The Smokey Wire : National Forest News and Views
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I wonder who pushed Trump to OK this….
Trump administration proposes expanding logging in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest
The U.S. Forest Service said it would publish a draft environmental impact statement this week that, if enacted, would exempt the Tongass from the 2001 roadless rule.
Nothing new, but how does Hansen get published so often?
From Nick Smith’s Healthy Forests, Healthy Communities email today… I don’t have an LA Times subscription, so can’t get the text.
Chad Hanson: California’s clear-cutting project in the Rim fire area is setting up the region for another tragedy (LA Times)
During hot, dry and windy conditions last November, the Camp fire devastated the towns of Paradise and Concow in the northern Sierra Nevada, ultimately claiming at least 85 lives and destroying thousands of homes. The tragedy was a wake-up call regarding the increasing risks to vulnerable communities stemming from the human-caused climate crisis. But forest fire behavior is complex, and multiple factors affect fire severity. In addition to high regional temperatures and aridity, the Camp fire was fueled by persistent forest mismanagement.
From the Billings Gazette:
In denying the request to halt the project as the lawsuit plays out, Christensen found that the alliance and council waited too long to file its lawsuit. Citing issues finding legal counsel, the lawsuit and request to temporarily halt the project came after logging and other activities had begun. But the delay “undercut their claim of imminent harm,” the judge ruled.
“Being experienced environmental litigants, plaintiffs should have known of the project and its impending timeline in the spring,” Christensen wrote. “Ground operations began in late June and early July. Although Plaintiffs could have filed suit when Helena Hunters did in mid-March, they waited three months to file and then another two months to seek emergency relief. The delay of even a few months – significant months in terms of project implementation – is a significant delay in the life of a timber sale operation.”
Christensen further found that the alliance and council did not fully allege harm to grizzly bears if the project proceeds during trial.
“Plaintiffs do not assert that grizzly bears or their habitat are likely to be irreparably harmed if the project is allowed to continue during the pendency of this litigation,” the judge wrote. “Nor can the court find evidence of irreparable harm to the species, given that the Ten Mile Project is located in a grizzly bear linkage zone (which is critical to the species survival in the long term) but the project’s impacts are alleged to cause only short term.”
NY Times, October 8, 2019:
Conservationists worry that the popularity of recreational mountain biking and e-bikes in public lands leads to unsafe conditions for humans, as well as for bears and other wildlife.
The article begins with an account of a mtn. biker killed by a grizzly:
Mr. Treat, an avid mountain biker, was zipping along at about 25 miles an hour through dense forest near Glacier National Park in the middle of a summer afternoon when he collided with a large male grizzly bear.
And mentions efforts to stop two ultramarathons in the Flathead National Forest.
Vast tracts of public land in the West have become favorite haunts of a growing number of mountain bikers, exploring wild areas for recreation. The Trump administration recently allowed e-bikes, or electric bikes, to be used on some trails under the jurisdiction of the Interior Department where bicycles are allowed.
The increasing popularity of trail biking has brought to the fore some of the inherent conflicts in the uses of public land — natural regions or playgrounds. And while the growth of tourism may help local businesses, the forays into deeper parts of the forests by more and more people are encroaching on wildlife.
Mechanized mountain bikes and e-bikes, especially at higher speeds, are incompatible with hiking, hunting, and bird and wildlife watching, some argue. Safety is also a concern. Some mountain bikers revel at bombing down trails at 20 or 30 miles per hour on single-track trails that hikers also frequent.
And biologists like Dr. Servheen who have spent decades studying grizzlies offer reminders about protecting the bears and other wildlife that unwittingly share their territory with more people and more mechanized vehicles.
In its report on Mr. Treat’s fatal accident, the interagency committee concluded: “The bear apparently had no time to move to avoid the collision. At a speed of 20-25 miles per hour, there were only one-to-two seconds between rounding the curve, the victim seeing the bear in the trail and impacting the bear.”
Folks, I’m looking into USFS partnerships with states, counties, NGOs, etc. For now, I’m focusing on roads. For example, Gila County, Arizona, maintains ~500 miles of roads, mostly unpaved, on the Tonto NF. Are you aware of any other road-maintenance partnerships? Reply here or to me directly at [email protected]. — Steve Wilent
Our Matthew Koehler is a coauthor on an essay on the Missoula Current: “Logging drives carbon emissions from U.S. forests, escalates climate crisis,” by Danna Smith, Chad Hanson and Matthew Koehler, October 2, 2019:
“To effectively mitigate climate change, we must stop burning carbon for fuel and greatly increase forest protection. If we take ambitious steps to protect vastly more of our forests from industrial logging, we can avoid emissions while also actively absorbing large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere and storing it back on land in the forest where it belongs.”
This is a carbon-central viewpoint that we’ve debated here over the years.
A new publication from two professors, Paul Catanzaro, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Anthony D’Amato, University of Vermont, offers a balanced perspective: “Forest Carbon: An essential natural solution to climate change.”
“To understand the full role of forests in the global carbon cycle, it is critical to consider both the amount of carbon stored in forest products and the amount of carbon that is saved when wood is used in place of more carbon-intensive materials, such as steel and concrete (i.e., substitution).”
Here’s an item that caught my eye in Mike Archer’s Wildfire News of the Day email today:
Wildfire NOTD subscriber Katie Lighthall, Coordinator for the Western Regional Strategy Committee (http://wildfireinthewest.blogspot.com), sent along their latest newsletter.
Demonstrations of Cohesive Wildland Fire Strategy in the West – Newsletter #66 https://mailchi.mp/5abe3d9605b5/news-cohesive-strategy-west-2418125?e=05ef71fab4
From the Cohesive Wildland Fire Strategy newsletter:
Oregon is the latest state to enter into a Shared Stewardship agreement with the US Forest Service to collectively set priorities and increase the scope and scale of critical forest treatments that support communities and improve forest conditions. In addition to the Oregon agreement signed this week, in recent months Idaho, Montana, Washington and Utah have signed on to these historical agreements that allow for mutual prioritization and implementation of landscape-scale projects for forest and watershed health, timber values and catastrophic wildfire prevention without the conflict of boundary lines. The agreements also allow for the use of new tools and technology such as the Scenario Investment Planning tool that helps land managers assess where investments will have the best outcomes based on specific priorities and achievement rates.
The Scenario Investment Planning Project (SIPP) web site says:
The scenario planning project is a US Forest Service initiative to improve investment strategies in landscape treatments. The tool will help explore tradeoffs and assess progress towards nationally identified priorities and targets. The tool fills a gap in current planning by providing a way to understand how priorities such as reducing wildfire impacts to communities at the national scale lead to outcomes on the ground. This project is integrating existing Forest Service models and data into a simulation framework to explore system-wide management scenarios and associated tradeoffs. The system will provide a method to analyze tradeoffs among land treatment investment strategies aimed at improving forest conditions and reducing wildfire risk. In contrast to typical assessments of forest conditions, this framework provides a way to optimize treatments at the stand scale to meet larger scale objectives and constraints (Watersheds, Forests, Regions), providing a linkage between national policy and on-the-ground implementation. This interdisciplinary project brings together scientists from landscape planning, fire ecology, operations research, and economics, to build linkages between science and operations that heretofore have not existed.
The SIPP website has lots of background info and a story map.
FYI….
Media contact:
[email protected]
202-205-1134
www.fs.fed.us
News Release
USDA Forest Service proposes changes to address land management challenges
WASHINGTON – September 23 This week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service will publish proposed changes to two regulations to implement new authorities the Forest Service received through the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018—also known as the 2018 Farm Bill—and the 2018 Consolidated Appropriations Act. The legislation gives the USDA Forest Service direction and new tools to improve forest conditions, services, and safety on and around national forests and grasslands. The Forest Service is proposing several regulatory changes to use these new tools and authorities. The proposed regulations will be open for public comment for 60 days following their publication in the Federal Register.
“These new authorities help us face land management challenges by accelerating and broadening management efforts to work across boundaries” said Chief Vicki Christiansen. “These regulatory reforms represent a small part of the wealth of tools and authorities granted to us by the 2018 Farm Bill and the 2018 Consolidated Appropriations Act but will undoubtedly help us in our mission to improve the value and benefits of national forests.”
The proposed changes to the two rules are as follows:
The proposed rule regarding Vegetation Management in Utility Corridors would establish options and incentives for more effective and collaborative vegetation management between the Forest Service and utilities. These utilities operate more than 3,000 transmission lines in and around national forests and grasslands. Management focus would be to remove dead and dying trees that threaten these transmission lines and power structures. Removing these hazards would reduce fire risk as well as increase the reliability of energy delivered to more than 70 million American homes.
The proposed rule regarding Communication Sites Management aims to expedite application processes for individuals and companies that want to build communication sites on national forests and grasslands. These changes would help connect rural communities as well as improve customer service to those applying for and operating under special use permits for communication sites.
Communication sites on national forests and grasslands supports more than 10,000 wireless uses. These sites support critical communications, including emergency services, railroads, utility companies, and companies that provide personal communications services as well as television and radio broadcasts.
The proposed rules can be found on the Forest Service website and in the Federal Register at https://federalregister.gov/d/2019-20741 for Vegetation Management in Utility Corridors and https://federalregister.gov/d/2019-20742 fr Communication Sites Management.
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Chaining of pinyon-juniper forests is back in the news. Today’s Greenwire:
Heather Richards, E&E News reporter
Published: Tuesday, September 17, 2019
Environmental groups have upended the Interior Department’s plans to cut down most of a scraggly forest covering about 30,000 acres of southern Utah within the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
The Interior Board of Land Appeals ruled yesterday that the Bureau of Land Management failed to consider how cutting down pinyon and Utah juniper trees would affect migratory birds. The appeals board also found BLM’s plan to use “non-native” seed — a part of its habitat improvement plans — was a mistake, as it conflicted with the agency’s management guidelines.
The board bucked other complaints in the appeal, such as conservationists’ argument that BLM failed to properly account for a climate change impact from bringing down the forest. That argument has been fairly effective for environmental groups in recent months for protests and lawsuits of oil and gas development on public land.
National Geographic a couple of weeks ago (with a misleading photo of a lone pinyon pine growing from a rock like a bonzai tree):
The U.S. is moving forward with a plan to create new cattle pasture and prevent fires despite what scientists say is meager environmental review.
Machine tracks in the sand frame the site near Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a harbinger of its vanishing solitude. The federal government plans to remove an unprecedented number of trees here, it says to reduce fire risk, improve habitat for greater sage grouse, and increase forage for cattle and a world-renowned trophy-hunting deer herd.
And it plans to do it fast. The Bureau of Land Management failed to conduct a thorough environmental analysis of the project that considered the impacts of cutting trees on the climate, said scientists who appealed to a federal review board to stop it. If approved, the effort could define how the nation’s most sensitive public lands are managed for a generation.
We’ve discussed this issue here, such as:
This article from a Northern California newspaper highlights a big problem for the state: with just 25 mills, there are few options to processing logs from USFS and other projects, and transportation costs are often prohibitive.
The Camp Fire left a staggering million trees dead or dying — at least — and the logs have almost nowhere to go.
Because Butte County has a dearth of local sawmills and biomass power plants, the high costs of transporting logs hours away is hampering the removal of burned trees. That raises the hazard for those returning to the burn scar: there are at least 400,000 trees at a high risk of falling in Paradise and Magalia, according to a survey by Sierra Timber Services. So local officials are now considering a slate of options to process the trees locally, from restarting a biomass power plant in Oroville to building a wood-powered heating and cooling system in Paradise.