21st Century Problems

Goats for Fuels Treatments

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We have been talking about “everything isn’t forest”. So it’s interesting to think about other fuels management techniques and tools. Because I do think we have to keep in focus that 1) some places do have timber industry.. but they might not be able to handle the scope of all the fuels treatments needed,
2) some places don’t have timber industry and
3) some places don’t have trees, or at least, currently merchantable kinds of trees.

Here is an articles in JSFP News on Karen Voth’s work on using goats in the WUI.

Below is an excerpt:

Voth adds, “The goats protect houses, and they easily provide firefighters a safe place to fight the fires from. The goats
can help make it safer for the firefighters and for communities.”

To that end, she reports on an initial project joining goats with an at-risk community of homes nestled in the heart of fire-prone Utah. The Woodland Hills community is surrounded by oakbrush and scrub. Once Voth explained to community members the possible power
of goats to reduce fire danger, they applauded the plan. Voth
coordinated with the town council and their fire department
and soon a herd of 30 goats were heartily tending vegetation
near the homes. Community members helped build the
fencing, took care of basic goat maintenance like watering,
and learned what the vegetation would look like when the
goats were “finished” in an enclosure. That’s when they
would call Voth and her team, who would drive the three
hours to move the goats.

Here’s a link for more information, also check out her work on Cows Eat Weeds.

Floods and Mitigation from Waldo Canyon

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While I was clicking on the photos for Andy’s post below, I ran across this video of the floods in Manitou Springs following the Waldo Canyon fire.

The Forest Service, state and county and NGO collaborators are all working very hard to mitigate this.. here are some photos from a recent SAF field trip of their mitigation efforts. I was really impressed how everyone is working together and especially how the water people are stepping up financially.

The good news is that I can post these photos legally, as I took them. The bad news is that I am not a very good photographer. Maybe we can crowdfund Larry to make a trip out here?

Tree-lovers: those dark green patches are scrub oak coming back.

Thinking About Fuel Treatments

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I'm running out of photos of fuel treatment projects and am recycling them..
I’m running out of photos of fuel treatment projects and am recycling them..if you have some that are not copyrighted or you have approval for, please send.

This post is a followup to Matthew’s comment here.. in the quote below I removed the references to the firefighter deaths, as I think the ideas he expressed should be followed further aside from that context.

Some frequent commenters on this blog often call for the Forest Service and other land management agencies to put out all wildfires. Phrases like “we need to be more aggressive and put these fires out” are common both in this blog and in letters to the editor during fire season across the west. Often times some of these same commenters claim that more logging will prevent “extreme” wildfires.

Is “fuel reduction” work in chaparral and grass even possible? If not, will that prevent some people from using this tragedy to call for more logging?

(edited from Matthew’s original).

So I will introduce you to my logic path on this, as clear as I can be.

1. People and infrastructure live in and around fire-prone vegetation throughout the West.

2. Fires can have negative impacts to people and infrastructure due to both the original burn and later flooding.

3. The condition of fuels can make a difference in how expensive and or safe it is to fight fire to protect people and infrastructure.

4.. Therefore treatment of fuels around infrastructure and in strategic areas for future fire lines is important(this seems to be where OMB is not in agreement, for reasons that are not transparent at this time).

5. In some cases, these treatments can be used to grow food or fiber for people to use and the “extra” plant material can be used instead of burned.

6. “Use” instead of “burning or putting in a landfill” has social, economic and climate benefits, not least of which is the ability to do more fuels reduction because each treatment costs less.

Therefore, using plant material removed in fuel treatments can be a good thing.

I’d be interested in what others think about these assertions.

OMB and Fuels Treatment Efficacy

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Pages from ERI paper

I found this to be an interesting blog post from Bob Berwin (thanks, Bob!), because, if true, it appears that we actually have a few more branches of government than the Founders intended. We know from Jack Ward Thomas’s Journal that DOJ can have its own policy agenda, which can be different from that of the agencies of the administration. Hopefully, there is some kind of higher-level conflict resolution at some point- but we don’t really know that, do we?

Now we have OMB, and here’s a quote from Bob’s post:

The letter was signed by Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, Mark Udall, D-Colo., and James Risch, R-Idaho. The lawmakers cited recent figures showing that the Forest Service has cut back on programs to reduce fire risks in areas where homes and the wilderness collide. The U.S. Forest Service treated 1.87 million acres of those lands in 2012, but expects to treat only 685,000 acres next year, out of millions of acres that need treatment.

“Our understanding is that these cuts were based on OMB’s continued skepticism about the efficacy of hazardous fuels treatments. We whole-heartedly disagree with OMB on this point,” the senators wrote.

Well, given the President’s efforts with regard to transparency in government, I think it is only reasonable to ask for OMB to document the reasons for its skepticism in a public forum, complete with citations and logic paths. If they don’t have the technical capacity due to the many lawyers of security, I would volunteer this blog for the discussion to take place.

For those of you who haven’t been following this, this study was specifically is directed to answer that question.

There are a variety of other interesting papers from the Ecological Research Institute here.

The Shifting Winds of Fire Policy

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This fire policy stuff is more confusing than a person might think. Here’s a new story from the Standard Journal about letting fires burn to save money. But I thought last year, the reason the fire policy came out about being careful to not let fires big and out of control, was also to save money. It seems to me that both can’t be true?

I guess folks need to be able to predict which ones will do fine if watched and which ones might get out of control. Certainly we have read about the latter. I wonder if the Lessons Learned Center or others are compiling information on how well we are doing at predicting.. if our predictions were not so hot (sorry) then letting fires get out of control might not actually be saving money. Plus it might have a domino-like effect from people and material being sent to the large fires, and more other fires are necessarily managed less intensively, necessarily risking that they too will become larger and suddenly take off due to unforeseen events.

Below is an excerpt.

Forest rangers told Madison County Commissioners that the fire suppression policy in the Caribou-Targhee National Forest has changed to a more limited response, even with a big fire season predicted for this summer.

Tracy Hollingshead, Palisades District Ranger for the Forest Service based in Idaho Falls, along with Jay Pence, the district ranger based in Driggs, along with Spencer Johnson of the Eastern Idaho Interagency Fire Center in Swan Valley, introduced a new map of immediate fire suppression areas. These small areas, marked in red on the map, are the only areas the Forest Service will respond immediately to in the event of a fire, which is a change from previous policy.

“Last year we had direction to put every fire out,” Hollingshead said on Monday.

The change came down to funding, they told the county commissioners.

“We definitely have a limited amount to spend,” Hllingshead said.

Red areas in Madison County include small portions of the Big Hole Mountains on the southern border of the county.

If a fire flares up in other areas, it will be dealt with on a conditional basis. Fire agencies will battle forest fires aggressively if the fire nears structures or population, even if it isn’t in a red-marked area on the map. But if the fire doesn’t threaten anything immediately, the fire will be allowed to burn out based on certain conditions.

“Other areas we’ll let burn depending on the time of year, weather and fuel conditions,” Hollingshead said.

Now it seemed like Andy (Stahl) was quoted last year as saying… Here.

Things like this have a tendency to become indelible,” he said. In order to reverse the policy next season, he thinks the Forest Service will have to make the case that budget and weather conditions are significantly different than this year—something he worries might not happen.

Here are a couple of other links to our discussions last year..
http://ncfp.wordpress.com/2013/04/15/the-fire-policy-in-plain-english-high-country-news/
http://ncfp.wordpress.com/2013/03/05/fanning-the-smouldering-pile-of-controversy-last-years-fire-letter/

The Return of Let-Burn

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Sadly, we get the same results as we’ve gotten in the past. When you “preserve” wildfires for weeks, the winds eventually come up and fires can (and will) escape. Now, all sorts of scarce resources will be tied up for an unknown amount of time, impacting other current and future wildfires, during an intense heatwave. How many Forest Service recreation opportunities will be closed up, due to wildfire concerns? How long will these wildfires continue to impact humans living close by? How many tens of millions of dollars will be wasted on these “resource benefits” touted by fans of “free range” wildfire? How many fuels reduction projects will have to be delayed, because fire suppression has “stolen” their funds? These questions need answers but, no one wants to answer them. “Unforeseen weather conditions” is an unacceptable answer for losing containment. Mountains and winds always go together!

From the Evergreen Magazine’s Facebook page:

The South Fork Fire: A firefighters perspective…
This was sent to us by a firefighter friend of ours. Lack of management in the forest is costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, taking lives and homes, decimating the land, wasting timber, and natural resources as well as dumping large amounts of CO2 and carcinogens into the atmosphere.

“The following message was forwarded by one of my Smokejumper Bro’s. For many years he was a lead plane pilot and has seen a lot from the air.

The temperature at 7500 ft in Los Alamos today reached 94 deg F. The winds were light however we can no longer see Santa Fe and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains because of the smoke from the Jarosa fire. Unfortunately this will drive the fire further into the Pecos Wilderness and no suppression will take place until ti crosses the wilderness boundary.

The Silver Fire is now listed at 85,000 acres with 10% containment according to the news reports.”

Subject: Feds, Fires, Frustration — CO (Lengthy)

“With the understanding that I’ve been wrong before, that I don’t have access to a lot of information and that I might be wrong again, here’s my opinion:
1. Background
The forest is in bad shape due to drought and the beetle infestation. There’s a LOT of standing dead timber and associated brush. In short, it’s a disaster waiting for the proper time to happen and it needs to be carefully watched by people with serious understanding of the potential problems. The right people weren’t in position and the supervision never took place.
2. What happened
A frontal system brought thunderstorms through the area about 5/6 June with a little rain and a lot of lightning. At least 3 fires started from lightning strikes in this area. The Forest Service (hereinafter ‘Feds’) knew these fires were active and, thinking that they could burn out the dead timber and not have to worry about it later, let them grow for 10-12 days without intervention — until they blew up, completely out of control. Then they began trying to play catch-up…in small and ineffective advances.
3. Why?
Apparently, the Feds, hand in hand with the Greenies — who seem to believe that Walt Disney was a wildlife biologist and get their expertise about the outdoors by watching reruns of Bambi — are/have been firmly of the opinion that no one should harvest any of this standing dead wood…because that wouldn’t be ‘natural’. (The beetle-killed timber actually is useful for paneling, furniture and a number of other purposes but the Greenies are terrified that anyone going in to get it will make those terrible trails and roads into the forest that ruin its ‘wildness’.) So, a time-bomb was allowed to develop. And it finally detonated.
4. Result
75,000+ acres of wilderness are reduced to burned wasteland (and a lot more will go up in flames in the coming days), the communities of South Fork, Masonic Park, Creede and others have been put at extreme risk and the entire National Forest in this region may have to be closed to public use for the rest of this year… or at least until the snow flies and kills the hot spots. (South Fork would have been lost had not a MUCH higher power — Thank You, God! — apparently stepped in and redirected the winds. The fire was headed directly toward town when the winds changed abruptly and drove the fires past it. Other locales may or may not be as fortunate.
So…
IMO this debacle could have been avoided if the Feds had spent more time recognizing reality instead of fantasizing about ‘Nature’s intentions’.
A lone guy in a Super Cub could probably have overflown these fires early in their development, poured half a thermos of coffee out the pilot’s window and flown home with the problem solved.
Instead, the bureaucrats sat on their thumbs and let everything get out of control.
(A friend of mine has a saying: “Kill the monsters while they’re small.” The Feds don’t seem to subscribe to that thinking. )
Right now, the Feds are in full CYA mode, claiming that this fire is very ‘complex’, that it was impossible to forecast this sort of development and that the weather was a factor that was unforeseeable.
Well, it wasn’t nearly so complex before they allowed it to grow beyond control. If they’d actually gotten out of the office and walked through the woods from time to time, they would have seen the huge amounts of dead wood and brush that’s fueling it. And, if they knew how to read weather charts — or had asked someone from the weather service (another federal agency) to read the charts for them — they wouldn’t have been so surprised by that little shocker.
I understand that hindsight is always 20/20 but the locals were already asking why the Feds were sitting on this a week or more before it blew up. Seems to me that our expert forestry folks might have at least listened a little bit.
So, a lot of people are out of their homes. Some may lose them. The local law enforcement and fire organizations (who have been doing truly heroic work) are spread thin and overtaxed. And a lot of businesses are in dire financial straits just at the start of the summer season. And it can all be laid at the feet of the Feds, most of whom will probably be promoted for their ‘selfless’ efforts in fighting this disaster…that they created.

I guess that incompetence flows from the leadership. Lord knows we’re dealing with really entrenched (politicians) at every level of Federal gubmint.”

Marijuana Crops in California Threaten Forests and Wildlife

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from the NY Times here (thanks to Mark Milligan for posting on the SAF LinkedIn site>

Below is an excerpt.

Scott Bauer, of the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, said, “I went out on a site yesterday where there was an active water diversion providing water to 15 different groups of people or individuals,” many of them growers. “The stream is going to dry up this year.”

While it is hard to find data on such an industry, Anthony Silvaggio, a sociology lecturer at Humboldt State University, pointed to anecdotal evidence in a Google Earth virtual “flyover” he made of the industrial farm plots and the damage they cause. The video was later enhanced and distributed by Mother Jones magazine.

Brad Job’s territory as a federal Bureau of Land Management officer includes public lands favored, he said, by Mexican drug cartels whose environmental practices are the most destructive. “The watershed was already lying on the ground bleeding,” Mr. Job said. “The people who divert water in the summer are kicking it in the stomach.”

That water is crucial to restoring local runs of imperiled Coho salmon, Chinook salmon and steelhead, which swam up Eel River tributaries by the tens of thousands before the logging era. Scott Greacen, executive director of Friends of the Eel River, said, “It’s not weed that drove the Coho to the brink of extinction, but it may kick it over the edge.” By various estimates, each plant needs at least one gallon and as much as six gallons of water during a season.

The idea that the counterculture’s crop of choice is bad for the environment has gone down hard here. Marijuana is an economic staple, particularly in Humboldt County’s rural southern end, called SoHum. Jennifer Budwig, the vice president of a local bank, estimated last year that marijuana infused more than $415 million into the county’s annual economic activity, one-quarter of the total.

For the professed hippies who moved here decades ago, marijuana farming combines defiance of society’s strictures, shared communal values and a steady income. “Marijuana has had a framework that started in the 1930s with jazz musicians,” said Gregg Gold, a psychology professor at Humboldt State University. “It’s a cultural icon of resistance to authority.”

“In 2013,” he added, “you’re asking that we reframe it in people’s minds as just another agribusiness. That’s a huge shift.”

Don’t forget that there’s a solution.. only buy marijuana sourced from Colorado and Washington. It’s only a matter of time before organic and sustainable certification…maybe FSC could develop a sideline?

Senate Committee Hearing: Challenges and opportunities for improving forest management on federal lands

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A reader sent me this link: here’s his review:

Bill Imbergamo’s hit it out of the park with his oral and written testimony. I wanted to give him a hug.

Norm Johnson was awesome about the variable retention and science, children’s books, etc

Risch was spot-on also.

If you haven’t watched, I highly recommend it. VERY worthwhile investment of time.

So far I managed to get to a part where Wyden notes that NEPA “requires a strong stomach” or something equivalent, somehow I couldn’t find it when I went back..

There’s a great deal to think about here.. I am not as sanguine as the Chief about large landscape NEPA. If someone wants to, couldn’t they go to court after a big blow down or fire (or new climate models or ???) and ask for a redo on the basis of new information and changed conditions? Fundamentally, it would require a change with some folks giving up power, which people usually don’t do voluntarily. Especially those who really believe that they have the right perspective.

The Black Hills doesn’t have any of those ESA animals which are involved in all the Montana and other lawsuits.. is that a coincidence? Perhaps not as applicable as a person might think. I feel like the Administration likes to think things will be fine if collaboration is done and they do huge NEPA. I am a fairly optimistic person but I don’t see that changing, say, Mr. Garrity’s view on the couple of R-1 timber sales because the NEPA is at a larger scale.

The pilots have a great deal of attention and support, in terms of getting various barriers out of the way. Even if the pilots are successful, this does not necessarily predict that everyday kinds of work will be equally successful. My optimism tells me that we would get further by determining what the real barriers to active forest management are.

Anyway, there’s a lot here. What’s your favorite quote? Did you want to hug anyone?

Saying “Yes” To Preferred Low- Carbon Energy

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Many believe that passing international agreements will be the way to slow or stop climate change. As for me, I believe in the power of human creativity, technology,economics and good will.

If I read the many stories in the press, even “science” stories, it seems like there are more projections of how bad things will get. And if there are stories from observations that things aren’t going as badly as thought, things are still bad because the pressure will be reduced for governments to sign on to international agreements, requiring many regulators and negotiators and checkers. All friction in the system (so to speak ;)), of directly producing and distributing low-carbon energy. Not to speak of the industry of calculating and projecting things that can’t be known. And I wonder if just hearing this side of things might cause people to despair. Which I can never believe is a good thing.

So here’s a piece in the Denver post on solar gardens:

Only about a quarter of the nation’s rooftops are big enough and sunny enough for rooftop solar, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden and not everyone can afford a rooftop array that can cost $12,000 to $18,000 in Colorado.

Solar gardens enable people who don’t have a sunny roof or the money to buy a full array to buy or lease a piece of an array — in some cases for as little as $1,000.

The Colorado Community Solar Garden Act was passed in 2010 to promote the community solar installations and directed the state Public Utilities Commission to include gardens in renewable energy plans. Xcel’s new incentive program for 18 megawatts of gardens in the next two years came out of that effort.

Xcel opened it program on August 15th and within 30 minutes had three times as many applications as it could fill.

Operators will get paid on a sliding scale — 14 cents to 10 cents — for each kilowatt-hour the garden produces. Residents will get a credit on their bill of about 6.8 cents a kilowatt-hour.

The Carbondale-based Clean Energy Collective, a private developer specializing in solar gardens, will develop six projects.

Among them are two gardens in Denver, where space is at a premium. One 400-kiolwatt array will cover the curved roof of the Lowry Hangar 2 and another 500-kilowatt installation will form a parking lot awning at the Evie Dennis school campus.

At the Golden Hoof Sustainable Demonstration Farm, in East Boulder, the collective will build a 500-kilowatt solar garden on pillars over a farm field.

“We’ve looked for innovative solutions for each community,” said Paul Spencer, chief executive officer of Clean Energy Collective.

The collective’s other solar gardens include one 108-kilowatt project in Arvada and two 500-kilowatt units in Breckenridge.

Solar Panel Hosting, Namaste Solar and Solar Power Financial teamed-up to win 497-kilowatt projects in Aurora and Saugache County.

“Installation will be similar to any other array,” Namaste’s Jones said. “The more complex aspect will be dealing with subscribers.”

Community Energy Solar, a Boulder-based project developer, and Bella Energy, another Boulder-based commercial solar installer are developing two 500-kilowatt projects in the City of Lafayette.

The projects will be on municipal land, one is adjacent to Lafayette’s water treatment plant and the city will be the prime customer for the garden, said Community Energy’s Eric Blank.

Lafayette officials and Community Energy executives are planning to donate output to low-income families, who would become subscribers to the garden for free.

“These ten projects are in areas that serve a million people, so the gardens will only be able to take a fraction of a percent of the potential customers,” said the Clean Energy Collective’s Spencer.

Here is an interesting article about new grids “Electric Avenue, When People Have the Power”..it’s subscription only at New Scientist but libraries usually carry it.

What’s the alternative? For the individual, complete separation from the grid remains an expensive, unreliable option suited only to the very rich or to determined eco-warriors.

But a small group of energy researchers is arguing for a third possibility, which they say is emerging thanks to advances in sensing, local storage and small systems for tapping renewable energy such as rooftop solar panels and micro wind turbines. At its heart is a vision of “community grids” that rely mostly on local energy sources and storage. They buy energy from the larger national grid when necessary, but can also feed renewable energy into the national pot. Such a system, they argue, could reduce demand on the main grid, freeing it up to run on a higher percentage of renewable energy sources.

It started with small grids that have for decades successfully allowed a range of self-contained communities to generate their own electricity. These range from military bases, university campuses and jails to remote villages in Alaska, for example, that have found it too expensive to connect to the central grid.

Most of these derive their electricity largely from constantly available sources like diesel generators and batteries. Not all, however: a microgrid at the University of California in San Diego adds clean sources like wind and sun to the mix.

Such microgrids could graduate from speciality niches and become much more common. To do that, however, it would be necessary to find a way for individuals to store the electricity in the community. One source with great potential, says Willett Kempton of the University of Delaware in Newark, is the batteries of electric cars. In April, Kempton, working with the local grid operator and a utility company, unveiled a system to enable electric cars to supply energy to the grid as well as taking it. Car owners can then earn around $5 per day by selling energy, along with providing the grid with a back-up supply.

In many ways, electric car batteries are the perfect storage medium for renewable energy. “The average US car is driven only 1 hour per day, the batteries are huge, and the times of use are fairly predictable,” says Kempton.

When plugged in, the circuit queries the grid every 4 seconds and receives a signal telling it to either charge, discharge or do neither, depending on what the grid needs.Kempton recently compared this Grid Integrated Vehicle (GIV) system with warehouses full of batteries and hydrogen fuel cells. “All three work, but GIV is the least expensive way to do it,” he says.

When I am a philanthropist (that is my next career goal), I would fund studies around which interventions could make the greatest difference in moving us from where we are in terms of energy to where we need to be. I would not focus on programs of “no to biomass” but rather focusing on these positive interventions, and finding an end state that most of us would support and moving there. No “enemizing” allowed.

“Forests Aren’t Fuel” Campaign and the Buchholtz et al. Review

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NRDC and Dogwood Alliance have launched the “Forests aren’t Fuel” campaign. Here is a link to the site.

The recent Buchholz et al. paper attached here has been cited (in the press) as evidence that using trees for fuel is “not green.” It’s also quoted as “new evidence”, but, in reality, it is a literature review, which by definition means a round-up of existing literature.

This has rather major policy implications in terms of policies that favor green energy sources.

It seems to me that this is once again a paper that looks at things framed in a certain way…but not a framing that I would have chosen.

1. Wood for energy can and does mean… people cutting firewood from their woodlots, backyards, or public lands. When we did the Colorado Roadless EIS, I think I remember 10% of households in the San Luis Valley heat with wood.

2. In fire prone areas (not the northeast), it can mean using trees removed for fuels reduction or dead hazard trees for energy. Soil characteristics of removing the trees occurs anyway, and the trees would otherwise be burned in piles with the CO2 released to the atmosphere.

So I am not a carbon expert, but it seems to me that the carbon effects of using wood for energy depend on the local situation and what else would happen, C wise, if you did not use the wood for fuel. Also if the wood you use is a byproduct of other activities like sawmills or fuel reduction projects.

Here’s a piece from the NRDC blog that makes the case.. it seems to be about “intensive forest management for energy.” But it takes a broad brush (or chainsaws a wide swath?;)..”cutting forests for electricity.” It is precisely that lack of precision that concerns me.

I think this is interesting, because as far as I know the southern forests are not New Hampshire (where the study was done) and folks in the northeast aren’t developing “energy plantations.”

Folks in the south are sending chips to Europe. But shouldn’t NRDC be trying to convince the Europeans that they are wrong? I see that this campaign is about Dogwood Alliance and NRDC. Now you might remember Dogwood Alliance from these recent stories about their work with IP.

But IP does “intensive forest management” just not for carbon, whereas I don’t see a lot of “intensive forest management” for biofuel in the northeast, where the cites in the Buchholz et al.study were.

Any help understanding all this, and whether something is really going on, or it’s just an idea of something that could be done.. (intensive management for energy plantations) would be helpful.

P.S. I have become curious about NRDC’s funding, and sent two messages asking for their 2012 990 and have not received a reply. I do know a human being there and got a nice reply from her, but when I send to the 990 department, I have gotten no answer at all.