Matthew Koehler

Potpourri of Recent Wildfire & Fuel Reduction Studies

by

(The following information was written and provided to me by George Wuerthner, author of Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy. – mk)

This study, Wildfire and Fuel Treatment Effects on Forest Carbon Dynamics in the Western United States, while focused on carbon losses and storage in forests, makes the point about probability – i.e. what is the likelihood of any fire actually interacting with fuel reductions? We can’t treat entire forests or even a significant portion of them due to cost and the undesirable impacts associated with logging, so it’s reasonable to ask the question as to whether there is a good chance as to whether a fire will actually burn through fuel reduction treated areas.

In other words since we can’t predict where a fire will occur, we can’t effectively treat forests with fuel reductions – even if they worked well – which they often don’t for a host of reasons including the fact that fuel reductions lose effectiveness over time.

We are spending a lot of federal dollars trying to treat forests to reduce fire spread and severity when the chances or probability that a high severity fire will actually interact with a treated forest is low. This, of course, again makes the case that treatments, if they are done at all, should be strategic and focused on lands near communities and other targeted areas of importance.

Abstract
Sequestration of carbon (C) in forests has the potential to mitigate the effects of climate change by offsetting future emissions of greenhouse gases. However, in dry temperate forests, wildfire is a natural disturbance agent with the potential to release large fluxes of C into the atmosphere. Climate-driven increases in wildfire extent and severity are expected to increase the risks of reversal to C stores and affect the potential of dry forests to sequester C. In the western United States, fuel treatments that successfully reduce surface fuels in dry forests can mitigate the spread and severity of wildfire, while reducing both tree mortality and emissions from wildfire. However, heterogeneous burn environments, site-specific variability in post-fire ecosystem response, and uncertainty in future fire frequency and extent complicate assessments of long-term (decades to centuries) C dynamics across large landscapes. Results of studies on the effects of fuel treatments and wildfires on long-term C retention across large landscapes are limited and equivocal. Stand-scale studies, empirical and modeled, describe a wide range of total treatment costs (12–116 Mg C ha−1) and reductions in wildfire emissions between treated and untreated stands (1–40 Mg C ha−1). Conclusions suggest the direction (source, sink) and magnitude of net C effects from fuel treatments are similarly variable (−33 Mg C ha−1 to +3 Mg C ha−1). Studies at large spatial and temporal scales suggest that there is a low likelihood of high-severity wildfire events interacting with treated forests, negating any expected C benefit from fuels reduction. The frequency, extent, and severity of wildfire are expected to increase as a result of changing climate, and additional information on C response to management and disturbance scenarios is needed improve the accuracy and usefulness of assessments of fuel treatment and wildfire effects on C dynamics.

Another long term study – this one in the Siskiyou Mountains of Oregon – demonstrates that fires are episodic and tightly bound with climate. It also points out that sediment loads increased dramatically after logging began–that has no previous analogue in history.

This paper documents how changing climatic conditions impact fire regimes and frequency. There were long periods without fires as reported in other recent studies and then periodic fire decades as well. In general this paper would support the notion that juniper and pinyon woodlands were not characterized by  “frequent fire/low intensity” fire regimes.

Wuerthner: Revisiting Fire History Studies

by

(The following piece was written by George Wuerthner, an ecologist, professional photographer and writer who has published over 30 books, including Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy. – mk)

One of the cornerstones of current forest policy is the assumption that western forests are outside of their “normal” density and appearance or what is termed “historic variability” due a hundred years of mismanagement that included logging of old growth, fire suppression, and livestock grazing. This idea has been used to justify logging public lands to “restore” forests to their pre-management era appearance and resiliency. Due to this past mismanagement we are told that forests are “overgrown” “decadent” and ready to burn.

Not to dismiss effects of the kind of management that largely continues unabated today, including on-going logging, grazing and fire suppression, but whether the current forest stand condition is that far from conditions that have occurred infrequently in the past is a matter of increasing debate.  This is especially important because public land management agencies feel the pressure to DO something beyond waiting for nature to do what it always does to “restore” forest conditions.

Timber harvesting is no longer done just to provide timber companies with profits or consumers with wood. Now lumber companies are involved in a much more noble enterprise—they are logging the trees to “restore” the presumed forest “health.”

The scientific basis for “restoration” is based to a large extent on fire scar studies. These studies suggest that the drier forests composed of lower elevation ponderosa pine and Douglas fir burned frequently and thus kept density low with “park-like” open stands of mostly larger trees. Keep in mind the discussion is focused on lower elevation forests since higher elevation forests like lodgepole pine, fir and spruce are characterized by much longer fire intervals, which have not experienced fuel buildups to any significant degree due to fire suppression, grazing, or timber harvesting.

So we often hear how such low elevation dry forests burned regularly at frequent intervals in “light, cool” blazes that removed the litter and killed the small trees, but did little harm to the larger trees.

Like a lot of myths, there is some truth to this generalization, and no doubt in some areas this characterization is accurate. But more recent studies using different methods have started to question this well-established story-line. These studies are finding that the intervals between fires is much longer than previously suspected, and that stand-replacement blazes (where most of the trees are killed) were likely common even in the lower elevation dry forests.

PROBLEMS WITH FIRE SCAR METHODS
The major method for determining the fire history of an area is to find trees with scars created by fires. If the tree is not killed by the blaze, it will develop a scar that can be counted in the tree rings. This record of past fires is then used to determine the “fire rotation” or the time it takes to burn an area equivalent to one’s study area.

There are four major flaws associated with traditional fire scar studies. These methodological flaws contribute to a bias toward shorter fire rotations—in other words, they tend to overstate the effect of fire suppression on forests because it appears that we are seeing more years between successive fires than we did in the past. If the fire rotation were judged to be longer, however, then much of what is being characterized as unhealthy forest may actually be perfectly normal and healthy.

The first flaw is targeted sampling. A researcher walks through the forest looking for areas with an abundance of fire scarred trees. The trees in this area are then sampled and used to determine the fire history for the area.  In the 1930s the bank robber Willy Sutton was asked why he robbed banks. Sutton is reputed to have replied with the self evident “because that is where the money is.” In a sense that is how fire researchers have gathered their data on fires—they sample in places with a lot of fire scars.

The problem with targeted sampling is that it’s non random. It’s like going into a brewery to poll people about whether they like beer. Places with an abundance of fire scars tend to have naturally low fuel loadings and frequent fires. But these sites may not be representative of the surrounding landscape such as north facing slopes or valley bottoms which may be wetter or have higher productivity and, thus, longer intervals between blazes. In fact, the reason non-sampled areas lack significant numbers of fire scarred trees is often because all trees were killed in a stand-replacement fire, but the omission of such areas from fire history studies leads to the false conclusion that stand-replacement blazes are unusual in dry low-elevation forests.

The second flaw is composite fire scars. Most fire studies add up all the fire scars recorded into a “composite” timeline. The problem with this technique is that the more scars you find and count over bigger and bigger areas, the shorter the fire interval becomes and the more risky your assumption that any fire recorded by one tree burned throughout the entire study area, even though some trees didn’t scar in the fire event. Some fire researchers now try to support this assumption by only including fire scars recorded the same year on 3 or more trees, but the trees do not have to be positioned throughout the study area, so even this will not eliminate the upward bias in frequency of fire in a given study area.

In other words, your composite may suggest a fire burned within your study area once every 5 years or whatever, but if most of these blazes burned only a few trees, then it is not accurate to say that the fire burned the entire area.  How frequent are fires that burn most or all of a large study area? These larger blazes may be far less frequent and take 100 years to burn most or all of the study area. Since the critical issue for the forest is the occurrence of the occasional blaze that burns most, if not all, of the entire study area, the fire rotation for those fires in such an area may be closer to 100 years, not the 5 years you get if you include even the tiny 1-acre fires.

The third flaw is an emphasis on the AVERAGE fire interval rather than the DISTRIBUTION of fire intervals. If you read fire studies carefully they will usually note the longest interval without any recorded fire. Often this is a significant period of many decades. Why is this important? Because the average person hears that there were fires, ON AVERAGE, every 5 years and assumes that fires operate like clocks on a regular schedule. In reality, fires burn in episodic groups usually dictated by periodic droughts that are controlled by shifts in offshore currents like the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, thus tend to be grouped together in certain drought prone decades.  The DISTRIBUTION of a fire interval shows clearly that there are always relatively long periods with little fire, even though the AVERAGE fire return interval might be 5 years.

Why is it important that we consider historic distributions of fire intervals rather than average fire intervals? Because the common assumption is that if the fire interval averages 5 years, fires would keep tree density low and reduce fuel build up. However, if it is also typical that there are also extremely long fire intervals of 80 years or more associated with the DISTRIBUTION of fire intervals, then there may not be an “abnormal” build up of fuel or increase in tree density, and nothing is out of the ordinary at all.

Finally the fourth major flaw is that traditional fire-scar studies have not been map based.  Why is a map of the distribution of trees with scars important?  It is only through such mapping that one can determine whether a scarred tree was in the middle of an extensive low-severity fire or at the edge of a high-severity patch.  One must look at the age distribution of the surrounding trees to gain real insight into the kind of fire that the scarred tree recorded.  This is what the more progressive fire ecologists are beginning to do, and they are finding that many fires in dry forest types are severe fires that burn relatively small areas within a larger fire perimeter, just like ALL fire we see burning in the same forest locations today.

Due to these flaws and errors in interpretation, many fire scar histories (but not all) misrepresent the fire regime associated with an area. If the period between fires was occasionally very long, then our forests may not be far out of their historic variability and may be well within that range of variation. If so, they do not require “restoration” because they are not out of balance.

The other major justification for logging is to reduce the chance that a community might be threatened but, as embarrassing as the facts are, there is no evidence that logging conducted miles from a town has anything at all to do with the probability that the nearest houses burn.

The fact that we are seeing more and larger fires fits perfectly with the pattern that is expected under current climatic conditions. In other words, if you have drier weather conditions, with high temperatures, low humidity and high winds, you will get more fires. You will get larger fires.

The prevailing climatic conditions are driving most of the apparent change in fire frequency and severity. For instance, the Southwest is in the grips of a drought that hasn’t been seen in five hundred years. Not surprisingly, there are fires now burning across the region bigger and more intense than any seen in the past.  However, Paleo fire studies confirm that such large fires may not be abnormal when compared to the fires that burned similar severe droughts occurred in the past centuries.

MANAGE FOR ECOLOGICAL PROCESS NOT SOME HISTORIC STAND STRUCTURE
Finally there is too much emphasis on “restoring” stand structure (in other words the presumed appearance) of forests rather than allowing natural ecological processes to occur on the landscape. It is more critical to accept and promote natural processes like beetle outbreaks, wildfires (including stand replacement blazes), and other natural ecological agents than to try to create some presumed historic forest structure that never existed in a steady state (and at taxpayer expense)! If natural ecological processes are allowed to occur on our public lands, then the forest will sort out the kind of appearance and structure that is appropriate for current climatic conditions. Critics will claim that a do-nothing approach outside the WUI will only lead to conversions of our forests to some other vegetation type, but the evidence for widespread type conversions is entirely absent.  Severe fires will restore forest conditions just fine.

All this is not to suggest that all historical reconstructions from fire scar studies are wrong—but it does suggest that most outside the pure ponderosa pine forests of the Southwest (and that’s most conifer forests in the West) are probably biased to some degree. Many of the logging proposals in the West are likely based on flawed assumptions about fire ecology and historic conditions.  And before any “restoration” logging is accepted as necessarily, the underlying assumptions should be carefully evaluated to make sure they are not skewed towards fire rotations that do not characterize the area accurately.

Fact Checking Roady, Daines and Hubbard

by

Last week I had to shake my head and literally laugh at some of the predictable statements of supposed fact being made during a hearing of the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Public Lands and Environmental Regulation.  Since one of the articles about the hearing has just been posted here, I figured I’d put together a fact-checking post of sorts.

“We need to invest more resources up front to keep our forests green and healthy, rather than wait until they are dead and dying, or on fire,” -Chuck Roady of F.H. Stoltze Land and Lumber

That’s a good example of a pollyannish statement that has no basis in actual forest ecology and science.

“Rep. Steve Daines, R-Mont., said another problem hampering the federal government’s ability to manage forests is an onslaught of frivolous lawsuits filed by environmental groups against the Forest Service.”

Filing of “frivolous lawsuits” is illegal, Congressman, and any attorney that files an actual “frivolous lawsuit” would be punished by the Courts and possibly even dis-barred.  There has never been one single “frivolous” lawsuit filed in Montana, or elsewhere, concerning Forest Service timber management. I’d challenge my Congressman Daines, or anyone else, to provide one concrete example.

Also,

“onslaught of frivolous lawsuits?” Or Daines claim that: “He said about 40 percent of the 124 management projects in Region 1, which includes Forest Service land in Montana and Idaho, have been appealed or litigated.”

Fact is, according to the most-recent GAO report, of 132 total “fuel reduction” decisions in the Forest Service’s Northern Region only 11, or 8% were litigated.  And those “fuel reduction” projects that were litigated includes issues such as logging in old-growth forests miles from homes or communities, logging within habitat for threatened or endangered species, logging is areas that are already heavily logged, roaded and fragmented, etc.

Also, the truth is that the public appeal process is part of the official public review process established by the US Congress. A member of the US Congress complaining that some people or groups filed used the public appeal process set up by Congress is the same as complaining that people participate in the process at all.  What’s next Congressman Daines? Bitching that citizens actually vote?

According to the actual actual GAO report the US Forest Service Northern Region had 132 total fuel reduction decisions during FY 2006 to FY 2008. Of those 132 total fuel reduction projects 11 were litigated. That comes to about 8%.

Jim Hubbard, deputy chief of state and private forestry for the Forest Service, said “such suits have ‘virtually shut things down’ on national forest land in Montana, ‘and so environmental clearance there … has been difficult.’”

Hmmmm….”Virtually shut things down” Hubbard? Really?

Here’s a link to the Forest Service’s Timber Sale Program Cut and Sold Reports for Fiscal Year (FY) 2012 in the U.S. Forest Service Region One.

Please note that over the past five years the Forest Service in Region One (which includes 12 National Forests located within the perimeter of northeastern Washington, northern Idaho, and Montana; and the National Grasslands in North Dakota and northwestern South Dakota. the Black Hills in SD) has sold enough timber to fill 239,000 log trucks, which if lined up end-to-end, would stretch 2,048 miles, or nearly from Missoula, Montana to New York City.

According to the Forest Service’s Cut and Sold report, here are the numbers over the past five years for the Forest Service’s Region One:

• FY 2012 Region One sold 208.3 MMBF, cut 219.4 MMBF (“Virtually shut things down?”)

• FY 2011 Region One sold 211.9 MMBF, cut 202.0 MMBF. (“Virtually shut things down?”)

• FY 2010 Region One sold 253.4 MMBF, cut 188.7 MMBF. (“Virtually shut things down?”)

• FY 2009 Region One sold 292.9 MMBF, cut 186.0 MMBF. (“Virtually shut things down?”)

• FY 2008 Region One sold 229.2 MMBF, cut 167.4 MMBF. (“Virtually shut things down?”)

NOTE: MMBF = million board feet. There are approximately 5,000 board feet per logging truck.

As you notice, the volume of timber sold by the US Forest Service in our Region has stayed pretty steady, while the volume of timber cut per year has actually gone up slightly during the past five years.  But, hey, the Forest Service timber sale program in the Northern Region is “Virtually shut down,” right Hubbard?

So, consider these actual numbers and this image of log trucks lined up end-to-end across the country in the context of those calling for more logging of our national forests and spreading false, misleading and self-serving lies about “Virtually shut things down.”

Court rejects Baucus-requested EPA rule that gave wood-burning biomass facilities a pass on compliance with federal greenhouse gas emission standards

by
On Tuesday, Senator Baucus (D-MT) sent President Obama a letter outlining Sen Baucus’ “Montana-centric” ideas for combating climate change. Sen Baucus’ ideas for combating climate change included approving the dirty tar sands Keystone XL pipeline, increasing oil and gas drilling in the Bakken and increasing industrial logging on our public lands.  Yes, you are not alone if you believe these are not good ways to combat climate change. Anyway….In the letter to the President, Senator Baucus also bragged:

“In 2011, in response to me and several other senators, EPA delayed for three years the application of any greenhouse gas permitting requirements to facilities that use biomass, like sawmills.”

Well, today, the U.S. Court of Appeals scrapped the Senator Baucus-supported EPA delay that had given wood-burning biomass facilities a pass on compliance with federal greenhouse gas emission standards. Here’s a copy of the ruling.  This is good news for those who value clear air and reducing pollution.

Here’s an article about the U.S. Court’s rejection of the EPA rule from E & E Publishing. What follows is the opening few paragraphs:

A three-judge panel scrapped a U.S. EPA rule today that had given biomass-burning facilities a pass on compliance with federal greenhouse gas emission standards.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit panel found EPA failed to justify its 2011 decision that provided a three-year exemption to its greenhouse gas rules for facilities that burn materials ranging from wood and algae to scrap tires.

In exempting biomass, EPA said it needed more time to study the overall impact of the industry’s carbon dioxide emissions. Industry has contended that in some instances — wood burning, for example — biomass facilities have a net neutral CO2 impact because trees absorb the heat-trapping gas before they are cut down.

Environmentalists didn’t buy EPA’s approach. The Center for Biological Diversity said the “blanket exemption” violated the agency’s greenhouse gas policies.

What follows is a quick legal analysis of what today’s U.S. Court ruling means.

As a legal matter this means that:

a)      The court reaffirms its view that EPA has authority to regulate greenhouse gas pollution and that those requirements are clear and mandatory

b)      In order for EPA EVER to implement an exemption from clear statutory requirements, the Agency must justify that under one of the legal doctrines available to it for crafting exemptions, AND with a robust record in science (in this instance) supporting its decision

c)       EPA did not have a robust record supporting the very broad exemption it created here – remember that even though it was for ‘just’ 3 years, it was for EVERY kind of biomass fuel, even though the science shows that burning most biomass fuels make climate disruption worse than burning fossil fuels per unit of energy created by the combustion of those fuels.  Best line from the lead opinion is the one that says that the atmosphere can’t tell a difference between a ton of biogenic CO2 ton and a ton of fossil fuel CO2.

d)      The fact that the court VACATED the rule, didn’t just remand to EPA to ‘fix’ it, shows that the court understood that there isn’t a fix available on EPA’s record – it underscores the point about the science not supporting the broad exemption EPA tried to craft here.

As far as the last question, what this means for facilities permitted during the exemption, it means they are supposed to have pollution control for their CO2 and any other air pollution they emit above the regulatory significance levels.  It means that citizens can go back and demand that, as soon as the mandate issues.  The court as it has in this case typically defers issuance of the mandate pending the review period.

Alaska’s chief forester hoodwinks Congress about the Tongass

by

(The following note and op-ed is from Larry Edwards, a Greenpeace forest campaigner and 36-year Sitka, Alaska resident. – mk)

I published the op-ed below today in the Juneau Empire, concerning fundamentally false testimony given at  Senator Wyden’s Senate E&NR Committee hearing on public forests (USFS and BLM) on June 25.  The particular testimony was given by the director of Alaska DNR’s Division of Forestry, Chris Maisch.

Although the topic may seem regional, concerning particulars about the Tongass National Forest, the piece should be of interest more broadly because Maisch’s testimony and the hearing in general were used to justify Senator Wyden’s approach to getting logging levels “UP” (his emphasis, repeatedly) by “streamlining” NEPA and ESA.

— Larry Edwards

——————–

Chris Maisch hoodwinks Congress about the Tongass
By Larry Edwards, Greenpeace
July 10, 2013

Alaska’s chief forester, Chris Maisch, should be fired and be held in contempt of Congress. Falsehoods were plentiful in his June 25 testimony to the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee, representing the state on Tongass National Forest issues.

He called these falsehoods “grim realities.” They mislead Congress, and their negativity harms the morale and economic reputation of Southeast Alaska.

Maisch introduced the Tongass as “the largest national forest …17 million acres of land.” Correct. But in noting merely that “not all of this” can be logged, he avoided informing senators that this land area is two-thirds glaciers, ice caps, rocky peaks, muskegs and scrubby trees. That’s nothing anyone would try to log, and not the prized forest habitats embroiled in controversy.

Had he disclosed that, his main point would have been silly: “the suitable timber base available for management has declined to only 672 thousand acres — or 4 percent of the Tongass acreage.” The comparison is absurd because the overwhelming portion of other 96 percent of the Tongass is the non-forest and unloggable landforms just described. Alaska’ chief forester must know better than the vision this created for senators.

More deceptively, he said, “Despite more than 50 years of timber harvest in the Tongass, a mere 2.5 percent of the old growth forest has been harvested.” That cons the Senate into believing the Tongass timber industry has had minuscule impact on forest habitat. If the existing 440,000 acres of Tongass clearcuts are really just “2.5 percent of the old growth,” doing the math, all the 17 million acres had to be old growth. Effectively, Maisch’s vision for senators is that there are no glaciers or unloggable terrains at all on the Tongass — just uninterrupted old-growth everywhere, of comparable quality to what has been logged.

Also deceptive: “The Tongass … is bigger than West Virginia, yet [that state has] 181 sawmills and 30,000 people employed.” West Virginia has far more commercial quality forest than the Tongass, and its climate grows trees faster. West Virginia’s industry is close to markets; Alaska’s is remote. Maisch’s incomplete comparison hoodwinked senators.

Maisch did a jobs shell-game. His testimony focused entirely on the Tongass, not mentioning other forest ownerships. Yet he claimed, “logging and wood products employment remains a mere shadow of its past, falling from 4,600 jobs in 1990 to approximately 307 logging jobs and 150 wood products manufacturing jobs in 2011.” In 1990 only 4,000 such jobs existed statewide. It was the peak year of Southeast Alaska’s logging boom, employing 3450. (Alaska Department of Labor). Over half the timber came from Native corporations rapidly liquidating their forests, not the Tongass. Maisch’s inaccuracy and comparison to an unsustainable high-water mark misdirected senators.

The current 457 jobs, too, are statewide. Under 100 jobs depend on Tongass timber, making this a good time for quickly transitioning out of Tongass old-growth logging. Magnifying the Tongass industry as four-plus times its actual size, Maisch avoided being confronted with that option. He asks the opposite — the ceding of 2 million acres of old-growth from the Tongass for logging — with contrived facts.

Maisch pointed to supposed steady decline in Southeast Alaska’s population and school enrollment. Population did decline 5 percent between the 2000 and 2010 Censuses, but senators also need to know the State estimates the population has rebounded 3.8 percent since 2010.

Maisch said school enrollment has declined 15 percent, “sustained over nearly two decades” in 87 percent of communities. Broad decline lasted only from 2000 to 2006. Stability or growth have become commonplace since then. Analyzing State records, enrollment has been stable in nearly 60 percent of Southeast’s school districts for the last 3-10 years, and is increasing in nearly one-quarter.

He also claimed that since 1990 six schools closed and the Southeast Island School District’s (SISD) enrollment declined from 381 to 160 students. (Enrollment of under 10 causes closure; correspondence school is a fallback option.) Of those six, permanent closures in two tiny fishing villages (1997 and 1999) and in Hyder (2009) are irrelevant to logging issues. A fourth school closed only during 1996. The remaining two, in timber country, have cycled on/off for two decades. Maisch ignored SISD’s steady enrollment recovery since 2010, reaching 190 (not 160) this year.

Chris Maisch’s testimony was fundamentally false. If he believes what he said, he is not a competent public resources steward. If otherwise, he committed perjury. Either way he must go, and the State needs to retract his testimony!

• Larry Edwards is a Greenpeace forest campaigner and 36-year Sitka
resident.

Sprawling Into the Fire Zone: How Much Longer can Homes be Banked, Built, and Sold in Fires’ Way?

by

(The following article was written by Lance Olsen and originally appeared over at Counterpunch.  – mk)

Although there has generally been silence about the potent roles they play, the banking, construction, and real estate industries have excelled at placing human homes and lives in the path of forest fires. At the same time, they have excelled at placing the same homes and people in the backyards of wildlife including, among many others, the grizzly bear. The consequences have been increasingly obvious, but the industries’ role still remains under the radar of many observers.Screen shot 2013-07-09 at 8.54.26 AM

It would be easy to argue that, at least until recently, these three key industries didn’t know what they were doing, or were at least oblivious to its consequences. But as fires become more fierce and frequent, conflicts with wildlife become more apparent, and officials at all levels of government issuing repeated warnings of risk, it’s getting harder and harder to think that these industries can claim the kind of innocence that comes with ignorance.

It’s also pretty easy to understand that this trio of influential industries can claim, with some justification, that people make their own choices where to live. But it’s just as true that most of the people who move into these fire-prone and wildlife-occupied areas would have a hard time doing it without at least some help from bankers, builders, and the real estate industry.

It seems time for these industries to accept a more positive role. For example, bankers evaluating loans could and should consider whether they are putting money into real estate at risk of burning. This need becomes more pressing if, as seems possible, fire insurance becomes hard to get or costs an arm and a leg to buy. Realtors could also disclose that the land or home a person contemplates buying is in fire-prone terrain. Not doing so leaves unsuspecting customers vulnerable to surprises that they may not want.

Bankers and realtors could and should also advise borrowers that they are buying land in the backyards of, say, mountain lions and bears, or are buying a home already placed in the lions’ and bears’ backyard, and may end up finding the likes of lion and bear continuing to use that land. Here too, not doing so leaves customers vulnerable to problems that they may not expect and certainly don’t want.

These problems clearly leave governments and taxpayers with unwanted costs, most prominently including the increasing cost of defending homes and lives from forest fire.  If the banking, building, and real estate industry were held responsible for picking up a fair share of these costs, the Forest Service budget wouldn’t be so badly busted by firefighting expenses.

As things stand now, however, increasing responsibility is being put on homeowners as governments step back. Former Montana governor Brian Schweitzer made it plain that the state budget can’t meet all demand for protecting housing from fire, and that homeowners will have to bear some of the cost themselves. Trouble is, nobody was telling that to the people who populated the fire-prone forests until after the fires drove the point home.

The home-destroying consequence of forest fires, as a recent Rocky Barker column in the Idaho Statesman makes plain, are “not natural disasters.”  They are the product of human choices. These choices have been made not only in Idaho, but all up and down the Rockies, and beyond. In Washington, for example, a Forest Service study found that housing development is occupying lands at the rate of a football field every 18 minutes. And fire is just one of many concerns this trend is raising. An author of the Forest Service report said that “People are concerned about losing capacity to grow local food crops and wood products, and about how patterns of development are impacting water quality, wildfire risk, and wildlife.”

The people concerned include the multiple agencies of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee. In IGBC’s recent draft conservation strategy for grizzlies in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem, agency biologists identify development as the top source of human-caused mortality in “management removals,” accounting for almost a third of grizzly deaths in the area.

Although they do not explicitly identify the banking, building, or real estate industries per se, biologists do conclude that “The majority of management removals result from conflicts at sites associated with frequent or permanent human presence,” and that grizzlies can be killed for “seeking natural sources of food in areas near human structures.”

Now, it’s plain as can be that a house placed in grizzly habitat can be pretty harmless in and of itself. But when the house is now made home to the likes of chickens, pet food, bird feeders, goats, or anything else a bear will see as something good to eat, and the new homeowner registers a complaint that a bear is showing up, that’s when management removals begin to kick in.

Biologists who prepared the recent grizzly conservation strategy describe sprawl and its consequences as “manageable.”  But the management comes at a cost. According to the agencies’ conservation strategy for grizzlies, agencies spend “considerable time and money on outreach actions and materials teaching the public how to prevent conflicts before they occur.”

Ultimately, these costs can be traced back to the sprawl of housing, and can plausibly be calculated as another subsidy for sprawl. If the three industries were held responsible for some share of these costs, state budgets could get some relief from the cost of responding to complaints from the people who move into the backyards of bears, lions, and other wildlife.

Moreover, the effects of such subsidy spill over into streams and rivers. As sprawl brings impermeable surfaces including rooftops, roads, and driveways into natural areas, the denizens of streams and rivers take hits too. And the hits start coming early. In 2012, a USGS study found that streams are more sensitive to development than generally understood, and that the loss of sensitive species in streams begins to occur at the initial stages of development.

A 2010 study in Ecology found that “The loss of natural land to urbanization is one of the most prevalent drivers of novel environments in freshwaters,” and that “Approximately 80% of the declining taxa did so between 0.5% and 2% impervious cover, whereas the last 20% declined sporadically from 2% to 25% impervious cover.”

But of course sprawl brings more than hard, rain-diverting surfaces. It also brings new use of pesticides used by people who want the perfect lawn, or the perfect garden of flowers not native to the landscape. A July 2013 study of pesticides’ impact published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that they can have radical effect on nearby streams, reducing life forms in streams by as much as 42%.

What we may be seeing is that runoff from hard surfaces hastens the pesticides’ progress into streams. But, so far as I know, nobody in banking, building, or real estate is disclosing these impacts to customers who crave a life beside some pretty stream. Likely of even more interest to many customers, though, streamside home construction has direct implications for people, too. Here, think flood, which is becoming much more likely as warming oceans pour more water to the skies. But few if any bankers, builders, and realtors ponder the risks they so willingly create for customers when streamside homes turn into costly nightmare every time a stream or river jumps the banks and brings mud to carpet and flooring.

In fairness, bankers, builders and realtors haven’t been acting alone in delivering unwanted and widely unsuspected  consequences to fish, wildlife, and homeowners. Congress and successive Presidents have thrown considerable support to these varied and damaging trends in the form of a Mortgage Interest Deduction which grants homebuyers tax cuts of up to a million dollars in interest payments alone.

This federal largesse is not granted just for primary residences. It is also granted for second homes, even when those homes have been built in our increasingly fire-prone forests, even when those homes are built in the backyards of threatened species such as the grizzly, and, yes, even when they’re built on the permeable soils of important stream and river drainages.

While the banking, building, and real estate industries have prospered in the boon this tax break brings, it would be hard to find a fish or bear that would cheer. For that matter, it would be hard to find much cheer in the hearts of people whose forest homes have gone up in fire, the families and friends of people killed in fire, or any of the victims of pesticide and flood.

Human death has finally forced at least some state governments to act on the risk to life and home brought on by fire. Colorado, for example has set up a task force which, according to a recent article in the Denver Post, may actually suggest “disclosure of wildfire risk before home sales” as a step toward stemming “risks and costs” that have become “too great.”

The Post quotes one Colorado official saying that the homes and lives lost in the Black Forest fire have been “ ‘ a cruel illustration’ of need for a smarter approach.”

Many will be watching to see how much support or opposition bankers, builders, and realtors give to Colorado’s requirement for disclosure of risk from fire. Together, these intimately related industries have high potential to be important allies, or foes, of a smarter approach.

A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision has added some interesting legal intrigue to these issues. At its heart, the Court’s decision was that developers’ rights trump public interest, and that local governments can’t inhibit land development unless they pay developers for any loss thus caused. Given the increasing budget constraints affecting government at every level, the consequence is that developers now enjoy greater freedom from regulation, whether that regulation would protect fish and wildlife from development or people from wildfire. And with this new freedom comes an added dose of responsibility for whatever blood this trio of industries has –and will have — on its hands.

Lance Olsen, a Montana native, was president of the Missoula, Montana-based Great Bear Foundation from 1982-1992. He has also served on the governing council of the Montana Wilderness Association and the advisory council of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies. He was previously a college teacher and associate of the American Psychological Association and its Division on Population and Environmental Psychology, and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. Now retired, he runs a restricted listserv of global scope for climate researchers, wildlife researchers, agency staff, graduate students, and NGOs concerned about the consequences of a changing climate. He can be contacted at [email protected]. This article originally appeared at Counterpunch.

GAO Report: 1/4 of USFS trails meet standards, maintenance backlog over $520 million

by

A new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) titled, “Forest Service Trails: Long- and Short-Term Improvements Could Reduce Maintenance Backlog and Enhance System Sustainability” was released recently.

According to the report, one-quarter of the Forest Service’s 158000 miles of trails met the agency’s standards, and the estimated trail maintenance backlog is $314 million, with an additional $210 million for annual maintenance, capital improvements and operations.

Add this big-ticket maintenance backlog to the growing $8.4 billion maintenance and reconstruction backlog the Forest Service current has on it’s 380,000+ miles of roads (and the fact that the Forest Service only receives 20% of the annual maintenance funding it needs to maintain its existing 380,000+ mile road system to environmental and safety standards) and one gets a sense just how far the Forest Service (and Congress) has dug the Forest Service’s backlogged maintenance hole.

Click here for a copy of the GAO report. A Missoulian article about the report is available here.

What GAO Found
The Forest Service has more miles of trail than it has been able to maintain, resulting in a persistent maintenance backlog with a range of negative effects. In fiscal year 2012, the agency reported that it accomplished at least some maintenance on about 37 percent of its 158,000 trail miles and that about one-quarter of its trail miles met the agency’s standards. The Forest Service estimated the value of its trail maintenance backlog to be $314 million in fiscal year 2012, with an additional $210 million for annual maintenance, capital improvement, and operations. Trails not maintained to quality standards have a range of negative effects, such as inhibiting trail use and harming natural resources, and deferring maintenance can add to maintenance costs.

The Forest Service relies on a combination of internal and external resources to help maintain its trail system. Internal resources include about $80 million allocated annually for trail maintenance activities plus funding for other agency programs that involve trails. External resources include volunteer labor, which the Forest Service valued at $26 million in fiscal year 2012, and funding from federal programs, states, and other sources.

Collectively, agency officials and stakeholders GAO spoke with identified a number of factors complicating the Forest Service’s trail maintenance efforts, including (1) factors associated with the origin and location of trails, (2) some agency policies and procedures, and (3) factors associated with the management of volunteers and other external resources. For example, many trails were created for purposes other than recreation, such as access for timber harvesting or firefighting, and some were built on steep slopes, leaving unsustainable, erosion-prone trails that require continual maintenance. In addition, certain agency policies and procedures complicate trail maintenance efforts, such as the agency’s lack of standardized training in trails field skills, which limits agency expertise. Further, while volunteers are important to the agency’s trail maintenance efforts, managing volunteers can decrease the time officials can spend performing on-the-ground maintenance.

Agency officials and stakeholders GAO interviewed collectively identified numerous options to improve Forest Service trail maintenance, including (1) assessing the sustainability of the trail system, (2) improving agency policies and procedures, and (3) improving management of volunteers and other external resources. In a 2010 document titled A Framework for Sustainable Recreation, the Forest Service noted the importance of analyzing recreation program needs and available resources and assessing potential ways to narrow the gap between them, which the agency has not yet done for its trails. Many officials and stakeholders suggested that the agency systematically assess its trail system to identify ways to reduce the gap and improve trail system sustainability. They also identified other options for improving management of volunteers. For example, while the agency’s goal in the Forest Service Manual is to use volunteers, the agency has not established collaboration with and management of volunteers who help maintain trails as clear expectations for trails staff responsible for working with volunteers, and training in this area is limited. Some agency officials and stakeholders stated that training on how to collaborate with and manage volunteers would enhance the agency’s ability to capitalize on this resource.

Why GAO Did This Study
The Forest Service manages more than 158,000 miles of recreational trails offering hikers, horseback riders, cyclists, off-highway-vehicle drivers, and others access to national forests. To remain safe and usable, these trails need regular maintenance, such as removal of downed trees or bridge repairs. GAO was asked to review the agency’s trail maintenance activities. This report examines (1) the extent to which the Forest Service is meeting trail maintenance needs, and effects associated with any maintenance not done; (2) resources, including funding and labor, that the agency employs to maintain its trails; (3) factors, if any, complicating agency efforts to maintain its trails; and (4) options, if any, that could improve the agency’s trail maintenance efforts. GAO reviewed laws and agency documents; analyzed Forest Service budget data for fiscal years 2006-2012 and trails data for fiscal years 2008-2012; and interviewed agency officials and representatives of 16 stakeholder groups selected to represent trail users, conservation, and industry. Their views are not generalizable.

What GAO Recommends
GAO recommends, among otheractions, that the Forest Service (1) analyze trails program needs and available resources and develop options for narrowing the gap between them and take steps to assess and improve the sustainability of its trails and (2) take steps to enhance training on collaborating with and managing volunteers who help maintain trails. In commenting on a draft of this report, the Forest Service generally agreed with GAO’s findings and recommendations.For more information, contact Anne-Marie Fennell at (202) 512-3841 or [email protected].

Up In Smoke: Is the Forest Service killing the last best chance to save the Southwest’s forests?

by

The following article, written by Claudine LoMonaco, appeared in the Santa Fe Reporter recently.  The article provides a number of details about a series of alleged lies, deceits and questionable business practices concerning Pioneer Forest Products, described as an “under-the-radar company from Montana” that “lied about its work history in its proposal to the federal government, hiding a record of failure and bankruptcy” in order to secure a huge federal contract as part of the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP).  Below are excerpts from LoMonaco’s article:

For the last several years, [Tommie] Martin’s [a supervisor in Arizona’s Gila County and fourth-generation Arizonan] been a member of a precedent-setting collaboration that aims to prevent catastrophic fires. Known as the Four Forest Restoration Initiative, or 4FRI, it brought together environmentalists, industry and the US Forest Service, among others.

Their aim is to thin and restore 2.4 million acres along the Mogollon Rim in northern Arizona, an enormous swath of land on four national forests stretching from Flagstaff to the New Mexico border, and reintroduce the natural fire regime. The idea was to have a business do the work—because the government can’t afford to—and make a profit by selling wood products.

It’s the largest restoration project attempted in the US, and it’s a model for what might happen with smaller, similar projects around the country, like the plan to protect 150,000 acres in the southwest Jemez Mountains just outside Santa Fe, says Bryan Bird, the wild places program director for Santa Fe’s WildEarth Guardians.

“Southwest Jemez is the little stepsister to 4FRI,” says Bird, who’s been watching the Arizona project for years. What happens in Arizona, he says, is likely to play out in New Mexico.

Which makes what’s going on within Arizona all the more concerning, because the project has gone haplessly awry.

In May 2012, the Forest Service regional office in Albuquerque awarded the 4FRI contract to an under-the-radar company from Montana called Pioneer Forest Products. But more than a year later, Pioneer hasn’t thinned a single overgrown tree, because it’s failed to attract any investors, and the project has stalled.

This infuriates Martin, but it doesn’t surprise her. She was one of several collaboration members who blasted Pioneer from the start for a business plan that didn’t make sense. The company says it wants to manufacture products like window frames, doors and furniture that are currently made in Asia at far less cost, and turn tree branches into an experimental fuel called cellulosic biodiesel.

“They claim they are going to run their logging trucks on it,” Martin said. “I say nonsense. No they’re not. That’s not even out of the lab yet.”

In addition, one of Pioneer’s main partners is a former Forest Service supervisor who worked at the same regional office in Albuquerque that selected the company. This link has fueled further questions. Critics say missed deadlines, insufficient funding and a harebrained scheme suggest that even though Pioneer may have lacked the ability to fulfill the contract, political connections trumped reason.

The Forest Service has continued to back Pioneer, praising nonexistent “progress” in cheery press releases.

But Martin’s concerns seem warranted. SFR has found Pioneer had very little chance of ever gaining investors or succeeding as a business. It turns out the company lied about its work history in its proposal to the federal government, hiding a record of failure and bankruptcy.

The Forest Service failed to catch this, along with other glaring problems, or perform basic due diligence when reviewing Pioneer’s proposal.

It also appears the Forest Service failed to properly consider the proposal of Pioneer’s most serious competitor—a legitimate company with a widely vetted business plan, broad community support and solid financial backing.

Making matters worse, the Forest Service has known about these problems for nearly a year, but seems to have done nothing about them.

And as the ambitious 4FRI plan falters, forests around the country are left to burn….

That’s why Pioneer’s selection came as such a surprise: Collaboration members knew so little about the company. To date, Pioneer has failed to discuss the details of its business plan, and the Forest Service has refused to release it, citing “trade secrets.”

Before winning the bid, Pioneer’s president, 84-year-old Herman Hauck, spent years trying unsuccessfully to secure a Forest Service contract in New Mexico.

Pioneer’s Four Forest proposal says the company will build a $200 million plant in Winslow, Ariz., and claims Hauck started a similar business in North Dakota. Hauck sold that business—known as TMI Systems—but, the 4FRI proposal reads, “his skill in designing and managing a start-up wood processing business is shown by the fact that it is still successfully operating more than 30 years later.”

The Forest Service has repeatedly touted this “long, successful history in the wood industry” as one of the main reasons Pioneer got the contract.

TMI is indeed a successful business. Its president, Dennis Johnson, however, was surprised to learn Hauck was trying to take credit for it.

“We bought his assets in bankruptcy proceedings,” Johnson says, adding that Hauck could take “very little credit” for the company’s success.

According to documents from the National Archives and Records Administration in Denver, Hauck’s business, then called Hauck Mill Work Co., actually filed for bankruptcy in 1969. By Hauck’s own admission, that was the last wood business he ever ran, and he later went into real estate.

In a telephone interview, Hauck initially denied the bankruptcy. When confronted with the legal documents in a follow-up call, he said it “didn’t matter.”

Coincidentally, the man who is supposed to run Pioneer’s Winslow plant, Mike Cooley, also ran his last wood business into bankruptcy. Cooley Industries, Inc. filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy on Dec. 27, 2012, after racking up over $9 million in debt, according to the US bankruptcy court documents in Phoenix. The bankruptcy occurred six months after Pioneer won the contract, but interviews with loggers last summer reveal that Cooley has a long history of unpaid debts.

During an interview with SFR last August, Corbin Newman, who headed the Forest Service’s regional office in Albuquerque until January, said he hadn’t known about Hauck’s bankruptcy, and said that agency would investigate.

“I don’t know that he asserted anything wrong or fraudulent in his proposal,” Newman said. “That’s what we’ll have to take a look at.”

It is illegal to lie in a proposal to the federal government, but in a written follow-up, Newman said Hauck’s bankruptcy “over 30 years ago” was irrelevant, and that the contract would remain with Pioneer.

Last June, the Forest Service released a brief technical analysis of Pioneer’s plan, meant to answer detractors’ questions about what the company intends to do. But a close inspection of the plan reveals a series of improbable or false claims.

It states Pioneer will produce biodiesel out of tree branches to fuel its trucks and sell at a gas station on I-40. That’s a risky proposition in itself, given the fuel has never been produced commercially. The largest attempt, by Range Fuels in Soperton, Ga., went bankrupt in 2011 after getting more than $150 million in government subsidies.

And Concord Blue, the German company Pioneer claims will make its biodiesel, has never even tried to produce the stuff. Thomas Sonntag-Roesing, the former engineer for Concord Blue’s test plant in Herten, Germany, said the plant tried to turn biomass like wood into energy, not fuel. He left after the company stopped paying him in 2005, and the plant closed soon after. It’s remained shuttered ever since.

Today, Concord Blue barely exists beyond its glossy website. The site gives no email address, and no one answers at its German or Los Angeles offices. Repeated voicemail messages requesting an interview were never returned.

“The company is a fake,” Sonntag-Roesing says. “It’s like a frame, but there’s nothing behind it.” He says he was surprised to the learn the US government had given a large contract to a company claiming it was going to use Concord Blue technologies.

“With every new project, we have to prove that we can do it by providing references,” says Sonntag-Roesing, who now manages billion-dollar projects for the international energy firm Hitachi Ltd. “I cannot really understand why the US government or any other government in the world would give a contract to a company without any references.”

Pioneer’s technical proposal has left many industry experts scratching their heads.

When David Jones, a wood science and products professor at Mississippi State University, first saw the Forest Service’s technical analysis of Pioneer, he printed it out.

“I took it down the hallway to my colleagues and we all had a good laugh over it,” he says. “Either they don’t understand what they are doing, or they’ve just worded it badly.”

Jones says much of Pioneer’s proposal doesn’t make scientific sense. In one section, the company says it’s going to “densify” pine and turn it into high-priced hard woods, like walnut and mahogany.

“There’s fallacy in that statement,” Jones said. “You can’t take a pine, which is a soft wood, and turn it into a hard wood. That’s not possible.”

In another section, Pioneer says it plans to produce wood panels “35 to 40 percent lighter than competitors’ panels” that will “substantially reduce shipping expenses.”

“In talking with other people in wood science,” Jones says, “we don’t know of any technology that would lighten the wood.”

Jones questioned whether a wood scientist at the Forest Service had even reviewed the proposal.

“If they did,” he asked, “why didn’t anybody raise any questions about this?”

It turns out, Jones was right. The Forest Service regional office in Albuquerque made the decision without consulting a wood scientist. Once Newman’s office selected Pioneer, the former head sent the proposal to Washington, DC, for review.

“I knew that we probably didn’t have all the technical expertise to assess the proposals,” Newman says. “That’s why I asked for a secondary review at the national level to say, ‘Let’s get technical experts to look at this to make sure these things are feasible.’”

At the time, he admitted he wasn’t sure if that had taken place. In a written follow-up, he said that two technical experts reviewed the proposal at the national level. In response to a written request to speak to them, or anyone else from the government that could defend Pioneer’s technical proposal, Newman wrote:

“Federal law and regulations prohibit us from disclosing the identity of the evaluators and subject matter experts…That information does not contribute significantly to the public understanding of the operations or activities of the government.” Further, he wrote that releasing information about the evaluators would be “an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”

Hauck, Pioneer’s president, also said he couldn’t speak about his technology.

“That is not open for discussion,” he said. “It is my own program that I have learned from foreign countries, and I cannot divulge that information.”

Late last June, more than a month after receiving the contract, Hauck publicly admitted for the first time that his company had no investors, and no money to begin the project. The announcement sent jitters among many of those watching 4FRI.

It wasn’t normal, “and it was concerning,” says Rich Bowen, the president and CEO of the Economic Collaborative of Northern Arizona. By then, Pioneer’s financing should have been much further along, he says. Bowen began to worry the company might not succeed, so he asked the Forest Service to investigate its ability to complete the project.

Instead, in December 2012—around the time Pioneer was supposed to have begun thinning trees—the Forest Service extended Pioneer’s deadline to raise the money. They extended it again last month, and dramatically reduced Pioneer’s expected work schedule from 15,000 acres in 2013 to 1,000 acres over the next 18 months.

Urs Buehlmann, a wood scientist and products expert from Virginia Tech University, says he wasn’t surprised to learn Pioneer doesn’t have investors. He read the company’s technical proposal, and echoes many of Jones’ concerns.

“It’s all so vague,” Buehlmann says. “I wouldn’t invest 1,000 bucks in that. Because, hey guys, tell me why this should work?”

For some critics, the most galling aspect of the Forest Service’s decision to give Pioneer the contract was that another, more qualified company was waiting in the wings.

At first glance, Pascal Berlioux’s pink Polo shirts, leather loafers and thick French accent seem oddly out of place amidst the ponderosa pines of northern Arizona. But Berlioux has spent nearly a decade—and emptied his sizable personal bank account—analyzing these woods and how to save them.

“What we’re looking at here is a typical thicket,” Berlioux says, snapping off a branch to get through a remote stand of spindly, densely packed ponderosas just outside Flagstaff. “This is not a healthy ecosystem, and obviously, it is a firebomb,” he says, pointing to a crinkly blanket of dried pine needles underfoot.

Back in his native France, Berlioux ran Europe’s first Oriented Strand Board, or OSB, factory. OSB is like plywood made out of wood chips, and it’s a huge, $2 billion-a-year industry. After founding and selling a successful optoelectronics firm in the US, Berlioux moved his family to Flagstaff. It was just as the devastating 2002 Rodeo-Chediski Fire broke out. The fire burned 480,000 acres and more than 400 homes, and it got him thinking: Could an OSB plant help the forests that lured him here?

In 2005, he began working on a plan to restore northern Arizona’s forest—and get business to pay for it. Together with a partner, Berlioux formed a company called Arizona Forest Restoration Products, or AZFRP. Their plan was to turn the crowded, small trees in Arizona’s forests into OSB, and let the large trees grow. OSB has largely replaced plywood in construction, but the closest plants are more than 1,200 miles away, in Canada or the Southeast. Transporting that wood to Arizona is expensive.

“When all is said and done, that will account for 20 to 30 percent of what you pay when you get a sheet of OSB at Home Depot,” Berlioux says. “So, one of the critical economic advantages of an OSB plant in the Southwest is you don’t have to pay the shipping costs.”

Berlioux was an outsider, but he knew the region’s contentious history. Plan in hand, he went about building a broad base of community support, from conservative county supervisors to the region’s most litigious environmental group.

“We viewed Pascal as an opponent,” says Todd Schulke, cofounder of the Center for Biological Diversity, which had also been looking for a way to restore the forest. “The Oriented Strand Board market is tied to housing, and it has a history of boom and bust. So we were very concerned about that.”

But Berlioux gained the center’s trust, says Schulke, who’s based out of Silver City, NM. This was no small feat: In 1996, the center famously stopped all logging on federal land in Arizona and New Mexico over lawsuits to protect the Mexican spotted owl, and it still wields considerable clout when it comes to the Southwest’s forests.

Berlioux convinced them his idea was viable, even in the lowest housing and construction market, by sharing the details of his business plan and market analysis. And he fine-tuned his plan to incorporate their concerns. Berlioux did this dozens, if not hundreds, of times with environmentalists, local governments, community groups and investors.

“I thoroughly analyzed their business model,” says Jim Miller, real estate director for John F Long Properties LLLP, one of Arizona’s oldest and largest development companies. “Even if you diluted some of their assumptions 50 percent, it was still a profitable operation.”

Miller and John F Long Properties’ president together committed $30 million to Berlioux’s company if it got the 4FRI contract. In all, Berlioux had pledges of up $400 million dollars when he submitted his proposal.

But the contract went to Pioneer instead, and AZFRP disbanded.

After announcing its decision, the Forest Service gave Berlioux an analysis of his losing bid. But the analysis gets several things wrong.

For example, it says no one at the company has experience managing a project of this type and scale. That’s hard to square with AZFRP’s management team, which includes—among others—Berlioux, Miller and Don MacInnes, a Canadian who’s built seven OSB plants in North America and retrofitted another 10 plants.

“Did they not read what we sent them?” Berlioux asks. “Did they ignore what we sent them?”

Even Newman had a hard time explaining what his review committee was thinking.

“I have no idea why they drew that conclusion. None,” he said during an interview last summer. “You would think that with that kind of bio, someone would clearly have shown that they’ve got experience doing it.”

In a written follow-up, he said the agency only considered forest restoration experience, and didn’t look at the manufacturing experience.

The analysis also suggested there wasn’t a strong enough market for OSB. For Miller, that meant the Forest Service hadn’t actually analyzed the company’s business plan.

“Obviously, they didn’t go into as much as they should have, as an investor would have, as I did,” Miller said. “I’m very disappointed in that.”

….Marlin Johnson, a former Forest Service supervisor who now heads Pioneer’s logging and restoration program.

“While he was at the Forest Service, he was the liaison for Pioneer,” notes Taylor McKinnon, an environmentalist who worked on 4FRI with the Center for Biological Diversity until earlier this year. “Within months of his retirement, he was representing Pioneer to the Forest Service. That is, he switched sides. It’s the perfect example of the revolving door.”

Critics say Johnson’s former position gave Pioneer an unfair advantage in gaining the 4FRI contract.

In his last years at the Forest Service, Johnson was involved in 4FRI’s precursor, a study to determine whether there were enough small-diameter trees available to support a large business. During that time, he worked with both Pioneer and AZFRP. Email records show he had access to Berlioux’s confidential, detailed business plan as far back as 2007.

Many credit Berlioux’s plan as the blueprint for 4FRI, which didn’t officially form until 2009.

Once Johnson joined Pioneer, the company’s focus changed to more closely mirror Berlioux’s, including using wood from northern Arizona, not New Mexico, and building a large processing plant in Winslow.  Raising more questions, Johnson’s former co-workers, including one of his former employees, sat on the selection committee that chose Pioneer.

Johnson says it was his qualifications—including 40 years at the Forest Service—that helped Pioneer get the contract, not his political connections. And he dismisses concerns about access to a competitor’s business plan dating back to 2007.

“I would assume they would have changed since then,” he says. “I don’t remember any details from a long business plan.”

Newman knew people might have concerns about a former Forest Service employee receiving the 4FRI contract, so once his office chose Pioneer, he says he sent its proposal to Washington, DC, for a national review.

“We asked folks at the ethics group to take a look and see it’s appropriate if a past employee would be associated with this company,” Newman says, “and we got an assurance that it was.”

4FRI’s most prominent ecologist, Wally Covington, who heads the influential Ecological Restoration Institute at Northern Arizona University, also backs Pioneer, and Johnson.

“I have known Marlin for years,” says Covington, whose fire and restoration research shaped the science behind 4FRI. “He’s a strong and ethical person, in my view, and I have no doubt that he intends to operate at the highest ethical standards.”

Pioneer’s selection has been the most dramatic rift within the 4FRI collaboration, but it isn’t the only one. After years of detailed discussions, environmentalists say the Forest Service is reneging on key agreements meant to protect the environment.

They center around preserving large trees, protecting the endangered Mexican spotted owl and northern goshawk, and building 500 additional miles of roads at great risk to the watershed. Any one of these issues could provoke environmentalists to take legal action—potentially derailing the project—and the Forest Service knows this, Schulke says.

“It’s almost as if they’re baiting us,” he says.

Similar problems are cropping up in New Mexico’s Southwest Jemez Mountain project, which worries WildEarth Guardians’ Bird.

“There’s a very good chance that the same train wreck could play out right here in our local mountains and forests,” he says.

The problems have led many to question whether the Forest Service’s regional office in Albuquerque is impeding projects in order to retain control. Collaboration represents a dramatic shift from the days when the Forest Service called the shots.

But something needs to change, and fast, says Tommie Martin. The Forest Service must be held accountable for 4FRI’s missteps, and needs to turn the project around. There’s a growing consensus that Pioneer will inevitably fail, and with it, the collaboration. She worries Arizona will have lost the last best chance to save its forests.

Dartmouth Study “Soils” CW on Biofuels

by

Dartmouth College
Public release date: 11-Jun-2013

Contact: John Cramer
[email protected]
603-646-9130

Wood not so green a biofuel: New Dartmouth-led study finds logging may have greater impact on carbon emissions than previously thought

Using wood for energy is considered cleaner than fossil fuels, but a Dartmouth College-led study  finds that logging may release large amounts of carbon stored in deep forest soils. The results appear in the journal Global Change Biology-Bioenergy.

Global atmospheric studies often don’t consider carbon in deep (or mineral) soil because it is  thought to be stable and unaffected by timber harvesting. But the Dartmouth findings show deep soil can play an important role in carbon emissions in clear-cutting and other intensive forest management practices. The findings suggest that calls for an increased reliance on forest biomass be re-evaluated and that forest carbon analyses are incomplete unless they include deep soil, which stores more than 50 percent of the  carbon in forest soils.

“Our paper suggests the carbon in the mineral soil may change more rapidly, and result in increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide, as a result of disturbances such as logging,” said Dartmouth Professor Andrew Friedland, a co-author. “Our paper suggests that increased reliance on wood may have the unintended effect of increasing the transfer of carbon from the mineral soil to the atmosphere. So the intended goal of reducing carbon in the atmosphere may not be met.”

The federal government is looking to wood, wind, solar, hydropower and other renewable energy sources to address concerns about climate change and energy security. Woody biomass, which includes trees grown on plantations, managed natural forests and logging waste, makes up about 75 percent of global biofuel production. Mineral soil carbon responses can vary highly depending on harvesting intensity, surface disturbance and soil type.

“Analysis of forest carbon cycles is central to understanding and mitigating climate change, and understanding forest carbon cycles requires an in-depth analysis of the storage in and fluxes among different forest carbon pools, which include aboveground live and dead biomass, as well as the belowground organic soil horizon, mineral soil horizon and roots,” Friedland said.

Co-authors included Dartmouth’s Thomas Buchholz, a former post-doctoral student, and Claire Hornig, a recent undergraduate student, and researchers from the University of Vermont, Lund University in Sweden and the Vermont Department of Forest, Parks and Recreation. The research was supported by awards to Friedland from the Northeastern States Research Cooperative and the Porter Fund.

Friedland’s research focuses on understanding the effects of atmospheric deposition of pollutants and biomass harvesting on elemental cycling processes in high-elevation forests in the Northeastern United States. He considers many elements including carbon, trace elements such as lead and major elements such as nitrogen and calcium. He also is examining issues related to personal choices, energy use and environmental impact.

###

Watch Clearcuts and Habitat Fragmentation Grow Before Your Eyes!

by

I just ran across an interesting new Google tool called Earth Engine, that allows you to view a timelapse of annual Landsat imagines from 1984 to 2012.   I’ve only used the tool to poke around the northern Rockies region, but it’s especially interesting to look at the timelapse images from places like the Bitterroot National Forest, the Lolo and Flathead National Forest in the Seeley-Swan Valley and the Clearwater and Nez Perce National Forest along U.S. Highway 12, just over Lolo Pass.  Of course, the most dramatic timelapse images from Montana might be of the clearcuts and habitat fragmentation that took place on the Kootenai National Forest in northwest Montana.  Sadly, I have a feeling that some parts of the national forests in Washington and Oregon will show the growth of clearcuts and habitat fragmentation even better than Montana examples. Check it out for yourself.