Steve Wilent

OSU press release: “CORVALLIS, Ore. – Oregon could eliminate an estimated 17 percent of carbon emissions from its forest ecosystems in the next century by increasing the amount of forested area and lengthening times between harvests, according to a new study from the University of Idaho, Oregon State University and EcoSpatial Services LLC.”

The full text of the study is online and free, from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The authors consider substitution:

“While product substitution reduces the overall forest sector emissions, it cannot offset the losses incurred by frequent harvest and losses associated with product transportation, manufacturing, use, disposal, and decay. Methods for calculating substitution benefits should be improved in other regional assessments.”

Just received a press release from the Forest Resources Association:

Omnibus Legislative Overview- (Passed House awaiting a Senate vote and the Presidents signature)

H-2B Cap Relief

 We have succeeded in attaining nearly the same language as last year related to raising the cap of the H-2B program.

·         The bill allows the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Secretary of Labor, the authority to raise the H-2B cap when he determines that there is an economic need. 

·         It limits the total number of H-2B workers to that may enter the U.S. during fiscal 2018 to 129,547, the number of new and returning H-2B workers admitted to the U.S. in fiscal 2007(the highest year).

·         Once the bill becomes law, we must work with the Administration to encourage the Secretary of Homeland Security to implement this provision more quickly than last year and to consider authorizing a much larger number of visas than they did last year. 

Fire Funding/Federal Forest Management Reform

 ·         The $1.3 billion FY 18 omnibus spending deal includes provisions that would establish a fund of more than $2 billion a year, which would increase modestly over a 10-year period. The fund could be tapped when the cost of wildfires exceeds the 10-year average cost of wildfires, which would be set at the 2015 level — an approach pushed by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mike Crapo (R-Idaho).

·         That arrangement wouldn’t take effect until 2020, however, meaning current law would remain in effect through 2019.

·         On the forest management side, the deal includes categorical exclusions from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) for hazardous fuels reduction on areas up to 3,000 acres. Lawmakers also opened the way to more 20-year stewardship contracts, in which the Forest Service collaborates with states on forest management projects.

·         Timber companies would also see an easier process for repairing and rebuilding access roads in some areas of national forests.

·         The agreement also includes language to limit the effect of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ 2015 ruling in Cottonwood Environmental Law Center v. Forest Service. That case forced the agency to consult more closely with the Fish and Wildlife Service on forest projects that might affect endangered species.

Biomass Carbon Neutrality

The wording maintaining the definition of forest biomass as carbon neutral was approved and extended through September 30, 2018.   This is good, but we continue to seek language that will preserve the concept of biomass carbon neutrality in perpetuity.  

What in an “object”?

Greenwire reports on controversy over a ~5,000 square-mile marine monument designated by the Obama admin: “Judge restarts lawsuit over Atlantic monument.”

Pacific Legal Foundation attorney Jonathan Wood: “Fishermen have waited a year for the government to respond to their lawsuit challenging a clear case of Antiquities Act abuse — locking fishermen out of an area of ocean as large as Connecticut.”

The 2016 proclamation states that “it is in the public interest to preserve the marine environment, including the waters and submerged lands, in the area to be known as the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, for the care and management of the objects of historic and scientific interest therein;”

Is this monument an “object”?

The proclamation cites the Antiquities Act, which “authorizes the President, in his discretion, to declare by public proclamation historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest that are situated upon the lands owned or controlled by the Federal Government to be national monuments, and to reserve as a part thereof parcels of land, the limits of which shall be confined to the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected;”

Interesting Greenwire article: “The green movement lacks diversity. She’s here to help.”

At the Sierra Club, the nation’s oldest environmental organization, the senior staff is around 92 percent white.

Nellis Kennedy-Howard is on a mission to improve diversity at the Sierra Club and across the mainstream environmental movement.

The 36-year-old is the organization’s first-ever director of equity, inclusion and justice. When she took the job in fall 2016, she was counting on the Sierra Club to take those issues seriously.

….

This E&E News article sounds like it could apply to USFS and BLM cases. I’m not sure if it sets precedent or not. The 6th Circuit’s decision is here.

Court dismisses NEPA challenge to Mich. trail

Amanda Reilly, E&E News reporter
Published: Friday, February 23, 2018

Citizens who don’t meaningfully participate at the planning stage of a federal action forfeit their ability to later challenge the environmental review of that action, a federal court ruled today.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed claims by a group of local residents challenging the National Park Service’s review of a scenic trail through Michigan’s Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.

The plaintiffs can’t bring their claims because they didn’t raise their objections when NPS issued a revised plan for the trail, Judge John Rogers wrote for the court.

….

Interesting open-access paper in the journal Land Use Policy: “Navigating social forestry – A street-level perspective on National Forest management in the US Pacific Northwest.”

Highlights:

• US National Forest management takes place within a vetocratic institutional setting.
• Non-agency actors both constrain and enable forest management.
• A mismatch exists between official policy objectives and institutional regime.
• Resulting decisions are sub-optimal for reaching management objectives.

Anyone on this blog going? Note that “The meeting is open to the public and grant applicants are encouraged to attend.” Press release:

The 2018 Collaborative Forest Restoration Program (CFRP) Technical Advisory Panel will meet April 30 – May 4 at the Hyatt Place Albuquerque Uptown, 6901 Arvada Ave., NE. The final number of days the meeting will last will depend on the number of grant applications we received by February 27. An agenda for the meeting will be posted on the CFRP Website the first week of March. The purpose of the meeting will be to review the 2018 CFRP grant applications and make recommendations to the Secretary of Agriculture on which ones best meet the program objectives. The meeting is open to the public and grant applicants are encouraged to attend.

For more information on the Collaborative Forest Restoration Program Technical Advisory Panel, please contact myself or Walter Dunn at [email protected] 505-842-3425.

Amanda Montoya
Program Specialist
Forest Service
Southwestern Region
p: 505-842-3176
[email protected]
333 Broadway SE
Albuquerque, NM 87102
www.fs.fed.us

FYI, webinar coming up on March 15: Collaboration and Cooperation in Protecting Resources and Ecosystems. Includes presenters from multiple federal agencies.

This article from the Spokane Spokesman-Review, “Colville National Forest poised to set records as both timber harvest, restoration increase,” notes that “The forest is expected to yield 120 million board feet of forest products in 2018, compared to 70 million board feet in 2017, said Colville forest supervisor Rodney Smoldon.”

“Compare that to the two years before 2017, when the forest’s output didn’t reach 50 million board feet; or since the late 1990’s, when it struggled to offer 40 million board feet per year.

“Those advances haven’t come overnight, and have spanned several White House administrations and leadership changes in Congress.

“Smoldon said he credits the advances to a mixture of local collaboration and use of innovative management tools Congress has provided, including those in the 2014 Farm Bill. Those resources were motivated, in part, by hopes of expanding forest restoration work necessary to reduce the risk of wildfire in northeast Washington.”

Lots to discuss in the article, including the words of Mike Garrity, executive director of the Wild Rockies Alliance: “corporate welfare.” His group lost in court, so far, on a challenge of the project.

Jeff Juehl, national forest chair of Upper Columbia River group of the Sierra Club, raises a good point: that the Forest Service doesn’t have the budget to monitor the contractors doing the work (Vaagen Bros.). Does the Northeast Washington Forestry Coalition do some monitoring?

FYI, I picked a year at random to check past volumes — 1988, when the Colville cut 127 million BF.

“The Unsolved Mystery of the Marbled Murrelet,” is from Hakai Magazine, which “explores science, society, and the environment from a coastal perspective.” It also recently was republished in High Country News.

“It was partially with the murrelets’ dire straits in mind that broad restrictions were placed on old-growth logging across 9.7 million hectares of federal land in the United States under the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan; individual states also curtailed the harvest on their lands to a lesser extent. In British Columbia, more than a quarter of nearly two million remaining hectares of suitable murrelet nesting habitat is on protected land.

“But the murrelets’ numbers haven’t climbed in response. The combined California, Oregon, and Washington population, with fewer than 20,000 individuals, continues to decline by as much as four percent per year. In British Columbia, where there may be closer to 100,000 murrelets, the population is declining by 1.6 percent per year. Even in Alaska, home to the greatest number of murrelets, scientists believe the population has declined by 71 percent since the 1990s, from around one million birds down to 270,000.”

Interesting points: “The terrestrial threats are as well understood as any, but marine threats are a complete mystery.”

And: “We strongly suspect that jays and crows can have a significant impact on murrelet eggs and chicks,” Rivers says. But why are jays and crows able to find the nests? It could be because the big trees murrelets use are too close to a forest’s edge, where jays and crows are more numerous.