Diversity and species conservation

FWS Decision: It seems to me that for the owl to be hurt, the BLM or the FS would have to propose, and actually do something on the ground with owl impacts. How likely is that in a Biden Administration?

From the New York Times:

Trump Opens Habitat of a Threatened Owl to Timber Harvesting
Going far beyond expectations, the Trump administration eliminated protection from more than three million acres of northern spotted owl habitat in the Pacific Northwest.

The plan, issued by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, grew out of a legal settlement with a lumber association that had sued the government in 2013 over 9.5 million acres that the agency designated as essential to the survival of the northern spotted owl. The federal protections restricted much of the land from timber harvesting, which companies claimed would lead to calamitous economic losses.

But rather than trim about 200,000 acres of critical habitat in Oregon, as the agency initially proposed in August, the new plan will eliminate protections from 3.4 million acres across Washington, California and Oregon. What is left will mostly be land that is protected for reasons beyond the spotted owl.

“These common-sense revisions ensure we are continuing to recover the northern spotted owl while being a good neighbor to rural communities within the critical habitat,” Aurelia Skipwith, the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, said in a statement.

Wildlife biologists expressed shock at the decision.

“I’ve gotten several calls from wildlife biologists who are in tears who said, ‘Did you know this is happening? The bird won’t survive this,’” said Susan Jane Brown, a staff attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center, a conservation group that advocates on behalf of the northern spotted owl.

From Roll Call:

The Interior Department said it will eliminate from federal protection more than 3 million acres of land in California, Oregon and Washington vital to the northern spotted owl, a species considered endangered under federal law.

In a draft rule published Wednesday as much of the nation was glued to impeachment proceedings, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a division of Interior, said it was excluding about 3.5 million acres of “critical habitat” established for the owls. Environmental groups warned that the move could spell the extinction of the species and immediately threatened lawsuits to block the action.

There’s a new Administration next week, whom we can imagine won’t want to “clearcut the last remaining fragments of old growth land.”

“Here in southern Oregon this is a death sentence for owls,” said George Sexton, conservation director for Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center. “This decision is intended to speed the clearcutting of the last remaining fragments of old-growth forests on Bureau of Land Management public lands.”

In the spirit of journalism analysis, I note that the Times story has a paragraph about the timber industry, and the Roll Call story has none. And yet, any projects proposed will be in a Biden administration or thereafter. I understand that writers can’t understand all the steps before a project is approved, but they could interview people who do.

I thought this storyin the Denver Post was interesting. It raises a question, though, we don’t really know why populations are declining, but the lawsuit from Western Watershed seems to be about grazing. This is not surprising, since that seems to be something WW doesn’t like. For whatever reason, WW doesn’t seem to have the point of view of many (at least in Colorado and Wyoming) that losing public lands ranchers also means losing the home ranch, and the home ranch then tends to become housing developments. And residential development is another threat to the sage grouse.

Grazing as a direct cause of the recent decline seems unlikely Grazers have been grazing maybe since the 1870’s and we can imagine that practices have improved through time. So apparently grazing and GSG have coexisted for the last 150 years. Here’s a story in the Crested Butte Journal about ranching in the valley. So why stop that if it’s not the cause?

If other things (known and unknown) are responsible for the decline (we are talking since the 70’s) why target grazing in the lawsuit? Will it actually help the bird? We don’t know, since we don’t know why it’s declining. For a while, as you can see, since 2005, the collaborative groups and ranchers seem to have made an impact.

CPW provides these population estimates:

In the years after it was named a new species, millions of dollars were spent on conservation efforts. Gunnison County hired a sage-grouse coordinator in 2005. The federal government paid for aerial seeding to provide food for the grouse and changed their mowing practices to cater to the bird. In 2014, the species was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

The Gunnison sage grouse numbers increased between 2004 and 2007, and annual counts of the males at the breeding grounds have shown the total population hovering between about 4,000 and 5,000 since then — until 2018, when the numbers began to plunge.

The total population was estimated at 3,500 in 2018, 2,100 in 2019 and 2,500 this year, according to data provided by Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

It could be part of a cyclical decline, a temporary dip driven by drought and two tough winters, but with so few birds left and with their habitat continually shrinking, the drop has raised alarm bells for conservationists, and for Braun.

Still, efforts are underway to protect the birds, said Jessica Young, who pushed Braun to recognize the birds as a separate species when they worked together beginning in the 80s.

“Since I live in Gunnison and make my life in Gunnison, I see day in and day out how hard people are working on the issue,” she said. “What he sees from the outside is the numbers, and the decline and the small populations literally starting to wink out. So we see two different worlds. I’m deeply concerned about them. I absolutely consider them imperiled….but I might have a bit more hope because of how hard I’ve seen people try.”

It’s interesting how Jessica Young talks about “different worlds”; it’s something I’ve heard quite a bit with these kinds of controversies. We’ll be discussing this more when we get to The Battle for Yellowstone.

In early December, the Center for Biological Diversity and Western Watersheds Project filed a lawsuit against the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, alleging that the federal agencies have failed to do enough to protect the Gunnison sage grouse.

The lawsuit, one of many over the years, takes aim at the amount of grazing that is allowed on publicly owned sage grouse habitat, arguing that the grazing is harming the birds by destroying vegetation they rely on, limiting their ability to breed and hide from predators.

“Ultimately the bird is critically imperiled and something has to change,” said Talasi Brooks, staff attorney at Western Watersheds. “Maybe it’s taking cows off the land, maybe it is changing the season of use…but one way or another, any movement toward actually doing something about the threat of livestock grazing to the sage grouse would be a good thing.”

It sounds like ranchers and the BLM and other cooperators, have, indeed, been assiduously doing things.. and they seemed to be working, but took a sudden downturn associated with heavy snow years. It seems to me that it’s another case where we don’t really know why populations are declining, but litigators round up the usual suspects that they don’t want around. Using lawsuits as a policy tool in this case can 1) place the pain on certain groups that the litigatory groups don’t approve of, and 2) placing the power to place that pain outside the hands of local people (justice question), and 3) having policy with impacts on folks’ livelihoods determined in settlements behind closed doors, without knowledgeable on the ground people, nor the public involved (both a justice and “are you getting the best information to decide” question).

It can effectively cut local people and their knowledge out of the decision-making process, which has serious justice implications IMHO. It can also simply not work for the species, as the target groups may not be the cause of the problem, and these changes could possibly make things worse for the bird.

The resolution was introduced in the Senate by Senators Bennet of Colorado and Udall of New Mexico. Rumor has it that Udall is being considered for Secretary of the Interior in the Biden Administration. In this piece in High Country News, he wrote that 30 by 30 is only a waystation to 50 by 50 (and one wonders, 100 by 2100?).

That’s why I’ve introduced the Thirty by Thirty Resolution to Save Nature — a resolution to set a national goal of protecting 30% of our lands and waters by 2030, with half protected by mid-century. The resolution reflects the will of the scientific community, including and scientists like E.O. Wilson, who say that we need to protect half the planet to save the whole.

it would be interesting if we treated all scientific communities that way. For example, if epidemiologists say we need $3 billion to protect us from the next epidemic, we would need to do “their will.” Or fire scientists (or historic vegetation ecologists) say we need to burn 50% more acres. Seems like we would run out of money fairly quickly, and pols wouldn’t be able to prioritize based on “the will of scientists.” I guess they’d have to go back to the will of the constituents.

Resolutions seem to be like bills only perhaps less specific and more exhortatory.
Here’s the resolution itself (many interesting elements) including:

Whereas the existing protections for land, the ocean, and wildlife in the United States are not sufficient to prevent a further decline of nature in the United States, with—
(1) only 12 percent of the land area in the United States permanently protected, mostly in Alaska and the West; and
(2) only 26 percent of Federal ocean territory permanently protected, the vast majority of which is in the remote western Pacific Ocean or northwestern Hawaii;

Note the introduction of “permanent” protections, perhaps this is a reason for the difference between the IUCN percentage in the map above. Or perhaps other definitions?

Where does the 12% come from and how did they define it? It’s the IUCN number, apparently and also it comes from a 2018 study by the Center for American Progress. They did a pretty good job of explaining how they came up with the numbers. Still, it seems to me that there is a lack of clarity around what’s in and out, and why, and particularly what I’ll call “chunkifying.” Here’s an example of “chunkifying”:

The United States is unique in that it is the only country of the three largest North American countries to show a net loss in overall protected area in any year. The Trump administration’s 2017 cuts in protections for the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments—which reduced their size by 50 percent and 85 percent, respectively—affected slightly less than 2 million acres of land and, as such, represents the largest reduction in protected areas in the nation’s history.

I guess the idea is that for the slightly less than 2 mill, it has changed from “nothing could happen except what the Monument allowed” to “some things could happen in some places”, e.g. mines where there is uranium, or wind turbines where there is wind. But does it make sense to write off the whole 2 mill because some things might happen? Critters don’t respond to intentions, just to physical changes on the landscape.

The Methods section of the 2018 CAP study is detailed with all the relevant datasets and caveats. I thought it was interesting that CAP added:
“National Forests – National Forest System lands in the United States without wilderness or inventoried roadless area designations have also been omitted from the WDPA dataset.(reference 53) However, CAP felt that they merited inclusion given their land management plans, so those designations were added using the USGS PAD-US data.” My italics. Another “useful things plans do” to add to Jon’s list.

But why were NF’s out of the IUCN/WDPA maps in the first place? It appears because NF’s allow ski areas. On TSW we spend much time discussing the pros and cons of different uses allowed on NFs and BLM that people disagree about. It seems weird to me that ski areas would be singled out by the folks at IUCN. But they have to figure out all the countries, so I understand how hard that would be.. still, if their maps don’t do a very good job as measured against the real world, or their lines don’t really mean anything, it’s not that helpful. It’s also an example of chunkifying in the sense that NFs don’t count as a whole due to ski areas as a possible use (or that’s what the folks at IUCN were thinking).

But if the FS counts as protected, then why not BLM? And if BLM counts as protected, then there wasn’t really an increase in protected areas with Monumentizing nor a decrease with deMonumentizing.

It should be noted that National Parks, which are defined as protected areas by IUCN, including heavily used ones like the Great Smokies (dealing with overcrowding and resource damage as discussed in this recent news article) or Yosemite, or Yellowstone, are equally not chunkified.. so the acres around Old Faithful counts as protected.

So besides varying approaches to chunkification, these definitions seem to be vague about recreation impacts, and it’s hard to see that there’s not some tension between these goals and building out wind and solar infrastructure. Certainly in a resolution it’s easy to simply say “leaving land alone is therefore good for climate change” but it’s more complicated than that. If we were minimizing carbon and spatial footprints here, proponents would be nuclear advocates, and I’m not sure those groups are.

Here’s a link to the IUCN protected area categories, including national parks (note the emphasis on intention as opposed to physical realities). Perhaps of more interest is the IUCN category of protected area VI, which sounds like national forests.

Category VI: Protected area with sustainable use of natural resources
Protected areas that conserve ecosystems and habitats, together with associated cultural values and traditional natural resource management systems. They are generally large, with most of the area in a natural condition, where a proportion is under sustainable natural resource management and where low-level non-industrial use of natural resources compatible with nature conservation is seen as one of the main aims of the area.

. Note the language is “One of the main aims”, not “where other things are never allowed.” It seems to me that there is a latitude for interpretation.

There is a movement, said by its proponents to be growing, with a goal of “30 percent of the planet protected by 2030”. Uh-oh, you might say “protected from what?” or “who is likely to get kicked out where and who determines it?” Where does this idea come from?

It seems to have come from a group called Campaign for Nature, funded by the Wyss Foundation. Mr. Wyss is, perhaps unexpectedly, a resident of Wyoming. The screenshot above says “join the race to save Earth’s wild places.”

Here’s what CFN says:

Scientists agree that to prevent a mass extinction crisis, support a growing global population, and address climate change, we must conserve at least 30% of the planet by 2030.

Specifically, the Campaign for Nature is calling on world leaders to:

*commit to protecting at least 30 percent of the planet by 2030;
*help mobilize financial resources to ensure protected areas are properly managed; and,
*approach biodiversity conservation in a way that fully integrates and respects indigenous leadership and indigenous rights.

They are also granting funding to the Guardian for journalists to tell appropriate stories leading up to the CBD (Convention on Biological Diversity) meeting next year.

I’ll start with the international level in this first post, the national level in the second, and the state level in the third as we see how these goals become more concretized, who is pushing for these goals, and discuss how it might work on our landscapes.

What’s Goin’ On.. Internationally

It appears that the CBD needed goals for 2050 so they had meetings and came up with some ideas. Apparently 30 x 30 is one of them (note, international groups set targets but don’t always meet them including the previous Aichi biodiversity targets for 2020). Here are the current proposed (not agreed to) goals (Update of the Zero Draft). The goals will be decided on at the 15th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity meeting in Kunming, China. You can look at the comments different groups submitted here.

However, some top world leaders have already gone on record as supporting it. What’s of interest to me is how these leaders talk about science. Frans Timmermans, Executive VP of the European Union is quoted as saying “It is a goal that is firmly grounded in scientific evidence.” This strikes me as highly unlikely. Without knowing what an area is being protected from, where it is located, and how effective the protections are, it seems to me that you, me or anyone can’t possibly know that 30% is the right answer.

The National Geographic blog post has a link to this article from the words “science-based.” Here’s an excerpt:

“Woodley et al. (2019a) argued that, in addition to a focus on quality, a focus on ambitious percentage areas targets was also required to inform decision makers of the scale of conservation required for science-based targets and to drive ambition.”

It sounds a bit more like a poll of scientists’ opinions than what I would call scientific evidence. Conservation scientists telling us we need to conserve more seems fairly predictable. I’m not saying they’re wrong- scientists have opinions like anyone else, but scientists’ opinions are not in and of themselves, scientific information. And our famous friend EO Wilson says that 50 percent is what is needed so clearly they don’t agree.

So, yes, CBD is in a situation where they need to set goals for the meeting next year. As we have seen, there’s no real downside, in this case, to having goals you can’t or don’t meet- but lots of good vibes for saying you support them. But as we see with our own Wilderness, Roadless “protected areas”, the devil is in the details where words become decisions to exclude this or include that.

Next post: 30 x 30 in the US.