Interesting look behind the scenes….

From E&E Daily today….

“Congress risks stirring old political battles by trying to scale back environmental rules in the fight against wildfires.”

But we are not talking about the same types of forest management — thinning and fuels management, rather than clearcutting old-growth, or clearcutting at all.

Wildfire legislation’s NEPA provisions generate divisions

The era of tree-sitting isn’t over yet. This article explains the latest protest:

Environmental group blocks path to timber sale
Cascadia Forest Defenders’ protest halts access near McKenzie Bridge

“Environmental activists ratcheted up their logging protest Monday about 50 miles east of Eugene, suspending a platform 80 feet in the air on a tree and tethering it by a cable to a roadblock that includes two old vehicles.”

A photo shows the group’s roadblock, which includes a pile of small logs and branches, with a large banner strung overhead that reads, “Cutting for Health is a Scam for Wealth.”

The protest is of the Goose Project, on the Willamette National Forest near the community of McKenzie Bridge, Oregon, which has been the subject of appeals and a lawsuit since 2010. It is worth noting that the Goose Project would treat about 2,400 acres (more info below), while there are currently 9 active fires burning on the Willamette totaling 85,400 acres. Some of the fires in the Horse Creek Complex are within a few miles of the community of McKenzie Bridge.

For what it’s worth, the USFS says:

1. What is the Goose Project?
The Goose Project proposes to commercially harvest and reduce fuels on approximately 2,452 acres on the Willamette National Forest near the community of McKenzie Bridge, Oregon. Harvest treatments proposed include thinning, dominant tree release, gap creation, regeneration harvest and skips. Fuels treatments include mechanical treatments, post-harvest underburn, natural fuels underburn, and hazardous fuels treatments.

2. Why is the Goose Project needed?
The Goose Project is needed to provide a sustainable supply of timber products, reduce hazardous fuels in the McKenzie Bridge Wildland Urban Interface (WUI), and actively managed stands to improve stand conditions, diversity, density and structure.

And Cascadia Forest Defenders’s view: “Since 2010, the Goose timber sale proposal has been portrayed to the public at large as a “fire fuels reduction” and “restoration” project. In reality this logging of native forest will only encourage the growth of understory vegetation thus increasing fire fuel loads in the long term. To add insult to injury, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife has given approval to “incidentally take” the lives of 5 listed “Threatened” northern spotted owls.”

For those in or near Missoula, Montana, the forum is to be in the University of Montana’s UC Theater from 7-9 p.m. at on Oct. 24. If you can go, please post your take on the event.

Publisher’s notebook: Treesource forum will move beyond sound bites to analyze 2017 wildfires

More research that shows the value of fuels treatments, and especially treatments that are strategically placed. Text of press release is below. The paper cited is here ($).

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Fighting fires before they spark

UNM research could impact forest management around the world

By Aaron Hilf October 17, 2017

With warm, dry summers comes a deadly caveat for the western United States: wildfires. Scientists say the hot, dry climates found west of the Mississippi, along with decades of fire suppression efforts, are creating a devastating and destructive combination – leading to fires like the ones currently burning in California.

It’s a problem biologists at The University of New Mexico are looking to put a damper on. Now, new research from UNM is giving forest and fire management teams across the country the upper hand in reducing the severity of these events.

“These big fires will always happen,” said Dan Krofcheck, a post-doctoral fellow in UNM’s Department of Biology. “We’re looking at what forest managers can do to minimize the impact these wildfires have on the system.”

The issue has two main components, according to Krofcheck, both stemming from human impact to the environment. Global warming, due to human-caused carbon emissions, has worsened the already hot and dry climate in the most at-risk areas, like California. In addition, aggressive firefighting and fire suppression efforts have left a large amount of fuel, in the form of underbrush, throughout the forests. Together, these two factors lead to massive blazes with the capacity to destroy land, homes and lives.

“For a long time, there’s been this stigma that fire in the landscape is a bad thing. It makes sense, because fire is a destructive process,” says Krofcheck. “But, it’s also an integral part of how these ecosystems evolved and we kind of shut that down through heavy fire suppression activity. The result is that fuel that would have been consumed by frequent fire, builds up and accumulates. Subsequently, when you finally have fire move through an area, after it’s been suppressed for 30, 50, 100 years, you have these massive fires that no longer just consume the understory but they’re actually torching crowns and moving through the tree canopy.”

To combat this, forest managers employ two primary treatment practices. Mechanical thinning is the process of physically removing the thick underbrush with machinery or by hand – a method that is effective but also very expensive. Managers also use prescribed burns to clear areas – using fire, under very strict environmental conditions, to consume excess brush.

The UNM research, ‘Prioritizing forest fuels treatments based on the probability of high-severity fire restores adaptive capacity in Sierran forests,’ recently published in Global Change Biology, examines how to most efficiently use these two methods.

Krofcheck, along with his advisor, UNM Associate Professor Matthew Hurteau, and colleagues from North Carolina State University and the USDA Forest Service, ran forecast simulations using projected climate data in the Dinkey Creek Collaborative Landscape Forest Restoration Project area in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountain Range. In Scenario A, researchers mechanically thinned the entire area that is operationally and legally available – an unrealistically expensive endeavor in practice. Scenario B employed an optimized approach, thinning only the most at-risk portions of land, about two-thirds less than in Scenario A.

“We wanted to find a way to apply these expensive thinning treatments in such a way that we could put as few on the landscape as possible and achieve some comparable outcome, relative to a case where we thinned everything,” said Krofcheck.

After nearly a thousand simulations, the results show that both scenarios reduced the mean fire-severity by as much as 60 percent.

“Even though we thinned about two-thirds less of the forest, we saw the exact same treatment outcomes,” said Krofcheck.

“This research and way of thinking about optimally using your resources, in terms of where you thin, could go a long way in helping these organizations use their dollars most efficiently to achieve their desired outcomes, which is less severe fires,” Hurteau said.

Along with mechanical thinning, both scenarios also heavily depended on fire, either naturally occurring or through prescribed burning, being present in the ecosystem. Researchers say it’s another big takeaway: without fire, no amount of treatment will successfully do the job. It’s something they hope those who live in forested areas will begin to appreciate as a mechanism for stopping devastating wildfire before it breaks out.

Pretty good article (posted here as a PDF) that presents a range of research on the relationship of wildfires and climate change. The author might have added more about other factors, such as fuels management, but did add this paragraph near the end of the article:

“Additionally, wildfires, perhaps more than any other type of natural disaster, are heavily subject to the influence of human land use — the types of vegetation we plant or clear away, how often we allow it to burn, and how we choose to manage fires once they start. These types of decisions could both mitigate or exacerbate the intensity of future fire seasons, the effects of climate change notwithstanding.”

This paper, in the July 2017 edition of the Journal of Forestry, may help us in our discussions of fuel-treatment effectiveness.

“An Evaluation of the Forest Service Hazardous Fuels Treatment Program—Are We Treating Enough to Promote Resiliency or Reduce Hazard?”

The USFS offers this intro:

In the wrong place at the wrong time, wildfires cause damage to ecosystems and threaten homes, communities, and cultural resources. To manage the impact of future wildfire and help restore its natural role in forest ecosystems, land managers often use fuel treatments such as thinning, mowing, and prescribed burning. How well do these treatments work? Ecologist Nicole Vaillant studies fire behavior and fuel treatments, including how effective they are over time. Her work is important in helping land managers assess wildfire risk and compare different fuel treatment strategies. She recently led a study that addresses the question: Are we treating enough of the landscape to compensate for decades of fire suppression?

Vaillant and her coauthor, Elizabeth Reinhardt, evaluated the extent of fuel treatments and wildfire on all lands administered by the Forest Service from 2008 to 2012. They compared these areas with historical wildfire rates and severities; they found that each year only about 45 percent of the area that would have burned historically experienced either characteristic wildfire or fuel treatment. This indicates a “disturbance deficit.” The good news is that 73 percent of the acres burned by wildfire during this period experienced characteristic fire (wildfire at an appropriate severity level for that ecosystem). However, Vaillant’s study also found that the forest type in the highest wildfire hazard class had the lowest percentage of area treated and also the highest proportion of uncharacteristically high-severity wildfire. This suggests that locating more treatments in areas with the highest hazard could improve program effectiveness. This is the first study to intersect the actual footprint of fuel treatments and wildfire with mean fire-return interval and wildfire hazard on a national scale.

From Greenwire… We’ve hashed this over here before, but here’s another go…. The threat of falling timber to firefighters, and the treat of snags falling across fire lines, is not an ecological issue, but one of physical safety and the ability to hold a fire line. I have seen burning snags fall across lines and put fire in the “green.” I’ll bet the FFs on the Chetco Bar fire, which is burning in portions of the 2002 Biscuit Fire and the 1987 Silver Fire, have lots of snags and downed trees to contend with.

Portion of a Greenwire article posted today…. Anyone want to bet that the USFS will issue a similar order?

Citing a need to reduce “paperwork,” the Interior Department has imposed controversial new restrictions on the length of crucial environmental studies.

In a newly revealed Aug. 31 memo, Interior Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt directed that the department’s environmental impact statements “shall not be more than 150 pages or 300 pages for unusually complex projects.”

The memo states it “dovetails” with a presidential executive order focused on infrastructure projects, while adding that it is being issued in the “context of the department’s overall effort to streamline the NEPA process.”

Officials will need high-level approval to exceed the new page limit. The memo also imposes a “target” of completing the studies required under the National Environmental Protection Act within one year.

“The purpose of NEPA’s requirement is not the generation of paperwork, but the adoption of sound decisions based on an informed understanding of environmental consequences,” Bernhardt wrote, adding that studies “should focus on issues that truly matter rather than amassing unnecessary detail.”

Grist for the (respectful, I hope) discussion mill in the form of a National Review article, “The Distant Conservative Heritage of the National Park Service.”

Subhead: “Protect our natural wonders, but don’t let the feds control too much other state land.”

The article is too long to post, but the full text is here, in case you can’t access the National Review site (or don’t want to be caught doing so <grin>). One interesting paragraph:

“For one thing, America has a federal system, and the use of state lands should be left up to the states. Frustrated with the federal government’s overreach, Congress placed two limitations on the Antiquities Act — the law allowing the president to set aside state-owned land as a National Monument. In 1943, after Franklin Roosevelt declared Jackson Hole National Monument federally protected, Wyoming congressmen persuaded their colleagues to limit the act to require congressional ratification for future enlargement or creation of national monuments in Wyoming. In 1978, after Jimmy Carter declared 56 million acres of Alaska federally protected, Congress expanded the Wyoming rule to include Alaska, with the ratification requirement covering areas of 5,000 acres and above.”

I hadn’t known about the Wyoming and Alaska exceptions to the Antiquities Act. I think the same ought to apply in all states: Congressional approval should be required for creating National Monuments.

FWIW, I’m conservative, generally, depending on the issue, but am not a member of a political party. In Oregon, I’ve been registered as Nonaffiliated for years. And Nonaffiliated is the state’s second largest “party” after the Democrat party.