Steve Wilent

From Regulatory Review: “Can the President Modify a Monument?”

Professor John Ruple argues that “Congress never granted the President authority to reduce a monument’s size. Neither the Act itself nor any legislative hearings leading to the Act’s passage mention altering a monument once created.”

Much of the article focuses on Ruple’s stance. But the last paragraph:

“Other scholars, such as Jonathan Wood of the Pacific Legal Foundation, contend that an argument like Ruple’s is too formalistic and would have drastic implications for the administrative state. Wood argues that a President commonly amends orders and rules put in place by a predecessor. Not allowing this, Wood argues, would make any one President too powerful.”

We’ve discussed this issue in the past, such as here:

Questions about FS national monument shrinkage

The 204 Cow Fire in eastern Oregon started yesterday, 8/29, and has burned 5,516 acres since then, mostly on the Malheur National Forest. From InciWeb:

Fuels Involved:
* Timber (Litter and Understory)
* Brush (2 feet)

Lower elevations mostly lodgepole pine with a large amount of dead and down. Mid-slope mixed conifer with dead standing and punky down wood. High elevations old fire scars with sparse fuels.

Here’s an image from the USFS, an example of the “mostly lodgepole pine with a large amount of dead and down” in the area — a tough fire to fight and one that, if left alone, would likely be stand replacing. This is not a pure lodgepole stand — lots of true fir, Doug-fir, etc.

From today’s edition:

Interior Secretary David Bernhardt issued an order yesterday that will require the National Park Service to open nonmotorized trails to e-bikes — a move that drew quick fire from green groups.

Under the long-awaited decision, e-bikes — electric bicycles — will be regulated the same way as human-powered bikes.

“E-bikes shall be allowed where other types of bicycles are allowed; and E-bikes shall not be allowed where other types of bicycles are prohibited,” Bernhardt said in his order.

With e-bikes growing rapidly in popularity, Bernhardt and other supporters say the order will make public lands more accessible to many Americans, including older people and those with disabilities who rely on them.

…

Here is a fascinating paper by Scott L. Stephens and 8 other authors from BioScience, February 2018 (open access):

Drought, Tree Mortality, and Wildfire in Forests Adapted to Frequent Fire

Stephens is a professor of fire science in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. He’s director of the university’s Fire Science Laboratory.

The authors suggest that “For long-term adaptation to climate change, we highlight the importance of moving beyond triage of dead and dying trees to making “green” (live) forests more resilient.” The focus on the central and southern Sierra Nevada, but the paper also applies to other areas of the west.

The recent massive tree mortality has many implications for the future of FF forests [forests adapted to frequent fire] and the ecological goods and services they provide to society (recreation, wildlife habitat, water storage, timber, aesthetics, carbon storage, etc.). It could be surmised that because FF forests have seen such dramatic increases in tree density relative to historical conditions, the bark-beetle-caused tree mortality could be helping to produce more resilient forest conditions (we define resilience as the ability of a forest to maintain characteristic structural components, such as large trees, and broad functionality following disturbance and/or chronic stressors). The actual outcome, however, will likely be forests that are very different from their historically resilient condition.

Also interesting: a sidebar entitled “The contrasting impacts of drought: Frequent fire forests in the western United States versus northwest Mexico.” The forests of the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir (SSPM) “have not seen the dramatic tree densification as occurred in California FF forests from fire suppression and logging.”

After the drought ended, a wildfire burned in the northern SSPM in 2003, but only 20% of the trees in this forest died from the combined effects of a severe 4-year drought followed by a wildfire (figure 4; Stephens et al. 2008), demonstrating considerable resilience to drought, tree-killing insects, and wildfire. FF-adapted forests in California and elsewhere once likely possessed similar resilience, which has been lost in the last 100 years.

I agree with the authors’ conclusion:

Many of our FF forests have failed to receive the very management that could increase resilience to disturbances exacerbated by climate change, such as the application of prescribed fire and mechanical restoration treatments (Stephens et al. 2016). Recent tree mortality raises serious questions about our willingness to address the underlying causes. If our society doesn’t like the outcomes from recent fires and extensive drought-induced tree mortality in FF forests, then we collectively need to move beyond the status quo. Working to increase the pace and scale of beneficial fire and mechanical treatments rather than focusing on continued fire suppression would be an important step forward.

From the USFS Pacific Northwest Research Station:

Implementing the 2012 forest planning rule: Best available scientific information in forest planning assessments

More fuel for our continuing discussion of forest restoration (and active management in general), CO2, and wildfires. Mentions the USFS’s Four Foerst Restoration Initiative. Note that “simulations show that despite early decreases in the ecosystem’s stored carbon, a rapid restoration plan increases total carbon storage by 11-20%.”

More information for our discussions of carbon and forests. From Penn State:

“Forests in Yosemite National Park hold more carbon today than they did 120 years ago despite burning in a severe wildfire in 2013, according to a Penn State-led team of researchers.”

Yes, but fires — such as the Rim Fire — burned the large amounts of fuel that accumulated in those 120 years and gave off huge amounts of CO2.

“Fire exclusion has probably allowed a lot of carbon to accumulate in the western United States,” said Lucas Harris, a postdoctoral scholar in Penn State’s Department of Geography. “But in the long term it’s not a good ecological or carbon storage strategy because it greatly increases the risk of the forest burning up and killing all the trees.”

The researchers also found that carbon storage across the research site was evenly distributed in the years before fire exclusion. The fire exclusion policy, however, encouraged the growth of less-fire-tolerant tree species that prefer shade and wetter conditions. These trees shifted the concentration of forest carbon to valley bottoms and areas with wetter soils. The Rim Fire burned less severely in these areas and reinforced the geographic shift in forest carbon storage.

“Thinking about carbon storage in terms of where it actually is at the landscape scale is meaningful if you want to manage for carbon storage going into the future,” said Harris. “For a land manager looking at where they might want to use a prescribed fire to reduce surface fuels, or where they might want to go through and thin the forest to reduce fire hazard, having this spatial perspective can be really valuable.”

The article is here. I think it’s public. Quotes Andy Stahl.

The Forest Service is letting a wildfire burn near the Grand Canyon, and fire experts are thrilled.

Officials are allowing the Castle Fire to burn roughly 19,000 acres of Arizona’s Kaibab National Forest, saying the fire will clear out dead vegetation and make the ecosystem healthier. Experts applauded that decision, saying it’s an overdue pivot from the agency’s history of heavy suppression.

“The Forest Service has been slow to make that transition, and even slower to talk about it,” said Andy Stahl, executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics.

As climate change exacerbates fire weather, officials are also grappling with the 20th century’s legacy of aggressive suppression. The absence of fire left forests overloaded with fuel, meaning future blazes would be more intense. Some experts call it the Smokey Bear effect.

The Forest Service is backing off full-scale suppression, Stahl said, but officials have been reluctant to communicate that until now. Public pressure to extinguish fires anywhere near settlements remains strong.

…

The Forest Service has highlighted the fire’s ecological benefits throughout the blaze, something observers say used to be an afterthought.

“The fire has burned through … a significant amount of dead and down trees and some mixed conifer species. By allowing the wildfire to naturally burn through this area, the ecosystem will become healthier and more resilient,” the agency said in a news release.