give away, America’s public lands, does not in any way make that person a huge public lands champion, or a “Teddy Roosevelt Republican” especially when the voting record clearly exposes the truth.
Here what some of the most mainstream and well-respect conservation, wildlife and environmental groups in the country had to say about Trump’s pick of Zinke:
Defenders of Wildlife says Zinke Poses Serious Threat to Wildlife Conservation (here)
Sierra Club criticizes Zinke nomination, strongly urges Senators to oppose nomination (here)
Natural Resources Defense Council: Zinke’s Record Falls Far Short and Adds to Trump’s Fossil Fuel Cabinet (here)
The Wilderness Society says “Trump Interior Nominee Ryan Zinke Raises Serious Concerns (here)
When President-elect Trump nominated Ryan Zinke yesterday, Trump issued the following statement: “[Ryan Zinke] has built one of the strongest track records on championing regulatory relief, forest management, responsible energy development and public land issues.”
Here’s what that strong track record looks like according to the very mainstream League of Conservation Voters. If you care about America’s public lands, wildlife and wilderness legacy…buckle up folks, because it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
I continue to fine some nuggets of good information in the Missoulian’s big series on the timber industry in Montana, even though none of the Missoulian articles (to date) have bothered to reach out to anyone in the environmental community and get our perspective on the timber industry, public lands management and the reality that we’re pretty much always blamed for all the timber industry’s woes.
The title of this post is a direct quote from Paul McKenzie, the resource manager for the F.H. Stoltze Land and Lumber Company in Columbia Falls, Montana, and is taken from this article.
Let the substance of that acknowledgement from Stoltze Lumber sink in for a second. Essentially they are admitting that when they mechanized their lumber mills half their employees were let go, but they still produced the same amount of lumber. And yet, despite this fact, the timber industry in Montana still gets away with blaming all the timber industry worker layoffs on environmentalists? How is that even possible?
Previous Missoulian articles documented the Montana timber industry’s “old-growth forest liquidation” strategy, which dominated the scene in Montana from 1970 to 1990. During those two decades corporations like Champion International tripled logging levels on their own lands – most of it via logging of old-growth forests. But other timber mills in Montana also took part in that old-growth logging frenzy of the 70s and 80s.
As the timber industry was pretty much mowing through all their own old-growth, they turned to the U.S. Forest Service and started pressuring the agency (and politicians) to open up vast swaths of public national forest lands – including old-growth forests and roadless areas – to large-scale logging and roadbuilding schemes.
Apparently, if you believe the timber industry lobbyists and mill owners story now, they actually had no idea that what they were during in previous decades was bad for forests, fish, ecosystems or long-term sustainability. Of course, I don’t buy that argument for a minute. And you shouldn’t either.
What follows is an action alert from Friends of the Wild Swan. Looks like this is just another proposal (in a long line of similar schemes) to have states and counties take over management of federal public lands, which belong equally to all Americans.
The Lake County Conservation District (LCCD) in Montana has been working on a novel approach to take over management of Flathead National Forest land in the Swan Valley. The Swan Resource Management Study vaguely outlines a plan to take control of 60,000 acres in the Swan Valley in Lake County which then would be managed by the Montana Dept. of Natural Resources and Conservation (DNRC) for logging over the next 100 years.
The LCCD seems to believe that these federal lands represent a cash cow for the county to use for various unnamed projects even though most federal timber sales lose money and DNRC doesn’t have an adequate accounting system to track its costs to see whether they make money from timber sales.
There are obviously flaws with the whole premise of controlling just the timber output on federal lands but the LCCD has been moving along with this since 2014 and is soliciting public comments about whether to proceed with asking Congress to authorize the transfer of management. These are federal public lands and they belong to everyone in the U.S. not just Lake County or Montana residents.
The Swan Valley is rich in wildlife and biological diversity. These wild lands are critical habitat for lynx, bull trout, grizzly bears and other fish and wildlife. Allowing the County to have management jurisdiction for purely logging and its associated roads will adversely affect the habitat for many imperiled animals and fish as well as water quality.
According to their website “LCCD residents, especially those with property in the Swan Valley, will be asked their opinion. LCCD wants to know if there is adequate local community support to request Montana’s governor and legislature to begin working on State legislation that would support the establishment of the proposed Conservation Forest. Conversely, LCCD wants to know if the study should be suspended and the idea of a Conservation Forest tabled.”
In an undated letter on the website it says that environmental groups, Lake County residents, legislators and others have been notified of the public meeting on December 7th at the Swan Lake Clubhouse at6:30 pm. However, even though Friends of the Wild Swan attended the previous meeting in 2014 and submitted comments we have not been notified nor have Lake County residents.
Please attend this meeting if you are able or send a letter to the LCCD and Lake CountyCommissioners — tell them:
• This is a bad idea and no more taxpayer funds should be spent on it,
• These wild lands are too valuable for their clean water, fish and wildlife and must be maintained for those values,
• These are federal lands that belong to everyone in the United States, not just Lake County residents. Any activities on Forest Service land must be in compliance with federal laws like the Endangered Species Act, National Forest Management Act, Clean Water Act and National Environmental Policy Act.
We need to let them know loud and clear that their proposal is not a viable option for our precious public lands.
For more information go to: www.swanforestinitiative.org
Send comments to the LCCD at [email protected] or by mail to 64352 US Hwy 93, Ronan, MT 59864 and to the Lake County Commissioners at [email protected] or by mail to CountyCourthouse, Room 211, 106 4th Ave E., Polson, MT. 59860
If a picture is worth a thousand words, perhaps the ones above and below will help tell the story of the timber industry in Montana, the dramatical liquidation of old-growth forests and the subsequent changes – and challenges – to National Forest management, especially in the context of the timber industry’s quest for more public lands logging, less public oversight and fewer pesky environmental laws and regulations to follow. But hey, we can always just continue to blame environmental groups for all the timber industry’s problems, right?
Below is some more timber industry ‘truth telling’ from the Missoulian’s big timber industry series. Here’s the full article.
1993 was also the year Champion completed its “accelerated old-growth liquidation” strategy. Over the previous 20 years, Champion had tripled its harvest. Much of that took place in the mountains around Primm Meadow.
“That’s why Champion divested,” explained Peter Kolb, Montana State University extension forester. “They said they’re going to convert value on the land that’s not producing a rate of return that’s fair. Once we’ve liquidated that investment, the remaining land has a rate of return that doesn’t meet our business model. They over-harvested their own lands, or from a business perspective, converted it to money for the company.”
The companies then turned to the Forest Service, seeking access to federal timberlands. University of Montana forest economist Alan McQuillan recalled Corrick announcing that Champion needed to buy 60 percent of the Forest Service’s available Montana timber after 1992 or the company wouldn’t be here to stay.
Congress also began receiving reports of “phantom forests” of greatly exaggerated tree inventories and underestimated costs of timber sale preparation and road construction. A General Accounting Office study in 1994 found the Forest Service failed to consider factors like wildlife habitat, sensitive plant species, or recreation in estimating its available timber production area. In one example, the study reported that between 1991 and 1993, costs of preparing timber sales on the Mount Hood National Forest in Oregon climbed 147 percent.
But by then, the agency had plunged into its own rethinking of its mission. After selling around 12 billion board-feet of timber a year in the 1980s nationally, the Forest Service reduced its Allowable Sale Quantity, or ASQ, to about one-third that amount by 1993.
Locally, forest supervisors were also cranking back the spigot of federal timber. Lolo National Forest Supervisor Orville Daniels whacked his ASQ from 120 million board-feet to 50 million.
Seems like you can’t talk about national forest management these days without also talking about wildfires. As an environmentalists I’ve gotten used to being blamed for wildfires no matter what the truth or the reality really is. Heck, environmentalists were even blamed by Montana Senator Steve Daines for this summer Roaring Lion Fire on the Bitterroot National Forest…even though that fire was started by some irresponsible teenagers and a lawsuit against a proposed timber sale and roadbuilding project in the area was filed – not by any environmental group – but by a local homeowner/property owner who happens to be a former U.S. Forest Service smokejumper and the owner a wood products manufacturing company. Go figure.
In the decade between 2006 and 2015, humans started nearly half of the 73,110 wildfires on national forest lands.
Campfires were responsible for one-third of the 33,700 human-caused wildfires in that decade. Those fires burned over 1.2 million acres.
This year saw 8,500 acres burned in the Roaring Lion fire outside Hamilton. Four young people were charged last week with negligent arson, a felony, for allegedly leaving the campfire that started that wildfire, which destroyed 16 homes and cost $11 million to fight.
“It’s a significant issue for us,” said Jennifer Jones of the U.S. Forest Service’s Fire and Aviation Management office in Washington, D.C. “We have a finite number of fire personnel and equipment. The more that we have to allocate to fight human-caused fire, the fewer we have to fight the fires we can’t prevent, which are those caused by lightning.”
This piece in the New York Times from Christopher Ketcham seems worthy of discussion on this blog. In Montana, public lands issues have been the centerpiece of pretty much every single statewide campaign this year. However, to date, not one politician in Montana has said anything about last week’s verdict in the Bundy Trail, and what that may mean for the safety of thousands of public lands employees in our state, or the future management of America’s public lands. Then again, I’m not sure I can think of one single example of where any statewide politician in Montana has ever said anything negative about ranchers that graze their livestock on our federal public lands for literally pennies on the dollar, at a tremendous impact to native wildlife, watersheds and the heath of our range and forested ecosystems. -mk
With the jury acquittals last week of Ammon and Ryan Bundy and their accomplices in the 41-day armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon last winter, the lives of federal land managers in the American West got a whole lot more difficult.
This was more than just a court victory.
The Bundys landed a blow against a culture of public service embodied by the federal employees responsible for maintaining law and order and protecting our wildest Western landscapes. And while we don’t know the reason for the acquittals in what seemed like an open-and-shut case of guilt, it comes against a backdrop of deep antipathy in parts of the West toward the environmental regulation of the hundreds of millions of acres of rangeland, forests and national parks managed by the federal government on behalf of all Americans.
This hostility is particularly strong in the high desert of southeastern Oregon that is home to the refuge, described by the environmental historian Nancy Langston in an Op-Ed article earlier this year as “a place of bitterly contested human histories that remain potent today.”
The federal land managers I’ve spoken to — rangers, biologists and law enforcement officers, almost all of them so fearful they won’t go on the record — worry that extremist copycats who seek to undermine the federal public lands system will be emboldened by the verdict.
The following is a press release from the University of California-Berkeley. mk
A severe fire cleared an area of forest in the Illilouette Creek Basin in Yosemite National Park, allowing it to become a wetland. Wetlands and meadows provide natural firebreaks that make the area less prone to catastrophic fires. Scott Stephens photo
Berkeley — An unprecedented 40-year experiment in a 40,000-acre valley of Yosemite National Park strongly supports the idea that managing fire, rather than suppressing it, makes wilderness areas more resilient to fire, with the added benefit of increased water availability and resistance to drought.
After a three-year, on-the-ground assessment of the park’s Illilouette Creek basin, University of California, Berkeley researchers concluded that a strategy dating to 1973 of managing wildfires with minimal suppression and almost no preemptive, so-called prescribed burns has created a landscape more resistant to catastrophic fire, with more diverse vegetation and forest structure and increased water storage, mostly in the form of meadows in areas cleared by fires.
“When fire is not suppressed, you get all these benefits: increased stream flow, increased downstream water availability, increased soil moisture, which improves habitat for the plants within the watershed. And it increases the drought resistance of the remaining trees and also increases the fire resilience because you have created these natural firebreaks,” said Gabrielle Boisramé, a graduate student in UC Berkeley’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and first author of the study.
Boisramé and co-author Sally Thompson, a UC Berkeley ecohydrologist and assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, found that even in the drought years covered by the study, the basin retained more water than similar areas outside the park. That translated into more runoff into the Upper Merced River, which flows through Yosemite Valley, at a time when other rivers in the surrounding areas without a restored fire regime showed the same or decreased flow.
“We know that forests are deep-rooted and that they have a large leaf area, which means they are both thirsty and able to get to water resources,” Thompson said. “So if fire removes 20 percent of that demand from the landscape, that frees up some of the water to do different things, from recharging groundwater resources to supporting different kinds of vegetation, and it could start to move into the surface water supplies as stream flow.”
The study was published in this month’s issue of the journal Ecosystems.
If the results are confirmed from other studies, including the UC Berkeley team’s new project analyzing the Sugarloaf Creek Basin in Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks, they could alter the way the federal government as well as water districts deal with fire, benefiting not only the forest environment but potentially also agriculture and cities because of more runoff into streams and reservoirs.
“I think it has the potential to change the conversation about wildfire management,” said co-author Scott Stephens, a fire expert and UC Berkeley professor of environmental science, policy and management who has studied the Illilouette basin since 2002.
This “wildfire management” strategy is counter to the federal government ‘s 110-year-old Smokey Bear policy, which is followed throughout the West and emphasizes suppressing fires wherever they occur for fear they will get out of control. With persistent drought and a warming climate, the U.S. Forest Service budget is increasingly going to firefighting. On most federal land, only forest thinning and human-initiated prescribed burns are allowed as a way to manage the trees and underbrush.
Stephens noted, however, that these agencies have recognized the folly of total suppression – thanks in part to his own studies throughout the Sierra Nevada over several decades – and current draft wildland management policies for three of the state’s national forests allow active wildfire management in up to 60 percent of the forests.
The value of forest clearings
Wildfire management, as opposed to suppression, comes with major changes in the way the forest looks, Stephens and Thompson said. Unlike the dense stands of pine and fir most people associate with Yosemite and similar mid-elevation Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountain forests, the Illilouette Creek basin has thinner forests and more clearings with dead trees.
“There is much more dramatic structural change in this forest than most people would probably feel comfortable with,” he said. “You are talking about low-density forests and gaps of 4 or 5 acres, up to maybe 100 acres. These are the result of major fires about every decade or so, large enough to cause tree scarring and affecting as much as one-quarter of the basin.”
These fire-caused clearings, however, act as natural fire breaks and make the area resistant to catastrophic fires such as the 2013 Rim Fire in the western part of the park, which burned 250,000 acres and left patches up to 20,000 acres in extent in which not a single conifer tree survived. These areas could take a century to recover, Stephens said.
“In the Illilouette basin we lost about 20 percent of the forest cover, but there was a 200 percent increase in wetland vegetation: meadows starting to reemerge from forests that have probably encroached on historical locations,” Thompson said. “That sets us up to think that this new regime should be leakier as far as water goes — leaky in the way that suits us as a society.”
Even if these wildfire management techniques don’t produce more runoff, Thompson added, “I think it is a fabulous result in terms of forest management if you end up with a healthier forest with some better intact aquatic habitat, even if you don’t see a drop of water further downstream. It is still the right thing to do from an ecological point of view.
“Bottom line, this strategy might be a triple win-win-win for water, forest structure and fire risk,” she said.
The ‘jewel’ of Yosemite National Park
The findings are the culmination of a 14-year study led by Stephens and his UC Berkeley colleagues to learn how monitoring natural, lightning-caused fires with a bias toward letting them burn affects the landscape, the vegetation and the groundwater. Only four areas in the western U.S., including two in California – the Illilouette Creek basin and the Sugarloaf Creek basin – have allowed lightning fires to burn in large areas for decades.
Most studies of different ways to manage wildland fires have been limited to a few hundred acres, and it’s hard to extrapolate from such limited experiments to an entire forest. Luckily, Yosemite National Park started its experiment in 1973 – spurred by a 1963 report authored by the late UC Berkeley forester Starker Leopold – to let nature take its course in the Illilouete Creek watershed, stepping in only when fires in the basin threatened to get out of control or sent too much smoke into Yosemite Valley two miles to the northwest.
“This is the first study that looks at fire regime restoration on a watershed scale with empirical data,” he said. “Others do smaller areas or modeling, but this is 40,000 acres – a big place – over many years.”
One reason the basin was chosen was that it was surrounded by granite walls, which naturally prevented fires from spreading outside the basin. It had not been burned by the indigenous tribes of the region, which often set fires to increase acorn production, and had no history of prescribed burns. In fact, it saw only natural, lightning-caused fires except for an interval of nearly a century – 1875 to 1972 – when the park suppressed all fires.
While Stephens and his many students documented the changes in fire over the past 400 years, Boisramé and Thompson analyzed aerial photos to document vegetation change. Then, with the help of installed sensors and more than 3,000 soil moisture measurements throughout the basin, the team was able to estimate the amount of water in the landscape today versus in the past. They found similar or marginally drier conditions where forests had been replaced with shrubs, but these were balanced by much wetter conditions in small areas where meadows expanded.
They observed more snow reaching the ground because of the clearings, and more snow remaining during the spring, delaying runoff. And in recent drought years, when surrounding basins saw more trees die, there was almost no tree mortality in the Illilouette basin.
“In order to really understand whether this approach should be part of our management toolkit, I would recommend that we give it a crack in a few other places,” Thompson said. “This appears to be a promising management strategy without significant harm and with several very strongly quantifiable benefits and several very suggestive outcomes.”
Boisramé, who spent the past four summers sampling and camping in the Illilouette Creek basin, emphasized that this is not a strategy that would work everywhere. But in wildernesss areas where wildfire management is being considered because of its safety benefits – to reduce underbrush and eliminate fuel for out-of-control and catastrophic fires that risk lives and property – the ecological and hydrological benefits are a big bonus. Areas with similar elevation and climatic conditions to the Illilouette basin, and thus perhaps suitable for managed wildfire, comprise about 18 percent of the Sierra Nevada, though the strategy may work at lower elevations as well.
“The whole ecosystem will be better off if we let the natural fire process back in,” she said.
The research was supported by a grant from the federal Joint Fire Science Program.
In case you missed it, below is a joint press release from Idaho Rivers United, Friends of the Clearwater and Advocates for the West. Interested readers can also find a handy link toU.S. Magistrate Judge Candy Dale’s ruling to see what the clearcuts and roads planned by the U.S. Forest Service in the Selway and Middle Fork Clearwater Wild and Scenic Rivers didn’t hold up in a court of law. -mk
MAY 13, 2016 – A federal court order issued late yesterday protects the Selway and Middle Fork Clearwater Wild and Scenic rivers from clear cuts and roads planned by the U.S. Forest Service following the 2014 Johnson Bar Fire.
Two Idaho conservation groups – Idaho Rivers United and Friends of the Clearwater – argued that the Forest Service violated its duties to protect the Selway and Middle Fork Clearwater rivers under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and also failed to fully evaluate cumulative environmental impacts along with other private and state land logging and 2015 fires in the same area.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Candy Dale agreed. She faulted the agency for failing to adopt a comprehensive river management plan as required by the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act more than 20 years ago.
“Without objective, predetermined criteria, the public is left to trust the Forest Service’s ‘word’ that it considered all relevant factors necessary to protecting the Middle Fork Clearwater and Selway Rivers’ Wild and Scenic values and that the Project will not affect or have minimal impact upon the Wild and Scenic values,” she wrote.
The Court also agreed the Forest Service failed to fully assess how the Johnson Bar project may cause mass erosion and sedimentation into area streams, which are habitat for imperiled salmon, steelhead and bull trout. She found the agency’s sediment delivery estimates “do not appear to accurately represent the Project’s overall sedimentation delivery to the river system.”
IRU Conservation Director Kevin Lewis said the Selway, one of America’s eight original Wild and Scenic Rivers, is too precious a resource for such haphazard work.
“The Selway and Middle Fork Clearwater Rivers are among the crown jewels of our nation’s river systems, as Congress recognized back in 1968 when it protected them as the first rivers under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act,” Lewis said. “This is an important court ruling enforcing Congressional direction that these are to be protected for present and future generations.”
Laird Lucas, executive director of Advocates for the West, was lead attorney for the plaintiffs.
“The Forest Service has not been candid with the public about this massive logging project that threatens harm to the Wild and Scenic rivers and their important fish populations,” Lucas said. “Unfortunately, it sometimes takes a federal court order to enforce the law and tell the Forest Service to do its job as Congress has directed.”
Friends of the Clearwater Ecosystem Defense Director Gary Macfarlane said the Forest Service has already damaged Wild and Scenic values along the Selway via state and private timber sales.
“We are pleased the federal court is willing to stand up and insist that the Wild and Scenic be protected,” he said.
Citing irreparable harm, the judge’s order blocks logging until the case is fully resolved.
Since May of 2015, IRU and allies have vigorously opposed two separate logging operations that would seriously degrade the Wild and Scenic values of the Selway River. To date, we’ve successfully blocked and won the first case and have won an emergency injunction on the second. Below is a chronology of the two cases.
Illegal Use Of Road In Wild And Scenic Corridor
May 19, 2015: IRU and local property owners file a suit seeking to protect the Wild and Scenic values of the Selway River by focusing on federal road access to state land.
July 10, 2015: Citing irreparable harm, Federal District Judge B. Lynn Winmill sides with IRU and our allies and grants a preliminary injunction to block vehicle access across Forest Service land.
March 30, 2016: Winmill rules on behalf of IRU and local property owners.
Johnson Bar Lawsuit
March 11, 2016: IRU and Friends of the Clearwater file in federal district court in Boise to block clear-cut logging on federal land above Johnson Bar in the Wild and Scenic Selway canyon.
April 7, 2016: IRU and our allies file for a preliminary injunction to block the clear cut before its projected start date in mid-May.
May 13, 2016: Citing an inadequate Wild and Scenic management plan, among other reasons, Federal Judge Candy Dale grants a preliminary injunction blocking the Johnson Bar timber sale until the case is fully resolve.
Occasional blog contributor Char Miller had the following OpEd appear in the LA Times this weekend, which should be of interest to regular blog readers and commenters. – mk
The trees are dying. The forests are not.
This distinction is getting lost in all the angst over the tree die-off in the central Sierra, coastal ranges and other forests of California. Players ranging from the Forest Service to CalFire to Sen. Dianne Feinstein and other public officials are ignoring this key fact in their rush to do something, anything, about the dying trees.
Feinstein, in a recent letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, urged him to transfer the tidy sum of $38 million to the Forest Service so that it could immediately harvest thousands of red-needled pine and other dead trees in “high hazard” areas in the Sequoia, Sierra and Stanislaus national forests. “After five years of historic drought,” she argued, “which has led to the death of an estimated 66 million trees in California alone, my state and its people face a heightened and potentially catastrophic risk of wildfire this year and for years to come.”
And that request is but a drop in the bucket, according to Feinstein. In a previous letter to the Office of Management and Budget, she said federal and state officials calculated that 5.5 million of California’s 66 million dead trees posed “a particular threat to public safety and must be removed as quickly as possible.” The Forest Service’s estimate to harvest just its portion of the threatening trees (3.7 million) was $562 million. There is no way the Obama administration is going to ask for, or that Congress would provide, half-a-billion dollars for such an effort in a single state.
Although the attention-getting figure of 66 million dead trees (or “snags”) — widely publicized this summer — seems like a lot, the figure shrinks when set in its wider, arboreal context. As Doug Bevington of Environment Now has reported, there are 33 million forested acres in the state, meaning that the recent pulse of tree mortality on average has increased the number of dead trees by a mere two snags per acre: “To put that number in perspective,” Bevington wrote, “forest animals that live in snags generally need at least four to eight snags per acre to provide sufficient habitat and some species require even more snags.” In short, viewed ecologically, California’s forests suffer from a deficit of dead trees, not a surfeit.
Besides, dead trees are not bereft of life. They are essential to the survival of such cavity-nesting species as the endangered California spotted owl and the increasingly rare black-backed woodpecker. Ditto for the little-seen Pacific fisher, a forest-dweller related to the weasel whose diet in part consists of small mammals that take advantage of snag ecosystems. A host of other organisms feast on dead trees upright or fallen, so that what on the surface might seem like a patch of ghost forest in fact is a biodiversity hot spot, a teeming terrain.
While countless living things thrive off the dead trees, fire does not. This seems counter-intuitive, especially when firefighters tell The Times “it’s going to be much harder for us to stop a fire in these dead forests, as opposed to when they were alive.” In fact, fire-ecology research has demonstrated that snags do not burn with a greater intensity than green trees, and their presence does not accelerate the spread of fire. Nor does it increase the chance of wildfire. Even the state’s firefighter-in-chief, CalFire Director Ken Pimlott,agrees with the “emerging body of science that has found dead trees don’t significantly increase the likelihood of wildfires.”
Don’t get me wrong: There are legitimate reasons to log some snags located in portions of the wildland-urban interface to ensure public safety and protect vital infrastructure. It’s entirely possible that Feinstein’s requested $38 million transfer for logging high hazard areas would be a good investment. But slicking off 5.5 million trees — or even just the 3.7 million proposed for harvest in the national forests — cannot be defended in terms of science or policy. And it would break the bank.
Instead, those kinds of harvest numbers sound disconcertingly like political logrolling. In this case, agencies and their allies may be spreading fear of imminent, ecosystemic collapse that can only be averted via a massive infusion of tax dollars that would also prop up the timber and biomass industries. (The latter turns board-feet into kilowatts, a process as inefficient and C02-spewing as coal, accelerating the planet’s warming. Not climate-smart.)
So let’s take nature seriously. Even those who mourn the loss of the iconic, pine-scented uninterrupted sweep of green trees in the Sierra should remember that the “death” we perceive in California’s forests presages their regeneration. John Muir, the troubadour of all things Sierra, said as much in 1878. After years of field research, he concluded that sequoia regrowth depended on natural disturbance. Erosion and floods, “some pawing of squirrel or bear,” and the “fall of old trees” cleared the way for successive generations to flourish. Even fire,“the great destroyer of tree life” prepares “bare virgin ground … one of the conditions essential for [sequoias’] growth from the seed.” Muir’s penetrating insight was controversial in the late 19th century, but it shouldn’t be today.
The trees are dying. The forests are not.
Char Miller is a professor of environmental analysis at Pomona College and is the author of the just-published “Not So Golden State: Sustainability vs. the California Dream.”
