From the Bend (Oregon) Bulletin, a barred owl has replaced two spotted owls that died a few years ago.

“If you go to spotted owl habitat (in the woods) this is often what you see,” Goodell said.

In other words, it’s also barred owl habitat.

An essay from High Country News (subscription). It’s been a long time since I worked for the USFS, but some of what Marsh says I can sympathize with. Do preservationists have a role to play at the agency? Conservationists, yes, but the National Forests weren’t intended for preservation. I’d like to know whether Dan’s career was ruined for trying to do the right thing instead of “getting along.”

What I learned from 30 years with the Forest Service
Susan Marsh
Opinion Dec 17, 2014

After working for the Forest Service for 30 years, I finally had to write a book about it — especially about some of the painful lessons I learned. Here are just a few of them.

It will come as no surprise that it wasn’t easy being a woman in what was, and remains, a man’s domain. Nor was it easy being a resource professional in one of the fields of study known within the agency as a specialty. Specialists, or “ologists,” were considered narrow in focus and sadly misinformed about the relative importance of scenery or wildlife in the context of meeting targets. I was a preservationist in the midst of managers who wanted to roll up their sleeves and Do Something.

I soon learned that a bureaucracy like the Forest Service values loyalty to the “outfit” above all. One has to be a team player, and in order to play on the team it is necessary to embrace a worldview shared by one’s teammates. So I learned to hunt elk and go ice fishing, to head for whichever bar offered country music and scantily clad waitresses, and to keep my cards close to my chest.

“Never let ‘em know what you’re thinking,” one district ranger advised. While mulling the need for such a motto, I took the advice of a different ranger whose loyalties matched my own. “My first priority is to the land,” he said. “Then to the public for whose benefit we’re managing it. Finally, to the outfit.”

This got my friend in a lot of trouble. When he tried to reduce the number of cattle in a battered little watershed in Montana’s Ruby River drainage, his boss refused to support the action. Even though evidence was strong that the stream banks would benefit from having fewer hooves in one small area, reducing cattle simply wasn’t a viable option. The permittee would complain to his congressman and the governor, both personal friends.

Where most rangers would have backed off, Dan fought. The poor condition of a stream within his district caused him personal pain, and if he didn’t try to fix it, he felt he wasn’t doing his job. His boss disagreed, saying: “Your job is to get along.” The bitter lesson I learned from Dan was that you could ruin your career if you tried too hard to do the right thing.

After three decades with the Forest Service, there remains one lesson that still surprises me: I still cherish a strong sense of loyalty to the agency, however flawed it is, and to the high-minded principles on which it was founded.

My desire to defend it arises when I hear someone complain about how the local district doesn’t do one thing or another, or at least can’t do it right. If you only knew how hard it is, I want to say. I react each time I witness yet another effort to privatize the public land, to hand it off to the states, to divide it up among interests that seek only to exploit it. As humanity continues to leave its heavy footprint across the planet, the national forests and other public lands become all the more precious.

The stereotypical government worker draws a salary without having to try very hard. It is true that I have encountered my share of drones over the years, but the people who represent the Forest Service to me are like Dan: They gladly work nights and weekends, if necessary donating their annual leave at the end of the year. They care deeply for the land and want to make a contribution to the greater good.

Working for the agency is more of a vocation than a job. A wise-ass adage holds this definition of success for a conservation-minded employee: It’s not the number of projects you accomplished, but the number of bad ideas you successfully scuttled. Most of my Forest Service heroes scuttled plenty of dumb ideas.

The Forest Service is far from perfect, and I would agree with those who say it is less effective than it could be. But it gives me comfort to know how many of the people within it are driven by the loyalties once articulated by my mentor, Dan. My hat is off to them.

— Susan Marsh is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a column service of High Country News (hcn.org). She lives in Jackson, Wyoming, and her latest book is A Hunger for High Country.

Wash. Post columnist Kathleen Parker, in “A wildfire of corruption,” writes that the story of the 2007 Moonlight Fire in California is “a tale of corruption, prosecutorial abuse, alleged fraud upon the court and possible government cover-ups in the service of power and greed.” As you may recall, Sierra PAcific Industries was found by Cal Fire to be culpable in the ignition of the 65K-acre fire. The state’s case has been dismissed, and this may have an effect on the federal suit, “which had resulted in a settlement by which the defendants are paying the federal government $55 million and have started to transfer 22,500 acres of land.”

I always have thought that forcing a “donation” of land was highly unusual, but maybe it isn’t.

I heard from a colleague that the USFS is moving away from USA Jobs as its job announcement/application web site, but he didn’t have any other info. Today I found this article, but didn’t move past the “pay wall.” Anyone know what’s going on?

Forest Service hiring process changes

NCW — The Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest and other national forests in the Pacific Northwest will use a new system to hire temporary or seasonal workers, including firefighters, next year.

The process will allow the agency to expedite the review and selection process for thousands of positions expected to be filled in Washington and Oregon this summer.

Letter published yesterday in an Alaska newspaper by Owen Graham, Executive Director of the Alaska Forest Association. Subject is the Tongass, but Graham addresses “below cost” USFS sales in general. Text is below….

Timber Economics
By Owen Graham

Dear Editor

Let’s talk about real timber economics. For years we have been listening to various environmental groups and others talk about Tongass timber sale subsidies. The reality is there are none; no matter how many times the falsehood is repeated. If the federal government provides billions in wind production tax credits; that’s a subsidy. When corn farmers and ethanol producers receive billions in tax credits and have their products supported with an ethanol gas mandate; that’s also a subsidy. However, if a local lumber yard or an appliance store spends more money selling lumber or appliances than it receives, that does not mean their customers are subsidized; it just means that the lumber yard or appliance store will soon go broke. Likewise, the timber industry is not subsidized when it purchases timber from the Forest Service. The industry is not responsible for, nor can it control how much a federal agency spends.

The Forest Service cost of preparing timber sales is very high compared to what the State spends preparing their timber sales, but that is a management issue, not a subsidy. After a timber sale is sold, the government still owns the timberland and they immediately start growing another crop of trees. The agency does a good job growing trees; they just spend too much money. The Forest Service also incurs costs designing and managing some of the access roads but like the land itself, the roads remain after the logging is complete and those roads are used for various purposes such as hunting and fishing access in addition to access for managing the land.

Federal agencies don’t go broke when they spend too much or produce too little, but they do respond to other kinds of incentives. For instance, environmental analyses (timber sale EISs) represent about half of the total cost of preparing federal timber sales. If environmental groups are sincerely concerned about federal fiscal responsibility, they could work to minimize the cost of these analyses rather than constantly demanding more.

A recent economic study by a Montana group criticizes the Forest Service for preparing below-cost timber sales (timber sales that cost more to prepare than the stumpage receipts). The issue is real, but the study grossly exaggerates the below-cost problem. However, instead of addressing the causes of this diseconomy, the study states that the agency should divert its funding to young-growth timber sales, recreation and fish habitat restoration. This not-from-Alaska group is evidently unaware that the young-growth on the Tongass is decades away from maturity and if it is harvested now, the below-cost problem will become much worse. The group also fails to recognize that the timber program has enhanced recreation opportunities and has not harmed fish habitat. In fact, fish populations have more than doubled in Southeast Alaska, particularly in the most heavily logged watersheds. The study also fails to address the issue of replacing year around, high wage logging and manufacturing jobs with low wage, seasonal jobs.

The Forest Service has done a good job managing the forest, even if it does spend too much money. All of the harvested lands support healthy, vigorous stands of young-growth timber, fish and wildlife populations are doing fine and the logging roads are providing access to the forest for everyone. The agency needs to honor the timber supply commitments it made many years ago and make the transition to young-growth timber as it becomes mature rather than submit to political pressure to reduce the timber supply and harvest the young trees prematurely.

Regards,

Owen Graham, Executive Director
Alaska Forest Association
Ketchikan, Alaska

About: Owen Graham is the Executive Director of the Alaska Forest Association – a Statewide Association since 1957.

From E&E News today….

Former Interior chief Norton faults state bids for federal tracts

Several Montana newspapers have published stories about the just-released study, Collaboration at a Crossroads, from The Wilderness Society. I’ve had time only to skim it, but it looks like it offers good summaries of 14 Montana projects.

This court order may offer some insight into the costs of litigation. Sometimes agencies are awarded costs. In this case, $9,502.12 “incurred in scanning, duplicating, collating, and Bates-stamping the administrative record, which numbered in excess of 24,000 pages.”

“More than 9 million acres of forest in Washington and Oregon should be selectively logged and burned to make the remaining trees more resistant to wildfire, disease and drought, according to a new study by the U.S. Forest Service and The Nature Conservancy.”

Report offers restoration plans for forests in Washington, Oregon

“The U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management are seeking to eliminate key protections for watersheds, streams and salmon” — says this op-ed in the Eugene Register-Guard.

Forest Service should keep stream protections

“In 1994, the Northwest Forest Plan allowed federal forest management to free itself from court injunctions. The plan contains an aquatic conservation strategy, which provides protections for streams and critical support for threatened and endangered salmon. The BLM and Forest Service are revising all forest plans under the Northwest Forest Plan with a goal of increased timber harvests and lower standards for the aquatic conservation strategy.”

Maybe I’ve been living on another planet….