This essay is worth reading and discussing:

“Our Languishing Public Lands: The Economic and Environmental Benefits of Decentralization,” By Robert H. Nelson  |  Posted: Wed. February 1, 2012. Also published in Policy Review.

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=3244

I did not find a discussion on this 2012 article elsewhere on this blog. Apologies if I missed it.

Nelson devotes much attention to economics:

“Not surprisingly, the Forest Service’s decision to abandon its historic economic objectives under multiple use management has led to corresponding declines in economic benefits achieved, as shown by the Forest Service’s own calculations. The 2001 Forest Service financial analysis described above also detailed the trends during the 1990s in the economic “present net value” (pnv) derived from all national forest outputs. As the Forest Service reported, the “all resources pnv” for the whole national forest system—covering all the forms of use—fell from more than one billion dollars in total values realized in 1991 to about $300 million in 1998. Most of this sharp economic decline was due to the precipitous drop in timber program pnv, but the abandonment of former timber sale activities did not yield any new gains in the pnv of recreation or other uses to balance things out. Ecosystem goals, however vaguely defined, increasingly were the ends in themselves—and the (lesser) economic outcome was a mere byproduct of the more important new ecological objectives.”

Here’s a section of an E&E News article today that deals with federal forestry, including permanent reauthorization of stewardship contracting.

http://www.eenews.net/eedaily/stories/1059993543

The draft also would bar the EPA from requiring permits for non-point runoff due to silvicultural activities.

Forestry

The bill would also provide big wins for forest health advocates by permanently extending stewardship contracting and expanding good-neighbor authority on roughly 193 million acres of national forests. It would also allow the Forest Service to designate “landscape-scale” treatment areas and use expedited permitting authority to protect the areas from insects or disease.

Permanent extension of stewardship contracting has been a top priority for the Obama administration and lawmakers of both parties, as well as conservation groups and logging companies. It allows lands agencies to sell 10-year timber contracts and use the revenue to fund forest health projects such as road improvements, stream restoration, hazardous fuel removal or recreation improvements. While it is used for roughly one-fourth of Forest Service timber harvests, the contracting authority is set to expire in September.

The farm bill’s good-neighbor provision is very similar to S. 327, which passed the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last year. It would expand the federal government’s authority to partner with state foresters on restoration projects, including bark beetle treatments, across state-federal boundaries. Currently, that authority only exists in Colorado and Utah.

The farm bill would also allow agencies to expand their use of streamlined permitting under the Healthy Forests Restoration Act to projects that reduce a landscape’s susceptibility to insect infestations or disease. Old-growth trees must be retained under this authority, “as appropriate to the forest type.”

Projects up to 3,000 acres in size could be permitted under a categorical exclusion as long as they follow several restrictions, including: They maximize retention of old growth, consider best available science, are developed through a collaborative process, do not result in new permanent roads, comply with forest plans and do not affect wilderness or wilderness study areas.

“The farm bill provides a broad array of new legal tools to allow the Forest Service to do their job,” said Bill Imbergamo, executive director of the Federal Forest Resource Coalition, which represents loggers that contract with national forests. “It has provisions that provide for streamlined analysis, give stewardship contracts the same liability limitations found in normal timber sales and provisions that will make it easier to manage the national forests.”

But Imbergamo said the bill fails to provide the comprehensive overhaul of the Forest Service’s timber program that industry was hoping for, including reforms to the National Environmental Policy Act and Endangered Species Act.

CHAD HANSON, John Muir Project, in the Manteca, Calif., Bulletin today, with his typical message:
<a href=”http://www.mantecabulletin.com/section/160/article/96042/”>Rim Fire logging plan poses major threat to Sierra wildlife</a>

“The proposed logging would heavily target the rarest, most threatened, and most biologically diverse and rich forest habitat type in the Sierra Nevada—“snag forest habitat”—and it would further threaten numerous rare and declining wildlife species that depend on this habitat, including the Black-backed Woodpecker.”

OK, so why wasn’t Hanson writing editorials before the fire, advocating for using fire to create snag forest habitat?

Two letters from the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Straka has a good point about state trust lands.

The Forest, the Trees, Conflicting Goals and Poor Policy
Traditional forestry would produce healthy, wildfire-resistant, sustainable forests, and a profit if that was in the objectives.

Jan. 13, 2014 3:42 p.m. ET

Robert H. Nelson did a great job of highlighting U.S. Forest Service management problems (“Taking an Ax to Traditional Forest Management,” op-ed Jan. 2). However, forest management on national forests is anything but traditional. Traditional forestry would produce healthy, wildfire-resistant, sustainable forests, and a profit if that was in the objectives. The Forest Service used to produce a profit and even turned 25% of it over to local counties to cover expenses of rural roads and schools. Since 2000, under the Secure Rural Schools Act, Congress has directly made these payments. Last year that was nearly $330 million. What was once a use-based, profitable forest is now a “welfare case.”

The idea of charter forests is excellent. A better idea might be to turn the forests over to state management using Mr. Nelson’s idea of retained federal ownership and oversight. Many Western states already manage state forests and easily generate funds for schools and other activities, while still actively managing for social and environmental goals. From the very beginning of the forest reserves, Western concern has been these huge assets wouldn’t be developed to their potential. What is needed now is traditional forest management, and the states are best positioned to provide that.

Prof. Thomas J. Straka
Clemson University
Clemson, S.C.

Wild lands (sometimes called forest land) are complex ecosystems with many objectives. The owners (the public) are convinced that their “objective” is the only one that is right, whether it be hikers, hunters or bird watchers. Professional managers with extensive natural-resource training are not allowed to make decisions that conflict with a special-interest group’s objectives or opinions. I have negotiated at the local level and reached agreement with various environmental groups on issues only to have the agreed decision overturned by their regional or national organization because it wouldn’t fit with their regional or national objectives. In addition, often a user’s complaint to a politician results in interference in making a sound decision which is best for all the competing resources. That is one of the main reasons for the low morale in the Forest Service.

The only solution is to have special-interest groups make their concerns and objectives known to the professional resource managers, step back, and let them do their jobs just as the professional teachers are allowed to do in charter schools. That is what they are being paid to do.

David Dahl
Tucson, Ariz.

This essay from High Country News my help us here in the Western US see a new perspective on our seemingly endless fighting over natural resource issues. I’m a subscriber to HCN, but I think this essay is available without a subscription: http://www.hcn.org/wotr/the-sounds-of-silence-eastern-style.

Steve

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The sounds of silence, Eastern style

 By Joe Hinson/Writers on the Range

I once read about a lock-tender who spent his life accompanied by the sound of rushing water going over the lock’s dam. Then, the dam was taken down, ending a lifetime of constant background noise, which, although perhaps a pleasant-enough sound, was still, well, constant. His greatest surprise was finally being able to hear the birds.

I now understand his perspective. A year ago, we moved from Idaho to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, the oversized apostrophe of land between the Atlantic Ocean and Chesapeake Bay. Our decision generated a lot of jaw-dropping, incredulous stares from our friends and endless questions of “Why?”

As we adjusted to our new home, it became clear that something was missing, but its absence was actually pleasing. Frankly, the West is consumed with noisy fights, mostly over land and resources. Now, we don’t hear it anymore. Like that lock-tender, the sound had become a constant context to our lives, and now, away from it, we, too, can finally hear the birds.

Westerners, listen to yourselves!  You’re each a part of a Tower of Babel — a discordant group arguing about sage grouse, water, fish, power, wilderness, old growth, bighorn sheep, forest health, wolves, mining, ATVs, wild horses, grazing, energy, Indians … the list is endless, the fighting never-ending.

Moreover, Westerners seem born to battle or at least driven to claim a predictable position by their profession or politics.  You’re born or become a rancher, a logger, wildlife biologist, Democrat, Republican, environmentalist, Indian, miner, recreationist or an agency manager. Each occupation or identity comes with a clear expectation of your behavior and opinions when it comes to any given issue. Your friends and social life are defined accordingly. Public lands may be great, but it seems their current biggest public value is to provide a large, conveniently located arena for a public brawl.  At least you’re brawling in a pretty place.

During my years in Idaho, I did my share of fighting.  Some of the conflicts were productive, like the one that inspired the rewrite of Idaho’s implementation of the Clean Water Act, a law that is still on the books and reportedly serving all interests well.

Other fights, in retrospect, were rather ridiculous, fighting over whether roadless land should be available for logging, for example. Now, there is very little left of the timber industry and an equally small amount of new wilderness designated in forested lands. Seems like kind of a wasted effort at this point. Other disagreements were gut wrenching, as we tried, for example, to find a solution to potential contacts between bighorn and domestic sheep that might carry disease. In the course of that fight, my wife’s family lost about half their forested sheep range.  The truly hard part was trying to explain “why” to the newly unemployed Peruvian herders, none of whom had ever even seen a bighorn sheep.

Our new Eastern friends are certainly curious about why we chose Maryland over Idaho, but our explanation seems to strike them as more boring than thought-provoking. To folks here, national forests are often confused with parks like Yellowstone or someplace similar that they’ve perhaps visited on vacation. Federal land-management agencies are largely unheard of, and locals don’t wring their hands over how many sockeye salmon returned to Redfish Lake. They’d rather discuss the Orioles’ game or the latest fishing reports. Frankly, Scarlett, they don’t give a damn — or a dam.

Sure, there are fights. Once, an environmental group sued a farmer here over alleged runoff from a pile of chicken manure; the environmentalists lost miserably. But fights here seem to lack the increasingly mean-spirited tone of some of those currently in the West. In contrast, the liberal state of Maryland was so embarrassed over the manure lawsuit that the Legislature offered to pay the farmer’s legal bills, and the University of Maryland set up extension courses to help the agricultural community cope with legal challenges. Imagine the fight that would have caused in the West.

Call me jaded or simply burnt-out; both are probably true. But after 30 years, in which much of my job was fighting for the timber industry while my wife fought to maintain a ranching livelihood, we came to realize that we had become mere gladiators, albeit without the physique for the task. Fighting had become the job. In a perverse sense, we had to leave the open spaces of the West to finally gain some peace and quiet. Besides sharing his first name, I find myself in sympathy with Chief Joseph’s poignantly expressed desire: “From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more, forever.”

So, here we sit on a small arm of the Bay, content to fish and to start contributing to society in a more constructive way.  For now, we can hear the silence and the birds — and both are golden.

Joe Hinson is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He directed the Idaho Forest Industry Council for 15 years and recently retired as a natural resource consultant. He and his wife, Margaret, a third-generation rancher, now live near Salisbury, Maryland.

An AP article appeared in several Oregon newspapers over the last few days, such as this one: “Private forest owners have started salvaging timber burned this summer.”

Excerpt:

Salvage logging on land burned by last summer’s Douglas Complex wildfire in southwestern Oregon is in full swing in privately owned forests, but not in federal ones.

Roseburg Forest Products has cut 8 million board feet of timber from its lands outside Glendale and plans to cut 32 million board feet more, The News-Review reported. One million board feet is roughly enough to build 50 homes.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management is still deep in the planning process and has no firm timber targets for the public land.

With that planning process and the likely appeals and perhaps litigation, I reckon no Douglas Complex timber will be salvaged from federal lands. Phil Adams, timber manager for Roseburg Forest Products, is “afraid that burned timber on BLM lands will turn into brush and stands of dead trees unless they are aggressively managed.”

On a related topic, I re-watched a rebroadcast of an episode of Oregon Public Broadcasting’s excellent Oregon Field Guide, Season 23, Episode 2, a portion of which is “Elk at Mount St. Helens.” In the area where forests were blown down or buried by the eruption in 1980, private timberlands were salvaged and replanted, and Weyerhaeuser conducted its first commercial thinning in 2005. On federal lands in the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, “the environment is left to respond naturally to the disturbance,” according to the Monument’s web site. The Oregon Field Guide program described the huge increase in the elk population in the Monument — elk like the open space and forage. (The program didn’t say so, but I’d bet that the elk also like the cover they find in the stands of young timber on private lands, since there’s little cover on the federal side.) However, the elk population has grown so large that there isn’t enough forage. Scenes of emaciated elk and rotting carcasses led to a public call for the government to “do something,” and that they did — they brought in hay during the winter. So much for letting the environment “respond naturally to the disturbance.” Now, if wolves had been reintroduced….

I know its the “holiday season,” but here’s some homework (hey, only 9 pages!) for us forest-planning freaks….

“Collaboration at Arm’s Length: Navigating Agency Engagement in Landscape-Scale Ecological Restoration Collaboratives,” by William Hale Butler, Journal of Forestry, November 2013.

The full text is here: http://wp.me/a3AxwY-4fU

Management and Policy Implications

This research suggests approaches for engaging in collaborative landscape-scale ecological restoration while balancing the tensions of agency authority and levels of engagement in collaboration. Through an analysis of the experiences of the first 10 CFLRP landscape projects, the paper argues that Forest Service staff and collaborators might be well served to engage in collaborative dialogue on substantive matters while maintaining an “arm’s length” posture procedurally. These cases suggest that when agency employees play too strong a role in collaborative decisionmaking processes, they risk being challenged on procedural grounds. These challenges focus attention on procedural concerns and can hamper dialogue on substantive issues. On the other hand, agency staff and collaborators avoided procedural concerns when they separated agency employees from collaborative decisionmaking. When accompanied by a joint commitment to engage in collaborative dialogue on the nature and content of those decisions, collaborators and agency staff have been able to work through substantive ecological restoration concerns together. This approach can ensure statutory compliance while deflecting challenges that the agency is co-opting the collaborative. Meanwhile, it allows agency personnel and stakeholders to engage in dialogue on substantive matters and bring a range of perspectives, ideas, values, expertise, and knowledge to bear on landscape-scale ecological restoration issues.

Long piece from Greenwire today, below….

Two points on Wyden’s bill.

“(H) to harvest wood and use the value of merchantable sawlogs and biomass to help
offset the cost of improving forest health and watershed health;”

Great, but that ought to be standard operating procedure, nationwide.

“(1) OLDER TREES- Except as provided in paragraph (2), the Secretary shall prohibit the
cutting or removal of any live tree located in the covered area that is 150 years of age or
older measured at breast height.”

Any age- or diameter-based cutting restriction is problematic. There ought to be some flexibility. At least, more that in the aforementioned paragraph (2):

(2) ADMINISTRATIVE EXCEPTIONS-
“(A) IN GENERAL- The prohibition described in paragraph (1) shall not apply if the
Secretary determines that there is no reasonable alternative to the cutting or
removal of the tree to provide for a safe administrative, public, or special use.”

If you want to restore an stand of 300-year-old ponderosa by reducing basal area in the stand, and you need to cut 150-year-old grand fir or Doug-fir, that would be illegal. For example.

Onthe other hand, this is an improvement over earlier versions of the bill, which would have prohibited cutting trees over 21 inches in diameter.

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Republicans, enviros air concerns over ENR panel markup of forestry bills

The last line in the article below is interesting:

The judge said he owes “substantial deference” to the agency’s analysis and “must not assume the role of a scientist.”

http://www.capitalpress.com/article/20131217/ARTICLE/131219907/1318

Judge rejects challenge of logging project

Mateusz Perkowski
Published: December 17. 2013 9:34AM
A federal judge has dismissed an environmental lawsuit challenging a timber sale in the Nez Perce National Forest.

A federal judge has refused to stop timber harvest and fuel reduction treatments on 2,600 acres of an Idaho national forest.

Last year, the U.S. Forest Service approved the Little Slate Project in the Nez Perce National Forest to improve aquatic habitats and other aspects of forest health.

Environmental groups — Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Friends of the Clearwater — opposed logging in the area and filed a legal complaint seeking an injunction against the project.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Mikel Williams has denied their request and dismissed the case, ruling that the agency properly followed environmental laws.

“After conducting the mandated substantial inquiry and probing review, the court finds that the defendants did not act arbitrarily or capriciously in approving the Little Slate Project,” the ruling said.

The plaintiffs accused the Forest Service of failing to fully consider and disclose environmental impacts, protect biodiversity and mitigate harm to the habitat of federally protected species.

For example, the environmentalists claimed the agency didn’t take a “hard look” at the negative effects on the Canada lynx, which is listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act.

However, the judge ruled that the Forest Service wasn’t required to supplement its environmental review due to unverified sightings of the animal.

The agency was also reasonable in determining that the project would not threaten the existence of “indicator species,” like the goshawk and pileated woodpecker.

Williams rejected arguments that the Forest Service’s data about the impacts to threatened bull trout were limited and outdated. He also dismissed criticism of the agency’s hydrological models.

“Plaintiffs’ failure to identify any better science or to point that any other existing data is available makes this claim a ‘non-starter,’” the ruling said.

The judge said he owes “substantial deference” to the agency’s analysis and “must not assume the role of a scientist.”

Article from http://www.citizen-times.com on Dec. 16….

No logging on parts of Courthouse Creek

New plan spares 54 acres of high elevation trees

WAYNESVILLE — Environmentalists reached a compromise with the government Monday that will spare some of the most sensitive areas of Courthouse Creek from logging.

The agreement with the U.S. Forest Service means 54 acres of mostly high elevation trees in Pisgah Ridge National Heritage Area are off the table.

The entire project, which the forest service has said is necessary for habitat improvement and forest health, will now include 368 acres in a bowl-shaped zone in Pisgah National Forest visible from the Blue Ridge Parkway and Devil’s Courthouse.

The legal agreement also required the forest service to decommission a road constructed to allow for logging in the three stands that are now out of the project.

Western North Carolina Alliance, one of the groups that challenged the timber plan, will help the forest service remove culverts, re-grade and re-seed the roadbed.

The Southern Environmental Law Center appealed the project on behalf of the Wilderness Society, Wild South and Western North Carolina Alliance.

It’s unclear how much of the timber work will be visible from the parkway, said DJ Gerken, senior attorney at the law center.

He said the agreement, at the least, mitigates the impact to the view and possibly erases it. Overall, he said, the groups are very pleased.

“We didn’t get everything we wanted, that’s what makes it a compromise,” he said. “It’s a substantially improved project.”

The decommissioning of the road is important to long-term environmental health.

“Roads are one of, if not the primary cause of, water quality problems on the forest,” said Hugh Irwin, conservation planner with the Wilderness Society, in a written statement. “Decommissioning the road just makes sense. It saves the forest service money by reducing the size of its road system, protects important trout habitat around Courthouse Creek, and ensures that this road stops causing environmental damage.”

The Southern Appalachian Multiple Use Council, which has in the past represented timber interests, could not be reached Monday.

The logging, which could begin as early as 2015, is dispersed in sites across the 7,000-acre Courthouse Creek area. The project would take four to five years and harvest about 6 percent of the trees in the area.