This essay by Ezra Klein in the NY Times is worth a look. (I hope this Share link works — the Times says that, as a subscriber, I can send links to 10 articles per month, and anyone can read the linked articles).

In “Government Is Flailing, in Part Because Liberals Hobbled It,” Klein suggests that NEPA and other environmental laws, are necessary and have been successful, but now make it too easy to block needed projects.

Zoom out from the specifics, though, and look at what it reveals about how government, even in the bluest of blue communities, actually works. Why was it so easy for a few local homeowners to block U.C. Berkeley’s plans, over the opposition of not just the powerful U.C. system but also the mayor of Berkeley and the governor of California? The answer, in this case, was the California Environmental Quality Act — a bill proposed by environmentalists and signed into law in 1970 by Gov. Ronald Reagan that demands rigorous environmental impact reviews for public projects, and that has become an all-purpose weapon for anyone who wants to stymie a new public project or one that requires public approval.

There are laws like this in many states, and there’s a federal version, too — the National Environmental Policy Act. They’re part of a broader set of checks on development that have done a lot of good over the years but are doing a lot of harm now. When they were first designed, these bills were radical reforms to an intolerable status quo. Now they are, too often, powerful allies of an intolerable status quo, rendering government plodding and ineffectual and making it almost impossible to build green infrastructure at the speed we need.

…

…environmental victories of yesteryear have become the obstacles of this year. Too many of the tactics and strategies and statutes are designed to stop transformational, or even incremental, projects from happening. Modest expansions to affordable housing or bus service are forced to answer for their environmental impact. But the status quo doesn’t have to win any lawsuits or fill out any forms to persist.”

FYI, Smokey Wire folks….

Biden-Harris Administration Issues Call for Wildfire Commission Member Applications

Members will recommend prevention and restoration strategies to tackle national wildfire crisis

The Departments of the Interior, Agriculture, and Homeland Security through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) are now accepting membership applications for the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission.

President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law authorized establishment of the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission. Announced in December 2021, it will play a key role in recommending federal policies and strategies to more effectively prevent, mitigate, suppress, and manage wildland fires, including the rehabilitation of affected lands.

The commission is seeking volunteer members from diverse backgrounds, with a specific focus on members who represent non-federal interests, as required by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Members will commit to serve for the life of the commission, which is estimated to be a year and a half, with the first meeting targeted for late spring 2022.

The commission will prepare policy recommendations and submit them to Congress within a year of its first meeting. Members should expect to devote between 10 and 15 hours a month to commission duties, which include attending meetings, strategic planning, and development of the reports. The Departments of the Interior, Agriculture, and Homeland Security through FEMA will provide support and resources to assist members with coordination and facilitation of their duties for the duration of the commission.

Non-federal membership, as required by law, will include state, local, Tribal, territory, and non-government partners with experience in preventing, mitigating, and managing wildland fires and the wildland-urban interface. Preference will be given to applicants from areas of high wildfire risk and areas with a high level of wildland-urban interface.

Applications for membership must be submitted via the online form by 11:59 pm Pacific Time on March 25, 2022. To ensure the process is equitable for all applicants, those who have previously expressed interest in membership must still apply via the online form.

For more information, visit the commission website or email wildlandfirecommission@usda.gov.

In addition to establishing the commission, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provides historic funding to address wildfire hazards, including $8.25 billion for a suite of programs aimed at reducing wildfire risks, detecting wildfires, instituting firefighter workforce reforms, and building more resilient infrastructure.

The title of this post is the title of an article by an Arizona public radio station, KNAU. The link to the bond is a “Sustainability-Linked Bond Framework” that details what the bond entails. I didn’t see information about what would happen if treatment targets are not met.

This note from the American Forest Resource Council‘s February 2022 newsletter may be of interest:

Forest Service Receives Disaster Relief Funding; Timber Outputs Continue to Diminish

The Pacific Northwest Region of the U.S. Forest Service was allocated $291.2 million in disaster relief supplemental funding to be directed to recovery actions associated with wildfires, floods, and other natural disasters. This allocation is a component of the $1.36 billion of supplemental appropriations provided to the Forest Service through the Extending Government Funding and Delivering Emergency Assistance Act of 2021. Most of the funding directed to the Pacific Northwest will be allocated to National Forests in Oregon, specifically those in western Oregon impacted by the 2020 Labor Day fires. The Mt. Hood, Willamette, Umpqua, and Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forests will receive 85% of the $252.9 million directed to Oregon. A complete breakdown of the funding allocation can be found here.

According to a press release on February 16, a portion of the $30.4 million allocated to the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest will be directed to the removal of fire-killed trees posing a safety hazard to forest roads caused by the Slater Fire. Similar expenditure of funds is certain for the Mt. Hood, Willamette, and Umpqua National Forests. Each attempted to removed hazard trees by selling them to the local timber industry for manufacturing into wood products; but were met with lawsuits from special interest groups that halted the removal and utilization of those fire-killed trees. Other activities proposed include road resurfacing, culvert replacements, bridge repair, hazardous material/waste removal, and nursery upgrades.

Counter to conventional thinking, this type of funding influx will likely cause the Region’s timber and vegetation management programs to shrink rather than remain stable. For example, as of December 1, 2021, the Willamette National Forest’s assigned timber target was 65 million board feet (MMBF). Less than three months later that target was reduced by nearly 50% to 35 MMBF following the allocation of $78.6 million in disaster relief funding. The cause of this decline is partly of function of reprioritization to address critical disaster relief needs and partly a function of how this supplemental funding can be used.

There are generally two operative sides to every project on U.S. Forest Service land: the planning side (NEPA analysis, wildlife & heritage surveys, timber sale layout, etc.) and the implementation side (completion of the work). Since each side is dependent on the other to achieve project success, each side must be adequately funded in a well-balanced manner. Infusions of supplemental funding, such as the disaster relief fund, have a tendency to disrupt this balance since its allocation is typically limited to the implementation side of the equation and not to the planning side.

For example, the Forest Service may allocate $10 million of supplemental funding to resurface damaged roads. That money will be directed to the material and labor necessary to do the resurfacing. However, none of that money will enable the Forest Service to hire a new engineer to plan and oversee this work, or a new soil scientist to analyze the impacts of the roadwork. The Willamette National Forest recently pointed to engineering gaps as partial cause for the reduction of their timber outputs, as engineers are redirected from timber sale planning to disaster relief planning.

Another scenario that is currently playing out on several National Forests impacted by wildfire is related to their inability to remove and sell fire-killed trees posing a hazard to roads. The Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest will allocate funding to fell and dispose of those hazard trees, but none of that funding will support the planning and analysis necessary to facilitate such work. Once again, the Forest Service will be compelled to redirect its current staffing resources and by doing so will likely suffer shortfalls in their vegetation management and timber programs.

If the vast majority of supplemental funding continues to be directed solely to the implementation side while the planning side is neglected, we will likely see future renditions of this year’s Willamette National Forest program, only at a much larger scale. This should be a troubling sign for anyone who is interested in seeing the $4 billion from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act directed to forest management result in more acres treated for hazardous fuels reduction or elevated timber outputs. /Andy Geissler

Kudos to the Stanislaus National Forest for its report that says “science shows that thinning and fuels treatments work” and a virtual tour of the project area on the Stanislaus-Tuolumne Experimental Forest in California. The link is to an press release that explains the science findings on variable-density thinning and provides a link to a virtual tour of the area. Note the warnings about the virtual tour taking a LONG time to load — it does, even with high-speed Internet. They recommend using the Chrome browser, which I did.

I haven’t viewed the entire tour yet, but the opening scenes show a dense stand that is very much in need of treatment — a fire there would be intense. It’ll have to be mechanically thinned before Rx fire can be used. The scene is representative of many, many sites in the Sierras. Similar conditions, with different species, exist across the western US.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the Stanislaus recently released the RoD for the Social and Ecological Resilience Across the Landscape (SERAL) project. A news article on the project explains that “The project is planned on an area that totals 118,808 acres of public and private lands that include 94,823 acres in Forest Service jurisdiction….”

The Stanislaus aims to use variable-density thinning (VDT) in the project area. VDT is controversial in the eyes of some environmental groups. For example, a coalition of groups convinced a federal court that VDT is highly controversial, scientifically, as proposed for the Crystal Clear Restoration Project in Oregon; the court agreed, and ruled that the Mt. Hood NF erred in using an EA. The forest had planned to do an EIS, but the White River Fire burned much of the project area in 2020.

On VDT in the experimental forest, the Stanislaus says, “What they found was that during a recent severe drought that killed over 147 million trees statewide, the two thinned treatments came through relatively unscathed, experiencing far less tree mortality than the adjacent unthinned areas. By reducing competition, the remaining trees had greater access to sunlight, water and the nutrients found in soils. They also found that the addition of prescribed fire is key to a more vibrant and diverse understory plant community, similar to what these forests once contained.”

This photo shows before and after conditions:

It will be interesting to see if enviro groups challenge the SERAL project. The news article says SERAL was “born from an ongoing partnership between the federal Forest Service, the collaborative Yosemite Stanislaus Solutions group, and Tuolumne County. Other partners include Sierra Pacific Industries, the Tuolumne River Trust, and the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center in Twain Harte.”

In any case, I recommend taking the time to experience the virtual tour.

The USFS recently sent out an R&D Special Issue, “Science to Support the Wildfire Crisis Strategy.” Lots of science on topics of our recent discussions. I hope this format will work….

Folks, the USFS had had an online, all-employee directory, which I have found very useful over the years. The link no longer works and I haven’t found a new link. Anyone know if there’s a new link, or if the directory is no longer public?

There’s a Forest Service Organizational Directory here, but it has contact info only for top-level staff.

I just stumbled on a new (I think) storymap from the USFS, Climate by Forest. It’s “A tool for exploring climate change information on National Forest System lands.”

“Using the first version of Climate By Forest, forest planners could obtain climate change graphs and data files with just a few clicks. However, they still had to perform statistical analyses on the data to test whether projected changes would lead to a significant departure from historical conditions. This step required days to weeks of a climate specialist’s time to find, process, and reformat data files. To resolve this, developers incorporated the relevant statistical methods into the tool, enabling managers for every unit in the lower 48 states to access projections and the relevant statistical documentation for their plans from Climate By Forest in a matter of minutes.”

Here’s an example using the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area:

This paper on ocean acidification has an element that is relevant for forest planning and litigation, and specifically the definition of “best available science.”

Ocean acidification has received much attention in the press, such as in a 2009 NT Times article, “Rising Acidity Is Threatening Food Web of Oceans, Science Panel Says.” The Times wrote that, “Now an international panel of marine scientists says this acidity is accelerating so fast it threatens the survival of coral reefs, shellfish and the marine food web generally.”

This month a study reported that a “Meta-analysis reveals an extreme “decline effect” in the impacts of ocean acidification on fish behavior.” PLoS Biol 20(2): e3001511. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001511

A press release says the paper “demonstrates that the apparent severity of ocean acidification impacts on fish behaviour, as reported in the scientific literature, has declined dramatically over the past decade.”

The press release includes this passage (emphasis added]:

The researchers used meta-analysis to analyse trends in reported effects of ocean acidification on fish behaviour in studies published from 2009-2019. While early studies reported extremely clear and strong effects, the magnitude of those impacts has decreased over time and have been negligible for the past five years.

“A textbook example of the decline effect”, explains Dr. Clements, lead author of the study. “The decline effect is the tendency for the strength of scientific findings to decrease in magnitude over time. While relatively well-recognized in fields like psychology and medicine, it is lesser known in ecology—our study provides perhaps the most striking example of it in this field to date.”

To determine what might have caused the decline effect in their meta-analysis, the authors explored numerous biological factors, but found that biological differences between studies through time could not explain the results. Instead, common scientific biases largely explained the decline effect.

“Science often suffers from publication bias, where strong effects are selectively published by authors and prestigious journals”, says co-author Prof. Jutfelt. “It’s only after others try to replicate initial results and publish less-striking findings that true effects become known. Our analysis shows that strong effects in this field are favorably published in high impact journals.”

Maybe forest planners, litigants, and courts ought to use the “best available mature science,” not necessarily the latest science.

Here’s a new paper that will no doubt be controversial: “Operational resilience in western US frequent-fire forests.” The full text is here. Sounds innocuous, but a Bloomberg article about the paper summarizes: “To Save Western U.S. Forests, Cut Them Way Back, Study Suggests.” This may sound radical, but the consequences of not doing this are clear, according to the authors including some well-known researchers: Malcolm P. North, Ryan E. Tompkins, Alexis A. Bernal Brandon M. Collins, Scott L. Stephens, and Robert A. York:

“The first two decades of the new century have demonstrated that disturbance complexes including drought, insect epidemics, and landscape-level, high-severity fire will be stressing and in some places, type converting dry, western U.S. conifer forests.”

USFS forest planners ought to take this into account when looking at desired future conditions.

Abstract:

With the increasing frequency and severity of altered disturbance regimes in dry, western U.S. forests, treatments promoting resilience have become a management objective but have been difficult to define or operationalize. Many reconstruction studies of these forests when they had active fire regimes have documented very low tree densities before the onset of fire suppression. Building on ecological theory and recent studies, we suggest that this historic forest structure promoted resilience by minimizing competition which in turn supported vigorous tree growth. To assess these historic conditions for management practices, we calculated a widely-used measure of competition, relative stand density index (SDI), for two extensive historical datasets and compared those to contemporary forest conditions. Between 1911 and 2011, tree densities on average increased by six to seven fold while average tree size was reduced by 50%. Relative SDI for historical forests was 23–28% of maximum, in the ranges considered ‘free of’ (<25%) to ‘low’ competition (25–34%). In contrast, most (82–95%) contemporary stands were in the range of ‘full competition’ (35–59%) or ‘imminent mortality’ (≥60%). Historical relative SDI values suggest that treatments for restoring forest resilience may need to be much more intensive then the current focus on fuels reduction. With the contemporary increase in compounding stresses such as drought, bark beetles, and high-severity wildfire, resilience in frequent-fire forests may hinge on creating stands with significantly lower densities and minimal competition. Current management practices often prescribe conditions that maintain full competition to guide development of desired forest conditions. Creating stands largely free of competition would require a fundamental rethinking of how frequent-fire forests can be managed for resilience.