Steve Wilent

Steve Wilent, a forester, is Director, Sustainability Communications, for the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI). Steve's posts here are not made on behalf of SFI or any other organization. All opinions he expresses on Smokey Wire are his, not necessarily those of anyone else. Steve previously served as Editor, The Forestry Source, the newspaper of The Society of American Foresters (SAF, www.eforester.org). He's been a member of the SAF since 1982. He also teaches forestry at Mt. Hood Community College, Gresham, Oregon.

New Book: Burn Scars

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This is due to be available in September from OSU Press. It’s by Char Miller. Very timely!

Burn Scars

A Documentary History of Fire Suppression, from Colonial Origins to the Resurgence of Cultural Burning

The first documentary history of wildfire management in the United States, Burn Scars probes the long efforts to suppress fire, beginning with the Spanish invasion of California in the eighteenth century and continuing through the US Forest Service’s relentless nationwide campaign in the twentieth century. The Forest Service argued that suppression was critical for good forest management, especially but not exclusively in the American West. In recent years, suppression has come under increasing scrutiny as a contributing factor to our current era of megafires.

In Burn Scars, historian Char Miller assembles a collection of primary sources focused on debates over “light burning” (as prescribed or controlled burning was called). These historic documents show that not only was fire suppression controversial, but that it was also driven by explicitly racist and colonial beliefs. Yet the suppression paradigm contained within it the seeds of its destruction: Indigenous people continued to use fire as did non-Indigenous land managers. By the 1920s, scientific evidence was beginning to reveal that fire was essential for regenerating grasslands and forests; by the 1930s even the Forest Service was testing fire’s ecological benefits.

Burn Scars focuses on the burning debates of the early twentieth century, but Miller also provides evidence of a powerful counternarrative emerging from southern non-Indigenous foresters who used fire to revive longleaf pine ecosystems. The volume begins and ends with contributions from Indigenous practitioners discussing the long history and resurgent practice of cultural burning as part of traditional stewardship.

About the authorChar Miller is W. M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis at Pomona College. He has written and edited numberous books, including Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism, Fluid Arguments: Water in the American West, and Deep in the Heart of San Antonio: Land and Life in South Texas.

Plans for an Ailing Forest Include Logging. Environmentalists Object.

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In the New York Times today:

Plans for an Ailing Forest Include Logging. Environmentalists Object.

Officials in Oregon say they need to cut trees, including some healthy ones. The reaction shows how complex land management has become as forest health declines.

Excerpts:

Across a patch of the Pacific Northwest, one of North America’s most important tree species is dying at an alarming rate. This spring, as in the past several years, the needles on Douglas firs are yellowing, turning red and then dropping to the ground in forests across southwestern Oregon.

Experts blame a combination of factors, including insect attacks, drought and increased temperatures caused by climate change. Decades of fire suppression have exacerbated problems by disrupting the natural balance of ecosystems.

“The droughts and heat and climate change are killing trees widely, and there’s no clear way to put that genie back in the bottle,” said Rob Jackson, an ecologist at the Doerr School of Sustainability at Stanford University who is researching the ways climate change affects forests and grasslands. “We are priming our forests to die.”

…

Dominick DellaSala, the chief scientist at Wild Heritage, a forest protection advocacy organization, has visited the forests with Mr. Ruediger to witness the Douglas fir die-off and also said he remained suspicious about the agency’s motivation. “What the agencies will do, they’ll cherry pick the science to fit the desired outcome,” he said.

“You’ve got to tackle climate change, because that’s a lot of what’s driving this,” Dr. DellaSala added. “And you’ve got to reduce the pressures on forests through these kinds of logging events.”

“Green Glacier” Encroaches on Prairies

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This isn’t a USFS planning topic, but interesting nonetheless. According to an NPR story yesterday and on other dates, a “blanket of shrublands and dense juniper [eastern red cedar] woods gobbling up grassland leads to wildfires with towering flames that dwarf those generated in prairie fires.” In part, this is due to eliminating Indigenous fire-based land management.

Trees And Shrubs Are Burying Prairies Of The Great Plains

Could ‘Science Courts’ Help Build Public Trust?

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This essay in Undark describes a “a citizens’ jury” designed “to ask whether the U.K. government should allow scientists to edit the DNA of human embryos in order to treat serious genetic conditions. Convening a jury was a non-traditional approach to involving the public in decision-making on a complicated scientific topic that could affect public policy.” Such a “science court” might help the public understand forest health/resilience treatments and could perhaps increase the forestry community’s social license to actively manage national forests.

 

 

The world is obsessed with forests’ climate benefits. Here’s the problem.

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Interesting essay in Grist. Not directly applicable to national forests, but there are some insights here to consider when pondering call for setting aside national forest lands as “climate forests.”

The world is obsessed with forests’ climate benefits. Here’s the problem.
People depend on forests for food and income. Offset projects can kick them out.

“The conversation about how to manage forests “has been overtaken by the climate discussion,” said Daniela Kleinschmit, an author of the report and the vice president of the International Union of Forest Research Organizations, the network behind the research. The result? Indigenous peoples are getting pushed out of their lands because of carbon offset projects. Native grasslands are getting turned into forests, even though grasslands themselves are huge, overlooked reservoirs of carbon. And offset projects in forests, more often than not, fail to achieve all of the emissions benefits their backers had promised.”

 

USFS Climate Action Tracker and Old Growth Report

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A link in Nick Smith’s email today goes to a press release about the USFS’s Climate Action Tracker, which I have not yet explored. The release also mentions “A revised Mature and Old growth Definition and Inventory revised report released today has new charts that include lands managed by both the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service.”

From the exec summary:

Based on the working definitions used in this initial inventory, Forest Service and BLM lands collectively contain 33.1 +/- 0.4 million acres1 of old-growth and 80.8 +/- 0.5 million acres of mature forest. Old-growth forest represents 19 percent and mature forest another 45 percent of all forested land managed by the two agencies. This initial national-scale inventory was conducted by applying the old-growth and mature working definitions to Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) field plot data.

Like all of the Nation’s forests, old-growth and mature forests are threatened by climate change and associated stressors. The initial inventory and definitions for old-growth and mature forests are part of an overarching climate-informed strategy to enhance carbon sequestration and address climate-related impacts to forests, including insects, disease, wildfire risk, and drought. Initial inventory results will be used to analyze threats to these forests, which will allow consideration of appropriate climate-informed forest management, which is also required by E.O. 14072.

NY Times: They Shoot Owls in California, Don’t They?

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Article in the4 NY Times today. I hope this link works — I’m allowed to “gift” articles….

They Shoot Owls in California, Don’t They?

An audacious federal plan to protect the spotted owl would eradicate hundreds of thousands of barred owls in the coming years.

Excerpt:

Crammed into marginal territories and bedeviled by wildfires, northern spotted owl populations have declined by up to 80 percent over the last two decades. As few as 3,000 remain on federal lands, compared with 11,000 in 1993. In the wilds of British Columbia, the northern spotted owl has vanished; only one, a female, remains. If the trend continues, the northern spotted owl could become the first owl subspecies in the United States to go extinct.

In a last-ditch effort to rescue the northern spotted owl from oblivion and protect the California spotted owl population, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed culling a staggering number of barred owls across a swath of 11 to 14 million acres in Washington, Oregon and Northern California, where barred owls — which the agency regards as invasive — are encroaching. The lethal management plan calls for eradicating up to half a million barred owls over the next 30 years, or 30 percent of the population over that time frame. The owls would be dispatched using the cheapest and most efficient methods, from large-bore shotguns with night scopes to capture and euthanasia.

How does USAJOBS work?

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Question about how USAJOBS works. A forestry student of mine applied for a technician job with a federal agency. The student was very well qualified, has a related associate’s degree, relevant work experience, and had done related volunteer work for an NGO (a watershed council) in the same watershed, plus had the president of the NGO as a reference. The student also reached out to the agency’s staffer who would make the hiring decision and was well received.  The student now has received an email from “usastaffingoffice” saying that “You are tentatively eligible for this series/grade combination based on your self-rating of your qualifications.” But: “You have not been referred to the hiring manager” for the position, and “If you were not referred, you were not found to be among the most highly qualified for the position.” Naturally, this very well qualified applicant is disappointed not to be selected for an interview with a real person.

Questions:

Did a human being evaluate the student’s application at any point? Or was it completely automated?

Can hiring managers request that USAJOBS re-evaluate the student’s application?

Study: Forest treatments that reduce surface fuels decrease subsequent wildfire severity

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New open-access paper in Forest Ecology and Management. A meta-analysis of 220 previous papers. Thanks again to Nick Smith!

Tamm review: A meta-analysis of thinning, prescribed fire, and wildfire effects on subsequent wildfire severity in conifer dominated forests of the Western US

Abstract

Increased understanding of how mechanical thinning, prescribed burning, and wildfire affect subsequent wildfire severity is urgently needed as people and forests face a growing wildfire crisis. In response, we reviewed scientific literature for the US West and completed a meta-analysis that answered three questions: (1) How much do treatments reduce wildfire severity within treated areas? (2) How do the effects vary with treatment type, treatment age, and forest type? (3) How does fire weather moderate the effects of treatments? We found overwhelming evidence that mechanical thinning with prescribed burning, mechanical thinning with pile burning, and prescribed burning only are effective at reducing subsequent wildfire severity, resulting in reductions in severity between 62% and 72% relative to untreated areas. In comparison, thinning only was less effective – underscoring the importance of treating surface fuels when mitigating wildfire severity is the management goal. The efficacy of these treatments did not vary among forest types assessed in this study and was high across a range of fire weather conditions. Prior wildfire had more complex impacts on subsequent wildfire severity, which varied with forest type and initial wildfire severity. Across treatment types, we found that effectiveness of treatments declined over time, with the mean reduction in wildfire severity decreasing more than twofold when wildfire occurred greater than 10 years after initial treatment. Our meta-analysis provides up-to-date information on the extent to which active forest management reduces wildfire severity and facilitates better outcomes for people and forests during future wildfire events.