21st Century Problems

Another Confusing Roadless Story: Aspens, Intervention, and Upper Tier

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Scott Fitzwilliams, left, and Glenn Adams discuss the health of an aspen grove in the White River National Forest near Silt, Colorado. Photo by Michael Brands.

Thanks again to Terry Seyden for this catch!

It’s a bit hard to tell in this news story, but the story is about a couple of different things that if you weren’t following this story closely, might be confusing. I will try to help.


Chain saw environmentalism at cutting edge of forest fight

Aspen, Colo. • Here is the next front in America’s fight for its Western forests.

Too late to head off a wave of climate-fueled beetles that have altered the evergreen landscape for generations — if not forever — foresters still believe they can rejuvenate this resort town’s namesake. They say the white bark and fluttering yellow heart-shaped leaves that announce fall in the Rocky Mountains are due for a pruning.

It’s chain saw environmentalism, and some of the West’s most ardent wilderness lovers have signed on. They face strong opposition from groups that believe Mother Nature can best repair her own, and their struggle over how best to legally protect untrammeled wild lands will profoundly shape the future of these hills.

“It’s no longer as easy as just saying wilderness is good and everything else is bad,” said John Bennett, a former Aspen mayor and current executive director of the advocacy group For the Forest.

Will aspen shoots — food to elk and other cherished Rocky Mountain wildlife — keep springing from the slopes in a warming and drying region? Can they without human help?

Government foresters want to start cutting down swaths of century-old aspens in hopes that young “suckers” will sprout from the roots to build a new forest. It’s how many of the aspens would have reproduced naturally during the 1900s had Americans allowed fire to scour more of the old trees from the land.

Today, there is some urgency because a widespread collapse that accelerated during a 2004-08 drought foreshadowed dire predictions of climate-linked losses over the next 50 years. The die-off blighted nearly a fifth of Colorado’s aspen stands, researchers say, thinning about a quarter of the forest crown in most of them with precious little regrowth.

Cutting aspens now, in the absence of drought, could regrow vigorous young trees before the next dry spell strikes.

“We certainly don’t have any silver bullets,” said Jim Worrall, a U.S. Forest Service Forest Health Protection pathologist in Gunnison, Colo., who studied the past decade’s so-called Sudden Aspen Decline syndrome. “But we do know that aspen stands less than about 40 years old were not really affected by Sudden Aspen Decline.”

Thus, cutting for regrowth is a prescription that’s taken firm root with foresters and opened a divide among environmentalists who might have unified against logging — if not for the wild card of climate change.

“Nature knows best,” said Sloan Shoemaker, executive director of Colorado’s Wilderness Workshop and a skeptic of the rush into forest interventions. He supports efforts to clear beetle-killed pines posing fire hazards and watershed threats around communities, but believes the aspens and other trees deep in the woods should adapt on their own.

“History is writ with many examples of humans monkeying in natural systems that have gone awry.”

OK, so the above is a question about cutting aspen for the purpose of trying to regenerate them.

That’s why Shoemaker and others with a more traditional wilderness ethic favor a hotly debated revision of Colorado’s roadless forest rule. The state and U.S. Forest Service are considering local changes to a nationwide 2001 rule protecting pristine forests from road construction, and one of several proposals under review would tighten restrictions considerably. It would generally ban tree cutting on 2.6 million acres of “upper-tier” protection zones — two-thirds of the state’s roadless areas.

Millions of acres of dead pines and spruces naturally give aspens new areas to colonize, Shoemaker said, while foresters seem fixated on old aspen stands in areas that aren’t likely to support them in the future. They want to prevent oak brush and other dryland species from taking over slopes that he believes are becoming ill-suited to aspens.

This next section is related to the aspen question because the “upper tier” acreage in the Proposed Colorado Rule does not allow tree cutting for wildlife habitat improvement, or restoration of endangered or sensitive species (fyi, aspen isn’t endangered or sensitive but it is good for wildlife). Note, this is not road building, it is tree cutting.. so people would have to walk in with chainsaws (or ride in on OHV’s) and drop the trees.

This aspect of the Upper Tier designation is of concern to some wildlife-oriented individuals as they may see the need for some cutting and burning to restore wildlife habitat in key corridors so animals can move (and also migrate based on future climate change).
Below is a quote from Colorado Roadless Q&A’s here.

“The Upper Tier designation was added based on public concern that exceptions found in the previous proposal would allow roads and tree cutting anywhere within CRAs. On Upper Tier acres, requirements are more restrictive than under the 2001 rule. The exceptions allow only road construction and reconstruction as allowed by statutes or treaties, and reserved or outstanding rights; and tree-cutting incidental to an activity not prohibited by the Colorado Roadless Rule and for personal or administrative use. ”

So now back to the news story.

“Trying to freeze an aspen stand in time,” he said, “is fighting nature.”

Sitting pretty

Others who love wilderness, and indeed moved here to live among it, point to the bark-beetle infestation — which stripped more than 6 million acres of Colorado evergreens — as evidence such hard-line protections are outdated.

“I’m a total wilderness advocate,” said Tom Cardamone, who moved here to work on a student-led wilderness campaign in 1972 and now directs the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies [ACES]. “Also, I recognize the increasing importance of hands-on forest management.”

ACES has a staff of naturalists whose mission statement seeks to nurture lifelong commitments to the Earth while “restoring the balance of natural communities.” Defining and championing proper balance can be difficult in a resort community where most residents moved because they liked things just the way they were — a problem Cardamone calls “the challenge of the perception of the pristine.”

If a place looks nice and attracts hikers and mountain bikers, he said, they don’t necessarily weigh whether its ecology is out of whack. Locals have battled the center’s efforts to restore a stretch of the Roaring Fork River from gravel mining and an alpine bog from peat removal, he said, because the areas remained pretty. Both projects went forward, and now both are hailed as ecological successes.

So it is with struggling forests, Cardamone believes. Residents don’t like the idea of roads and heavy equipment trudging through pristine wilderness, but “I’m also concerned about the damage of climate change to pristine wilderness.”

Confusing, because now we are not talking about Colorado Roadless nor upper tier. No one is proposing building roads for aspen treatments in roadless.

The bark beetles that have munched through at least 40 million acres of Western evergreens since 1997 served a warning. Aided by warming winters and lengthening summers, they attacked forests that were effectively overpopulated. Individual trees competed for soil moisture and daylight to steel themselves against the onslaught, and when it was too late for people to react on a landscape level, foresters started thinning trees in an effort to save favored recreation spots or reduce fire hazards.

The question now is whether active management would avoid a similar collapse among another key forest species, or whether it’s futile to play God. Which lesson should be taken?

Dangers of drought

Aspens host their own species of native bark beetles, and those can find heightened success during droughts. But it is the drought itself — heat coupled with drying soils — that scientists believe threatens to shrink aspen range, currently stretching along the Rockies from Mexico to Alaska.

The Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station has used greenhouse-gas projections to estimate that up to half the suitable aspen range in the central Rockies will vanish under something like permanent drought by 2060, eliminating low-elevation stands.

Some ecologists believe aspens are resilient, though, and argue that something besides logging could help them thrive.

“The prime culprits are the rising elk populations in the West and, in some cases, livestock,” said Paul Rogers, director of Utah State University’s Western Aspen Alliance. Hunting more elk, restoring wolves to push them around and better managing livestock, he said, would help aspen sprouts survive in many places.

Rogers doubts Sudden Aspen Decline is as widespread as others say. He doesn’t question that, for instance, 17 percent of Colorado’s aspen stands suffered in the past drought, but he doesn’t believe the roots are dead in most of those. Protect the areas from overgrazing and browsing, he said, and many would spring back. Aspens have expanded and contracted with previous climate shifts.

Logging trees, as the Forest Service wants, would stimulate new growth, Rogers said. But none of the sprouts would climb past “mouth-high” if wildlife and livestock aren’t managed accordingly.

“Don’t do anything,” he warned, “unless you have a way to protect [new growth] afterward.”

I’m not an expert on aspen decline, but it seems like it should be pretty clear if “sprouts are not coming up” or “sprouts are coming up and being eaten.” Certainly if you are successful at “sprouts coming up” you would have to manage “sprouts being eaten.” Not sure how this relates, unless it is impossible to manage “sprouts being eaten” so why spend money to help “sprouts come up?”

But to be relevant to the Upper Tier Roadless question, you would have to say that there are no situations for wildlife for any tree species that could be helped by tree falling -ever. Again, going from the specific to the general is a bit confusing.

Buying time

If fire suppression has built aspen forests that are unnaturally old and uniform in age, shaking them up makes sense to Cardamone. Doing so might stimulate young aspens and buy the forest time for humans to slow climate change.

Roadless protections for their own sake, he said, aren’t the ultimate goal anymore.

“Road or no road, if all the trees are dead because we didn’t do something wise,” Cardamone said, “we may regret that.”

That’s the plea echoing around the White River National Forest, which surrounds Aspen and shelters the nation’s largest elk herd. District rangers and Forest Supervisor Scott Fitzwilliams fear that if public pressure leads their agency bosses to choose the most restrictive alternative for their new roadless rule, the forest will shrivel. It’s not even about roads, he said, because the agency could cut trees without building any — if the roadless rule allows.

“We’re losing our aspen pretty quickly in this part of the world,” Fitzwilliams said on a recent drive into the Divide Creek Basin. And more than half the forest there is aspen, mostly tall, stout, old.

Eighty percent are mature to “overmature,” he said.

Fitzwilliams drove up dirt roads past elaborate hunting camps of tents and buses — even one big rig hauled into the woods to outfit enthusiasts — showing what draws elk hunters here, and what he believes is at stake.

Elk thrive among aspens, but here and there along Divide Creek, century-old trees are toppling under their own weight, with nothing but grass growing under them. Eventually, without active management, he believes spruces and firs will fill in some of these gaps, squeezing out elk and deer. Oak brush will creep up other slopes.

And Divide Creek, it turns out, is among those zones that his crews couldn’t touch if the Forest Service designates 2.6 million acres for full roadless protections. Step off the existing roads, Fitzwilliams said, and you couldn’t cut a tree in the name of forest health. “If this all becomes upper-tier roadless, I’m out of business.”

Those stricter protections are what the Pitkin County Commission, based in Aspen, requested in its official comments to the agency, and it’s a popular stand among lots of politicians in ski country. But Fitzwilliams has been trying to change minds.

“I’ve joked with the Town Council that they need to change [Aspen’s] name to Spruce-Fir,” he said.

‘Hidden gems’

Beyond ecology, Fitzwilliams said, there’s an economy and a people at stake.

West central Colorado’s wilds are interwoven with a string of ski resorts, highways, electric lines and forested homes. Further limitations on tree thinning would risk catastrophic fire.

Those are fears that many wilderness lovers share, and they accept logging around the edges to improve safety. But many also push not just for more roadless protections, but also for new congressionally designated wilderness areas to limit most man-made disturbances.

They’re pushing a campaign called “Hidden Gems” to expand wilderness areas by 342,000 acres in this part of Colorado, effectively moving the protected zones farther downhill into areas considered important winter range for wildlife.

Outdoor photographer Steven DeWitt, of Eagle County, Colo., is a hiking and snowboarding enthusiast who holds wildlands dear. He sees the need for action near towns and highways, he said, but “what we’ve got for wilderness now is all we’ve got left.”

The pine forest’s rapid decline saddened DeWitt to the point that he has been shooting photos since 2007 for a planned online essay that he hopes will motivate Americans to deal with climate change. But in the backcountry, he prefers to see forests regenerate on their own.

Chain saw environmentalism isn’t for him. Rooting around in wild places sets a precedent.

“It’s a bad cocktail,” he said of Forest Service hopes for logging the roadless areas. “Everybody’s good intentions before anything is cut are great, but a road in a wilderness is a bad idea.”

It seems like Scott Fitzwilliams valiantly keeps saying “we are not talking about roads, we are only talking about the ability to cut trees” but then others are quoted as “roads are bad and you shouldn’t have them.”

I think it would be really hard to understand what the issue is from reading this story. It would also have been a better story if the author had quoted someone from the wildlife community who are concerned about the prohibitions in the Upper Tier.
Some people might say that the Upper Tier acres are “more protective than the 2001” because they don’t allow tree cutting for wildlife habitat or endangered species.. yet what are you really “protecting” by not allowing those actions? Certainly not wildlife, nor endangered species. It’s all rather ideological, and not very real, IMHO.

Further, I don’t think it’s accurate to say you are “logging”, when the material is not removed (because there are no roads). You may be “cutting” but using that darn dictionary again (Merriam Webster online):

“log
verb
transitive verb
1 a : to cut (trees) for lumber b : to clear (land) of trees in lumbering.”

It’s also interesting everyone quoted in the story agrees on a need for tree cutting around towns and highways.

Ethnobotany Interrupted

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Thanks to Bob Zybach for this piece from the Eugene Weekly. It talks about “what is “restoration” and what is the role of Native Americans and their traditional management techniques.
Here’s an excerpt. the original story is here.

A Human Dilemma

Current restoration objectives for the West Eugene Wetlands tend to center around creating habitat for threatened and endangered species, such as Fender’s blue butterfly. This often involves removing invasive plants like blackberry and ivy, and introducing native plants that are beneficial to species at risk.

For the most part, land managers and restoration ecologists — including those who oversee the Wetlands — tend to focus on restoring natural functions, not so much on returning a landscape to any particular previous state. Ecologists study the relationships between natural elements such as native species, soil quality and the ability of nutrients to flow through a system, and attempt to restore as many of these elements as possible to ensure biodiversity.

“What you’re restoring a landscape to is a really important question,” says Emily Steele, a restoration ecologist with the city of Eugene. “And you’ll hear a lot of different things from different people. We’re trying to get the habitat back to a state where it can be self sufficient and resilient, so that it will require less management from people.”

But restoring land using traditional Native American methods involves preserving culturally important native plants with the intention of using them — for basketry, food or canoes.

Zybach, who is an expert in Indian burning patterns in the Willamette Valley, says that because ecosystems in the Willamette Valley evolved alongside human activity, they function best when people are using them.“Restoration doesn’t mean a return to natural functions; it means a return to a previous condition,” he says. “Natural to people often means no humans. But if we’re not interrelating with the environment, something’s wrong. You have to have people tending the land.”

“When you restore a landscape, that would include cultural use,” says Lewis. “There’s an assumption that plants, animals and humans are separate, but in ecology we know that they’re interrelated. That traditional landscape is almost gone, and you want to preserve what’s endangered. It’s a cultural landscape; people were involved in it, therefore, you want people to come back in.”

Pine Beetles in the Black Hills

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For those who need a break from Colorado pine beetle stories..Note that this story is the sixth article in an eight week series in the Black Hills Pioneer. Remember that the Hills are full of ponderosa pine, a different beast in terms of pine beetles than the lodgepole in Colorado, Wyoming and Montana.

Forest Service ‘optimistic’ about success against pine beetles

By Mark VanGerpen Black Hills Pioneer | Posted: Thursday, November 17, 2011 9:38 am

NORTHERN HILLS — The Black Hills National Forest faces some serious challenges in terms of combating the mountain pine beetle, but its managers say there is hope of success.

In terms of the beetle epidemic, Forest Supervisor Craig Bobzien said that with the variety of resources available to us, we can be optimistic about successfully preventing the total infestation of the forest.

“I’m of the belief — and I will say this is a shared belief among a lot of people who are working on this — that in the Black Hills, we have the ingredients in place to have the best chance of being successful in having a healthy forest, of really any place that I know of in the West that’s being threatened right now,” Bobzien said.

To achieve that success, the Forest Service has formulated a strategy for responding to the beetles, but it will also take cooperation with governments, landowners and other entities across the forest.

The Western Bark Beetle Strategy, published by the Forest Service in July, identifies three main “prongs” or considerations in treating for the beetles: human safety, forest recovery after a devastating infestation, and long-term forest resiliency through thinning and treatment methods.

Bobzien said the Forest Service treats for safety first, in areas like campgrounds, trailheads, roads and the wildland/urban interface where public communities meet forestland.

He added, though, that many of those areas aren’t facing serious public safety threats right now.

“(Safety) is our first priority, but it’s the smallest part of what we do on the Black Hills,” Bobzien said. “We don’t have many areas like that because we’ve been able to manage so much of the forest in advance of the beetles.

“We are really working to look at the areas that are both most at risk and where the public resource values are the highest — said differently, where we’d have the greatest consequence if we didn’t take any action.”

Strategically, Bobzien said the most effective place to be — and where the Forest Service is trying to be and remain — is in the “leading edge” zone, which is the area beetles are approaching but have not yet reached.

Strengthening the forest in those areas will presumably prevent the beetles from extending any farther, protecting the forest from further infestation.

But the cumbersome regulations by which the Forest Service must abide sometimes keep it from getting to leading edge zones before the beetles do, and Bobzien said some of the leading edge zones that were identified earlier are filling up with bug-hit trees pretty quickly.

Delayed action is nothing new for the Forest Service, which is hampered by federal regulations, budget processes and litigation from outside sources. Approving a timber sale can take years. Sometimes plans need to adapt during that time to meet new threats, but regulations prevent a quick change in direction.

“It’s like the Titanic – if you see a threat coming at you, how hard is it to change course and do something different? It’s not very easy,” said Northern Hills District Ranger Rhonda O’Byrne.

Bobzien said that the 325,000-acre Mountain Pine Beetle Response Project, along with various other projects that amount to about 200,000 acres, will help decrease response time to newly-hit areas and increase the ability to create a beetle-preventing barrier of thinned, healthy forest in leading edge zones.

Some of those projects could have boots on the ground by summer of 2012.

Bobzien said that approving that many acres for a quick response is critical to staying ahead of the spreading infestation.

“We have just got to look at every possible stand that could be threatened here and analyze this now,” he said. “I don’t think we can (assume) that this is moving at such a pace that we can keep up with it.”

O’Byrne said the Forest Service’s main defense in battling the pine beetles is the timber sale, which allows the timber industry to harvest trees on federal land and what makes thinning in leading edge zones possible.

Maintaining those timber sales in advance of the beetles is “clearly our niche here,” Bobzien said. Without timber sales, which actually create revenue for the Forest Service, then the Black Hills would have to rely on federal funding to fight the beetles, as many other forests in the U.S. do. And federal funds are in short supply these days.

Unfortunately, while the Black Hills has sold more timber than any other forest nationwide in the past five years, the beetles are still advancing, and the timber industry has limits to what it can economically log on the forest.

In other words, the timber sale can’t be our only preventative measure, and O’Byrne said the Forest Service recognizes that. The Forest Service is working with private landowners and volunteer organizations to find a solution for how to best treat the forest.

A lot of landowners and volunteers have come forward in the past six months, ardently trying to help the Forest Service remove beetle-killed trees from national forest land. But there are time-consuming processes for that too.

While O’Byrne and Bobzien said they are impressed with that effort forest wide, it’s not as simple as handing a volunteer a hardhat and chainsaw and setting him loose in the forest.

Legal questions need to be answered first: what degree of training will volunteers need to undergo? Who will pay for it? If a volunteer is injured on the forest, who is liable?

“We are trying to find some instrument that will let the Forest Service work with these other entities … so that the timber sale contract isn’t our only option,” O’Byrne said.

“Right now we’re looking through law regulation policy that affects the Forest Service, seeing if there’s some way that’s legal out there for us to be able to do it. We really want to be able to work with them, but it’s the mechanics of trying to be able to do that … All the federal processes, the laws that we have to meet, they’re there for a good reason, but it takes time to get through them.”

Along with volunteers eager to help are those eager to offer advice, which in turn generates a wide variety of ideas and values about the best treatment strategies and most critical areas to protect. Bobzien said there is no universal strategy for everybody to follow, because the beetles affect different jurisdictions that have different priorities and methods.

That said, Bobzien said there is a need for cooperation and forest-wide prioritization of areas that need to be treated.

“The reality of it is that we do have to prioritize areas, by looking at the values at risk and the consequences of not going there,” Bobzien said. “We clearly have to do that. We do that on a daily and weekly basis.”

Those priority areas naturally shift as new beetle attacks appear or existing ones expand, and even as funding is allocated and spent. Safety is always the top priority, but Bobzien said the Forest Service will also work to protect the economic, recreational and environmental assets in the forest as well, because even though fighting the beetles is tough to do with limited funds, doing nothing could end up costing even more.

This is the sixth article in an eight-week series that discusses the effects of the mountain pine beetle on the Black Hills. Next week’s article will discuss treatment options and tactics in combating the pine beetle.

River-restoration guru to target creek in Colorado’s Hayman wildfire area

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From the Denver Post here.

DECKERS — The U.S. Forest Service has deployed a river-restoration guru in a $4.5 million gambit to accelerate recovery on a first segment of the South Platte tributaries ruined a decade ago by a massive human-caused wildfire.

The project launched this week by foresters and private-sector partners will try to rework the altered flow of Trail Creek to make it more natural.
For Fort Collins-based hydrologist Dave Rosgen, this also is a chance to demonstrate techniques increasingly in demand worldwide.
The problem is that the aftermath of the Hayman fire unleashed torrents of sediment — sand and decomposed Pikes Peak​ granite — that slumps from barren mountainsides into an estimated 157 miles of streams.

Before the 2002 fire, for example, Trail Creek carried 1,200 tons of sediment a year. Now foresters say 20,000 tons a year course through the creek, which flows into West Creek, Horse Creek and then the South Platte River​, which is the major source of water for people in the Denver metropolis.
Denver Water managers’ struggle to manage the sediment in both Cheesman and Strontia Springs reservoirs is driving up monthly water bills. At Strontia Springs, the utility is involved in a $29 million project to dredge out 675,000 tons of sediment.
Enter Rosgen.
“This is how Mother Nature does it,” he said Friday, describing his plan to stabilize what has become a sluice for corrosive sediment.
The steep banks will first be reshaped, and fallen tree trunks will be used to reinforce the new channel. Then, the stream bed will be raised by about 7 feet so water carrying sediment disperses into a willow studded plane instead of racing down stream.
“We’re going to basically go back in here and re-establish a braided, meandering channel,” Rosgen, 69, told a gathering of county and federal employees.
Amid budget-cutting, federal environmental stewards have turned to private-sector partners for help containing the damage. The National Forest Foundation and the Coalition for the Upper South Platte coordinated funding, with contributions of $750,000 from ski goliath Vail Associates, $500,000 from Aurora Water and $200,000 from the Gates Family Foundation.

Rosgen has developed formulas for calculating rates of erosion, enabling detailed analysis of mountain slopes, fire impact and hydrology. His team at Wildland Hydrology Inc. has restored dozens of damaged streams in Argentina, Costa Rica, Tanzania and around the western United States.

Ever since the Hayman fire, heavy rains have led to increasingly severe flooding across the scorched burn area. Foresters and volunteers have tried to address this, planting 3.5 million tree seedlings.
“But it seems that 137,000 acres doesn’t heal as quickly as we’d like it to,” said Pikes Peak District Ranger Brent Botts.
Eroding mountainsides and clogged streams eventually would stabilize on their own, Rosgen said, but not until the whole area burned by the fire is reforested — a process expected to take 80 years. Meanwhile, the growing Front Range​ population demands water and healthy mountain fisheries for wildlife and recreation.

That forces a decision of whether to intervene by re-engineering key tributaries, Rosgen said. “We’ll work with the river, not against it” with a goal of “getting back to a natural rate of erosion that is acceptable,” he said.
Over the next year, his crews with heavy machinery “will come as close as we can to duplicating the stable natural form of the rivers and their processes,” Rosgen said. “We will become a copycat of nature.”

PEER Press Release on Marijuana in the Upper Midwest Forests

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Here’s the link to the memo and here to the press release on the PEER website.

MEXICAN DRUG GANGS INVADE GREAT LAKES FORESTS — Forest Service Cops in Michigan and Wisconsin Decry Agency Head-in-Sand Stance

Washington, DC — Mexican drug gangs have expanded their mega-marijuana operations into the Upper Midwest, according to an internal briefing memo released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). U.S. Forest Service law enforcement agents in Michigan and Wisconsin say their agency is “dangerously unprepared” for the explosive growth of “Drug Trafficking Organizations” in this region which had not before seen “multi-thousand plant grows” tended by armed gangs.

The undated 2010 briefing memo obtained by PEER under the Freedom of Information Act describes a “disturbing new trend” in which Great Lakes states are on a trajectory approaching the notorious Mexican gang incursions onto California public lands. The memo warns that the number and size of cultivation operations has spiked dramatically since 2008 but that the Forest Service is outgunned, outmanned and disinclined to deal with the growing role of Mexican drug gangs:

“Drug traffickers have harmed and threatened innocent civilians and law enforcement. There have been attempts to kidnap civilians and there have been several shootings this year alone”;
“During the season when DTO [Drug Trafficking Organization] is prevalent, we have been forced to restrict our employees from working in large portions of the forest”; and
Drug gangs have set “large forest fires” and wreaked extensive resource damage in the forests.

“The leadership of the Forest Service’s law enforcement program seems far more intent on covering up problems than addressing them,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. “The public has a right to know what dangers they may encounter while hiking in the woods.”

Forest Service law enforcement officials had earlier released only a highly redacted, virtually unreadable, version of the memo to PEER, claiming that it was pre-decisional and revealed sensitive law enforcement techniques. PEER later obtained the memo from another branch of the Forest Service which released it largely un-redacted as an attachment to a 2011 report on severe morale problems within the region.

The 13-page memo recounts a litany of instances in which Forest Service brass refused requests for inter-agency cooperation, training and surveillance. It paints a stark picture of an agency in denial:

“We are not prepared in terms of manpower, training resources for ourselves and local agencies, investigative and operational resources…”
Supervisors “denied, ignored or failed to support requests for additional training, funding and public education efforts” while one supervisor tried “to convince others that eradication and cultivation numbers in Wisconsin had actually decreased” (emphasis in original); and
Referring to an all inclusive gag order against law enforcement officers speaking with the media, “we are not reasonably allowed to use the media to educate the public on the dangers” they face.

“This memo is a cop calling for help from a stone deaf chain-of-command,” added Ruch. “Disturbingly, the indifference and self-serving reaction from Forest Service leadership may pose a greater threat to public safety than the gangs themselves.”

Taking a Closer Look at “Corporate Interests” and the Forest Service

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Photo by Josh Birnbaum

This weekend, I ran across this op-ed piece in the Denver Post by JoAnne Ditmer. In it, she said:

That’s what critics call the Wilderness and Roadless Area Release Act, which would erase current protections on more than 60 million acres of America’s undeveloped public lands, including 4.6 million acres in Colorado. The act would affect 55 million acres in national forests and almost 7 million acres in Bureau of Land Management properties, “releasing” them to corporate profit-making decisions.

I don’t think that that is exactly true, as there are regulations and environmental laws that intervene between “release” and “corporate decisions.” It’s not a simple and direct relationship.

And:

The vast majority are in the West and this is an alarming signal that some powerful people think the West and its spectacular landscapes no longer deserve special protections. With protection removed, these irreplaceable lands would be open to destructive “multiple use” — oil and gas development, mining, timber harvests, off-road vehicles.

“Come help yourself to our national treasures” seems to be the motto.

I don’t think that timber harvests or off-road vehicles are best described as “corporate interests,” at least not here in the Interior West. Which is, after all, where the Denver Post is located. What I would call Urban Elk Country.

I know that corporations are unpopular these days, so therefore are good for inflammatory op-eds. And the word “corporations” comes from corpus or body- so all organizations, in a way, are “corporate.”

Nevertheless, I wonder if “corporate” really is a good term to use about the timber industry in the Interior West. In the WFLC Newsletter (here), I ran across this Photography Fellowship Blog for the International Year of Forests. Take a look, many interesting photos.

So I happened to click on one labelled “Ovando Montana” by Josh Birnbaum that showed the Pyramid Mountain Lumber mill (photo above). I wondered if the conversation would change if instead of “corporate timber interests” people substituted “local businesses that provide family-supporting-wage jobs in rural areas.”

And so back to our discussion of “corporate huckster” here. How about substituting for “corporate huckster” “supporter of local businesses that provide family-supporting wage jobs in rural areas and otherwise contribute to their communities.”

I don’t think we’ll be able to work our way out of our current economic crisis (bad for people, good for GHG reduction) without acknowledging that there is value to companies that providing goods and services to people, thereby providing jobs and taxes.

To my mind, there is a big, and important, differences between the Pyramid Valley Lumbers of the world, and, say, Conoco or Enron.

More Bucks From Congress if it’s a Park; What’s Up with That?

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All US tax dollars come from the same source, the US taxpayer. In a couple of recent instances, people are sure that putting an area under the Park Service would get them more funds to do a better job of management.

Here are two examples, in Southern California here
“Diverse support shown for National Park Service proposal for San Gabriel Mountains, River” and here for the Valles Caldera.

The economic benefits of consolidated management of both the Valles Caldera National Preserve and Bandelier National Monument is one of several reasons the preserve should be taken over by the National Park Service, according to a recent study.

Caldera Action, which advocates for increased public access to the preserve, is touting an analysis from The Harbinger Consulting Group that, according to Caldera Trust Executive Director Tom Ribe, “produced more dramatic findings than we expected in terms of impact to the local economy.”

Harbinger says a Park Service takeover would net the Valles Caldera millions more in revenue.

The preserve was created by Congress in 2000 as a kind of private-public management experiment. It is now run by the Valles Caldera Trust, with a board appointed by the president and which has been charged with making the preserve a financially self-sustaining operation.

That, however, isn’t likely to happen. Other studies have shown the preserve won’t make nearly enough money to meet the federal requirement that it break even by 2015. The preserve’s annual operating budget is about $3.5 million; the trust typically raises, through grazing contracts and recreation fees, about $800,000 per year.

“Through fees and commercial resource management, the Trust has made gains in recovering some of the costs of managing the Preserve, but by all accounts, that experiment has not succeeded and is unlikely to do so,” the Harbinger report says.

U.S. Sens. Jeff Bingaman and Tom Udall have been making this argument since at least last year, when they introduced legislation to fold the Valles Caldera into the National Park Service.

The report backs them up, saying National Park Service management would provide “more stable long-term benefits, more reliable resource protection, and superior visitor experiences.” Key findings in the study include:

Under NPS management, the preserve would support over $1 million more in sales to local businesses and nearly 50 more local jobs than it would if managed by the Forest Service with a similar operating budget and staff.
NPS management would generate in excess of $110 million in local economic benefits over the first 15 years.
In 2016, NPS operation of the preserve would be expected to support 202 local jobs, nearly $8 million in wages and $11 million in economic activity. And between 2012 and 2016, construction projects on the preserve could support an average of 50 local jobs per year.
Consolidated NPS management of the preserve and neighboring Bandelier National Monument would attract more visitors to the preserve and improve the visitors’ experience at both sites. Consolidation would also boost efficiency and create consistent policies and programs.
The National Park Service is more likely than the U.S. Forest Service to maintain a high and consistent level of funding, staffing, visitor services and resource protection.

Part of the reason NPS stands to make more money with the preserve than the Forest Service is that the Park Service would probably invest more money in the preserve upfront. “With a small number of notable exceptions,” the study notes, “the Forest Service does not tend to put in place the same level of infrastructure and visitor services typically associated with NPS units.”

Based on plans already presented by the Valles Caldera Trust, the analysis says a likely scenario for the preserve would include the addition of a main visitors center overlooking the Valle Grande, a loop drive with interpretive signs, a full slate of interpretive and educational programming, more trails and trailhead facilities, and one or two small campgrounds on the preserve.

The Park Service is more likely to raise the funds for these projects because of its budget process, the report says. NPS requests annual appropriations by line item for each of its parks — a certain amount for a particular park’s visitors center, for example. The Forest Service, on the other hand, receives appropriations for broad functional categories like fire-fighting, and has to spread those funds out among its areas.

Plus, the Park Service is a draw in itself, much more so than the Forest Service, according to the analysis. Informal surveys of visitors to attractions managed by the National Park Service have shown that “many travelers (especially international visitors) use the NPS website to help plan their visits,” the report says. “Over time, the Preserve would become widely known as part of the NPS system, and word of mouth from other parks in the region could encourage even more visitors to Bandelier and Valles Caldera.”

The bill to put the Valles Caldera under management of NPS has gotten a hearing in Congress’ Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which Bingaman chairs, but has not advanced.

In a statement, Bingaman said, “The National Park Service is best suited for the long-term management of the Valles Caldera as it has a long history of protecting unique cultural and natural resources, while also increasing tourism to our nation’s crown jewels.”

For those curious about the study and the assumptions therein, here is a link to the study.

Maybe it’s time to consider changing the budget structure of the Forest Service to be unit by unit- or somehow otherwise equilibrating the budgets among agencies for equivalent kinds of activities. Perhaps there is something about lobbying for a park or for parks; that lobbying for a “fuels treatment” line item across the country doesn’t have the same resonance.

Perhaps, if a place is special, then it belongs best at the Park Service.. otherwise if it’s forested, the Forest Service and if not, the BLM. Maybe it’s time to put all federal lands together under one budget process and approach (if not department). Otherwise, there is likely to be increasing amounts of transferring as local areas try to increase their funding- with the transfers themselves incurring additional costs.

Nibbled to Death By Neighbors: The Future of Public Lands?

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One of the issues that you usually don’t hear much about in the press are “lands” issues. Lands people, in my opinion, are among the unsung heroes of the Forest Service.

If you talk to them, you will find out some of the problems facing public lands-
neighbors attempting to cut off access to the public, through
land exchanges, trespass and subsequently being granted the land through efforts of their Congresspeople, putting gates on public roads, signing public roads as private, removing Forest Service signs, and probably other approaches I have not yet heard about.

Because of the relative tininess of each individual action, it is difficult to get a handle on the overall size of the problem. I have heard that it is difficult to get the courts involved, again, due to the individual size of each incursion and the workload of the Justice Department- although some are successfully litigated. My understanding is that there simply aren’t enough people funded to keep an eye on these kinds of things to keep up with the need.

Here’s a discussion about the roads problem- the question raised was “how can you tell if the “private” signs are accurate?”

Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to tell. In Wyoming, you can check the commissioners’ records at the local courthouse to find out the surveyed route of all the county roads, and get copies of the easements (or orders) establishing the road. Even then, you can get into issues regarding whether the county road has been abandoned, and reverted to private.

The forest service roads are not so easy, because the forest service is so bad about either maintaining their roads, or keeping records regarding which ones are public and private. It is not uncommon for private inholders in the forest who block a road through their property, which was built and maintained by the public long before their property was private. The Forest Service (or the public) is left to file suit to enjoin the blockage, and they usually conclude it is not worth the money to bring suit.

I just finished working on a lawsuit where this precise issue was involved, and the forest service won the suit, but they had allowed the road to remain blocked for over a decade. If they hadn’t convinced the U.S. Attorney to bring suit to establish a trail along the old railroad bed passing through the same property, they would never have sued just to reopen the road.

There are several theories under which the forest service, the local county commission or the public can sue to enjoin a landowner from blocking a public road. (prescriptive easements, R.S. 2477, implied easement, simple lack of right) Sadly, the amount of historical research necessary to prevail in those suits means that few ever get brought, due to the cost. The private landowners know this, so they routinely just block the roads, and dare anyone to do anything about it.

The worst abuse I’ve seen in Wyoming is where a private landowner (with buddies on the county commission) will grant an easement for a county road, get the county to pay to build the road, then convince the commissioners to abandon the road later. The landowner, in the process, just got the taxpayers to build him a nice long driveway, thank you very much. I can point to a couple of these in my county.

Here’s a story in the Denver Post yesterday about a land exchange. It’s not clear to me why one individual’s desire to join pieces of property is more important than traditional rights of access for the public.

At the root of the controversy is the fact that the swap is being carried out with legislation rather than through an administrative process as most of the land swaps in the country are done.

That means there is no environmental review process before the trade takes place: There are no formal public hearings that would put a spotlight on the trade rather than making it just another item on a county commission’s agenda.

That is one reason a national watchdog group devoted to overhauling the way the government trades public land is looking askance.

The Western Lands Project in Seattle is questioning the transparency and is troubled that Koch included land in two states (Colorado and Utah) and land involving two federal management agencies. Those factors guarantee the trade must be done through legislation.

“The thing that bothers me about this bill — it appears to me this whole thing was engineered to keep it out of the normal public process. All of our questions could have been answered if this hadn’t been done legislatively,” Western Lands director Janine Blaeloch said.

Goldstein said Koch is only interested in having a much larger ranch in Gunnison County so he can hunt and ride horses and have a place to put his extensive collection of Western memorabilia. He has had enough of people trespassing from the quarter-mile-wide strip of public land that runs through the ranch. The trade would fix that.

Hmm. If there is public access, and people trespass on nearby private land, and the proposed solution is to cut off public access, then there is not much hope for much public land. Another solution would be to not buy (or sell) land that is adjacent to roads with public access.

Readers: do you have these kinds of problems in your neck of the woods?

Fourmile Canyon Fire Report Confirms Firewise

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The Rocky Mountain Research Station released its Fourmile Canyon Fire report, requested by Senator Udall of Colorado. The Report confirms that:

1) A home’s fate depends upon fuel in its immediate surroundings and construction materials;

2) Fuel treatments, especially those that leave fine fuels untreated, are ineffective protection against wildfires that threaten homes, i.e., windy, dry conditions; and,

3) Fire suppression resources are easily overwhelmed precisely when Fire-Unwise homes need them the most.

The report took a special look at aerial attack, finding that the great preponderance of retardant was dropped after the fire had already stopped advancing.

NY Times on “Forests are Dying” and Carbon

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Thanks to Marek Smith for this piece on carbon and forests.
Here’s more on “forests are dying”.
It’s worth reading the whole thing, plus some of the sidebars. I just quoted the part here on our favorite topic, fires’n’bugs.

Wildfires and Bugs

Stripping the bark of a tree with a hatchet, Diana L. Six, a University of Montana insect scientist, pointed out the telltale signs of infestation by pine beetles: channels drilled by the creatures as they chewed their way through the juicy part of the tree.

The tree she was pointing out was already dead. Its needles, which should have been deep green, displayed the sickly red that has become so commonplace in the mountainous West. Because the beetles had cut off the tree’s nutrients, the chlorophyll that made the needles green was breaking down, leaving only reddish compounds.

Pine beetles are a natural part of the life cycle in Western forests, but this outbreak, under way for more than a decade in some areas, is by far the most extensive ever recorded. Scientists say winter temperatures used to fall to 40 degrees below zero in the mountains every few years, killing off many beetles. “It just doesn’t happen anymore,” said a leading climate scientist from the University of Montana, Steven W. Running, who was surveying the scene with Dr. Six one recent day.

As the climate has warmed, various beetle species have marauded across the landscape, from Arizona to Alaska. The situation is worst in British Columbia, which has lost millions of trees across an area the size of Wisconsin.

The species Dr. Six was pointing out, the mountain pine beetle, has pushed farther north into Canada than ever recorded. The beetles have jumped the Rocky Mountains into Alberta, and fears are rising that they could spread across the continent as temperatures rise in coming decades. Standing on a mountain plateau south of Missoula, Dr. Six and Dr. Running pointed to the devastation the beetles had wrought in the forest around them, consisting of a high-elevation species called whitebark pine.

“We were going to try to do like an eight-year study up here. But within three years, all this has happened,” Dr. Six said sadly.

“It’s game over,” Dr. Running said.

Later, flying in a small plane over the Montana wilderness, Dr. Running said beetles were not the only problem confronting the forests of the West.

Warmer temperatures are causing mountain snowpack, on which so much of the life in the region depends, to melt earlier in most years, he said. That is causing more severe water deficits in the summer, just as the higher temperatures cause trees to need extra water to survive. The whole landscape dries out, creating the conditions for intense fires. Even if the landscape does not burn, the trees become so stressed they are easy prey for beetles.

From the plane, Dr. Running pointed out huge scars where fires had destroyed stands of trees in recent years. “Nothing can stop the wildfires when they get to this magnitude,” he said. Some of the fire scars stood adjacent to stands of lodgepole pine destroyed by beetles.

At the moment, the most severe problems in the nation’s forests are being seen in the Southwestern United States, in states like Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. The region has been so dry that huge, explosive fires consumed millions of acres of vegetation and thousands of homes and other buildings this summer.

This year’s drought came against the background of an overall warming and drying of the Southwestern climate, which scientists say helps to explain the severe effects. But the role of climate change in causing the drought itself is unclear — the more immediate cause is an intermittent weather pattern called La Niña, and research is still under way on whether that cycle is being altered or intensified by global warming, as some researchers suspect. Because of the continuing climatic change, experts say some areas that are burning this year may never return as forest — they are more likely to grow back as heat-tolerant grass or shrub lands, storing far less carbon than the forests they replace.

“A lot of ecologists like me are starting to think all these agents, like insects and fires, are just the proximate cause, and the real culprit is water stress caused by climate change,” said Robert L. Crabtree, head of a center studying the Yellowstone region. “It doesn’t really matter what kills the trees — they’re on their way out. The big question is, Are they going to regrow? If they don’t, we could very well catastrophically lose our forests.”

A couple of thoughts..

It’s interesting to me that people are predicting that trees are “on their way out”. I wonder specifically what evidence is there for this? I wonder about what I call the “pontification to data ratio” of some of these observations.

It’s also interesting when people use the term “devastation” to describe mountain pine beetle killed forests. Because “natural” cycles vs. “climate change induced” cycles look exactly the same (acres of dead trees).