Fire and Fuels

The degree to which forest fires are caused by fossil fuel-driven climate change

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I happened to run across something that contradicts Bob Zybach’s repeated assertions that, “these fires have been clearly predicted by me and others because of USFS management policies and Wilderness designations and have zero to do with warming climate or drier fuels.”  The Union of Concerned Scientists calculated the effect of warming climate and drier fuels on burned area, and the result from their peer-reviewed analysis is not “zero.”

Climate change is causing hotter, drier conditions that are also fueling these increasingly large and severe wildfires. In particular, vapor pressure deficit (VPD), a measure of atmospheric “thirst,” has emerged as a key way of tracking how climate change is amplifying wildfires because of its role in regulating water dynamics in ecosystems and, together with rising temperatures, contributing to increasing dryness (Box 1).

UCS used a combination of data and modeling to determine how much the carbon emissions associated with 88 major carbon producers (hereafter, the “big 88”) have historically contributed to increases in VPD and burned forest area across the western United States and southwestern Canada (see Methodology).

Across western North America, the area burned by forest fires increases exponentially as VPD increases, which means that relatively small changes in VPD result in large changes in burned forest area. The observed rise in VPD has enabled a steep increase in the forest area that has burned across the region since the mid-1980s. Since 1986,1 a cumulative 53.0 million acres of forest area has burned across western North America as VPD has risen. Without emissions tied to the big 88, the rise in VPD would have been much smaller, and 33.3 million acres (IQR 27.7 million–38.5 million) would have burned (Figure 4). That means that 37 percent (IQR 26–47 percent) of the cumulative burned forest area from 1986 to 2021 is attributable to emissions from the big 88. This represents nearly 19.8 million acres of burned forest area, or an area roughly the size of Maine.

You can criticize UCS for being agenda-driven (and we’ve talked about the limitations of “burned area” as a metric), but I’d challenge Bob or others to provide a similarly peer-reviewed research paper that attributes fire effects to his chosen causes.

 

Let’s Discuss: Your Priorities and Bold Innovations to Carry Out Recommendations from The Wildfire Commission Report

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There is much to talk about in the Wildfire Commission Report.  Kelly Martin has offered to talk to us about it (she is a member of the Commission) via Zoom, so please let me know if you are interested.  Today, though, I had heard that Commission members were making Hill visits to highlight priority actions.  I don’t know what they came up with as priorities, so hopefully someone will let us know.  But I thought it might be fun to generate ideas here.  There is plenty of expertise among TSW readers.  The way the Report is written, it’s an emergency- so that gives us room to think outside the box.. way outside the box!

Here’s mine.

1. Workforce.  Of course, give wildland firefighters a living wage and what they are already owed.  Work on housing.  How about a CE for FS and BLM to develop sites on federal land to house workers? Perhaps for workers’ RVs or trailers, or provide those to them at reasonable cost? Maybe used FEMA trailers? Cheaper and quicker than building permanent housing, as some places are trying. What else can we do?

Perhaps synchronistically, I received in my mailbox this morning a post from a person whose pseudonym is N.S. Lyons, who writes a Substack called The Upheaval.  He was talking about the failure of security systems in Israel at the border, but I thought this might be relevant to this topic.

One of the most famous sayings of the legendary U.S. Air Force pilot and strategist Col. John Boyd, who helped develop modern maneuver warfare (and is maybe best known for inventing the “OODA Loop”) was: “People, ideas, machines – in that order!” While warfighting devices were and are important, as are doctrines, tactics, and stratagems, these are all less important than the people doing the fighting, planning, and organizing – and are far less adaptable and reliable. As Boyd would often harangue Generals in the Pentagon, usually to no avail: “Machines don’t fight wars… Humans fight wars!”

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Today we have come to practically worship technology and complexity for its own sake, believing it to be the sorcery that must be able to solve our problems once and for all. Except far too often it actually doesn’t – it just creates the illusion of having done so, while our own capacities have actually diminished and our vulnerabilities to entropy-induced system failure have increased. In this way, technology has increasingly become a false idol, squatting in the place of or even preventing genuine human ingenuity, innovation, and adaptability.

People, ideas, machines.. indeed! So let’s invest in them. First.

2. Build Trust About Use of Beneficial Fire. Having fuels experts live in their communities (see 1) will help.  I would add Congress asking the FS to stand down on plan revision until each Forest finishes (including litigation) a plan amendment that develops  1) PODs, or equivalent mapping of potential operational sites  2) conditions and places for prescribed fire and wildland fire use and 3) programs to understand and reduce human-caused ignitions.  The amendment would include an EIS for ongoing maintenance of PODs and maybe some programmatic stuff for prescribed fire and wildland fire use.  By doing this with an open, public process, communities could quickly get on board with understanding how PODs related to their own efforts and can coordinate.  Right now in many places it appears that communities are doing the “random acts of mitigation” without the kind of knowledge that fuels and fire suppression folks from the agencies have available.   My thinking is that building trust with individual humans who live in their community, and the kinds of discussions and public involvement that would come with an amendment, will build a solid relationship for working together on mitigation and beneficial fire.  If Forests just proceed with plan revisions, fire will be one of many things on a relatively small sample of forests.. is it or ain’t it an emergency?

3. Commission or Workgroup on Wood Waste Utilization.  When I read these recommendations in the Report, I thought “we’ve been working on this for forty years now.” And I know some of the folks who continue to work on it today.  We have long had grants for this kind of thing, and yet..  Ten years or so ago, I was in a meeting with DOE who wanted to try something at a gigantic scale, and The Wilderness Society who was afraid if we developed markets for small diameter woody material that they would take over politically and the environment would be sacrificed.  So all the bright young Colorado entrepreneurs at the meeting gave up.  Then there is the question of supply, that 4FRI was developed in part to deal with.  When I look around I see excellent efforts by some FS researchers, by Extension faculty at land grants, by entrepreneurs and so on, and yet…we’ve lost capacity in terms of forest economists and utilization specialists.  Weirdly we spend more money on modeling problems in the future than on solving problem right in our face (emergencies!). What’s up with that?

California had a 50-member working group on “advancing collaborative action on forest biofuels” (of course biofuels is only one use of woody waste) and produced a report in 2022, plus they have some zones of agreement with ENGO’s so perhaps some of those folks could be tapped to anchor a national Commission or Workgroup.  Whatever we have been trying has not been working, and needs organized, comprehensive and dedicated attention.  Key stakeholders are small businesses with experience in the space, technology folks, economists and utilization operations specialists, communities and ENGO’s.  If we keep doing what we always did, we’re going to get what we always got.

And finally (a girl can dream…)

4. Stick a Fork in the Current Admin’s MOG Initiative..err.. climate resilience and adaptation  initiative.  Parsing out what treatments are best to protect OG  or any forests from wildfire.. would be best developed by fire amendments to forest plans.  All hands on deck.  Focus.  This is what climate adaptation looks like.. worked out day by day with resource professionals and communities in specific places.  Many excellent folks are working on MOG who could be working on fire amendments to forest plans, collecting data, etc.  Emergency? Yes if you really want to protect OG and mature stands (at least from wildfire).

NY Times on “How Megafires are Remaking the World”

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Firefighters- mysteriously absent from this NY Times story.

 

What’s interesting to me about this NY Times story  is that discussion of adaptation.. most notably, in this case, fire suppression.. is completely missing when discussing bad potential future outcomes. Nothing against reporters.. not having specialists who understand complex topics  is a business decision of the Times.

Dr. Hodges, a conservation ecologist at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, also found herself worried about wildlife. She had been studying some Western screech owls that had been nesting in the heart of the fast-moving inferno. “That speed of fire would be difficult for animals to evacuate in front of,” she said. Had the owls escaped in time? And after Canada’s worst wildfire season on record, what would be left for the survivors?

Fire is a natural phenomenon; some species actually benefit from its effects and even those that don’t can be remarkably resilient in the face of flames. But as fires intensify, they are beginning to outstrip nature’s ability to bounce back. “Not all fires have the same impact,” said Morgan Tingley, an ecologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “These megafires are not good for ecosystems.”

Megafires, which dwarf typical wildfires in size, have an immediate ecological toll, killing individual plants and animals that might have survived more contained blazes. In the longer term, changing fire patterns could drive some species out of existence, transform landscapes and utterly remake ecosystems.

Not that long ago, fires were thought to be good and natural.  Fish in streams which had died off would come back, and trees regrow on their own time and so on.  And smoke was not studied as a problem.

But now we have “megafires” from climate change (and other causes) which are bad.  Because they are larger? But of course fires are larger, since suppression folks are building big boxes where possible and using wildfire for resource benefits.

So there’s the acres burned (function of “some unable to suppress, plus some WFU”), severity (function of fuel loads onsite plus fire attributes). Then there’s windspeed, which likely differs by day.  The more human-caused ignitions, the greater the change one will take off on a high-wind day.  Which is not to say that climate change doesn’t have an impact.. but other factors include difficulty in finding and keeping fire workers ..by paying them (!)and a variety of others.

Plus there is the great incursion of the Military Industrial complex into the wildfire space, on the basis of being able to put fires out more quickly.

Globally, the risk of catastrophic fires could increase by more than 50 percent by the end of the century, the United Nations reported.

It could of course.. or it could decrease by 50%, depending on your assumptions about the success of new technologies. Or if countries around the world decided to not pay firefighters appropriately…

This discussion seems to argue that the sand racer is capable of adapting to wildfire as a species, or perhaps is implying that things will be messed up if fire happens where it did not formerly happen. But did it “not formerly happen” due to suppression or other human factors? Isn’t evolution a process that should be allowed to work? Or can’t be stopped from working when environments change for whatever reason.

The Algerian sand racer, a Mediterranean lizard, lives in a variety of habitats, only some of which experience frequent fires. In a 2021 study, researchers found that lizards collected from fire-prone sites reacted quickly to the smell of smoke, flicking their tongues and running around their terrariums. “In places where fire is not a common threat, lizards did nothing,” said Lola Álvarez-Ruiz, a biologist at the Desertification Research Center in Spain, who conducted the study.

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Fires that consume more fuel may also produce more smoke per unit of area burned, threatening animals far from the flames.“All air-breathing animals are going to be impacted by smoke exposure, because the chemicals in smoke are toxic,” said Olivia Sanderfoot, an ecologist at the University of California, Los Angeles.Smoke inhalation can do more than cause respiratory problems. For months after severe peatland fires produced record air pollution in Indonesia in 2015, Bornean orangutans vocalized less frequently and their voices became harsher.

But if you have lots of material on the ground to be consumed, then what else can you do besides burn it (note “more smoke per unit area”)? Maybe haul some to a sawmill to reduce fuels?

“You could walk half a mile, and you wouldn’t see a single living tree,” said Andrew Stillman, an ecologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “Increasingly, these fires seem to create habitat conditions that are outside of the norms that these species are adapted to.”

This seems to be an argument that large treeless acreages after wildfire are more common now than before- however for much of history we didn’t have satellite imagery.  But I think what’s interesting about this is the idea of “what species are adapted to.” How long does it take for adaptation to occur? Generations are different lengths of time in different species. I think the fear may be that conditions have changed enough that current species will be unable to adapt.

That may be true even for fire-loving animals, like the black-backed woodpecker. The birds nest in scorched trees and feed on the beetle larvae that colonize the charred trunks. But they prefer patches of burned trees that are near stands of leafy, living ones, which protect their fledglings from being picked off by predators, Dr. Stillman and Dr. Tingley, of U.C.L.A., found.

After the enormous Rim fire in California in 2013, scientists searched for the woodpeckers at nearly 500 sites across the expansive burn scar. They found just six birds. “Even though it had created all this great burned habitat, it wasn’t the right kind of burned habitat,” Dr. Tingley said.

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Fewer clusters of living trees can also reduce regrowth. “In many places, we’re not getting regeneration because the seed source is lost,” said Mr. French, of the National Forest System. “It honestly looks like someone went in and just set off a bomb.”

In dry areas, even before climate change was thought to be a thing, we were aware that some tree species can have trouble regenerating without help.  We developed and  adopted the primitive technologies known at the time as “collecting seed from appropriate sources,” “planting trees” and “protecting seedlings’ which seems to be coming into vogue again.

Scorched, vegetation-less soil, which does not absorb rain well, can also hamper regeneration. Flash flooding after fires can wash ash and sediment into rivers and streams, polluting the water, killing fish and reshaping waterways.

After the Rodeo-Chediski fire in Arizona in 2002, repeated flooding washed away fertile soils that had taken more than 8,000 years to develop. “That has cascading impacts on the kind of plants that can grow,” said Jonathan Long, an ecologist at the U.S. Forest Service, who conducted the research.

What’s particularly interesting about the way that this is reported is that if you click on the link, the study says..

 the second site, Swamp Spring, was treated in 2005 by placing large rock riffle formations and vegetation transplants to prevent further incision and stimulate wetland development. The treatment was soon followed by cessation of channel incision and reestablishment of native wetland vegetation, while headcutting caused extensive erosion at the untreated site for eight years.

The theme of this piece seems to be that “scientists (var. ecologists) tell us really bad things  may happen more in the future, if we don’t do anything like fire suppression, tree planting, or wetland restoration.”  This is actually not all that unusual, either for reporting or for scientific papers.

Wildfire Commission Report Released

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From this page.

 

The commission’s second and final report was submitted to Congress on September 27, 2023 and reflects one of the most sweeping and comprehensive reviews of the wildfire system to date.

The report makes 148 recommendations covering seven key themes:

  • Urgent New Approaches to address the wildfire crisis
  • Supporting Collaboration to improve partner involvement at every scale
  • Shifting from Reactive to Proactive in planning for, mitigating and recovering from fire
  • Enabling Beneficial Fire to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire
  • Supporting and Expanding the Workforce to hire and retain the wildland firefighting staff needed to address the crisis
  • Modernizing Tools for Informed Decision-making to better leverage available technology and information
  • Investing in Resilience through increased spending now to reduce costs in the long run

Opportunities to Act:

Rather than selecting one or more potential recommendations, the Commission urged an “all of the above” approach, because the scale of the problem requires broad integrated, solutions. While the resulting recommendations are extensive and diverse, they are also complementary and interrelated. With these solutions in hand, the commission is recommending Congress act as quickly as possible.

Commission members will remain empaneled for six months following the final report being submitted to Congress.

 

Links:

 

Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission Webinar September 27

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Needed to post this in time..

The above is an image.. you actually need to click here to register. Hopefully at least one someone will attend and report on it at TSW.  If you do please email me with your reporting.. sharon at forestpolicypub.com.

Kelly Martin offered to host a separate Zoom for interested TSW-ites, please email me or note in the comments below if you are interested. I will schedule something when I get back from my break.

Hotshot Wakeup Interview with Jason Forthofer of the US Forest Service Missoula Fire Laboratory

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Jason Forthofer, mechanical engineer, stands in an area burned by the Carr Fire, one of the devastating California wildfires in 2018. (Photo provided by Bret Butler, U.S. Forest Service)

I thought this was a terrific podcast, an interview with Jason Forthofer at the Missoula Forest Sciences Lab by the Hotshot Wakeup on his Substack.  He has a gift for talking about fire models in a way that is easy to understand, at least for TSW-ites and our ilk.   And the range of tools he’s working on, and their practical applications, are fascinating. At least to me.

He talks about AI and machine learning .. I’ve always been interested in these new-fangled analysis contraptions, so asked Jason these questions.

When you say “AI” what do you mean exactly? Do you mean machine learning? I kind of thought that that was empirical also, based on loading data into it. But then you mentioned a combination of using your physical model with AI.  We have many older readers so if you could explain this a bit more (or anything else you wanted to say but did not get to, or links to key papers), that would be great!

Below are his answers.

Yes, when I was saying “AI” I was primarily talking about machine learning.  I often use these terms interchangeably, but I understand that there are some differences.  In the context of the spread model work we are doing with Google, we are using machine learning, and specifically a method called deep learning which uses the idea of neural network.

I would say that you are correct that AI and machine learning could be considered essentially empirical models.  And yes, often these models use learning data that comes from measurements of actual phenomena.  So in the case of fire spread for example, you could burn some fires in a laboratory and vary, say, the wind speed and measure the outcome (let’s say you measure the fire’s spread rate).  An empirical model would, in one way or another, correlate the input (wind speed) to the outcome (fire spread rate).  For simple cases like this you could do a curve fit to the data, just like you might learn in an elementary physics or math class (one common method is the “least squares” fit).  You could also use a more sophisticated and complex method like machine learning.  From my limited experience with machine learning, I would say that it really is like a kind of very sophisticated “curve fitting” method.  As the phenomena you are trying to model get more complex, for example many different inputs and outputs and also complex relations between the variables, more complex methods like machine learning may work better than the simpler methods.

But machine learning can also use data that is output from another model instead of actual measurements of the real phenomena, which is what we are doing in collaboration with Google.  Instead of the machine learning algorithm using lab or field measurements to learn from, we are feeding it input/output from our relatively slow running physically-based model of fire spread.  The whole purpose of doing this is to have a predictive model that is fast running.  To give you an idea of the speed up in the computation, some preliminary investigations we have done show that the machine learning model (that learns from our physically based model) can predict fire spread somewhere around 100,000 times faster than the original physically-based model.  The huge benefit of this is that it essentially allows us to use our machine learning model to predict fire spread over large landscapes (where tens of thousands or more of these small fire behavior calculations must be done).  It would not be feasible to do such a simulation using the original physically-based model.

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When I think about different research that uses machine learning, I think it’s safe in the hands of folks like Jason who are experienced with the real-world processes he models.  If you are trying to relate machine learning to old processes that you understand, like, say linear regression, I thought that this Forbes article is helpful.  Let’s be careful out there!

Pattern verification is an especially powerful way of using machine learning models to both to confirm that they are picking up on theoretically suggested signals and, perhaps even more importantly, to understand the biases and nuances of the underlying data. Unrelated variables moving together can reveal a powerful and undiscovered new connection with strong predictive or explanatory power. On the other hand, they could just as easily represent spurious statistical noise or a previously undetected bias in the data.

Bias detection is all the more critical as we deploy machine learning systems in applications with real world impact using datasets we understand little about.

Perhaps the biggest issue with current machine learning trends, however, is our flawed tendency to interpret or describe the patterns captured in models as causative rather than correlations of unknown veracity, accuracy or impact.

One of the most basic tenants of statistics is that correlation does not imply causation. In turn, a signal’s predictive power does not necessarily imply in any way that that signal is actually related to or explains the phenomena being predicted.

 

Foot on the Gas. Log on the Brake and.. Arbitration?

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A theme I’ve been thinking about..is in terms of infrastructure build-out our country has one foot (and lots of federal tax $) on the gas, and a log (and lots of federal tax $) on the brake. I’ve been working on comments to the proposed NEPA regs, and listening to speakers on their webinars. It’s kind of funny how agency NEPA people are responsible both for not using plain language, and not including enough detailed scientific perspectives- which might be hard to do at the same time. We can discuss the proposed reg here at TSW, if anyone wants. The Admin claims that it is streamlining while adding more analysis and legally disputable changes. Anyway, I’d appreciate draft copies of comments if you would like to share.

From last week, here are some foot and log stories..

From the LA Times:

Note what Dave Jones, director of UC Berkeley’s Climate Risk Initiative and the state’s former insurance commissioner says needs to be done to avoid an “uninsurable future” in California?

“I’m not suggesting that we’re there yet,” he noted, “but it definitely bears paying attention to, because that’s a potential path of transmission of this risk in ways that could have negative consequences for our financial system.”

So what else should the state and federal government be doing to avoid the “uninsurable future” Jones warns about? He shared a few ideas:

  • The Federal Reserve and other federal financial regulators need to get serious about assessing the risks climate change poses to the financial system. That’s something the Fed just recently started to do, though critics say their efforts are weak and well behind other countries’ efforts.

  • State and federal leaders should invest more in forest management, especially prescribed burns. Jones said officials finally recognized that “a century and a half of fire suppression has resulted in forests choked with fuel.” Prescribed burns are key to reducing the risks of fires growing to out-of-control infernos, and Jones would like to see insurers factor such risk reduction into their assessments.

  • Most significant, Jones said, is the need to dramatically and quickly cut the human-made emissions that affect our environment.

I’m kind of dubious when financial regulators, who seem to have challenges with regulating things currently and most notably in 2008 , may take their eye off the ball to worry about the climate future.  But then perhaps that’s a feature for them, not a bug.  I wonder what regulatory work they are now not doing and whom that not-regulating might benefit?  And could there be reasons for insurance companies to err on the side of overestimating future risk?

So we need to invest more in forest management?

And to the brake..

From the Flathead Beacon (op-ed by Jim Peterson):

How else to explain the Court’s rejection of two forest restoration projects on the Kootenai National Forest in only 41 days. Judge Donald Malloy shut down the Black Ram Project on August 17 and Judge Dana Christensen’s July 7 ruling upended the Ripley Project.

Lincoln County and the State of Montana have an agreement with the U.S Forest Service to restore – via thinning and prescribed burning – up to 10,000 acres of designated Wildland Urban Interface per year to protect homes and forests from catastrophic wildfire.

Again, like last week’s post, somehow I don’t think it’s true that if NEPA practitioners cleaned up their act, then these projects would move through smoothly.  The other interesting thing is that the Kootenai Tribe supports the project:

“The Tribe supports the Black Ram project, because it protects our Ktunaxa resources, furthers restoration of Ktunaxa Territory forests and was developed through our government-to-government relationship with the United States Forest Service,” said Gary Aitken, Jr., Vice-Chairman, Kootenai Tribe of Idaho.

So even their feet on the gas doesn’t seem to matter because at the end of the day a federal judge will decide.  I hope that any settlements will involve the Tribe.

Anyway, back to the op-ed – Jim suggests arbitration instead.. it’s been around awhile as an idea.. I think it might have been in some proposed legislation..at least as a pilot.  Does anyone remember what bill that was? He suggests:

Let’s nix litigation in favor of baseball-style arbitration. You bring your best ideas for protecting forests and we’ll bring ours and three qualified arbitration judges will decide which ideas best meet the goals and objectives of the Forest Service’s decadal forest planning documents. No more bad juju.

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Which reminds me that I ran across this idea also from Wildlife for the 21st Century by the American Wildlife Conservation Partners.

Increase Collaboration, Reduce Litigation
* Authorize collaboration in federal land decisions and protect collaboratively based decisions from litigation. Congress;Agriculture/FS; Interior/F WS, BLM; Defense/COE
* Authorize alternative remedies to litigation, including arbitration, and limit fee reimbursement to cases of direct and personal interest as defined in the Equal Access to Justice Act. Congress; Agriculture/FWS, BLM; Defense/COE; DOJ Collaboration is the voluntary work of citizens with each other and federal agencies to develop plans and projects.
These locally driven solutions achieve buy-in from diverse stakeholders. New policy must place collaborative agreements on par with lawsuits in determining the direction of federal land conservation. Arbitration between litigants and collaborative groups can avoid costly and disruptive litigation on projects where stakeholders have already agreed upon the best approach.

Of course, the forest kinds of collaborative efforts might work for forest resilience projects, probably not so much for transmission lines, solar and wind installations, carbon capture, mines and other kinds of facilities. Still, it may be worth it for vegetation projects.

And Then There Is This – Globally Wildfires Decreasing Since 2001

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Italics and bolding added by Gil

#1)  WSJ ByBjorn Lomborg,

Climate Change Hasn’t Set the World on Fire

a) It turns out the percentage of the globe that burns each year has been declining since 2001.

b) For more than two decades, satellites have recorded fires across the planet’s surface. The data are unequivocal: Since the early 2000s, when 3% of the world’s land caught fire, the area burned annually has trended downward.

c) In 2022, the last year for which there are complete data, the world hit a new record-low of 2.2% burned area. Yet you’ll struggle to find that reported anywhere.
d) Yet the latest report by the United Nations’ climate panel doesn’t attribute the area burned globally by wildfires to climate change. Instead, it vaguely suggests the weather conditions that promote wildfires are becoming more common in some places. Still, the report finds that the change in these weather conditions won’t be detectable above the natural noise even by the end of the century.
e)Take the Canadian wildfires this summer. While the complete data aren’t in for 2023, global tracking up to July 29 by the Global Wildfire Information System shows that more land has burned in the Americas than usual. But much of the rest of the world has seen lower burning—Africa and especially Europe. Globally, the GWIS shows that burned area is slightly below the average between 2012 and 2022, a period that already saw some of the lowest rates of burned area.
f) The thick smoke from the Canadian fires that blanketed New York City and elsewhere was serious but only part of the story. Across the world, fewer acres burning each year has led to overall lower levels of smoke, which today likely prevents almost 100,000 infant deaths annually, according to a recent study by researchers at Stanford and Stockholm University.
g)  Likewise, while Australia’s wildfires in 2019-20 earned media headlines such as “Apocalypse Now” and “Australia Burns,” the satellite data shows this was a selective narrative. The burning was extraordinary in two states but extraordinarily small in the rest of the country. Since the early 2000s, when 8% of Australia caught fire, the area of the country torched each year has declined. The 2019-20 fires scorched 4% of Australian land, and this year the burned area will likely be even less.
h) In the case of American fires, most of the problem is bad land management. A century of fire suppression has left more fuel for stronger fires. Even so, last year U.S. fires burned less than one-fifth of the average burn in the 1930s and likely only one-tenth of what caught fire in the early 20th century.

 

#2)  The Canadian Take by LIFESITE News,Thu Aug 31, 2023

New research shows wildfires have decreased globally while media coverage has spiked 400%

Judge sides with environmental groups in ‘Eastside Screens’ case

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I think this story by the Associated Press deserves an award for maximum number of using “Trump-era” in one piece..the headline, the first line,and paragraphs 7, 9 and 14 (the last is a quote).

“We’re looking to create landscapes that withstand and recover more quickly from wildfire, drought and other disturbances,” Ochoco National Forest supervisor Shane Jeffries told Oregon Public Broadcasting at the time. “We’re not looking to take every grand fir and white fir out of the forests.”

The lawsuit, however, said the government’s environmental assessment didn’t adequately address scientific uncertainty surrounding the effectiveness of thinning, especially large trees, for reducing fire risk. The groups said the thinning and logging of large trees can actually increase fire severity.
….

Rob Klavins, an advocate for Oregon Wild based in the state’s rural Wallowa County, said in a news release that he hopes the Forest Service will take this decision to heart and called on the Biden administration to stop defending the Trump-era rule change.

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Here’s a story from the Wallowa County Chieftain, originating with the Capital Press.

Oral arguments in the case were heard on May 1 in U.S. District Court in Pendleton, Ore. Magistrate Judge Andrew Hallman issued his findings and recommendations on Aug. 31, siding with the plaintiffs on three key claims.

First, Hallman agreed that the Forest Service violated the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to issue a full Environmental Impact Statement, or EIS, reviewing potential environmental impacts of the amendment and alternatives.

Second, the agency violated the National Forest Management Act by not holding an objection process after the decision was signed.

Finally, the Forest Service violated the Endangered Species Act by not consulting on how the amendment will impact endangered fish, Hallman ruled.

Hallman recommended the court vacate the Eastside Screens amendment and order the Forest Service to prepare an EIS. Those findings will be forwarded to District Judge Ann Aiken, and defendants will have until Sept. 14 to file objections.

…

Nick Smith, public affairs director for the AFRC, said the ruling is “just the latest example of how anti-forestry litigants are preventing the Forest Service from implementing proactive forest management projects that reduce the risks of severe wildfire.”

It seems odd to me that the FS wouldn’t have a required objection process and didn’t consult on fish. My sensors tell me there might be more to this story. Hopefully, someone knowledgeable will weigh in.

Also I would think that the list of notable forest scientists who sent the amicus curiae (right language?)letter would have dealt with the scientific controversies adequately. So I wonder if the Judge’s idea was that these scientific issues should have more air time in the EIS? Since it’s Labor Day weekend, I’d like to give a shout out to all those who worked on this and may be dealing with the miasma of “bring me a rock” hood.

Bitterroot Front Project draft

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The Bitterroot National Forest is going to try out “condition-based” NEPA with the Bitterroot Front Project.

The project anticipates 54,046 acres of prescribed burning alone; 35,575 acres of non-commercial logging coupled with prescribed burning for whitebark pine restoration; 27,477 acres of commercial logging with prescribed burning; 16,019 acres of vegetation slashing and burning; and 3,163 acres of non-commercial logging and prescribed burning… It will take dozens of miles of roadwork to do all that.

The project is expected to take four years.  “Condition-based” means they don’t know where any of these things are going to happen until they get there.  From the EA, as the project proceeds …

Information about proposed activities, including maps, treatment unit tables, and the activities’ relationship to the Bitterroot Front project’s overall treatment thresholds, would be available on the Bitterroot National Forest website. The responsible official would finalize proposed activities only after field review of existing conditions. The responsible official would retain the authority to make final decisions about the location, extent, and types of activities planned and completed under the Bitterroot Front project.

Nothing said here about the process they’ll follow to evaluate and disclose that new information they find when they get there, in particular about site-specific effects. They seem to be taking the position that “this is it” for NEPA compliance:

By preparing this environmental assessment (EA), the Forest Service is fulfilling agency policy and direction to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requirements and to determine whether the effects of the proposed action may be significant enough to require the preparation of an
environmental impact statement (EIS).  (EA, p. 1)

The EA says, “if an EIS is required, the Forest Service will prepare an EIS consistent with 40 CFR section 1501.9(e)(1).”  I know this is the theory, but how often does a draft EA get redone as a draft EIS after public comment makes the case for significant effects?  Usually the agency makes that call early enough to not create the extra step of an EA.   The agency has plenty of examples of timber sales much smaller than this that had “significant” environmental effects documented in an EIS, but they seem kind of committed to an EA.

This years-long project is being pursued under emergency authority, so there will be no administrative review.  So if the Forest stays this EA course here, the emergency determination would allow local officials to make the call on whether they think this EA would hold up in court.

The “implementation plan” in the EA says that the obligation during implementation is to “Demonstrate that the effects of implementation would be within the scope of activities and the range of effects described in the EA and authorized in the Decision Notice.”  This would be an effects analysis, which would trigger consideration of NEPA.  It could answer the question of whether the effects have become significant (triggering an EIS for the whole project), but apparently is not intended to address the question of whether the site-specific effects have been accounted for pursuant to NEPA after the locations and treatments are known, and whether they are “consequential” (in a NEPA sense).

Where courts have approved of approaches like this it has been where the “conditions” are very specifically defined in the initial decision so that there is not much flexibility in implementation and the site-specific effects can be determined and evaluated.  It doesn’t look to me like the Bitterroot Front is similar to the two favorable court examples I’ve read, but it does feel like the familiar pushing of the envelope to see how far they can take this approach.

So, while I think an EA (with no administrative review) in these circumstances seems like kind of an outrageous idea, I actually wanted to focus on another familiar issue this article brings up:

Critics of the proposal argue that the significant removal of vegetation — including live trees and brush and standing and downed dead timber — will actually promote wildfire spread by allowing uninhibited wind to whip flames through opened-up forest that’s been dried by more wind and sun penetration…

A body of science supports the idea that “forest treatments” — a regime of logging, thinning and burning — can reduce wildfire risk on a landscape and make firefighting efforts more successful. But critics of widespread forest treatments can point to other studies that cast doubt on their efficacy, and on the idea that forests in western Montana used to be dominated by spread-out Ponderosa pine with frequent low-severity fire.

I hope the EA has a good discussion of the science on both sides.  But that last point is a new one to me.  Several national forests in Montana with dry forest habitats have revised their forest plans, and included desired vegetation conditions, which are supposed to be derived from historic conditions.  I don’t think I’ve heard much disagreement with establishing “spread-out Ponderosa pine with frequent low-severity fire” as a desired condition for places similar to the Bitterroot.  Have I missed something?  (Or did the author misinterpret something?)

Here’s what I find in the EA (based on “a geospatial analysis of the Bitterroot Front project area to prioritize communities at risk from large wildland fire growth”):

Modeling results of the current conditions within the project area show that the forest is at extreme risk of a catastrophic fire. The modeled outputs from the present fuel arrangement conditions do not mimic the natural fire spread type for sustainable ecosystem management in the Bitterroot National Forest.

Part of the proposed action is:

Restoring and maintaining ecosystem health by continuing to move the fire regime condition class toward the desired future condition through continued treatments that create disturbance.

Most of the discussion in the EA seems to be about the existing fire risk rather than whether that risk is “natural fire spread type.”  According to the Vegetation Specialist Report, “Overall, the desired future condition includes forest structures, composition, and processes that would have been present historically.  It proceeds to offer a description of “warm/dry” and “cool/moist” vegetation types.   If there are truly disagreements about the desired condition of vegetation or fire regime for these types or areas, alternatives should be considered.  (Under the 2012 Planning Rule, these desired conditions should be found in the forest plan.)

Then there is the question of, “whether the forest plan should be amended for elk habitat objectives, snags, old growth, and coarse woody debris standards to accomplish the project objectives.”  This all comes off looking like they are revising their (very old) forest plan for half of the forest, with new desired conditions and standards, using a project EA.