Fire and Fuels

Reflections on the Biomass Monitor Debate 8/16/17 on Fuel Treatments

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I found this discussion to be very interesting, and I think the Biomass Monitor is going to post a recording on their website here. It seems like everyone agrees that “more fire is needed” in dry western landscapes, as we discussed before. It also seems like (some) fire ecologists think that it is important to recreate frequencies of different intensities of fire similar to the past. I was a little confused because every area’s fire history is different, and it seems like there was Native American burning, then not, then fire suppression, and what we see on the landscape today or in the past is a function of all these changes (so where is the point/ranges ecologists want are going back to?) How do we know that there are so many birds that like snags now, is because we have provided more snags in the lst 100 years due to fire suppression and more high intensity fires?

It doesn’t bother me that ecologists want to go back to some past that they identify, or want to protect species that are currently rare. But I’ve got to wonder if the folks who are worried about megafires (there would be no shortage of nags, conceivably) are on the same wavelength. Mostly I am concerned that we would spend mucho bucks to “restore” areas to certain things from the past, that can’t possibly be the same due to the presence of people and climate change. If climate change is going to cause all kinds of big shifts in plant and animal populations, shouldn’t we just accept the fire frequencies we can afford to manage?

It seems to me that there may be a tension between different scientific communities..

(1) Climate Change science- Megafires, be very afraid, vegetation will completely change.
(2) Fire ecologists- Let’s try to replicate previous conditions.
(3) Fire scientists- if we do prescribed burning, then we can reduce fuels at the landscape level, that will help suppression efforts for people and also manage fire toward desired ecological conditions.
(4) Fire ecologists- that wouldn’t make enough high-severity fire acreage as “we need.”

My question is that given how hard it is to do prescribed burns, EVEN IF FOLKS DID A LOT MORE, WFU will still be popular, so how can a person predict that the resultant mix would not be “enough” as identified by ecologists (although I don’t really agree with the idea of trying to replicate historical conditions, but given for now that that is a desirable goal)?

As this discussion was going on, I was thinking maybe there was ground for possible agreement:

(1) We do WFU only in roadless, wilderness and parks, and other areas under conditions without danger to populations as identified through public process in a fire plan, and
(2) in other areas, prescribed burning, based on fireshed assessments of where it might be needed for protection of watershed, people, and other reasons is done,
a. And in those places, if it were determined that tree removal would make for better fuel reduction, removing trees would be OK.

At that point, ecologists could analyze whether the amount of snags from (1) plus a range of scenarios of plain old wildfires would be “enough.”

As an aside, it sounded like one of the participants was really worried about the Westerman bill. I think that there are all kinds of reasons to think it isn’t a good bill, but very few reasons to worry about it being passed into law. Does anyone know why folks would think it is close to passage (as in passed by both houses and signed by the President?)

Why We Disagree About Fuel Treatment: VI. Stewardship and Fireshed Assessments

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From Reality Show: SPLATS Take a Trip from Theory to the Tahoe National Forest

Sometimes when I hear that “science says that fuel treatments don’t work” I wonder why the views of scientists who work on fuel treatments don’t seem to count as “science”. IMHO, there is altogether too much ready acceptance of (generally scientists) framing issues as “science” issues, and then claiming one discipline is key to the answers. But “how we should live on fire-prone landscapes” and “what should we do about the changing climate” are not science issues, although certainly the research conducted by a variety of scientific disciplines can shed light on different policy options open to public choice.

Thanks to Dr. Mark Finney for guiding me to this effort, and Bernie Bahro for his knowledge of the SFA process. We probably don’t need to go into the reasons it hasn’t been working, despite having both scientific research and local knowledge behind it. Once again, people will say “we need more fire on the landscape” or “we need to help suppression folks deal with problem fires”. So folks participate in planning exercises, and then the FS runs into the obstacles associated with implementation. The Forest Service is between a rock (we need more fire) and a hard place (doing actions like PB and WFU) (between a backfire and the main fire?). Interesting that GAO was tentatively pro-SFA…Here’s the link and below are excerpts.

However, a recent GAO report (GAO-04-705) noted: “One [approach] that appears promising for national implementation is the Fireshed Assessment process, an integrated interdisciplinary approach to evaluating fuel treatment effectiveness at reducing fire spread across landscapes.”

The Stewardship and Fireshed Assessment (SFA) process is a rapid assessment process that has been developed for the national forests in California. The SFA process frames and evaluates the performance of hazardous fuels treatments at a landscape-scale, where treatments are designed to change the outcome of a “problem” fire in a particular landscape. A “problem” fire is a hypothetical wildfire that could be expected to burn in an area that would have severe or uncharacteristic effects or result in unacceptable consequences. While the primary objective of strategic treatments is to reduce the wildfire risk to communities in the wildland urban interface, treatments must also be designed to integrate broader stewardship objectives, such as improving forest health, meeting habitat needs, and maintaining and improving watershed conditions. Given these multiple objectives, it is important that a landscape treatment strategy be reasonable and feasible and, critically, that it have public support. This is accomplished by evaluating treatment scenarios, which are combinations of treatment locations, treatment prescriptions, and implementation
timelines, in an open and transparent manner. Through repeatedly testing and improving assumptions, public understanding of ecological processes, the effects of management, and management constraints and opportunities can be enhanced.

I’ll just outline some of the obvious barriers: negotiating with interest groups to the point in which the project doesn’t actually work for fuels reduction, not having the $ to implement when the NEPA is finished and the ROD signed (or to have $ for some phases, but not for all), air quality restrictions for prescribed burning, and so on. The Stewardship and Fireshed Assessments may still be valuable for the opportunity for the public and specialists to discuss what happens and what has happened on a particular landscape or fireshed, and may also help to have information organized and synthesized for later WFU efforts. I’d be interested to hear from folks who have experience with the SFA process.

“I understand firefighter safety, but you have to put people on the fire.”

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This from a resident near the Lolo Peak Fire – a fire that had recently killed one firefighter.  He added, “I’m tired of the smoke and I’m tired of the fire. I think there needs to be more accountability.”

I’m appalled by the sense of entitlement to protection of private property that this statement reveals, which I think helps illustrate the point I’ve been trying to make about who should pay to protect homes near national forests.  Sometimes that payment is measured in lives lost.

Agreement Check-In: More Fire on the Landscape?

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Photo courtesy U.S. Forest Service
Pre-firing operations are starting Wednesday in the HD Mountains to expand the 842 Fire.
The fire was caused by lightning and has burned about 13 acres. Expanding the fire will provide beneficial aspects for the mountain forest, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

Good explanation of a current WFU here in the Journal (Cortez, Dolores, Mancos, Colorado).

There was only one comment on yesterday’s post (thanks Forester 353!), so I want to run these questions again to see where people are.

There seems to be a broad agreement among different people that we “need to put fire back on the landscape” (where feasible). Some people look at it as “there are fire dependent ecosystems so they need it” and others may think “we’re going to get fires anyway, so we might as well make life easier for suppression folks and prescribed burning is great for fuel reduction”.. these differences may play out at designing treatments on a specific landscape, but I’m not sure the differences are that important at this level of discussion.

As folks have pointed out, there are many barriers to increasing the use of PBs and WFU and conceivably everyone who thinks that “we need more fire” could join hands and work on those together.. everyone from WEG to AFRC. Which may be the kind of work the Washington Prescribed Fire Council is doing- I have a request in for an interview.

If we agree (1) We need more fire on the landscape
(2) Choices for this are Prescribed Burns (PBs) and Wildfire Fire Use. Each has advantages and disadvantages.

I’d like to hear from folks on the blog. But since we don’t represent everyone associated with the land management community, including groups known for litigation, I would be really interested to know if there has been litigation on prescribed burning projects without mechanical fuels treatment (which might be the point of disagreement). I realize that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but I’m not even sure there is a public database that a person could query to find out.

Please chime in either way including with your caveats.

Some red meat for the anti-litigation crowd

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Here’s a story about an enjoined timber sale that might be burning up right now.  It will no doubt become Exhibit A for arguing why we should not allow the public to sue the government over its land management decisions.

“Both the Park Creek and Arrastra Fires on the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest were ignited by lightning storms that spread through dense stands of dead timber. And both are located within the area of the Forest Service’s proposed Stonewall Vegetation Project, which was halted when two environmental litigant groups successfully convinced a federal judge to issue a preliminary injunction to halt the project.”

I just have to question the conclusions:  “The preliminary injunction against the Stonewall project, and the resulting fires …”  and the idea that environmental litigants should be “held accountable for their actions.” First there is the question of what exactly their actions caused (the fires?), and second is the idea that there should be liability associated with winning a lawsuit.  I think the judge allocated accountability in this case to the Forest Service for failing to follow the law.  They could have reconsulted on lynx critical habitat long ago, and the court said they should have, and if they had, the project would have probably occurred on schedule.

 

Why We Disagree About Fuel Treatments: V. Getting Fire Back on the Landscape- PB, WFU and WPFC

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There are different reasons that different groups of people, including scientists, want more fire on the landscape. Fuels specialists want to reduce fuels and make problem fires safer to fight. Ecologists want to have various good ecological kinds of things happen. At the same time, there are bad things that fires can do, to people, watersheds, soils, animals, infrastructure and communities, that people want to avoid. At the fireshed level, these things can be discussed and worked out by the relevant experts, but many folks agree that getting more fire on the land can be good.

To get more fire on the landscape we only have a few choices…let’s use fire folks’ terminology (as much as we can, some NWCG definitions are apparently under review). These folks are the experts, so let’s use their terminology.

Prescribed Fire
Any fire intentionally ignited by management actions in accordance with applicable laws, policies, and regulations to meet specific objectives

Then we have what we used to (still?) call
Wildland Fire Use (definition from 2009 here.) Wildland fire use (WFU) is the management of naturally ignited wildland fires (those started by lightning or lava) to accomplish specific resource objectives within a pre-defined area. Objectives can include maintenance of healthy forests, rangelands, and wetlands, and support of ecosystem diversity.

Wildfire
An unplanned, unwanted wildland fire including unauthorized human-caused fires, escaped wildland fire use events, escaped prescribed fire projects, and all other wildland fires where the objective is to put the fire out (definition currently under review).

Now, if folks generally agree that more fire on the landscape is a good thing, then we get to choose between WFU and PB. As Rebecca Watson pointed out in a comment on a previous post, PB could have some advantages over WFU in terms of air quality. In terms of suppression, it might be better to have PB to free crews during the summer where they are needed to deal with wildfires. Except, that the fire that becomes a WFU would have to be otherwise suppressed. It seems like PBs can be better planned and more controllable (because of being during the off-season and the fuel and weather conditions then) so you might be able to meet your objectives easier. It seems like you would want to do both. Anyone who has seen any studies on this, please post! I did find this paper on barriers to WFU in Wildfire Today (2008)that looks interesting.

I asked Dr. Mark Finney “who is doing a good job on returning fire to the landscape in the west?” and he pointed to the Washington Prescribed Fire Council. Here’s some info and here’s a link:

Rediscover Prescribed Fire
Prescribed fire is the planned, professional application of fire in the right place, at the right time. It is a safe, effective process that has been sidelined for the last 100 years as we suppressed wildfire on a state and national level.
Fire suppression was intended to keep people safer and industry thriving, but over time, has actually resulted in the reverse: unprecedented forest density, stockpiled fuels, and diseased, degraded forests that are more likely to burn hot, fast and out of control. Recent wildfires have been especially devastating for Washington: lost lives, lost homes, shuttered businesses, millions and millions spent.

There has to be a better way, and there is. It’s time to embrace prescribed fire.

With recent record-breaking years of megafire, and devastated communities across the state, it’s not surprising that fire is on lawmakers’ minds. In the 2016 legislative session, lawmakers explored tools for creating more fire-resilient forests, including the passage of House Bill 2928, the Forest Resiliency Burning Pilot project. The bill provides funding for prescribed fire on at-risk forests, as well as an exploration of current barriers to expanding the role of controlled fire in creating and maintaining fire-resilient forests.

We’re proud to say the Washington Prescribed Fire Council and our partner organizations are at the heart of this landmark effort to expand the use of prescribed fire, reduce megafire risk to communities and restore Washington’s forests and streams.

Check out their website and pilots!

New York Times on Fire: “Science” Without Fire Science

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There’s lots of fire science that isn’t vegetation ecology.https://www.firelab.org/photo_gallery

Thanks to readers who shared this NY Times article. The subheading is A “scientific debate is intensifying over whether too much money and too many lives are lost fighting forest fires”.

The article says that the black=backed woodpecker is “a symbol of a huge scientific and political debate over the future of fire in American forests.” Of course, the click-addicted media thrive on “huge controversies” so if they didn’t exist they would have to be made up.

Scientists at the cutting edge of ecological research, Dr. Hanson among them, argue that the century-old American practice of suppressing wildfires has been nothing less than a calamity. They are calling for a new approach that basically involves letting backcountry fires burn across millions of acres.

(my italics)

This is not a particularly new idea. Anyone remember Harold Biswell? And people do let fires burn in the backcountry, (to the extent that folks on this blog have questioned the wisdom of doing so), so how can that be a new idea? I can’t blame the writer for not knowing this, but all writers should be wary of scientist hype.

Yet that awareness has yet to penetrate the public consciousness.People still think forest fires are bad and expect the government to try to stamp them out, even in remote wilderness areas. Federal and state firefighting costs in some years approach $2 billion.

Of course, this is in the science section of the NYT, so the author didn’t have to interview those pesky people like residents of communities, nor their elected officals, nor suppression people (whom you think would be the legitimate source of information on the perils of fighting forest fires).

It’s also interesting how scientific disagreement itself is characterized (as two people within the veg ecology community in California):

Still, considerable disagreement remains among scientists about exactly how forests should be managed. Dr. Hanson studied under Malcolm North, a Forest Service scientist who also holds a position at the University of California, Davis — but the two men have come to disagree. Dr. North argues that Dr. Hanson goes too far in arguing that even the most severe fires, those that produce some large patches of snag forest, are a good thing.

“I would agree it’s actually a valuable habitat type,” Dr. North said. “It’s just that he’s arguing for way too much of it, and in really big patches.”

It’s interesting that this way of looking at it assumes that vegetation ecologists get to decide how much acreage “should” be in what conditions. Do a subset of vegetation ecologists speak for “science”?
Is how land is managed a “scientific” question? Not.

But of all this, I think the most important philosophical question is posed by reflecting on this quote:

“From an ecological standpoint, everything I’ve learned teaches me this is a good idea: Stop putting out fires,” said Jennifer R. Marlon, a geographer at Yale who was among the first to use the term “fire deficit” to describe the situation. “These forests are made to have fire.”

I think it’s fascinating that the author of the article quoted a non-ecologist about ecology in the name of “science”. They were “made to have fire”.. so other areas are “made to have hurricanes” or “made to have floods”, “volcanoes” or “tornadoes”. In what other context does the existence of a disturbance factor privilege vegetation ecologists to determine how communities should respond, including over communities themselves, and over other fire science disciplines? It’s bizarre.

Why We Disagree About Fuel Treatments: IV. Framing the Issue: Living with Fire on the Landscape

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Western wildfires 2014 from space.

Before we move on to “how have SPLATS worked in practice?,” we probably need to go back to the fundamental beliefs underlying our policy preferences. In political science or policy studies, this is known as the way the problem is “framed.” See this description, if you’re not familiar with the term. I think it’s important in dealing with wildfire controversies as it’s easy to see that different folks in the media, politics and research frame the issues differently. It’s also important to realize that these framings are often imbedded in what and how people write about issues, and so you have to go looking for them (which we can do with stories that crop up). But I believe it’s most important to understand that we each get to choose our own framing. Once we have identified the framing within, say a news story or scientific paper, we are free to say “all that information is well and good, but if I frame the problem this way, it’s really not relevant.” From the above link:

HOW DO YOU BEST FRAME AN ISSUE?
To frame an issue, you should begin by asking these questions:

What is the issue?
Who is involved?
What contributes to the problem?
What contributes to the solution?
Once you’ve asked these questions, you can begin to answer them. For some guidelines on how to do this, see the sections below.

So let’s start.
My framing of the issue is “in the dry western US, how are people and communities best able to live with fire as a part of the landscape?”

Who is involved: Western communities, landowners (including the feds), all levels of government in those areas, insurance companies, scientific disciplines.

Who contributes to the problem: I don’t think it’s really a problem- it’s more of an acknowledgement of the way things are, and a question of the best way to live, given that situation.

What contributes to the solution: Culture, government, finding some kinds of agreement. People are, in fact, living with fires on the landscape. Communities have developed CWPP’s and have done other amounts of work. Suppression forces are very active and successful.

The question seems to be, though, different actors think that the current status quo is suboptimal. Probably the most important thing to do is ask that question.. what exactly is suboptimal about it, and what is your solution?

The southern US has some of the same landowners, including the FS, and the same environmental laws. They seem to have figured this out (how to live with fire on the landscape) due to differences in cultural, physical and biological parameters. Given that, what would our vision of “living with fire on the land” look like for us westerners?

FS Litigation Weekly, July 14, 2017

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Here’s the Lit Weekly version of the Court decision on NEPA and the Wolverine fire we discussed previously here (27 comments).

1. Fire I Region 6
The District Court for the Eastern District of Washington ruled for the Forest Service on a National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) case challenging the construction of a Community Protection Line (CPL) to contain the Wolverine Fire on the Chelan Ranger District of the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest in Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics v. United States Forest Service et al. The Wolverine Fire was ignited by lightening on June 29, 2015. By August 27, 2015 the fire grew to approximately 62,000 acres. After two failed attempts to contain the fire, the Forest Service began constructing the CPL, described as an approximately 20-mile long contingency line consisting of a roughly 300 foot wide thinning of vegetation. The CPL was near completion when the Forest Service halted construction after rain showers slowed the fire. Plaintiffs filed suit against the Forest Service on August 16, 2016, – “well after the construction of the CPL— complaining that the CPL was constructed without complying with NEPA.”

Plaintiff’s NEPA claims assert: 1) NEPA does not have a waiver from its procedural requirements for emergency actions and 2) even if NEPA did have a waiver, the Forest Service did not meet the requirements for claiming that waiver and wildfires do not represent emergency situations.
The court rejected both of plaintiff’s claims. The court ruled that NEPA does allow agencies to take actions in emergency situations “without complying with the ordinary, burdensome reporting requirements” because to require agencies to do so “is generally not feasible or prudent.” Under NEPA, an agency can circumvent traditional NEPA requirements if a “responsible official” determines “an emergency exists that makes it necessary to take urgently needed actions before preparing a NEPA analysis,” and the action is “necessary to control the immediate impacts of the emergency.” The court concluded a responsible official did determine that the Wolverine Fire constituted an emergency situation and “just because wildfires are common and their general existence is foreseeable, the danger created by any specific wildfire is not so foreseeable and can create an emergency situation with little or no forewarning.” (16-293, E.D. Wash.)

Here’s a copy of the ruling..
Lit Weekly July 14

Wolverine Fire Ruling

Jasanoff on Public Truths: An Approach to the Fire Retardant Debate?

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Sheila Jasanoff, Sheila Jasanoff
Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School

Andy Stahl’s comment here: reminded me of a recent piece I’d read by Sheila Jasanoff. Andy made the claim:

“While anecdotal information (“evidence based on hearsay“) can be helpful, scientific research and hard facts are a better basis for policy decisions.”

Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School, is an expert on the intersection of science, policy and law. This interesting piece by her recently came across my desk, and while it is fairly long, I’d like to draw your attention to her thoughts about how democracy, information and science come together (my italics).

To address the current retreat from reason—and indeed to restore confidence that “facts” and “truth” can be reclaimed in the public sphere—we need a discourse less crude than the stark binaries of good/bad, true/false, or science/antiscience. That oversimplification, we have seen, only augments political polarization and possibly yields unfair advantage to those in possession of the political megaphones of the moment. We need a discourse more attuned to findings from the history, sociology, and politics of knowledge that truth in the public domain is not simply out there, ready to be pulled into service like the magician’s rabbit from a hat. On the contrary, in democratic societies, public truths are precious collective achievements, arrived at just as good laws are, through slow sifting of alternative interpretations based on careful observation and argument and painstaking deliberation among trustworthy experts.

In good processes of public fact-making, judgment cannot be set side, nor facts wholly disentangled from values. The durability of public facts, accepted by citizens as “self-evident” truths, depends not on nature alone but on the procedural values of fairness, transparency, criticism, and appeal in the fact-finding process. These virtues, as the sociologist Robert K. Merton noted as long ago as 1942, are built into the ethos of science. How else, after all, did modern Western societies repudiate earlier structures of class, race, gender, religious, or ethnic inequality than by letting in the skeptical voices of the underrepresented? It is when ruling institutions bypass the virtues of openness and critique that public truthfulness suffers, yielding to what the comedian Stephen Colbert called “truthiness,” the shallow pretense of truth, or what the Israeli political scientist Yaron Ezrahi calls “out-formations,” baseless claims replacing reliable, institutionally certified information. That short-circuiting of democratic process is what happened when the governments of Tony Blair and George W. Bush disastrously claimed to have evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. A cavalier disregard for process, over and above the blatancy of lying, may similarly deal the harshest blows to the credibility of the Trump administration.

Public truths cannot be dictated—neither by a pure, all-knowing science nor unilaterally from the throne of power. Science and democracy, at their best, are modest enterprises because both are mistrustful of their own authority. Each gains by making its doubts explicit. This does not mean that the search for closure in either science or politics must be dismissed as unattainable. It does mean that we must ask and insist on good answers to questions about the procedures and practices that undergird both kinds of authority claims. For assertions of public knowledge, the following questions then seem indispensable:

Who claims to know?
In answer to whose questions?
On what authority?
With what evidence?
Subject to what oversight or opportunity for criticism?
With what openings for countervailing views to express themselves?
And with what mechanisms of closure in cases of disagreement?

If those questions can be raised and discussed, even if not resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, then factual disagreements retreat into the background and confidence builds that ours is indeed a government of reason. For those who are not satisfied, the possibility remains open that one can return some other day, with more persuasive data, and hope the wheel of knowledge will turn in synchrony with the arc of justice. In the end, what assures a polity that knowledge is justly coupled to power is not the assertion that science knows best, but the conviction that science itself has been subjected to norms of good government.

It might be fun to work through Jasanoff’s list of questions with the fire retardant issue. To someone outside this issue like me, it seems that we have practitioner experience vs. other knowledge approaches. It seems to me that any “serviceable truth” around fire retardant would have to incorporate both practitioner observations and explain the information (or lack thereof in the case of no studies) presented by Andy. Note that it doesn’t seem to be anyone’s paid position to arrive at “serviceable truths,” and it requires hard work to dig into the details. And of course, we could also use Sheila’s questions for our fuel treatment discussion after we have rounded up the relevant information and looked at it from a variety of angles.