The following piece was written by Dr. Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist at Wild-Heritage, a project of the Earth Island Institute, and award-winning author of over 200 peer reviewed studies and books. It was published yesterday in the Medford Mail Tribune. To view more photos from the Almeda fire in the Talent and Phoenix, Oregon area taken by the Mail Tribune’s Jamie Lusch, click here. – mk

As I write this, my hometown of Talent is a disaster area, and I am in tears over the destruction of my neighborhood. Lives have been forever changed by this tragedy that could have been avoided with better planning.

Our elected officials have neglected to take action on community safety, focusing mostly on backcountry logging projects, and this destruction took place on their watch.

We simply were not prepared.

Consider, it took hours to reach safety in miles-long traffic jams. Ashland has a single lane leaving town heading north to Interstate 5, jammed with escaping traffic. As grateful as I am for our brave emergency responders, they were understandably overwhelmed and grossly underfunded.

We have been falsely promised that if only forest managers can thin, smoke levels would drop and wildfires would be less intense.

The Almeda fire had nothing to do with forests. Hundreds of urban structures burned in a domino effect ignited by embers cast for miles ahead of flames by unusually strong winds, extreme temperatures and excessive drought as homes became fuels.

Wildfire activity follows drought cycles and global-regional temperature spikes that dictate local fire weather. The Pacific Coast has been in excessive drought since March, aided by unprecedented summer temperatures, historically low humidity levels, and strong winds that scientists have been warning us about at least since the tragic Paradise-Camp fire disaster.

Consider that in 2017, 1,300 wildfires in the interior of British Columbia spread rapidly during extreme summer heat. Aided by strong winds, smoke billowed into the southeasterly flow of the jet stream, eventually settling in the valley. This year, fires from as far away as treeless Siberia again poured smoke into our region as, for the first time in recorded history, Siberia experienced triple-digit temperatures. Wildfires in California recently broke out during an unprecedented heat wave with temperatures soaring past 120 degrees, spinning off rare pyro-tornadoes and sending smoke into nearby states. Escaped campfires, accidental sparks and “gender-reveal” parties contributed.

Meanwhile, the climate of Oregon becomes increasingly like that of Redding, greatly upping the ante that such extreme conditions will become the new “abnormal,” as is the case for much of the dry West.

Instead of prayers and thoughts from elected officials, we need real action that rebuilds communities with safety first and foremost. We desperately need an infusion of disaster aid, relocation assistance, and proper planning to make sure this never happens again. This means planning for home hardening and defensible space along with sufficient shelters for every single community. Local planners need to have escape routes ready to go on a moment’s notice with a central warning system accessible to all residents in real time.

Retraining timber managers in law enforcement to monitor recreation use in extreme fire weather would prevent future unwanted fire ignitions. Nationwide, some 80% of all fires are human-caused, about half of them in our region by people. Road and campground closures are a must in red-flag warnings, no matter how unpopular.

Logging will do nothing to help us out of this mess. Based on the most comprehensive study ever conducted of 1,500 forest fires across the West, forests with the most logging burned in the severest fires [PDF links here and here]. This was also shown for a large fire near Roseburg in 2013 that raced through densely packed tree plantations under extreme fire weather (high temperatures and wind gusts). So, instead of logging forests, they should be managed to contribute to climate safety.

Climate-safe forest management means protecting older forests on public lands from logging to absorb and store atmospheric carbon while allowing logged-over areas decades to recover. For instance, the landmark Northwest Forest Plan reversed the dangerous trend of global warming pollution from excessive logging in the 1980s to public forests now acting as vast repositories of carbon. Logging, mostly on private lands, emits up to 10 times more carbon than even the largest wildfires.

By most accounts, scientists give us but a decade to greatly cut global warming pollution before all hell breaks loose. The way we manage forests and urban areas right now will affect generations to come as carbon has a long hang-time in the atmosphere — decades to a century.

As an evacuee, it’s only natural for me to feel angry about the abject neglect for public safety that could have been avoided with proper planning by elected officials in a region that is feeling unprecedented pain. It is irresponsible for our state and local elected officials to continue ignoring the obvious connection to climate chaos going forward.

Dominick A. DellaSala, Ph.D., is now chief scientist at Wild-Heritage, a project of the Earth Island Institute, and award-winning author of over 200 peer reviewed studies and books.

The following comment was posted by Jim Furnish, former Deputy Chief of the U.S. Forest Service on this blog over here. I believe Jim’s “2 cents worth” deserves to have its own post for discussion.

According to Jim’s bio at the Oregon State University Press: “Jim Furnish is a consulting forester in the Washington D.C. area following a 34-year career with the USDA Forest Service. He served as the agency’s Deputy Chief and Siuslaw National Forest Supervisor in Corvallis, Oregon. Furnish was a principle Forest Service leader in creating the Roadless Area Conservation Rule (2001), as well as in reforming management of the Siuslaw National Forest from timber production to restoration principles. He has served on the board of directors of several environmental and faith-based non-profit organizations.” More details on Jim’s book, “Toward A Natural Forest: The Forest Service in Transition (A Memoir)” can be found here.

My 2c worth, after almost 40 years with USFS 1965-2002, and a couple more decades observing since… As any on-the-ground firefighter or fire boss will tell you, when a fire gets ripping with high wind, heat, and low humidity and reaches project size, suppression efforts are band aids, at best. And we are seeing it RIGHT NOW. Control will come with – and ONLY with – a change in the weather. It’s an ugly scene and an ugly truth. But the “wet West” of 1945-1980, coinciding with a huge uptick in logging, population, and residential development, kind of lulled us into a false mindset (of which I was also guilty). Now that drier conditions have become entrenched, exacerbated by climate change, we reap the whirlwind. I approve of veg mgmt to try to reduce fire risk and severity, but have seen my share of fires burn right through treated areas. I strongly endorse focusing on WUI first and investing in fire-wise treatments of forest homes and lots. But when too-close homes start to burn and the domino effect kicks in, best to stand back and take your medicine. Sorry to be such a downer, but all the talk of logging impacts on fire behavior (and there ARE impacts) is akin to arguing about how the clothing I wear affects my weight on the scale vs. weighing naked.

This was posted as a comment by Richard Halsey of the California Chaparral Institute in previous posts, but it deserves to be on this blog as a guest post…so here it is. -mk

As with the Creek Fire, logging, habitat clearance, and the creation of forest plantations by private corporations and the US Forest Service in the Bear Fire area (in the northern Sierra Nevada) are making the fire worse and threatening lives as a result.

The Bear Fire area has been heavily logged over the past couple of decades – clearcuts, commercial thinning, “salvage” logging of snags, mostly on private lands but also quite a bit on National Forests too.

The consequence?

The Bear Fire dramatically expanded yesterday when it got to this massive area of heavy logging (see image below).

The Bear Fire is now over 200,000 acres (mostly from yesterday), and at least three people have been killed (see perimeter map below). This situation is very much like the Camp Fire in terms of the direct threat of recent logging to lives and homes, by contributing, along with the dominant force of extreme weather and climate change, to very rapid rate of fire spread, giving people little time to evacuate.

None of this is being seriously discussed in the leading media stories on the current fires.

The Main Take Aways

1. Logging and forest plantation forestry is a contributor to increased fire spread and fire severity (Zald and Dunn 2018, Bradley et al. 2016 – see below).
2. Weather and climate change are the dominant drivers of fire behavior.
3. Promoting logging as “fuel reduction” under the guise of fire risk reduction flies in the face of the facts.

The Facts

“Areas intensively managed burned in the highest intensities. Areas protected in national parks and wilderness areas burned in lower intensities. Plantations burn hotter in a fire than native forests do. We know this from numerous studies based on peer-reviewed science.”*– Dominick DellaSala
From: Exploring Solutions to Reduce Risks of Catastrophic Wildfire and Improve Resilience of National Forests. Congressional testimony by Dr. Dominick DellaSala, Sept. 27, 2017.

* The research cited above analyzed 1,500 fires in 11 Western states over four decades – an overwhelming convergence of evidence. Some of those studies include the following:

1. Odion et al. 2004. Fire severity patterns and forest management in the Klamath National Forest, northwest California, USA. Cons. Biol. 18:927-936.

2. Zald, H., and C. Dunn. 2018. Severe fire weather and intensive forest management increase fire severity in a multi-ownership landscape. Ecol. Applic. 4:1068-1080.

3. Bradley, C.M., et al. 2016. Does increased forest protection correspond to higher fire severity in frequent-fire forests of the western United States? Ecosphere 7:1-13.

217 scientists sign letter opposing logging as a response to wildfires (we are signatories).

Here’s a press release issued today by Western Watersheds Project. Keep in mind that much of what is taking place is happening on National Forest System lands and also within federally designated Wilderness areas. Blog readers may recall that in April we featured and discussed an oped written by Wilderness Watch titled, “Time for USFS to Curtail Idaho’s Wolf Slaughter in Wilderness Areas.” This is, unfortunately, what state management of native predators like wolves looks like in places like Idaho.

BOISE, Ida. – Newly obtained records from Idaho Department of Fish and Game (IDFG) reveal that between January and September 2020, recreational wolf hunters, the IDFG and USDA APHIS Wildlife Services killed 35 wolf pups and juveniles in Idaho, some weighing as little 16 pounds, and likely only four to six weeks old. The new records show that, in total, over 256 Idaho wolves have already been killed in Idaho in 2020—and the wolf hunting season, which runs for 11 to 12 months in much of the state, is not over yet.

Wolves in Idaho were removed from the Endangered Species list in 2011 by congressional decree, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service announced this week that the removal of wolves from Endangered Species Act protection nation-wide is “very imminent.” The recent records from Idaho show what state wolf management really looks like, and it’s ugly.

“They are killing whole litters of nursing wolf pups,” said Talasi Brooks, Staff Attorney for Western Watersheds Project. “It just puts the lie to the narrative that IDFG is ‘managing’ the species.  What they are really promoting is slaughtering native predators for no other reason than Idaho’s anti-wolf, pro-ranching agenda. Putting wolf management in the hands of the states is a recipe for disaster.”

The records reveal the brutal effects of wolf trapping. One trapped wolf had only three legs with a trap still stuck on one leg. Two wolves had cracked teeth to the bone or shattered teeth trying bite traps. One wolf trapped by Wildlife Services in July died of hyperthermia, and one wolf was found dead in a private trap. A number of wolves were gunned down by Wildlife Services in “Aerial Control Actions.”

“The slaughter of wolf pups is cruel on its face, but these records are still more disturbing because they demonstrate the agony that even so-called nonlethal traps can cause,” said Brooks. “Idaho’s 72-hour trap check time leaves wolves and other animals to languish for days, causing intense suffering and gruesome deaths, and there’s just no excuse for such cruelty.”

About 400 wolves have been killed each year in Idaho for the past several years, and 2020 seems to be on track to set records. With only about 1,000 wolves in the state, this means about 40 percent of the wolf population is removed each year. This level of population disruption leads to population-level effects among wolves, including population decline, a younger, destabilized population, and ultimately more livestock conflicts.

“This is why wolves need to be listed and protected by the Endangered Species Act,” said Brooks. “Science needs to guide decision-making, not just state-by-state hostility towards native predators.”

IDFG is accepting comment on a proposal to further expand wolf-killing in Idaho by allowing wolves to be trapped near dead animal carcasses—reviving an effort to allow wolf-baiting that previously failed following overwhelmingly negative public comments.  Comment is due by September 23.

Here’s an update in the Oregonian on a story we’ve been following here on this blog.

Reporting on timber lobbying prompts Oregon Gov. Kate Brown to call for audit of state institute

The Oregon Forest Resources Institute worked to undercut academic research and acted as a lobbying and public relations arm for the timber industry. Now, the governor has asked for an audit.

By Tony Schick (OPB) and Rob Davis (The Oregonian)

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown this week requested an audit of the Oregon Forest Resources Institute after an investigation by The Oregonian/OregonLive, OPB and ProPublica revealed that the tax-funded agency worked to discredit academic research and acted as a lobbying and public relations arm for the timber industry.

In a letter dated Aug. 31, Brown’s office asked Secretary of State Bev Clarno to conduct a thorough audit of the agency, pointing to a need for an investigation in light of “facts recently disclosed” in public records and media reports that “allege a variety of statutory and ethical concerns.”

“An audit is necessary to bring transparency to whether OFRI conducts its mission in keeping with its statutory authority, including the clear prohibition on OFRI influencing, or attempting to influence state policy,” Jason Miner, the governor’s natural resource policy director, wrote in the letter. He added that the audit should also determine “whether there is any public benefit to OFRI.”

The Oregon Forest Resources Institute, known as OFRI, was created in 1991 to educate the public about forestry and to teach landowners about logging laws and sound environmental practices. Lawmakers established a tax on logging to pay for the institute while cutting taxes paid by the timber industry that helped fund schools and local governments.

By law, OFRI is prohibited from attempting to influence policy.

Thousands of records obtained by the news organizations found the agency targeted university climate change research and spent millions of dollars on advertisements that promoted Oregon’s logging laws as strong, even as federal biologists said they did not do enough to protect coastal rivers from pollution. Its leaders also sat in on a lobbying group’s deliberations about attack ads against Brown during her 2018 bid for reelection.

“The revelations recently uncovered by OPB, the Oregonian, and ProPublica — that the Oregon Forest Resources Institute (OFRI) engaged in activities seeking to influence campaigns and legislation and interfere with university climate research –– are deeply concerning,” Charles Boyle, a spokesman for Brown, said in an email.

Boyle noted there have been only two other audit requests during the governor’s five years in office. He said the institute’s use of tax dollars merits further examination, particularly at a time when the economic impacts of the coronavirus have forced the state to weigh difficult budget decisions to preserve health care, education and senior services.

“OFRI’s work and stewardship of tax dollars have escaped public scrutiny for more than a decade,” Boyle said. “In this fiscal climate, it’s worth asking the question whether those tax dollars are needed elsewhere.”

Erin Isselmann, OFRI’s executive director, said in an email that the institute welcomes the audit from the secretary of state. She has previously said that, under her leadership, the institute has operated “under the highest ethical standards.”

“We look forward to working with the audit team and learning from their analysis and recommendations,” Isselmann said.

The institute has not been audited since 1996, according to the secretary of state’s office. The office’s Audits Division said it would begin its work soon, but it is unclear how long the probe will take.

“Our independent auditors look forward to working with the Governor’s Office, OFRI leadership, and stakeholders to review how the agency can best deliver on its mission,” Kip Memmott, the secretary of state’s audits director, said in a statement.

Brown’s request comes as several Democrats in the Oregon Legislature, including the chairman of the Senate Environment and Natural Resources Committee and a high-ranking House member, said there would be legislation in the upcoming session in response to the yearlong investigation by the three news organizations.

A citizens group of 70 teachers, nurses, water managers, foresters and others last week also announced plans to introduce a ballot initiative, citing the investigation’s findings. In its current form, the initiative, which would need to gather more than 100,000 valid signatures before qualifying for the ballot, would redirect OFRI’s budget to support outdoor education programs and rural job training. It also would reinstate timber severance taxes, which are based on the value of the trees that are logged.

In a story published in June, the three news organizations found that the state’s largest timber companies received billions of dollars in tax cuts since the 1990s. The investigation, which analyzed data from the state Department of Forestry and Department of Revenue, found that without the tax cuts cities and counties would have collected about $3 billion in severance taxes from the timber industry during the past three decades. Instead, they got about $871 million.

State Sen. Jeff Golden, D-Ashland, who leads the Senate environment committee, said lawmakers would take a hard look at the institute when the Legislature convenes in February. He said details on how lawmakers will address concerns related to the institute, including plans to redirect its budget, would emerge during committee hearings in December.

Golden also expects lawmakers will more seriously debate reintroducing the state’s severance tax for timber companies. He said the investigation generated significant interest among lawmakers and constituents.

“I can’t tell you how many people wrote me after those, sent me the links and said, ‘Did you know about this stuff?’” Golden said. “It really brought things that have been on the back burner to the front burner.”

Among the measures already being drafted, state Rep. Marty Wilde, D-Eugene, said he is crafting legislation that would increase property taxes for industrial timberlands and give forest owners incentives to allow trees to grow older before cutting them down. State Rep. Andrea Salinas, D-Lake Oswego, said she would file a bill to restore severance taxes. The measure would offer tax breaks for ecological forestry that would promote selective tree logging instead of clearing large swaths of forest at once.

Democrats have a supermajority in both chambers of the Legislature, allowing them to pass laws without Republican support, but efforts to reform forest policies have stalled in recent years.

State Rep. Paul Holvey, D-Eugene, has been pushing legislation unsuccessfully to revisit timber taxes since 2014. Holvey said legislative action feels closer to reality than in previous years.

In 2018, Holvey tried to shrink OFRI’s budget by 60% and use the savings to help combat wildfires. His bill died after the timber industry opposed defunding the institute. Holvey also previously attempted to introduce a new severance tax that would fund the state’s wildfire response.

“I think people are much more concerned about it now, which has kind of elevated the conversation. And I think the industry has come to the realization that the conversation is going to happen so they need to be in it,” Holvey said. “But at the end of the day, I’m not seeing everything through rose-colored glasses, because the political power of that industry inside the state of Oregon is very strong.”

In case you were wondering, this is entirely by design and intentional malfeasance.

“The Bureau of Land Management’s move West has resulted in changes to the bureau’s organization that, in some instances, reduced staff in divisions overseeing planning and compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act.

Documents obtained by E&E News reveal new details of how BLM’s move to the West has changed and rearranged staffing, while the bureau continues to obfuscate the results of its overhaul of the bureau.”

Read the full article from E&E News here.

As you all may recall, according to this September 2019 article in the Washington Post:

“The Bureau of Land Management has selected a site for its new headquarters in Grand Junction, Colo. — and it’s in a building that also serves as the home to a Chevron corporate office, a state oil and gas association and an independent natural gas exploration company….

The following article, written by Jordan Rane, ran in Columbia Insight on August 20, 2020. It was shared by Rob Klavins of Oregon Wild.

Forest Service wants to eliminate protections on large trees

The U.S. Forest Service is a business. That fact was driven home in an August 10 bottom line memo U.S. Department of Agriculture (which oversees the Forest Service) Secretary Sonny Perdue sent to regional foresters around the country pressuring them to increase efforts to meet annual timber harvest goals.

The agency is behind on its yearly timber sales projections. Perdue is clearly anxious to get chain saws roaring. Perhaps to drive the point home the USFS recently posted job openings for all nine regional forester jobs (which pay between $175,500 and $186,500 a year) on USAJobs.gov.

But the USFS is also a government agency responsible for implementing good management policy that protects 154 national forests.

The tension between those two goals is already dominating reaction to one of the most consequential forest management decisions to hit the Columbia River Basin since President Donald Trump took office.

Last week, the U.S. Forest Service announced its intention to do away with a 25-year-old standard preventing logging companies from cutting down the largest trees in eastern Oregon. This potentially means logging old-growth trees.

Since 1995, a USFS public land management regulation known as the Eastside Screens has prohibited cutting down any live tree with a trunk exceeding a 21-inch diameter at breast height (DBH), which means about four and a half feet off the ground. The regulation affects public forests in Oregon east of the Cascade Range.

The “21-inch rule”—the most salient piece of the Eastside Screens, i.e. “screening questions” land managers must comply with before timber harvesting—was designed to protect wildlife habitat and water supplies, and maintain a healthy mix of young and old trees.

On August 11, the Forest Service announced a rollback of the rule that will affect more than 9 million acres in six national forests across eastern Oregon—the Deschutes, Fremont-Winema, Malheur, Ochoco, Umatilla and Wallowa-Whitman National Forests. A portion of the Umatilla National Forest in Washington might also be affected.

“The harvest limitation under the wildlife standard is being reassessed in light of current forest conditions and the latest scientific understanding of forest management in areas that have frequent disturbances, like wildfires,” stated the USFS last week in explaining its decision to retire the 21-inch rule.

The Forest Service’s draft environmental assessment was published in the Federal Register on August 11, beginning a 30-day public comment period that will close on September 10 at 11:59 p.m. PDT. To submit a comment go to the Forest Service’s Eastside Screens Plan Amendment and click on the “Submit a comment” link.

Opposition questions timing

If a once-protected tree is felled in eastern Oregon during a pandemic in a highly polarized country on the eve of a colossal presidential election, will it even make a sound?

Yes.

At least according to a raft of angry regional and national environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council and Earthjustice. A growing coalition is voicing opposition to the Eastside Screens amendment—a move being branded as a thinly disguised, eleventh-hour USFS giveaway to Trump pals in the timber industry.

“If the agency starts cutting down old-growth forest, it’s not going to end well,” says Andy Kerr, veteran conservationist and founder of Ashland, Oregon-based, environmental consulting firm The Larch Company. “Right now the Forest Service is under a mandate to not log big, old trees. … If the agency is on a mission to lift limits in a manner that is not in the public interest, it’s going to activate people even more and will likely lead to litigation.”

Among a litany of issues, one of Kerr’s main contentions has to do with a USFS policy transition from enforceable standards to voluntary discretion when it comes to cutting old-growth trees or younger big ones.

“New science presented in the Forest Service’s latest study suggests that the 21-inch rule, which is an enforceable standard, is not perfect. But the question is what do you replace it with?” asks Kerr. “What they’re replacing it with is not a better enforceable standard but a voluntary guideline—essentially a recommendation. That’s like taking the speed limit off of highways and saying please drive sensibly. We hope everyone does the right thing. But they won’t.

“And this is in the context of the Trump administration, which has issued an executive order to increase the cut. So if you’re saying this is really about improving nature, let’s take a close, hard look at the specific timing of all this and not kid ourselves.”

New thinking on forest management

The Trump administration’s eagerness to expand logging on public lands has been clear from early in his administration.

“The administration’s ‘vision’ includes increased forest thinning, more timber production, more grazing of livestock and shorter environmental reviews on land the Forest Service oversees,” according to E&E News, a respected journal for energy and environment professionals.

Coming as it does with the presidential election approaching, conservationists like Kerr have questioned the timing of this latest decision.

The Forest Service views the amendment differently.

Invoking a quarter century of evolving ecological science since the Eastside Screen policies were passed during the Clinton administration, the agency’s latest studies recommend what it calls an “adaptive management” style in the discretionary monitoring of old trees and larger young ones.

“Old trees in eastern Oregon currently have a relatively high mortality rate,” Forest Service Pacific Northwest Region project coordinator Emily Platt told Columbia Insight. “Changing the 21-inch-rule standard to a guideline would allow managers to more effectively cultivate those old trees across the landscape.

“It would also allow managers to remove some young but large—over 21-inch—trees that now compete for resources like water with old trees and create ladder fuels that allow fires to more easily spread into the canopy of forests.”

In other words, while big trees may provide an emotional rallying point for conservationists, the USFS now says that over the years the 21-inch rule has actually been disadvantageous to some of those older trees the rule was meant to protect.

“Although the current 21-inch standard protects large trees from logging, it does not protect large trees from mortality from fire, insects and drought,” said Platt.

It may sound counterintuitive, the agency is saying, but to save large trees you have to cut down large trees.

It’s not an easy message to get across.

Eastern Oregon goes national

The Forest Service says that when they were introduced 25 years ago, the Eastside Screens were intended only as an interim measure. They were never meant to stand as a permanent policy.

This, too, is a point conservationists are calling foul on.

“The whole ‘interim’ or ‘temporary’ argument by the Forest Service is as misleading and disingenuous as those assurances of sound logging discretion when it comes to big trees,” says Rob Klavins, Northeast Oregon field coordinator for Oregon Wild. “Those rules were meant to be a placeholder until the agency put together more comprehensive environmental protections to address things like grazing, riparian logging, road building—not just old-growth and big tree protection.

“They skip the second part, which is that it was interim until the Forest Service provided a more comprehensive set of protections for landscapes and forests for eastern Oregon. The Forest Service never did that, and a lot of people can reasonably argue that this is essentially a broken promise.”

Klavins believes discarding the 21-inch rule will “undo decades of good work” in the fight to protect old-growth trees and extend conservation values.

Last month, he was busily getting the word out on the Eastside Screens amendment, calling it “the most significant environmental story in the state that no one was talking about.”

“Thankfully that’s very quickly changed,” he says now. “It’s not surprising that conservation groups are going to dust up with the Trump administration over all of these environmental protections being undermined across the board—wetlands in the Southeast, mining in the Upper Midwest and so on.

“But it’s not every day that you get some of the nation’s biggest environmental organizations weighing in on an issue that just affects eastern Oregon. Suddenly there’s broad nationwide consensus that this is extremely significant and consequential.”

Is the timing of these policy changes pertinent from a Forest Service perspective?

“We think this is the right decision to make,” said Platt. “Regardless of how it relates to political calendars.”

Jordan Rane is an award-winning travel writer whose work has appeared in CNN.com, Outside, Men’s Journal and the Los Angeles Times.

Oh boy, the Trump administration apologists and U.S. Forest Service fans are going to have a tough time spinning this one, I think. If you are one of the seven current Forest Service Regional Foresters who sees your current position advertised as vacant on USAJobs.gov how would that make you feel?  Why some people think we should continue to ignore everything the Trump administration is doing to dismantle and undermine key public institutions like the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service and U.S. Postal Service is a real mystery to me.

Perdue pressures forest managers on Trump agenda
Marc Heller and Scott Streater, E&E News reportersPublished: Thursday, August 13, 2020

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue has asked regional foresters to step up efforts to implement his “vision” for forestland management at the same time the Forest Service is posting a call for applications for their jobs.

Two regional forester positions — in the Intermountain region and the Southwest — are actually vacant due to retirements, the Forest Service told E&E News. But all nine are currently advertised as vacant on USAJobs.gov.

The other seven are being advertised through Aug. 27 in an effort to “be prepared with a pool of candidates for consideration if other critical leadership positions become vacant in the near future,” the service said. The posting on USAJobs.gov — posted a week ago today — remains open to applicants for up to a year, following Office of Personnel Management guidelines, the Forest Service said.

Officials advertised the vacancies four days before Perdue sent each of the nine regional foresters a memorandum prodding them to do more to pursue the administration’s “vision,” which includes increased forest thinning, more timber production, more grazing of livestock and shorter environmental reviews on land the Forest Service oversees.

An agency spokesperson said the memo and the job postings aren’t related, but it prompted some worries in the ranks that the secretary was getting ready to clean house.

Perdue’s memo also comes as the Forest Service falls short of timber harvesting goals, despite directives from the Trump administration and some members of Congress to increase sales from national forests.

In the memo, Perdue reminded the foresters of his June directive in which the secretary outlined those goals (E&E News PM, June 12).

Perdue — bypassing Forest Service Chief Vicki Christiansen — asked the regional foresters to answer a series of questions about how they intend to meet the goals and added, “I want to hear from you directly on how you are progressing in implementing the vision.”

The regional foresters have until Aug. 31 to reply.

“The advertisement is in anticipation of normal agency attrition and has no connection to the Secretary’s memo,” the Forest Service told E&E News.

But current and former Forest Service officials said the concurrent timing led to speculation that jobs might be on the line and that a pool of potential candidates would be in place if regional foresters’ answers don’t satisfy the secretary.

One senior Forest Service official who spoke to E&E News on the condition of anonymity called the memo “very brutal,” though Perdue took a congenial tone and thanked the regional managers for their efforts to date.

A letter from the secretary of Agriculture to regional forest managers is unusual, former Forest Service officials said.

But Perdue has expressed a personal interest in many of the related issues, and President Trump has taken up forest policy in speeches and in an executive order.

Among the top questions Perdue said he wants answered:

“What actions have you taken in your region” since June “to implement the direction laid out in the memo?”
“What future actions will you be taking to implement the vision and direction” outlined in the June directive? “Specifically, I want to hear your timeline and key milestones for implementation.”
“What more can be done by the Forest Service, the Department or our external partners to support implementation of the memo?”
Regional foresters are not political appointees but senior executive level employees who can be moved into new positions at the administration’s discretion. All “SES” employees sign a statement acknowledging that.

A shuffle of senior executive positions wouldn’t be unprecedented with a potential change of administration coming in January, former Forest Service employees said.

A Forest Service spokesperson said the agency has used a similar approach in the past for leadership positions such as forest supervisors, though people who work with the Forest Service said they’ve rarely seen regional forester positions posted publicly. Regional foresters are paid between $175,501 and $186,500 a year, according to the job posting.

Regional foresters are a key piece of the Department of Agriculture’s management of the national forest system’s 193 million acres of wildlands. They bring the administration’s forest policies to the field and are a point of contact for state and local officials. They also hire and fire the foresters for each national forest.

Some oversee as many as a dozen national forests at once, making decisions that affect forest ecology across vast areas — and they develop working relationships with state forestry departments.

“I’ve always considered it to be a really important position,” said Laura McCarthy, New Mexico state forester. New Mexico is in Region 3, home to one of the job vacancies.

In that region, McCarthy said, the regional forester has managed negotiations with environmentalists suing to protect the Mexican spotted owl, for instance. “We’ve been kind of a region in crisis.”

Missing the targets
The vision Perdue laid out in June has run into the realities of tough international market conditions for wood products, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic. The Forest Service is on track to miss its timber targets as a result, according to industry and agency sources.

Through the first three-quarters of fiscal 2020, the Forest Service has sold 1.194 billion board feet of timber, less than in any of the four previous years, the agency reported.

In the Pacific Northwest region, the agency has attained just 58% of its timber target with two months to go in the fiscal year, said Dan Shively, the region’s natural resources director, in an Aug. 3 memo to forest supervisors.

“It’s clear that all of you are working extra hard this year under our COVID-19 challenges delivering not only the timber program but also a broad portfolio of integrated restoration activities and other work that remains critically important to our partner agencies, NGOs, communities, and the public we serve,” Shively said. A recent upturn in market conditions could help, he said.

Perdue, who told lawmakers two years ago that he wants USDA to be “the most customer-focused department in the entire federal government,” reiterated that priority in his memo, saying the department’s “customers” want a Forest Service that’s accessible, responsive and solutions-oriented.

He inquired what each regional forester is doing “to ensure a culture of customer service extends through every level of your operation.”

He also asked them to identify “the key stakeholders in your region,” and to answer, “what are you doing to improve your staff’s, your region’s and your personal relationships with them?”

Timber companies, state forestry officials and some conservationists cheer Perdue’s emphasis on more intensive forest management, which they say could prevent catastrophic wildfires and protect watersheds, among other benefits.

Environmental groups oppose those moves.

The secretary’s memo looks like “pure intimidation,” said Randi Spivak, public lands director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “Any regional forester who doesn’t dramatically increase logging or curry favor with the livestock industry better polish up their resume.”

Like the many folks in the forest protection community have been saying for decades “we should question assumptions about wildfires.” That’s the title of a guest column by Dr. Jack Cohen and Missoula County Commissioner Dave Strohmaier in the print edition of today’s Missoulian.

The title of the on-line version is different, and pasted below “Community destruction during extreme wildfires is a home ignition problem.” Many people in the forest protection community have also been saying that for decades.

Dr. Jack Cohen is the most knowledgable on the planet when it comes to protecting homes and communities from wildfires. Dr. Cohen’s bio in the Missoulian reads: “Jack Cohen, PhD, retired from U.S. Forest Service Research after 40 years as a research physical scientist where he conducted experimental and theoretical wildland fire research. In addition, he developed operational fire models for management applications and served operationally as a fire behavior analyst.”

Meanwhile, “Dave Strohmaier is Missoula County Commissioner. He previously worked for both the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service in fire management, and has published two books (here and here) on the subject of wildfire in the West.” Strohmaier is not only one of my Missoula County Commissioners, he’s also my former Missoula City Councilperson and my former state legislator. I’ve chatted with both Dave and Jack about wildfires and home protection over the years.

Question: Where would our country, the U.S. Forest Service, and communities be in terms of being better prepared for wildfire if we would’ve listened to—and implemented—the recommendations of Dr. Cohen, Strohmaier and numerous forest protection groups over the past two decades instead of letting some politicians and some in the timber industry use the wildfires as an excuse for more logging and roadbuilding with less oversight and less public participation?

Community destruction during extreme wildfires is a home ignition problem
By Dr. Jack Cohen and Dave Strohmaier