21st Century Problems

Putting Lawsuits Before Results: Missoulian Editorial on Colt Summit

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Thanks to Terry Seyden for this find (so glad you’re back!).

Putting lawsuits before results: Environmental groups suing over timber sale need to collaborate
Missoulian editorial | Posted: Sunday, October 2, 2011 8:00 am

http://missoulian.com/news/opinion/editorial/article_f76db5d8-eb93-11e0-af9c-001cc4c002e0.html

Nearly everyone – environmental groups, timber companies, private landowners and public lands agencies – would agree that land management decisions are best made outside the courtroom. Years of bitter legal disputes have demonstrated that the vast majority of problems are best solved out of court, so forest lands can be managed in a more timely, efficient, and less costly manner.
This has been especially apparent in Montana, where a relatively new collaborative approach is increasingly gaining traction – and being watched carefully by others hoping to copy its success.
By bringing to one table all those with a vested interest in forest land management, collaboration has significantly cut down on the number of lawsuits concerning the Lolo National Forest, supervisor Debbie Austin told the Missoulian editorial board last week. What’s more, she said, it results in better management decisions.
But not everyone is on board. Certain environmental groups remain stuck on the old way of getting their way. Apparently, they continue to favor lawsuits over a seat at the table.
Earlier this month, several environmental groups filed suit against the Forest Service over a timber sale near Seeley Lake. The Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Friends of the Wild Swan, Montana Ecosystem Defense Council and Native Ecosystems Council say the Colt Summit Forest Restoration and Fuels Reduction Project should have included a full environmental impact statement, and that the statement’s results should be compared to the provisions in the National Forest Management and National Environmental Policy acts. They also argue that the project ignores the potential impact on wildlife.
The groups involved in the project’s planning, of course, beg to differ. The Wilderness Society, for one, believes the environmental analysis performed on the project is sufficient – and certainly more expeditious than a cumbersome environmental impact statement. That is especially important given the risk of wildfire to the Seeley Lake community, said Megan Birzell, a Northern Rockies forest associate for the Wilderness Society.
The project now being challenged in court would both remove roads and thin forests on more than 4,300 acres of land over five years. The specifics of the project are the direct result of much hard work, debate and problem-solving by a group of people with diverse but intersecting interests – and a test, of sorts, for the Montana Forest Restoration Committee, to see whether collaboration can trump litigation.
It ought to. Lawsuits have an important role to play in protecting public resources from bad decisions. But they should be methods of last resort, used only after all other options have been exhausted.
Unfortunately, some environmental groups may be so used to slapping lawsuits on new projects that they are missing an opportunity to solve potential problems before they become actual problems. They are rejecting an open invitation to resolve their concerns during the planning process, instead of after the fact.
Regardless of whether they win or lose in court, that’s clearly not the best way to go about protecting Montana’s public lands.

EDITORIAL BOARD: Publisher Stacey Mueller, Editor Sherry Devlin, Opinion Editor Tyler Christensen, Sales and Marketing Director Jim McGowan

Southwest blazes this year less severe than initially thought — study

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Photo from USGS

Thanks to Matthew Koehler for suggesting this for the blog.

WILDFIRE: Southwest blazes this year less severe than initially thought — study

April Reese, E&E reporter/Published: Thursday, September 29, 2011

While much of the public saw the record-setting wildfires that burned through Arizona and New Mexico last summer as disastrous, the fires were actually less severe than many thought and are likely to bring significant ecological benefits over the long term, according to a new study from an environmental group.

But Forest Service officials say it is too early to draw broad conclusions about how the fires affected tens of thousands of acres scorched by the Wallow, Horseshoe II, Las Conchas and Pacheco conflagrations.

Wallow fire map

A new study issued by WildEarth Guardians asserts that fire damage caused four major blazes across the Southwest last summer, including the Wallow Fire (mapped above), was not as extensive as initially thought. Map courtesy of WildEarth Guardians.

Bryan Bird, public lands program director for WildEarth Guardians, who co-authored the report with Kurt Menke of Bird’s Eye View GIS LLC, an Albuquerque-based company specializing in geographic information systems, said his group felt there was a need to educate people about the true impacts of the blazes.

“There was just such a wide perception out there that these fires were just completely destructive, we wanted to make clear that these fires were in some areas beneficial,” Bird said.

By examining satellite data measuring vegetation characteristics before and after the fires, Bird and Menke concluded that lands within the four fire zones burned in a mosaic pattern, with fire severity ranging from high to low.

For example, within the perimeter of the Wallow fire, which burned 538,000 acres on the Arizona-New Mexico border, more than 64 percent of the lands burned at low intensity or not at all, while 16 percent burned at high severity and 20 percent burned at moderate severity.

For the Las Conchas fire, which scorched 156,600 acres in northern New Mexico, including parts of Bandelier National Monument and the Valles Caldera National Preserve, about 20 percent of the area was severely burned, while most of the lands burned either at low severity (39 percent) or moderate severity (about 29 percent).

How the fire behaved in a given area depended on a range of factors, including forest type, dryness and whether fuel treatments had been done in the area.

“These four fires exhibited very different characteristics and consequences because of the wide variety of ecosystems in which they burned as well as the variable conditions,” according to the report, which notes that the findings need to be verified with field surveys. “Not all of the acreage within the fire perimeters burned severely, and in fact much was unburned or burned only at low and moderate severity.”
Inconclusive results?

But Penny Luehring, leader of the Forest Service’s national Burned Area Emergency Response program, which is based in the Southwest regional office in Albuquerque, N.M., said Bird and Menke based their assessment on soil burn severity data, not vegetation burn severity data, and therefore it cannot be considered conclusive.

“The information that they have in their report aligns quite well with what the Forest Service has collected in terms of soil burn severity, but it’s a measurement of the severity on the soil itself, not a measurement of the effect on vegetation,” she said. “You could you have a lot of burned trees, for example, and you wouldn’t notice them on a soil burn severity map.”

Luehring said the Forest Service plans to conduct field assessments of the effects of the fires on trees and other vegetation over the next several months.

While the report’s conclusions may well turn out to be true, Luehring suggested the data are not yet there to support them.

But Bird said he stands by the report, explaining that the datasets he and Menke used, which were from the Forest Service’s “Burned Area Reflectance Classifications,” did include information on vegetation changes as well as effects on bare soil.

Melissa Savage, an adjunct professor at the University of New Mexico and director of the Four Corners Institute, a Santa Fe-based organization that provides scientific expertise to communities undertaking ecological restoration projects, said she believes the report’s conclusions are likely to be borne out with field studies.

“It will probably be largely verified when we get on the ground,” Savage said.

The report makes several recommendations, including using prescribed burns or naturally ignited fires every five to 20 years to maintain the fuel-clearing benefits of fire and keeping development out of forested areas.

New Mexico still has about 600 square miles of undeveloped private lands adjacent to fire-prone public lands, and Arizona has 400 square miles of such lands, the report notes.

Click here to read the study.
Reese writes from Santa Fe, N.M.

Green Building with Wood: USDA Report

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photo by Derek Weidensee


Forest Service Report Documents Environmental Benefits of Wood as a Green Building Material
Agriculture Secretary Vilsack urges US builders to prioritize wood in green buildings

WASHINGTON, Sept. 29, 2011 – The findings of a new U.S. Forest Service study indicate that wood should factor as a primary building material in green building, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced today.

The authors of Science Supporting the Economic and Environmental Benefits of Using Wood and Wood Products in Green Building Construction reviewed the scientific literature and found that using wood in building products yields fewer greenhouse gases than using other common materials.

“This study confirms what many environmental scientists have been saying for years,” said Vilsack. “Wood should be a major component of American building and energy design. The use of wood provides substantial environmental benefits, provides incentives for private landowners to maintain forest land, and provides a critical source of jobs in rural America.”

The Forest Service report also points out that greater use of life cycle analysis in building codes and standards would improve the scientific underpinning of building codes and standards and thereby benefit the environment. A combination of scientific advancement in the areas of life cycle analysis and the development of new technologies for improved and extended wood utilization are needed to continue to advance wood as a green construction material. Sustainability of forest products can be verified using any credible third-party rating system, such as Sustainable Forestry Initiative, Forest Stewardship Council or American Tree Farm System certification.

“The argument that somehow non-wood construction materials are ultimately better for carbon emissions than wood products is not supported by our research,” said David Cleaves, the U.S. Forest Service Climate Change Advisor. “Trees removed in an environmentally responsible way allow forests to continue to sequester carbon through new forest growth. Wood products continue to benefit the environment by storing carbon long after the building has been constructed.”

The use of forest products in the United States currently supports more than one million direct jobs, particularly in rural areas, and contributes more than $100 billion to the country’s gross domestic product.

“In the Rockies alone, we have hundreds of thousands of dead trees killed by bark beetles that could find their way into the building supply chain for all types of buildings,” said Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell. “Taking a harder look at wood as a green building source could reduce the damages posed by future fires, maintain overall forest health and provide much-needed jobs in local communities.”

The U.S. Forest Service report identifies several areas where peer-reviewed science can contribute to sustainable green building design and decisions. These recommendations address the following needs for use of wood as a green building material:
• Information on environmental impacts across the lifecycle of wood and alternative construction materials needs to be updated and revised;
• Green buildings codes and standards should include adequate provisions to recognize the benefit of a lifecycle environmental analysis to guide selection of building materials; and
• A lack of educational, technology transfer, and demonstration projects hinder the acceptance of wood as a green building material.

Research recently initiated by the wood products industry in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service Forest Products Laboratory will enable greater use and valuation of smaller diameter trees and insect and disease-killed trees. Research on new products and technologies has been initiated including improved cross-lamination techniques and the increased use of nanotechnology.

These developments are especially important amidst a changing climate because forest managers will need to increasingly thin densely forested areas in the coming years to reduce the impacts from longer and more severe wildfire seasons. Continued research of wood-based products and technologies will contribute to more environmentally responsible building materials and increased energy efficiency.

The mission of the U.S. Forest Service is to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the nation’s forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations. Recreational activities on our lands contribute $14.5 billion annually to the U.S. economy. The agency manages 193 million acres of public land, provides assistance to state and private landowners, and maintains the largest forestry research organization in the world.

To view the full Green Building report please click here.

Colorado cougars routinely traverse urban areas, study finds

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I thought this was an interesting story about wildlife not behaving exactly the way scientists predicted nor we thought. There is a pattern this week which I’ll follow up on with a few more posts. Humility, for all of us, when talking about what we know about biology, is always a good thing. Here’s the link in the Denver Post.

BOULDER — AF69, a 90-pound female cougar, makes a healthy living on human habitat — stalking, eating and hiding deer around houses — usually when people aren’t looking.

But one day, while she was dragging a dead doe past a front door west of Boulder, homeowner Ian Morris caught AF69 on his camera — first as he peered through his screen door, then over two days as she cached her kill under grass clippings and periodically gorged.

“I wondered what she could see,” Morris said. “Could she see me? Would that be a good thing? We’re told that we should avoid any contact, which will make the animal more confident in approaching humans.”

He notified the Colorado Division of Parks and Wildlife, and wildlife researcher Mat Alldredge came and darted the cougar. Now AF69 is being tracked, along with 61 others, as part of a study that finds cougars may be living much closer to people than previously believed.

State researchers say AF69’s adaptive lifestyle, including regular night forays into the western edge of Boulder, reflects an emerging pattern for many of Colorado’s estimated 3,500 cougars. GPS tracking shows cougars at hundreds of locations near Front Range​ neighborhoods.

For example, during one week last month, AF69 was located at three spots near Broadway in Boulder between dusk and 2 a.m.

Tracking data also detail AF69’s move that week from foothills north of Boulder Canyon to a neighborhood where she killed a young buck, which she cached under a conifer tree near a house, covering it with landscaping mulch and pine needles.

“The interesting thing is that she’s living in these neighborhoods but she is rarely seen,” Alldredge said. “By and large, this cat is making a living in the urban-exurban environment. She’s killing deer. She’s doing the best she can in this area where she was born and raised. Part of the city is her home range.”

UM Public Lands Conference: Climate Change Sends Forest Managers into Unknown Territory

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From the Missoulian here.. note to readers.. the U of M has allowed us to post the papers from this conference here on our blog. I am expecting to get them next week.

While the U.S. Forest Service grinds away at a new planning rule to manage its forests, the forests themselves face an entirely separate timetable of change.

“We’re approaching the no-analog future – we haven’t been here before,” Missoula attorney and law professor Jack Tuholske told the Friday session of the 34th annual Public Land Law Conference at the University of Montana. In a time when the calving of gigantic ice floes off Greenland glaciers could affect rainfall in the Rocky Mountains, we can’t rely on doing things the way we did before, he said.

That’s especially true in America’s forests. UM entomology professor Diana Six ran through recent research showing the progress of pests like mountain pine beetles, which are spreading across acres 10 times bigger than previous outbreaks.

“As things warm up, everything for the insects speeds up,” Six said. A 2-degree increase in average temperature doubles the rate bugs like the pine beetle reproduce and consume resources, she said. Similar bursts are happening in spruce, pinyon and fir forests in the United States, and many other tree species elsewhere on the planet.

“That means forest restoration may no longer be appropriate,” she said. “You can’t force something back to existing conditions when they no longer exist.”

That could pose big challenges to land managers who expect to harvest certain numbers of trees, support local communities and jobs, and depend on watersheds for drinking water.

University of California-Berkley law professor Eric Biber warned that intensive baseline monitoring of forest conditions needed to be in place before new policies had a chance of proving their effectiveness. But although the Forest Service has some of the world’s largest and best archives of forest data, even that is incomplete.

Furthermore, Biber warned that the monitors themselves must be carefully chosen and watched. For example, forestry biologists would have a good handle on the needs of tree species, but conservation biologists might know better how to serve the animals that depend on those trees.

And both could be vulnerable to the whims of political leaders, budget crunches and their own scientific disciplines, Biber said. He cited research on Forest Service fire policy in the early 20th century, in which the country wanted fires controlled and evidence of beneficial fire effects was overlooked.

“They didn’t want scientific information that made the political arguments more difficult,” Biber said.

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Dan Kemmis, director of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West and former Missoula mayor, suggested looking beyond the local trees to see the worldwide forest.

“It’s just not possible to think seriously or clearly about managing forests without looking at the global economy,” Kemmis said. “The imperatives of debt reduction are faced by every country in the world. And that will affect land management in severe ways.”

To adapt to that, Kemmis advised agencies like the Forest Service to collaborate more with citizens who can guide it to the most needed and effective projects. That could also help avoid future lawsuits and “analysis paralysis” in decision-making, he said.

“The Forest Service needs to reduce its nonproductive activities,” Kemmis said. “I don’t know how to do that effectively without involving citizens in the problem-solving on the forest.”

Region 1 Forester Leslie Weldon echoed that idea, saying the Forest Service was trying to build the interests of local recreationists, businesses and groups into its planning. But she also warned that the Department of Agriculture (which oversees the Forest Service) expects at least 5 percent budget cuts in each of the next two years. Prioritizing projects and monitoring efforts will become harder as the money gets tighter, she said.

“Can public land law really function as a Swiss Army knife,” with individual blades for urban sprawl, job demands, species loss, climatic change and scientific incompleteness, UM law professor Ray Cross asked at the end of the gathering. Conference speakers were split, he said, with some believing policy could handle those challenges and others arguing that political tradeoffs, budget constraints and natural change would overwhelm any paper solution.

“Do we despair?” Cross asked. “We know nature will be here long after this.”

Read more: http://missoulian.com/news/state-and-regional/article_dfb45390-e0d8-11e0-af41-001cc4c03286.html#ixzz1YGDF4I1V

Clean Air and Prescribed Burning

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Last week I spent a day on a field trip with some conservation NGO interns. The ranger had asked them to think about a question:

On the watershed for an important Colorado water supply, prescribed burning would lead to a better situation to protect from wildfires that degrade water quality. Yet air quality requirements make it difficult to do prescribed burning. Mechanical treatments would not release particulates, but without a timber industry we can’t afford mechanical treatments. We know there is a trade-off between prescribed fire particulates and, ultimately, wildfire particulates (greater in quantity). Wildfires can have greater negative effects on both watersheds and soil and vegetation carbon, compared to prescribed burns. So how do we negotiate the apparently contradictory requirements of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act?

It was a great question, and I was very impressed with the thoughtfulness and expertise of our FS employees (as I usually am :)), as I think were the interns.

So here are my additional wonkish questions. Is that tension between air quality and prescribed burning an equal problem in all the western states? Why can southern states have so much (comparatively) prescribed burning- are the reasons environmental or social or some combination?

Timber Wars: Bayoneting Those on Life Support?

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Here’s a press release from Senator Mark Udall’s office:

Today, Mark Udall sent a letter urging the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to take immediate action to help three of Colorado’s largest sawmills stay afloat and keep rural jobs in the state. Udall suggested that the USFS and the USDA rework timber sale contracts with the sawmills, which are struggling financially. In addition to employing hundreds of Coloradans, the mills play a crucial role in the fight against the bark beetle and wildfire by providing the infrastructure to help clear 4 million acres of hazardous fuels and beetle-killed trees and processing them into wood products.

The downturn in the housing market and the state’s forest-management economy led to financial trouble for the mills—Intermountain Resources (Montrose), Mountain Valley Lumber (Saguache) and Delta Timber (Delta)—because their legacy timber sale rates are higher than it costs to remove the dead trees from the forest. Udall is asking the agencies to work with the sawmills to modify some of their contract terms so the mills can stay open and maintain hundreds of jobs in those regions, mitigate wildfire risks by clearing dead trees, and revitalize the timber industry.

“These mills provide hundreds of jobs in Colorado’s rural communities and are irreplaceable parts of the statewide infrastructure we need to reduce wildfire risk to communities and remove millions of hazardous beetle-kill trees adjacent to roads, powerlines, trailheads, picnic areas, and campgrounds,” Udall wrote in the letter. “I appreciate the role the market must play in timber sales, but at this juncture in Colorado we must maintain an infrastructure to safely and economically dispose of our surplus of dead timber.”

Udall raised the issue of legacy timber sales at a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on wildfire management in June, saying that the clock is ticking on helping sawmills deal with beetle-killed trees in economically viable ways. Udall has been working for over a decade to help mitigate the impacts of the bark beetle epidemic in Colorado communities and forests.

The text of the letter follows:

Dear Secretary Vilsack and Chief Tidwell:

I am contacting you today to appeal for your immediate action to help preserve Colorado’s forest management infrastructure. Repeatedly over the last two years, I have been contacted by Colorado’s timber industry and other stakeholders asking for help. Our last three remaining large and medium-size sawmills are struggling financially. In fact, the largest – Intermountain Resources in Montrose, Colorado – went into receivership in June 2010. These mills provide hundreds of jobs in Colorado’s rural communities and are irreplaceable parts of the statewide infrastructure we need to reduce wildfire risk to communities and remove millions of hazardous beetle-kill trees adjacent to roads, powerlines, trailheads, picnic areas, and campgrounds.

While there are a number of reasons that the mills are faltering, including the economic recession, one significant source of financial stress is that all three mills hold legacy U.S. Forest Service (USFS) timber sales that are no longer financially viable and have become a liability. As recently as May 2011, the USFS stated that it was continuing to review its authority to reduce timber sale rates and/or mutually cancel contracts within Region 2 that have become unviable to operate. The USFS has made some contract term adjustments, but none of these adjustments have allowed for the downturn in the market for wood-based products. The agencies have repeatedly pledged to do everything possible to save these mills, but the problematic timber sales remain. I am aware that Intermountain Resources had over 50 timber sales with a variety of terms and issues. However, it is my understanding that the two smaller mills each have only one seriously problematic timber sale. There is an immediate sense of urgency because one of these mills had a periodic payment due last week, and yet has still not heard back from the USFS on its request for a mutual cancellation.

Modifying these contracts and thus helping sustain these three mills will have a direct public benefit. The USFS, other land managers, communities, and industry across the state and region are working to reduce the potential for catastrophic wildfires and restore healthy forests by clearing beetle-kill hazard trees and reducing hazardous fuels adjacent to communities. This critical mitigation work that protects people and property will become exponentially more challenging, if not impossible, if we lose our forest management infrastructure. Without these processing locations in Colorado, the distance to the next closest mill with capacity to process any meaningful volumes of timber is nearly 800 miles away in Montana.

On behalf of Colorado’s struggling timber industry, I ask that you take every action within your power to provide relief for these mills and preserve these critical local jobs. I appreciate the role the market must play in timber sales, but at this juncture in Colorado we must maintain an infrastructure to safely and economically dispose of our surplus of dead timber. It is my hope that in the years to come we can work collaboratively to restore balance to Colorado’s timber economy. Thank you for your consideration and I look forward to your response.

Interestingly, here is a story from the Colorado Independent, with these quotes.

But some members of the conservation community have their doubts.

“The whole issue points out the problem of removing beetle kill — the dead lodgepole pine isn’t worth much as a potential commercial product,” Rocky Smith of Colorado Wild told the Colorado Independent. “That is why there are efforts to create a biomass industry, which might allow the use of dead lodgepole pine for heating and electric power generation. Those efforts have only had limited success.”

The ski town of Vail came up short in its bid to build a multi-megawatt biomass power plant that would use the proven process of high-heat wood gasification to cleanly generate power and heat by consuming chipped up wood products. The process is considered carbon-neutral compared to forests biodegrading naturally or being consumed in wildfires.

“We are not against a wood products industry, but we want to make sure that it is sized appropriately and would sunset when the dead material runs out or is no longer available for product use,” Smith said. “It is tempting to think that there is so much dead stuff out there, so we should try to facilitate creation of a large industry that could utilize it. But that could result in industry dictating what land could be harvested.”

Smith also pointed out that the current state of the economy has lowered the demand for wood products.

But it doesn’t actually sound like they have their doubts about what Udall is doing.. they are worried about the use of biomass leading to “too much” harvesting. So far there is no biomass industry of any size, so this is a preemptive strike. Their comments have nothing to do with helping those sawmills. Strange reporting, IMHO.

Social Media May Spark a Rebirth in Natural History

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This may be a tiny bit off-topic but I thought this was pretty interesting.

Tapping Social Media’s Potential
To Muster a Vast Green Army
A rapidly expanding universe of citizens’ groups, researchers, and environmental organizations are making use of social media and smart phone applications to document changes in the natural world and to mobilize support for taking action.
by Caroline Fraser

Here’s the link.

My only tiny concern is that

Perhaps the most intriguing capability of social media involves something that goes deeper than data. The University of Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay Game is an interactive computer simulation with the power to change minds. Beginning in 2000, it plays out over a 20-year horizon, allowing teams to take on the roles and responsibilities of oystermen, crabbers, crop and dairy farmers, real-estate developers, and policy-makers, everyone with an impact on one of the world’s most endangered watersheds. As teams make decisions based on economic and regulatory restrictions, determining how much land to cultivate or how many crabs to trap, they watch the real-time, long-term consequences of their choices playing out. Crucially, “the game is politically neutral,” says David E. Smith, professor in U. Va.’s Department of Environmental Sciences.

On Earth Day this year, teams from seven Chesapeake Bay-area universities played, each representing a major basin — York River, James River, the Eastern Shore, etc. It was a sobering experience. At the end, a College of William and Mary biology professor acknowledged that despite players’ best efforts, “the quality of the bay went down.”

The game is impressively accurate: Its recent iteration encompasses tens of thousands of data points, and IBM has selected it for the World Community Grid program, harnessing over a million volunteers’ computers to crunch numbers. Philippe Cousteau, grandson of the oceanographer, is partnering with the university to adapt it for other ecosystems, from Australia to Arizona. He foresees a day when younger students can input real data to model their backyards and lobby their parents — “Hey, mom and dad, let’s not use fertilizer on the lawn.”

Perhaps people start to believe the reality of models and don’t have the proper respect for the universe to be “queerer than we think, queerer than we can think” as Haldane said.
Also:

Meanwhile, the environment waits for a software wunderkind to find the social formula that may lure a fickle public to fall in love with the real world, not a fake one.

To me a modeled world is still a fake world..and plenty of people are in love with the real world- but we disagree on what to do about it. And that’s OK.

Full disclosure: I am a graduate of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, the publisher of “Yale 360”.

National Voter Attitudes Toward America’s Forests

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I ran across this report of a survey done by NASF which I thought was interesting.
Here’s the survey.

Given these factors, seven out of ten voters support maintaining or increasing efforts to protect forests and trees in their state. Among the key specific findings of the poll are the following:
• Voters continue to value the nation’s forests highly, particularly as sources of clean air and water and places for wildlife to live. The survey found most voters are personally familiar with the nation’s forests: two-thirds of voters (67%) say they live within ten miles of a forest or wooded area. Voters also report engaging in various recreational activities that may bring them to forests. These include: viewing wildlife (71% of voters say they do this “frequently” or “occasionally”), hiking on outdoor trails (48%), fishing (43%), overnight camping (38%), hunting (22%), using off-road vehicles (16%), snow-shoeing or cross-country-skiing (15%), and mountain biking (14%).

Taking all of this into account, it should be no surprise that voters value the many benefits forests provide. As shown in Figure 1, 92 percent of voters surveyed believe that helping to keep the air clean is at least a “very” important benefit of forests, including 58 percent who believe it is “extremely” important. A nearly identical 91% of voters assign similar importance to forests’ role in filtering water to keep it clean. Solid majorities of voters found other benefits of forests to be “very important” as well, including providing a place for wildlife to live (86%), providing a source of good-paying jobs (73%), supplying products like wood and paper (73%), providing a place for recreation (71%), and reducing global warming (60%).

Appreciation of the economic benefits of forests has increased sharply in recent years. Most likely due to the economic downturn, voters appear to have a more acute awareness of the good-paying type of jobs provided by forests. Only 47 percent of voters considered this to be an “extremely” or “very” important benefit of forests in a 2007 national survey, a proportion which rose to 73 percent this year. There were also gains in the proportions viewing it as important that forests supply essential products and provide a place for recreation.

• At least three in five voters see major threats to forests from wildfire, development, and insects and diseases. American voters recognize that the nation’s forests face a variety of significant threats. As shown in Figure 2, 73 percent of all voters consider wildfires to be a “major” threat to forests. Three in five voters believe the same about insects and diseases that harm trees (62%) and development (62%).

Three-quarters of voters want to see efforts to protect and manage forests maintained or increased. In total (as shown in Figure 3), 74 percent of voters say they are comfortable with the current level of forest management and protection, including 41 percent who say it needs to be increased.

The figures included are interesting but I couldn’t transfer them to this post.

Coal Mine Methane- Colorado Voices II

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A methane drainage well

There are many compelling public lands issues not related to vegetation treatments. This is a small contribution to increasing public knowledge of some of these.

Remember Ed Quillen in his op-ed Maximum Trashing Utilization, here, described the coal mine methane issue this way…

here has been some progress on the regulatory front. Back in 2008, High Country News carried a story about methane escaping from Western coal mines. Methane is a flammable gas (it and its close chemical relative ethane are the major components of natural gas) that is given off by coal as it decomposes underground.
Since methane is flammable and sometimes explosive, mine safety requires venting it away from the working area.
Logically, this methane should be burned in a productive way. Unburned methane is more than 20 times as potent a greenhouse gas as the carbon dioxide produced by combustion. Plus, there’s the energy from burning it, which could be used to heat homes or generate electricity.
But certain regulatory policies for coal mines on federal land prevented the methane from being put to public use. Essentially, the mining companies had the right to use the coal, but not the methane. For safety reasons, they have to vent it — but they couldn’t put it to work.
That’s changed recently, at least on a case-by-case basis. The Interior Department now allows the capture and sale of methane. But is it economical to do so when the methane is diffuse and the nearest pipeline might lie miles away?
“We’ve tried to look at it every way in the world. If it were economic to do, we would already be doing it. It would add to our income.” That’s what James Cooper, president of Oxbow Mining, which operates the Elk Creek Mine in western Colorado, told a Grand Junction business journal.

Cap-and-trade legislation might change the economics by paying the coal company to capture methane. It’s unlikely to be enacted in the current political climate, but again, if some subsidies are required to get MTU, there are certainly worse ways to spend public money.

Here’s Ted Zukoski from Earthjustice on flowers, coal and methane (“Earthjustice is a non-profit public interest law firm dedicated to protecting the magnificent places, natural resources, and wildlife of this earth, and to defending the right of all people to a healthy environment.”).

With hot summers hitting the high country in the Rockies hard, one would wish the agencies that manage many of the mountain meadows – the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management – would be doing something about climate change.
To the contrary. BLM recently proudly approved a new coal mine expansion on Colorado’s West Slope, enabling the Elk Creek Mine to vent untreated more than 5-million-cubic-feet of methane pollution into the atmosphere every day. BLM refused to even take a hard look at alternatives to require the mine to capture the methane or reduce its climate change impact. This unnecessary methane pollution will have the warming impact of 1 million tons of carbon dioxide over a year – about the same as a small coal-fired power-plant.

Ted also makes some comments on Colorado roadless and coal, which I’ll discuss in a later post.

In my view, BLM did take a pretty good look, check it out for yourself here. But ultimately more pages of analysis are not going to change the fact that it’s not economic to do it, and that’s what the regulations are based on. The BLM regulations were designed for methane to be a gas that has economic value. If, instead, methane from coal mines were regulated as a pollutant, mines could simply be required to capture it. We don’t need cap and trade or any fancy mechanism to do this. It could be as simple as legislation to require capture of methane from coal mines on federal land.

But one thing I know is that many people could write paragraphs pages or books on the environmental impacts; virtual roomfuls of attorneys could have lengthy and expensive conversations (and have had) but that won’t solve the regulatory problem. In my opinion, joint efforts toward a surgical piece of legislation would probably be much more productive for the environment than more analysis and roomfuls of folks jawing or writing.

Ed Quillen brought up subsidies, I suggested legislation. A group of environmental lawyers are litigating (predictably). Would there be less methane in the air today if all had worked together on identifying and pushing one policy solution?