Sharon

Is “The Forest Service” “Lost” or “Not Functional”?

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This is the second of two posts reflecting on generalized critiques of “the Forest Service.” Yes, things seem to be unusually messed up right now, but looking more broadly…

Bob said:

The Forest Service is lost and struggling. The NLT, RFs, and Rangers have developed an unhealthy contempt for the mission. I think it blossomed in the pandemic. It manifests as arrogance and a complete lack of focus on the public.

and Zeke (maybe) said:

They’ve lost their esprit de corps and sense of purpose, and their reason for being has gone away

It’s certainly true that cutting trees, in some Regions and on some Forests, led to hiring of many kinds of specialists (including me, back in the day). Funding from KV and BD led to work and experience with  burning piles and planting.  We general employees were available for wildfires, and it all worked together, as a kind of general system in some areas.  Even then, though, there were regional differences. For example, the Fremont (Region 6) had a very different approach to timber than its next-door neighbor, the Modoc, in Region 5.

On some forests, though, grazing was the big thing, and in others, recreation.  It seems to me a natural fact that what you work in seems important to you, and there’s the overall old statement “caring for the land and serving people”.   We all seemed to see it that way,  whether we worked in wildlife or reforestation or hydrology or engineering or recreation, and I assume folks still do.

Check out your neighborhood  Forest SOPA for ongoing projects to see what they are actually spending time on, along with the standard operations of recreation, road maintenance, signs, trails permits, encroachment, and so on.  Or check out the White River  SOPA or the Inyo  or the Chattahoochee-Oconee as.. there are plenty of other things going on besides vegetation management – special uses, recreation, minerals, and watershed rehab projects.  Even new (motorized!) trails as in the Lake Tahoe Basin.

Project work will include constructing three new trailheads, paved parking and restrooms at Pine Drop, Brockway Summit and Elks Point; constructing new e-bike trails, new motorcycle trails, and new non-motorized trails; designating new routes open to e-bikes and new routes open to motorcycles; upgrading road and trail crossings for aquatic organism passage; installing wayfinding and interpretive signs; developing and upgrading existing trailheads, parking areas, and access points; and updating the Motor Vehicle Use Maps.

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But behind that is both an philosophical question “what is “the Forest Service”?” as well as a social science question “what do individuals think of when you think of “the Forest Service?”.

Again, I’d like to place this discussion in context of other institutions. One that comes to mind is the Roman Catholic Church- having been an institution for 2000 years or so- through a variety of different Zeitgeists in different countries through time.   Let’s ask the same questions “What is the Catholic Church?” Is it the local parish, is it the Vatican curia, is it the people who did the Crusades, or people today or..? It’s all of those things.   If we were to ask individuals, though, it might depend on how closely they had encountered individuals.  Like, “I think the bishop is a jerk but my priest is great” or vice versa.  It’s about the people and the experiences for those closer to the action.  But there are also observations from afar.

Or try State Parks and Wildlife.  Some people look at our in Colorado as “those people – all they care about it hunting.” In my case, it’s about my local guy AB, who always answers emails and writes a column in our local paper about wildlife concerns.  I’ve had a conflicted relationship in the past with certain politicals in the organization’s previous (DOW) incarnation, but if you asked me today, my warm fuzzies about the organization are about AB and my liking of a certain wildlife area that they manage.  But I would like if State Park passes worked at wildlife areas.  So, like the Forest Service,  (and the RC church) I’ve got generic warm fuzzies but also ideas for improvement. Both things are true. It’s not a loyalty test or an us vs. them.  When people get frustrated with various aspects of the RC church, I tend to sigh and say “it’s an institution, composed of flawed people, many of whom are trying to do their best.”

We can, and should,  work on improving institutions but as long as people run them, it’s best if we don’t get too upset when they behave suboptimally.  Is the organization working? Is there a church to go to? Do I get answers to my wildlife questions? Are campgrounds and trailheads open? Does a university teach students?  It’s pretty clear where the rubber meets the road in most organizations and where the focus of energy and funding should be.

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I probably contact different Forests, Regions and the WO as much as anyone.  Shoot, Dave Mertz and I have been trying to get the info on how much funding has been obligated to the Keystone Agreements and Community Navigators.. a simple spreadsheet would do- for almost a year. FS public affairs asked me to ask the Department; the Department won’t acknowledge my requests let alone answer them.  Either to the form I submitted or directly to the person putatively in charge of the FS section.  So I too am frustrated.

But I also find forests and districts where I really couldn’t tell the difference between the old FS and the new FS in terms of responsiveness. So there’s that. And some are actually better because they have more technology to better answer questions.

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Anyway, I think broad generalizations don’t help.  I do think talking about our specific concerns, and getting them in the open would help. Like what could the Forest Service do to increase transparency and accountability, and give people better customer service experiences?  We could start by learning from units that already do those things well. Remember that old management slogan “catch people doing something right?”

Forest Service Leaders and Willowhood

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Lately on TSW there have been a great many critiques of the current Forest Service situation. We’ll go into specific critiques in another post.  But some of the critiques are fairly broad-brush, like this one Frank Carroll quoted from Zeke Lunder (I don’t have independent confirmation that Zeke said it):

“We should…not pretend … the Forest Service is a functional agency because it’s not   They can’t meet our expectations of them getting anything done because they can’t . They lost so much they’re really not a functional agency. They can’t do anything at scale, and they haven’t been able to since they stopped cutting big trees …. They were really good at cutting big trees …, but since then they no longer have a function. They’ve lost their esprit de corps and sense of purpose, and their reason for being has gone away …. So, they still have to manage the land with active management …what does that leave us? Well, using fire is active forest management. So, they’re using fire.”

Well, you see, I don’t believe that that’s true.  And I’ll talk about that in the next post.  But here I want to talk about the fact that the Forest Service as an agency is responding to the currents of the time.  And I think that this is a very important conversation to have, and hopefully we can continue sharing our stories and understanding different points of view.

 Lao Tzu: “A strong wind may topple the sturdy oak, but the willow bends and lets the wind pass through.”

Let’s talk about this point in time.  It has many folks of the Baby Boomer generation retiring, and new people being hired.  It includes post-Covid work at home (although pressure to allow that started a decade ago), so that people may not have the informal connections and training via storytelling around the field lunch of the past. ROs and SOs in some areas are (expensive) ghost towns.  In some ways, work at home broke both the traditional social organization and relationship building, and the visitor response, as in some of the examples we have seen in the comments.   My friends in other fields have observed different work ethics and cultures in some of the younger generations.  Their salaries don’t go as far as they did, especially in terms of housing.

So there are many challenges, which  the BLM has also faced (it would be interesting to do surveys and compare, social scientists out there?).  Then there was a vast infusion of funding, the likes of which had never been seen, as well as changes in the budget structure.  Many of us outsiders still don’t understand how that works, or how that change may have affected appropriate ranger district autonomy.

Then there has been a tremendous increase in employees being hired from outside the agency, including from the military, USFWS, Congressional staffs, and so on.  That idea is a very old one in management, even from my day.  The idea is that you don’t really have to understand the work or the land or the people, you are interchangeable from McDonalds to Tesla to the CIA to the Forest Service, if you are a good leader.  This used to be true of Senior Executives and political appointees, but has now reached the District Ranger level.

So… the Forest Service today confronts many challenges that are different from what we retirees remember, which have nothing at all to do with “big trees.” And I am going to ask for some grace for them, in addition to specific critiques and ideas for improvement.

I’m going to tell a story about another institution, the Yale School of Forestry (when I attended), later Forestry and Environmental Studies,  and today the Yale School of the Environment.   Two years ago, I attended an alumni gathering.  Dean Indy Burke spoke, and I happened to be sitting next to a group of what I’ll call “uppity” alums. They were mostly from New England.  They were younger than I (well, most people still out and about are, so there’s that).

It turns out that these alumni weren’t happy about the name change.  I had been on some Zooms about it, and it appeared to me that if YFES didn’t change their name, circling shark administrators from other units would see YFES as a minnow and yes, start a completely new school.  It seems to be feature of the Zeitgeist that more different administrative units are needed to coordinate the workers, in this case,  professors.

Back to the Forest Service.  I was told by a reliable source that 43% of the Forest Service works in direct provision of services on the Ranger District.  It would be interesting to know what it was in the past.  So.. there are forces in both academia and government (and probably other institutions) that have led to of more what we might call overhead.  I myself worked in overhead pretty much my whole career (various kinds of support to the field), so I am not dissing the idea.   It’s just that it seems to have an almost cancer-like tendency to grow and spread if not consciously contained.

So Dean Burke was being a willow, standing her ground and bending, which was necessary to maintain the institution and keep it from the circling sharks.   Now, we are not privy to the conversations between Randy Moore and the Secretary. let alone the Secretary or Randy’s conversations with CEQ or other White House-favored entities.  So I think it is difficult or impossible to judge FS leadership on its willowhood.

A few other observations from Indy’s presentation.   She pointed out that Yale profs had an important role in recent legislation, I think it was the IRA.  I think we were supposed to think that this was a good thing, but I did not.  They also were proud of funding NPR to reach recreational fisherfolk to talk about the dangers of climate change with examples of how fishing will be impacted.   My uppity neighbors noted  “the people they are trying to reach don’t listen to NPR.”

Dean Burke also replied to a question about the name change something along the lines of ” forestry sounded too “extractive.”  This exchange occurred in Kroon Hall which proudly touts wood from the Yale Forest.  The hall is in the photo above.

Our uppity alum suggested “maybe this is an opportunity to educate them that extraction is not a bad thing”.  But no, of course, not,  because that is not really the issue.   It’s about that there the need for institutions to align with the ideas of the time and avoid sharks.

Is it a little bit silly to decry extraction in a wooden building? Of course.  We might call it hypocritical (in general, I think we should rename ourselves Homo hypocritus).  We might say that the non-extractive emperor has no clothes (of course, since clothing is manufactured using natural resources).  But it doesn’t matter.  If you work in an institution, especially if you are a leader, you have to be a willow not an oak for the institution to survive. And institutions still do good things.. teach students, or maintain campgrounds, or do prescribed fires.

And we don’t have much insight into the strength and direction of the winds that blow the Forest Service, nor is there much of a chance we will find out.

Which is not to say that we cannot attempt to understand, or critique what we see.  I just wanted to set this context.

 

The Wildfire Policy Windows are Shaking: Guest Post by Frank Carroll

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This guest post from Frank Carroll was originally a comment.

The Chief received a watershed letter that will ring down the Ages in wildland fire policy. Mark this day. A shot has been fired and the windows are shaking.

https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:US:67d7585d-31e2-4587-a999-c60aabe128e2

Sharon: I posted the letter in a previous post for non-Adobe folks.

Montana Governor Gianforte wrote to the Chief to tell him that Montana would no longer participate in science fiction and that “full suppression” could be anything other than “anchor, flank, and hold.” Those of us working on this issue for the past decade are euphoric. Montana has removed any doubt that FS firefighters intentionally use wildfires to manage natural resources.

This development is critical for many reasons. First, Montana will no longer share the outrageous and growing costs of giant, summertime prescribed wildfires under the Master Agreement. The governor told the chief, “Either put the fire out immediately, or you’re on your own paying for your alternative strategies.” This is an astonishing and overdue development. Gianforte’s letter shatters the deception that the FS is working with cooperators, and everyone is on board with the wildfire use policy. They are not.

See my presentation here: https://1drv.ms/p/s!AuKr93RuXe49gbIHkbk4dY3DoqJvbA

Sharon: I converted the ppt to pdf for easier viewing Smokey Wire Version 1.0 10.12.2024

With the FS budget in complete disarray and a billion dollars in the hole, the FS needs the states to participate to defray the high costs of current policies. The states are not sympathetic. Many key state leaders first heard the FS was expanding wildfires on purpose as a result of my work with Sarah Hyden, Joe Reddan, Van Elsbernd, Nadine Bailey, Quentin Rhoades, Roger Jaegle, and many others meeting for the past several years with states Attorneys General in Montana, Idaho, and others, and in multiple presentations to any significant group who would listen and buy us lunch. We lobbied Congress at home and in DC. We challenged the FS’s assertions of legal management strategies in meetings and in fire briefings.

The Governor’s letter clarifies that the vagaries of wildfire use and applied wildfire in PODs and firesheds is not a conspiracy theory or a figment of the imaginations of disgruntled former employees. Gianforte says it’s all too real, and he’s not playing.

I regret feeling so much affirmation after such a long fight, but I do, and it’s an important fight.

The days of the Chevron Deference ended in June this year. The time of National, Regional, and Unit EIS’s addressing wildfire use, disclosing impacts, inventorying the casualties to date, cooperating to forge robust public scoping and planning, and differences of opinion no longer ignored has come and I welcome it. The Chief will have to retire and make way for an effective and creative manager who can dig out of the mess.

The Forest Service is lost and struggling. The NLT, RFs, and Rangers have developed an unhealthy contempt for the mission. I think it blossomed in the pandemic. It manifests as arrogance and a complete lack of focus on the public. I went to the Boise Supervisor’s Office a few weeks ago. The Visitor Information Center was open, but no one staffed it except a lone federal security guard. He told me two women were supposed to be there but were “unreliable” and often not at their posts. He said I could try later, but there were no guarantees. Most of the staff was not there. The historic archive was thrown away by new kids who didn’t understand the need to preserve federal records. There were no principal staff officers ready to assist anyone.

The Chief and RFs allowed fear to rule from 2010 to today. The agency has been overcome by false constructs of employee health and wellness, now interpreted as meaning everyone can do whatever they want about coming to work (or not), showing up to work together to teach each other (or not), and interacting with the public (or not).

Employees are allowed to stay home. GS Fantastics in the 13-15 range live in their awesome refuges at home or wherever they want, traveling at will to spendy locations and racking up huge expenses. No one is going to work. There’s no opportunity for new kids to learn from old hands. They are lost and afraid. It’s a perfect storm of a once-powerful and now inert agency no longer able to muster a relevant presence on the ground.

I didn’t believe it when I first heard it, but the folks at the top came up with solutions to the current budget shortfall last month that beggars the imagination. The first idea was not to hire the seasonal workforce; now, it’s a solid plan bemoaned by High Country News. The Second was to consolidate Ranger Districts. Hopefully, this nutty idea was stillborn. There was no one with enough courage to enter into a Reduction in Force focused not on seasonals but on the herds of GS-13-15 planning staffers, teams scions, and others at the WO, Region, and Forest level who now constitute the bulk of the nondiscretionary workforce. Lol!! What?? Now is the time for buy-outs and mass reassignments.

The Chief disingenuously claims the current permanent staff will take up the seasonal slack, opening trails, cleaning campgrounds, and handling the work the public expects and deserves to have as support for their use of their lands. What the hell happened to leaders who knew how to lead? What happened to the Forest Service?

In any event, the States are no longer interested in enabling the once iconic agency to fail to grasp its own mission. They are saying, not theoretically, that they are not paying for the pretend party in the halls of the now-empty Forest Service offices (where we are still paying rent and utilities for no-show staff). I’ll stop here lest my fury overcome my message. Suffice it to say that the era of irresponsible, anti-public service, union-driven craziness, and a goofy, indefensible assertion of “safetiness,” is coming to a crashing end: Just in time.

Please read the attached letter several times and rejoice. It took a Governor to drag us back to reality. The entire workforce and lots of accountability will drag the FS back from the brink.

I remain optimistic. My Dad and I served from 1943 to 2011. We know how to do stuff and we can do it with unafraid leaders. We may have the chance to go back to the future with Elon Musk in charge of government reform.

Montana Governor Letter to FS on Wildfire Cost-Sharing

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Frank Carroll posted this link in a comment which I will post separately.  There are a couple of different topics in this letter, including cost-sharing agreements, transparency and communication, including definitions of what is a full suppression strategy. It would be interesting to hear the FS side of this story.
US:67d7585d-31e2-4587-a999-c60aabe128e2

Montana Governor Gianforte wrote to the Chief to tell him that Montana would no longer participate in science fiction and that “full suppression” could be anything other than “anchor, flank, and hold.” Those of us working on this issue for the past decade are euphoric. Montana has removed any doubt that FS firefighters intentionally use wildfires to manage natural resources.

This development is critical for many reasons. First, Montana will no longer share the outrageous and growing costs of giant, summertime prescribed wildfires under the Master Agreement. The governor told the chief, “Either put the fire out immediately, or you’re on your own paying for your alternative strategies.” This is an astonishing and overdue development. Gianforte’s letter shatters the deception that the FS is working with cooperators, and everyone is on board with the wildfire use policy. They are not.

See my presentation here: https://1drv.ms/p/s!AuKr93RuXe49gbIHkbk4dY3DoqJvbA

With the FS budget in complete disarray and a billion dollars in the hole, the FS needs the states to participate to defray the high costs of current policies. The states are not sympathetic. Many key state leaders first heard the FS was expanding wildfires on purpose as a result of my work with Sarah Hyden, Joe Reddan, Van Elsbernd, Nadine Bailey, Quentin Rhoades, Roger Jaegle, and many others meeting for the past several years with states Attorneys General in Montana, Idaho, and others, and in multiple presentations to any significant group who would listen and buy us lunch. We lobbied Congress at home and in DC. We challenged the FS’s assertions of legal management strategies in meetings and in fire briefings.

The Governor’s letter clarifies that the vagaries of wildfire use and applied wildfire in PODs and firesheds is not a conspiracy theory or a figment of the imaginations of disgruntled former employees. Gianforte says it’s all too real, and he’s not playing.

I regret feeling so much affirmation after such a long fight, but I do, and it’s an important fight.

The days of the Chevron Deference ended in June this year. The time of National, Regional, and Unit EIS’s addressing wildfire use, disclosing impacts, inventorying the casualties to date, cooperating to forge robust public scoping and planning, and differences of opinion no longer ignored has come and I welcome it. The Chief will have to retire and make way for an effective and creative manager who can dig out of the mess.

The Forest Service is lost and struggling. The NLT, RFs, and Rangers have developed an unhealthy contempt for the mission. I think it blossomed in the pandemic. It manifests as arrogance and a complete lack of focus on the public. I went to the Boise Supervisor’s Office a few weeks ago. The Visitor Information Center was open, but no one staffed it except a lone federal security guard. He told me two women were supposed to be there but were “unreliable” and often not at their posts. He said I could try later, but there were no guarantees. Most of the staff was not there. The historic archive was thrown away by new kids who didn’t understand the need to preserve federal records. There were no principal staff officers ready to assist anyone.

The Chief and RFs allowed fear to rule from 2010 to today. The agency has been overcome by false constructs of employee health and wellness, now interpreted as meaning everyone can do whatever they want about coming to work (or not), showing up to work together to teach each other (or not), and interacting with the public (or not).

Employees are allowed to stay home. GS Fantastics in the 13-15 range live in their awesome refuges at home or wherever they want, traveling at will to spendy locations and racking up huge expenses. No one is going to work. There’s no opportunity for new kids to learn from old hands. They are lost and afraid. It’s a perfect storm of a once-powerful and now inert agency no longer able to muster a relevant presence on the ground.

I didn’t believe it when I first heard it, but the folks at the top came up with solutions to the current budget shortfall last month that beggars the imagination. The first idea was not to hire the seasonal workforce; now, it’s a solid plan bemoaned by High Country News. The Second was to consolidate Ranger Districts. Hopefully, this nutty idea was stillborn. There was no one with enough courage to enter into a Reduction in Force focused not on seasonals but on the herds of GS-13-15 planning staffers, teams scions, and others at the WO, Region, and Forest level who now constitute the bulk of the nondiscretionary workforce. Lol!! What?? Now is the time for buy-outs and mass reassignments.

The Chief disingenuously claims the current permanent staff will take up the seasonal slack, opening trails, cleaning campgrounds, and handling the work the public expects and deserves to have as support for their use of their lands. What the hell happened to leaders who knew how to lead? What happened to the Forest Service?

In any event, the States are no longer interested in enabling the once iconic agency to fail to grasp its own mission. They are saying, not theoretically, that they are not paying for the pretend party in the halls of the now-empty Forest Service offices (where we are still paying rent and utilities for no-show staff). I’ll stop here lest my fury overcome my message. Suffice it to say that the era of irresponsible, anti-public service, union-driven craziness, and a goofy, indefensible assertion of “safetiness,” is coming to a crashing end: Just in time.

Please read the attached letter several times and rejoice. It took a Governor to drag us back to reality. The entire workforce and lots of accountability will drag the FS back from the brink.

I remain optimistic. My Dad and I served from 1943 to 2011. We know how to do stuff and we can do it with unafraid leaders. We may have the chance to go back to the future with Elon Musk in charge of government reform.

Untrammeling the Wilderness via Prescribed Fire: Journal Article and Story Map

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Thanks to The Fire Networks for this link.

Here are 4 key takeaways from our work:

  • The exclusion of fire from wilderness over the last 120 years – including the suppression of lightning-ignited fires and the removal of Indigenous cultural burning – demonstrates a clear alteration of historical ecological processes, with cascading negative effects that include substantial changes to fire-adapted forest ecosystems, increased risk of uncharacteristically severe wildfires, and greater vulnerability to fire-driven conversion from forest to shrubland, grassland, or other vegetation types that do not resemble long-standing conditions.

  • Intentional burning may be necessary to restore historical fire regimes to certain wilderness landscapes. Such burning also provides opportunities for increased engagement between federal agencies and Tribes seeking to resume practices of cultural burning.

  • Despite calls for the use of prescribed fire in wilderness spanning decades, the implementation of intentional human-ignited fire in wilderness continues to face specific and unique barriers and challenges.

  • However, some wilderness areas have been able to successfully implement prescribed fire. We provide several examples, including the positive effects of this burning.

And check out the journal article and/or the story map .  The story map has great photos.

Check Out TWIG Viewer! Maps FS (and BLM) Fuel Treatments and Wildfires

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Thanks to Anonymous for putting this in the comments. For a long time, many of us have wanted a simple way to look at what’s out there and somehow combine info in FACTS and NFPORS. Well, Congress funded SWERI to do that, and here is TWIG and the viewer.

I don’t know how it handles repeated treatments on the same acres (a concern pointed out in the Fix our Forests bill).


As far as I know, the SWERI folks have combined existing layers, so there shouldn’t be any question about accuracy.  If the FS were to differentiate unintentional wildfire from WFU or whatever it’s called now, it could be added easily.

Here’s an example in my area:

It seems very cool.  It turns out that incorporating private and State land data is already being worked on as per Anonymous’ comment below.
Here’s the link:

Timmons Group partnered with multiple agencies working towards better tracking and management of national fuels treatment data. These agencies include DOI – Office of Wildland Fire, USDA – Forest Service, and the National Association of State Foresters (NASF).

These 3 entities (and their members) represent the bulk of the public bodies vested in wildfire and fuels management. This project is currently in-flight and has a few working titles. The project was initiated as a joint effort to prove a path forward for the implementation of the then, recently signed, Shared Stewardship agreements between all State Forestry agencies and the USFS. This initial effort was termed SWRM which stands for Shared Stewardship Risk Mitigation. This project was a pilot that was further funded and positioned as a replacement for the current, NFPORS system (national fuels reporting system used by Federal and State agencies). The current project has the working name of NextGEN (next generation system to replace NFPORS) but also goes by the title of National Fuels effort.

The NextGen / National Hazardous Fuels Reporting Initiative, once completed, will fully replace NFPORS and be the official reporting system for all State and Federal wildfire agencies. The solution will include tools to harvest treatments from agencies using FME and other custom tools. It will include portals for displaying and prioritizing treatments in context with peer agencies and executive reporting dashboards.

The project team includes multiple State Forestry agencies, Federal partners (e.g., DOI OWF / USFS), and NGO representation (NASF). The project is only partially funded as of calendar year 2023. The project team has grand visions for this effort to include expansion out to the private prescribed burning community and to potentially support the fuels projects that will emerge from local governments via the Community Wildfire Defense Grant (CWDG) BIL funding.

The Puzzle of Counting Wildfire Acres: Sarah Hyden Op-ed

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Map of Tanques Fire 7,000-acre focal area and planning area. U.S. Forest Service.

Last week, I wrote about what was in the Fix our Forests Bill about counting fuel treatment acres.  Last July I wrote about what happens to total wildfire acres if you subtract WFU acres, which led to the conclusion that there was little or no increase in unwanted acres burned through time. Of course, at the same time there are, and continue to be, seriously bad and impactful wildfires.

Well, yesterday Nick Smith had a link to this op-ed by Sarah Hyden in The Revelator.

“But by that date, the Forest Service had made the decision to expand the fire up to a “planned perimeter” of 7,000 acres with firing operations. That means the Service intended to expand it up to 538 times its size. The fire may have continued to slowly expand naturally, but relatively high vegetation moisture from recent rains made it unlikely that the fire would spread much on its own. By Aug. 1, when the fire had been expanded to 6,500 acres, enough rain came that it was apparently too difficult to expand the fire any further. It’s hard to say exactly which part of the 6,500-acre “wildfire” was due to intentional burning and which was “natural” wildfire, but it is clear the vast majority of the acres burned were due to the Forest Service’s own ignitions. Nonetheless the agency calls the Tanques Fire a wildfire.”

She goes back to the Biscuit Fire

The first publicized example of such wildfire expansion was the 2002 Biscuit Fire. Timothy Ingalsbee of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology estimated that a large proportion of the Biscuit Fire was ignited by Forest Service firing operations. Inglasbee stated in a 2006 report largely focused on the Biscuit Fire that “burnout operations can sometimes take place several miles away from the edge of a wildfire, or alternately, miles away from the fire containment line.” Wildfire expansions have greatly increased since 2002, and wildfire starts, such as lightning strike ignitions, are often simply the “match that lit the fire,” leading to numerous firing operation ignitions to implement intentional burns that the agency calls wildfires.

Now while I and many other scientists disagree with Sarah on this..

However, evidence clearly shows that burning of homes and communities by wildfire is not significantly impacted by logging, thinning, and intentional burning treatments out in the forest, and that only the 100 feet surrounding homes and other structures is relevant to structure ignitions.

we can also ask the question, “what is the best way to count what I call “unwanted wildfire acres””?  Because fire folks might intentionally build a larger box than “necessary” but who decides what is “necessary”?  We can’t really analyze the probabilities of success of different boxes without making a host of assumptions.  And would it be worth the time and money to even try?

So the FS wants to reduce fuels.  It has an opportunity with a lightning strike. Fire folks consider the opportunities and the risks and determine a course of action.  I don’t know but perhaps they consider 1) firefighter and public safety, 2) likelihood of success holding a line and 3) need for acres treated.  There may be other factors as well.

So how to parse out what is done for fuel reduction versus safety versus likelihood of success?  Seems tough or impossible looking from here, but I am not a fire person.  In the case of Tanques fire, it seems like it was an intentional and documented decision to expand.  At that point, it seems like it would be possible to delineate Unwanted Wildfire Acres (as if they had put it out directly) from Intentional Wildfire Acres (or Beneficial Fire, as the Wildfire Commission would have it).  But at the same time, those early acres are probably beneficial in some sense as well, because if those acres had endangered communities or other infrastructure, fire folks might have gone to full suppression. Or maybe not.

This seems like a very head-scratchy kind of question.  Maybe someone out there with more fire experience has some ideas?

NBC Interviews FS Researcher Jeff Prestemon on Arson Fires

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With the Park Fire, I think they’re going to have to use a log scale (no not that kind of log scale) for next year’s chart.

 

These are some of many cool statistics kept by  Calfire here.

Thanks to Center for Western Priorities for this story from NBC news.

Here’s the summary you can click on (perhaps AI generated?)

In California, nearly half the acres burned this year were due to blazes allegedly ignited by arson. The damage shows how climate change is exacerbating the danger of arson.
Technically speaking it seems like it was one blaze, the Park Fire.  I’m not sure I can get from the Park Fire to climate change,   but OK.

Here are the paragraphs in the story itself.

The Park Fire was the fourth-largest in California’s history, burning 430,000 acres. It set a state record for acres burned in an alleged arson.

“We don’t have an arson-caused fire that’s gotten to that size on record,” said Gianni Muschetto, the chief of police for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “That’s going to be something of historical significance.”

In total, just over 1 million acres of California have burned so far this year, and nearly half were the result of blazes allegedly set by arsonists, according to fire authorities and an NBC News review of state incident data.

If the “half” refers to acres, the Park Fire itself is responsible for nearly half.  But maybe it refers to starts? Not clear.

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But let’s go to Prestemon’s observations:

Jeffrey Prestemon, (note his email and phone are available), a researcher at the U.S. Forest Service’s Southern Research Station in North Carolina, said arson also presents an acute risk because fires started that way tend to cause more damage per acre than blazes caused by lightning or other factors.

“They’re often set where … people live, where there are structures,” Prestemon said.

I’d also add that they are often set at particularly bad times of the year.  We actually don’t know how that enters, if it does, into the minds of the arsonists.  With some, as The Hotshot Wakeup has covered, the time and place are selected so that the wildfires do as much damage as possible.  Others seem to be more or less random.

Given that, he said, “an arrest can have a big payoff.”

Prestemon has studied wildfire arson events in Florida, Spain and other locations. He and other researchers found in one study that the arrest of a single arsonist in a particular region of Spain correlated with a decrease of nearly 140 wildfire starts in that area the following year.

“What we surmise: It’s mainly a serial effect, it’s one individual setting multiple fires over a brief period of time usually spanning over several days, a week or two weeks,” Prestemon said. “If they’re not caught, they will repeat this kind of serial episode.”

Prestemon added that arrests could deter other arsonists.

This year in California, Cal Fire had arrested 91 people on suspicion of arson by the end of August, Muschetto said. The number appears to track with normal trends.

Wildfire arson isn’t well studied, but researchers in the U.S., Europe and Australia have narrowed down the profile of typical perpetrators. Wildfire arsonists tend to be men, often young. Many set multiple fires.

“They’re often likely to do repeat fires,” said Janet Stanley, an honorary associate professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia. “People who have got a psychological need for some reason around fire will do it many times, and often they’re not caught until they’ve done it multiple times.”

In California, Muschetto attributed fluctuations in the number of wildfire arsons to fire risk levels and how likely the landscape is to burn.

Cal Fire has counted between 182 and 386 arson fires each year since 2014, with rates roughly consistent relative to the number of overall fires. However, the true number of fires caused by arson is likely higher than the official count, because investigators can’t always determine how a blaze started. The causes of more than 320 fires in 2023 remain unknown.

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Muschetto said the rise in the use of security cameras, smartphones and satellite-tracking devices in rural areas has helped Cal Fire clear more cases over the past 10 or 20 years.

It seems like it would be hard to compare numbers of arsons over time, strictly speaking, due to improvements in criminal-catching technology over time.  Some of the previous unknowns may have been arson.

 

 

Election Coming: Time to Resurrect Bundys and Flirt With Mormophobia

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In the spring of 2020 (I probably have told this story before) I was on a Zoom with members of the Society for Environmental Journalism who were interested in federal lands.

It was fascinating, because most of the folks on the call were interested in reporting on what they felt was an possible armed rebellion of people in the Interior West. I don’t know where they got this idea, but it didn’t bear any resemblance to reality.  Meanwhile Sammy Roth and I were both interested in the tension between environmental concerns and renewable buildout (next post is a comprehensive story that Sammy posted recently).

Almost four years later, we can see what was the real story and what was fear-mongering (why and to what end, I have no idea). The story continues to be promulgated in certain quarters.. Bundys.. bad .. far-right antigovernment militas…ready to pounce.  I don’t actually see what good this fear-mongering does; I don’t think it changes anyone’s mind politically. I also don’t think that “their wackos are wackier than our wackos” leads to thoughtful political discourse.

I always make fun of these folks who seem to think there are masses of incipient Bundys somewhere between the Mississippi and the Sierra.  But it seems like the discussion might be heating up again. Our friends at High Country News have an interesting article called

What the Bundy Bunkerville standoff foreshadowed

Ten years after the impasse between the Bundy family and the BLM, the doctrine of white oppression is widely embraced.
It seems like it was April ten years ago and not October. This article seems to go after Mormons a bit more than I recall in previous iterations.  Let’s see, a religious minority who has had a troubled history with the federal government, shouldn’t we be sympathetic?.. is this Mormophobia? Meanwhile they are helping out hurricane recovery

and many are not.. western at all.

When the Bundys declared victory, it was hailed as a win for their vision of the American West, a place where white ranchers are heroes and yet also an oppressed minority. But their triumph went beyond Bunkerville: It was a victory for the entire far-right antigovernment militia movement and paved the way for ultra-conservative ideas to dominate the Republican Party’s agenda. All this foreshadowed a nationwide political storm — one that would divide lifelong neighbors, polarize the nation and help lay the groundwork for the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Ten years after Bunkerville, the people and ideas that shaped the standoff are key to understanding American politics as the country faces its next presidential election.
A very long thread… also it seems to me that is it getting increasing hard to tell reporting from opinion.  So let’s investigate the reporters claims “key to understanding”… based on my own experience in political internet space.. I would say that few to none of the people I encounter on both sides are even aware of those ideas, let alone them being “key.”

Scholars have long studied the particular flavor of conservatism that has thrived among the Mormon subcultures of the Mountain West — “the Mormon Corridor.” In 2003, John-Charles Duffy, now a professor at Miami University, wrote in Sunstone Magazine that some members of the LDS Church resisted the changes in the 20th century that were aimed at making the faith more palatable to a wide audience: “The older, hardline tradition of constitutionalism, coupled with accusations of government tyranny, has survived in an LDS subculture devoted to ultraconservative politics.” In the 1990s, LDS leadership responded with mass excommunications, hoping to push out the ultra-conservative constitutionalists and survivalists. But the beliefs continued to flourish, if quietly.

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So the LDS threw the bums out..shouldn’t we give them credit? And if those folks got kicked out, is it accurate to characterize their views as “Mormon”?

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And in publicly proclaiming their beliefs and tying their ideology to the standoff, the Bundys moved “the boundaries of what’s expected Mormon political discourse,” Park said. He pointed to the Utah Legislature. “You see a lot of far-right Mormon conservative voices,” Park said, “who don’t go fully Bundy, but they’re willing to go half Bundy. They’re willing to take advantage of this anxiety.”

I wonder exactly what “half-Bundy” means?

In 2022, the Deseret News — a newspaper owned by the LDS Church — reported on “an emerging pattern” of public protest driven by conspiracy theories that had recently emerged in the Utah Legislature. “A deep distrust in the federal government and also a broad agreement with deep-state conspiracies,” Park said, became the norm.

The norm of whom exactly?

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Still, lawmakers from around the region declared their support for the Bundys. Several of them remain in office today, including Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar and Idaho state Rep. Heather Scott. President Donald Trump unlawfully appointed William Perry Pendley — a vocal Bundy sympathizer — deputy director of the BLM. (He served for over a year, despite never being confirmed by the Senate.) More recently, Pendley authored a 22-page section of Mandate for Leadership, the 922-page manifesto of Project 2025, a vision for the country drawn up by a far-right think tank. Pendley lays out how the Department of the Interior would function during a second Trump administration, seeking “American energy dominance” through oil and gas leases and a complete reinstatement of Trump-era Interior policies.

I would just say tying  “Trump-era Interior policies” and Bundys seems a bit of a stretch.

THE ANTI-GOVERNMENT and ultra-conservative Mormon beliefs that were so key to the Bundy standoff are deeply rooted in Western identity. The Bundy story appealed to a shared “‘rural mentality,” Cooter said, that is prized by militia groups.

“Even if they live in cities, even if they live in suburbs, this idea of rurality means a lot to them, in no small part because it’s sort of an extension of our imagining of the frontier (and) what real men and real Americans are supposed to be,” she said.  “It’s almost like they’re trying to make up for the fact that they’re not living in that rural environment where they have to prove themselves in a very stereotypically masculine way.”

An old white man in a cowboy hat complaining about government overreach was, essentially, an ideal story for them — a narrative that reinforced “that frontier piece of masculinity,” Cooter said.

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Park, the historian, saw the Bundys’ refusal to acknowledge Indigenous land rights when they talked about Western land ownership as another nod to that conservative brand of Mormonism. “That Manifest Destiny ideology, of course, is widespread in America,” he said. “But it had a particularly Mormon flavor, because they believed this is a land that God has prepared for us.”

Political leaders like former President Trump have advanced a worldview in which white rural Americans are an oppressed class. But Cooter said that this idea gets at something much, much deeper in the American psyche.

“That starting line realistically goes back to the founding of our country,” Cooter said. It “is really baked into this idea of the American mythology that’s going to be very difficult for us to ever move away from.”

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I wish the reporter had asked how exactly did the “white rural Americans were an oppressed class” went back to the founding of the country.  Since according to this website (not fact-checked) 94% of the population in 1800 was rural.. did they feel oppressed then?  And that is not to say that Tribes and Hispanics have not had problems with federal “overreach”.. see the history of New Mexico and the Forest Service. And of course, overreach is in the eye of the beholder.