Steve Wilent

From the San Diego Union-Tribune. Mentions the Save Our Sequoias Act, which “would provide $350 million in federal funding over 10 years to help thin, manage and fire-proof forests and protect trees by streamlining environmental reviews of efforts to restore the health of sequoia groves — reviews that now could take 52 years to treat the 19 most at-risk groves.”

Unfortunately, dozens of environmental groups including the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the League of Conservation Voters oppose it. They view any weakening of environmental rules affecting forests the same way the National Rifle Association views any weakening of gun rights: as the start of a slippery slope that ends with disaster, in this case loggers ravaging pristine natural areas. Local Sierra Club chapter chair Lisa Ross asserts the bill was introduced on “behalf of a panoply of special interests hoping to bring more commercial development into our national forests.”

Subhead: “It’s a shabby tactic to pretend thinning forests to protect historic trees is the same thing as inviting loggers to despoil pristine natural lands.”

New York Times today: “At Yosemite, a Preservation Plan That Calls for Chain Saws: With treasured forests perennially threatened by fierce wildfires, many experts say it’s time to cut and burn protectively. A lawsuit is standing in the way.” It’s subscription only, unfortunately. Excerpts:

An essay from The Conversation, “A case for retreat in the age of fire.”

“It has been nearly four years since the Camp Fire, but the population of Paradise is now less than 30% of what it once was. This makes Paradise one of the first documented cases of voluntary retreat in the face of wildfire risk. And while the notion of wildfire retreat is controversial, politically fraught and not yet endorsed by the general public, as experts in urban planning and environmental design, we believe the necessity for retreat will become increasingly unavoidable.”

Excerpts from “Why have all the trees been dying?” in a Lake Tahoe area paper [emphasis added]. I think this mortality will spread north in to the Cascades in Oregon and Washington.

Jonathan Cook-Fisher, District Ranger for the Tahoe National Forest in Truckee said, “It is happening from the west shore to the north. The fir trees are the first to go. There are some beetles, but the primary driver appears to be overstocked forest stands with drought conditions.”

…

Overstocked forests didn’t just happen in the last few years. It has been a growing (sorry couldn’t resist) problem for the past 100 years. Sierra Nevada forests (and forests throughout the west) have adapted to regular fires that were spurred by lightning storms. Trees adapted by growing rapidly and close together in an attempt to “out-grow” the fires. The lightning caused fires stayed low to the ground, burned out the brush and those swiftly growing young firs before the stands could get too thick, leaving a forest of primarily mature, bigger trees spread out around the forest. Fewer, large trees were better able to fend off pests and drought. 

…

In a scientific study in the Journal of Ecological Applications [2021] on the impact of tree mortality on wildfire severity entitled “Recent bark beetle outbreaks influence wildfire severity in mixed-confer forests of the Sierra Nevada,” Rebecca Wayman and Hugh Safford found: 

“Our analyses identified prefire tree mortality as influential on all measures of wildfire severity… All measures of fire severity increased as prefire mortality increased…Managers of historically frequent-fire forests will benefit from utilizing this information when prioritizing fuels reduction treatments in areas of recent tree mortality, as it is the first empirical study to document a relationship between prefire mortality and subsequent wildfire severity in these systems.”

The fire has grown to 2,340 acres as of this morning, July 11, according to the NPS via Inciweb. “Fuels Involved: Timber and Brush – Mostly high load conifer litter (TL5) with heavy dead and down component as well as substantial standing dead.”

“The fire is burning in difficult terrain with continuous heavy fuels in and around the fire.  Significant tree mortality from 2013 – 2015 has left dead standing and dead fallen fuels.  This also presents significant safety hazards to firefighters.  Fire scars from past fires located approximately one to three miles from the current fire perimeter will assist firefighters in slowing the growth of the fire.  Firefighters will continue going direct when safe and will scout and prepare indirect lines.

“The fire was active overnight. Today is expected to be hotter and drier than yesterday, with similar fire behavior. The Park Service and Firefighters are proactively protecting the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias. While structure wrap is not being used on the sequoias themselves, additional methods are being used including the removal of heavy and fine fuels around the trees and deploying ground-based sprinkler systems to increase humidity near the trees. Fortunately, the Mariposa Grove has a long history of prescribed burning and studies have shown that these efforts reduce the impacts of high-severity unwanted fire.”

From Jefferson Public Radio in southern Oregon….

A proposed lawsuit from Cascadia Wildlands, Center for Biological Diversity, Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center and Western Environmental Law Center seeks to protect the marbled murrelet and coastal marten, which are both threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

The BLM’s Integrated Vegetation Management forest management plan outlines 150,000 acres of prescribed fires, small diameter tree thinning, and commercial thinning in late successional reserves over the next ten years.

They argue the new decade-long forest management plan will be ineffective. The groups claim the proposed projects would make the old-growth forests less resilient to fire.

But Regional Fire Specialist Chris Adlam with Oregon State University says the BLM plan is a good approach and that the plan will help reintroduce beneficial fire.

“We wanna avoid these large areas of high-severity fire that tend to burn again and again at high severity, and prevent the forest from regenerating,” Adlam says.

He says, there’s a difference between low-intensity and high-intensity wildfires. Low-intensity fires — such as those happening naturally or in prescribed burns — can be beneficial. But high-intensity fires, like many wildfires we see now, can bring negative effects to the landscape and take longer for recovery.

Adlam says the 2020 Slater Fire wiped out huge portions of northern spotted owl habitat. That’s not the only time endangered species habitat has been threatened by high-intensity wildfire.

…

The last line:

Adlam warns that if government agencies and conservation groups don’t work together, they could waste time as future catastrophic wildfires put species at greater risk.

The NY Times has an interesting essay today by David Wallace-Wells, ‘There is no future in which we somehow manage to suppress all these fires that also does not have any prescribed fires.’ It’s behind a pay wall, but here’s one quote:

“The reality is, there is no ‘no fire’ option,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “There is no future in which we somehow manage to suppress all these fires that also does not have any prescribed fires.” That’s how he presents the landscape: not a choice between fire or no fire. “The choice is what kind of fire,” he said.

Wells also has this passage featuring Stephen Pyne:

“Inevitably, our future holds a lot of fire,” Pyne wrote recently. His goal: “a variety of techniques for a variety of purposes,” he said, including an “urban fire” approach to those burning in the wildland-urban interface, where a much more aggressive firefighting and fire-prevention effort could be targeted. He mentions Indigenous practices, cultural burning and agricultural burning, alongside forest management through mechanical thinning and burning. “Thinning plus fire is what’s really effective,” he said. “In a lot of places, they get the thinning done, but they don’t do the burning. So in a sense, you haven’t solved the problem. You may even have made it worse in some ways, because now you’ve got all these jackpot piles, like gopher mounds all over the countryside, waiting for a fire.”

But Pyne is most focused on what he calls “working with wildfires”: a more open and fluid approach that treats those that begin with an accidental or natural ignition almost like prescribed burns by guiding them toward useful spread. “I wish the agencies were a little more forthright about this” — that some remote fires can just be left to burn, he said. “It’s legal, it’s legitimate. But it can also seem evasive, a little sub rosa,” especially against a backdrop of growing fire anxiety across the West, driven not just by the fires themselves but the smoke they produce. “People get hay fever in the spring,” Pyne said. “Well, you may be dealing with smoke fever in the fall.”

“We don’t have complete control,” he went on. “We don’t control the weather. We don’t control the mountains. But, he added, “We can decide where and when to set a fire, we can do some prior treatments at a certain level, but we can’t treat tens of millions of acres across the West — much less, a couple hundred million acres across the West before we put fire in.”

Ultimately, “I think prescribed burning has got to be a part of it, but it’s not going to be the dominant one,” he said, pointing out that in most years, acreage consumed by wildfire is much larger than what’s burned in prescribed fires and that in 2021, prescribed fires burned nearly 1.3 million acres in the Southeast, where climate conditions make such fires relatively safe, compared with less than 200,000 in the Southwest, West, Mountain West and Pacific Northwest each.

“In the West, the complications are much larger,” he said — and growing, of course. “It’s a lot harder than it was say a 100 or 150 years ago,” because “the landscape is much more vulnerable to explosive fire,” he said. “We still haven’t grappled with the sense that it’s systemic. And I don’t think we ever will.”

The latest on the Pisgah and Nantahala (North Carolina) NFs plan revision (Recently discussed here). From Carolina Public Press: “Objections to proposed plan for Western NC national forests delay process.”

“U.S. Forest Service proposed land management plan for Pisgah and Nantahala forests has drawn thousands of objections, leading to extension of time to review concerns. Forest Service chief now calls plan revision process that took more than a decade unsustainable. ”

Thanks to Nick Smith’s HFHC News for the link.

The Property and Environment Research Center has a new report, “Does Environmental Review Worsen the Wildfire Crisis? How environmental analysis delays fuel treatment projects.” Highlights:

• Fuel treatment projects designed to reduce wildfire risks, including mechanical treatments and prescribed burns, often take longer to implement than other U.S. Forest Service projects because they are more likely to require rigorous environmental review or be litigated.
• Once the Forest Service initiates the environmental review process, it takes ​​an average of 3.6 years to begin a mechanical treatment and 4.7 years to begin a prescribed burn.
• For projects that require environmental impact statements—the most rigorous form of review—the time from initiation to implementation averages 5.3 years for mechanical treatments and 7.2 years for prescribed burns.
• Given the time it takes to conduct environmental reviews and implement fuel treatments, it is unlikely that the Forest Service will be able to achieve its goal of treating an additional 20 million acres over the next 10 years.