Election Coming: Time to Resurrect Bundys and Flirt With Mormophobia

In the spring of 2020 (I probably have told this story before) I was on a Zoom with members of the Society for Environmental Journalism who were interested in federal lands.

It was fascinating, because most of the folks on the call were interested in reporting on what they felt was an possible armed rebellion of people in the Interior West. I don’t know where they got this idea, but it didn’t bear any resemblance to reality.  Meanwhile Sammy Roth and I were both interested in the tension between environmental concerns and renewable buildout (next post is a comprehensive story that Sammy posted recently).

Almost four years later, we can see what was the real story and what was fear-mongering (why and to what end, I have no idea). The story continues to be promulgated in certain quarters.. Bundys.. bad .. far-right antigovernment militas…ready to pounce.  I don’t actually see what good this fear-mongering does; I don’t think it changes anyone’s mind politically. I also don’t think that “their wackos are wackier than our wackos” leads to thoughtful political discourse.

I always make fun of these folks who seem to think there are masses of incipient Bundys somewhere between the Mississippi and the Sierra.  But it seems like the discussion might be heating up again. Our friends at High Country News have an interesting article called

What the Bundy Bunkerville standoff foreshadowed

Ten years after the impasse between the Bundy family and the BLM, the doctrine of white oppression is widely embraced.
It seems like it was April ten years ago and not October. This article seems to go after Mormons a bit more than I recall in previous iterations.  Let’s see, a religious minority who has had a troubled history with the federal government, shouldn’t we be sympathetic?.. is this Mormophobia? Meanwhile they are helping out hurricane recovery

and many are not.. western at all.

When the Bundys declared victory, it was hailed as a win for their vision of the American West, a place where white ranchers are heroes and yet also an oppressed minority. But their triumph went beyond Bunkerville: It was a victory for the entire far-right antigovernment militia movement and paved the way for ultra-conservative ideas to dominate the Republican Party’s agenda. All this foreshadowed a nationwide political storm — one that would divide lifelong neighbors, polarize the nation and help lay the groundwork for the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Ten years after Bunkerville, the people and ideas that shaped the standoff are key to understanding American politics as the country faces its next presidential election.
A very long thread… also it seems to me that is it getting increasing hard to tell reporting from opinion.  So let’s investigate the reporters claims “key to understanding”… based on my own experience in political internet space.. I would say that few to none of the people I encounter on both sides are even aware of those ideas, let alone them being “key.”

Scholars have long studied the particular flavor of conservatism that has thrived among the Mormon subcultures of the Mountain West — “the Mormon Corridor.” In 2003, John-Charles Duffy, now a professor at Miami University, wrote in Sunstone Magazine that some members of the LDS Church resisted the changes in the 20th century that were aimed at making the faith more palatable to a wide audience: “The older, hardline tradition of constitutionalism, coupled with accusations of government tyranny, has survived in an LDS subculture devoted to ultraconservative politics.” In the 1990s, LDS leadership responded with mass excommunications, hoping to push out the ultra-conservative constitutionalists and survivalists. But the beliefs continued to flourish, if quietly.

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So the LDS threw the bums out..shouldn’t we give them credit? And if those folks got kicked out, is it accurate to characterize their views as “Mormon”?

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And in publicly proclaiming their beliefs and tying their ideology to the standoff, the Bundys moved “the boundaries of what’s expected Mormon political discourse,” Park said. He pointed to the Utah Legislature. “You see a lot of far-right Mormon conservative voices,” Park said, “who don’t go fully Bundy, but they’re willing to go half Bundy. They’re willing to take advantage of this anxiety.”

I wonder exactly what “half-Bundy” means?

In 2022, the Deseret News — a newspaper owned by the LDS Church — reported on “an emerging pattern” of public protest driven by conspiracy theories that had recently emerged in the Utah Legislature. “A deep distrust in the federal government and also a broad agreement with deep-state conspiracies,” Park said, became the norm.

The norm of whom exactly?

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Still, lawmakers from around the region declared their support for the Bundys. Several of them remain in office today, including Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar and Idaho state Rep. Heather Scott. President Donald Trump unlawfully appointed William Perry Pendley — a vocal Bundy sympathizer — deputy director of the BLM. (He served for over a year, despite never being confirmed by the Senate.) More recently, Pendley authored a 22-page section of Mandate for Leadership, the 922-page manifesto of Project 2025, a vision for the country drawn up by a far-right think tank. Pendley lays out how the Department of the Interior would function during a second Trump administration, seeking “American energy dominance” through oil and gas leases and a complete reinstatement of Trump-era Interior policies.

I would just say tying  “Trump-era Interior policies” and Bundys seems a bit of a stretch.

THE ANTI-GOVERNMENT and ultra-conservative Mormon beliefs that were so key to the Bundy standoff are deeply rooted in Western identity. The Bundy story appealed to a shared “‘rural mentality,” Cooter said, that is prized by militia groups.

“Even if they live in cities, even if they live in suburbs, this idea of rurality means a lot to them, in no small part because it’s sort of an extension of our imagining of the frontier (and) what real men and real Americans are supposed to be,” she said.  “It’s almost like they’re trying to make up for the fact that they’re not living in that rural environment where they have to prove themselves in a very stereotypically masculine way.”

An old white man in a cowboy hat complaining about government overreach was, essentially, an ideal story for them — a narrative that reinforced “that frontier piece of masculinity,” Cooter said.

***************

Park, the historian, saw the Bundys’ refusal to acknowledge Indigenous land rights when they talked about Western land ownership as another nod to that conservative brand of Mormonism. “That Manifest Destiny ideology, of course, is widespread in America,” he said. “But it had a particularly Mormon flavor, because they believed this is a land that God has prepared for us.”

Political leaders like former President Trump have advanced a worldview in which white rural Americans are an oppressed class. But Cooter said that this idea gets at something much, much deeper in the American psyche.

“That starting line realistically goes back to the founding of our country,” Cooter said. It “is really baked into this idea of the American mythology that’s going to be very difficult for us to ever move away from.”

************

I wish the reporter had asked how exactly did the “white rural Americans were an oppressed class” went back to the founding of the country.  Since according to this website (not fact-checked) 94% of the population in 1800 was rural.. did they feel oppressed then?  And that is not to say that Tribes and Hispanics have not had problems with federal “overreach”.. see the history of New Mexico and the Forest Service. And of course, overreach is in the eye of the beholder.

There is No “West”: And What’s Up with Bund-Obsession?

I just returned from a driving trip from Colorado to Los Angeles California, and to Sacramento, California, passing through New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and Utah, including passing through one of my favorite highways, US 50 in Nevada, “the loneliest road in America”. Shout out to the BLM and the Humboldt-Toiyabe NF! In many places, NPR was the only station I could get (in rental car, because my 252K car was receiving a well-earned rest). It was fascinating to listen to NPR’s ideas of what was happening in “the West” and relate them to my own observations. It’s interesting to check every story you read about “the West” and wonder “do they mean Malibu, Eugene, Baker, Fallon, Red Feather Lakes, Chugwater, Silver City, Raton, Helena, Wenatchee, Republic or…?”Well, you don’t have to think very far to think “those places are incredibly different.. historically, which Tribes, which folks settled, which folks are there now, where folks are moving to these areas from, and so on.” And money, of course, is a thing.

Poverty rates US counties 2022 https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-county-rankings/poverty-rate-by-county

Counties in the “West”  range from among the richest in the country (say around the SF Bay area) to some of the poorest. It’s an amazing diversity of peoples and cultures.

A year or two ago, I was on a Zoom session with folks from the Society of Environmental Journalists on people covering “western” federal lands issues.  Most of the folks were not from what I’d call the Interior West, that would be from the crest of the Cascades/Sierra/Angeles to the Great Plains. They were (to me) surprisingly focused on “we need to cover people in “the West” who are planning to overthrow the government” (this was after January 6).  I’m not kidding, of all our issues, really? Of all the issues we (I’ll call us Interior Westerners) face, these folks seem to believe that we in the IW are infested with incipient Bundys.  And what surprised me the most is that these people seemed to really believe it and thought it was important to impart this (misplaced, IMHO) fear to the rest of the world.  Of all the local papers I’ve read over the years, I haven’t seen many other Bundys.. but why the Bundobsession?

Many thanks to Matthew for posting the High Country News piece that illustrates my point.  From Mr. Segerstrom (who resides in Spokane, definitely the Interior West):

THE WESTERN U.S. isn’t the only place where anti-government sentiment festers, but here the wounds are open, frequently endured and historically recent. Violence and the threat of violence in the region occur within the context of a nation founded on the genocide of Indigenous people. Leaders of anti-federal movements lean into this violent history and include factions that are specifically anti-Indigenous. In defending his right to graze cattle on federal land in Nevada — a claim he successfully defended at Bunkerville in 2014, when federal authorities withdrew after being outgunned by militiamen — Bundy argued that his claim to the land was more legitimate than the Southern Paiutes’ because “they lost the war.”

This white-plus-might-makes-right sentiment is a pervasive feature of Western mythology and cowboy culture. Over the last half-century, anti-government leaders have rallied to that image as the West’s population swelled and control over its natural resources became more contested and regulated. The original Sagebrush Rebellion of the mid-to-late-1970s — which inspired the modern Bundy-led standoffs but were not nearly as paramilitary — came in response to federal public-land laws like the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, Wilderness Act and Endangered Species Act, which increasingly restricted how natural resources could be used.

Those restrictions were seen as unconscionable overreach by rural Westerners who were accustomed to using public-land resources as they wished. “The hardest thing to do in American politics is to withdraw a right,” said Daniel McCool, a political science professor at the University of Utah. Even though those rights were privileges in the legal sense, the perception that they were rights, and that they were being taken away, fueled the original Sagebrush Rebels, McCool said. “The roots of the Sagebrush Rebellion were when they no longer got what they wanted,” he said. “There’s a direct line from there to the Bundy groups active today.”

Hmm. So the East, South, and Midwest, weren’t founded on the “genocide of Indigenous people.”  And, of course, as a native of Southern California, there are all kinds of racial complexities, as there colonization was accomplished by the Spanish.  But today’s descendants of these folks are not considered exactly “white”(although I think some have been called “white-adjacent”. And cowboy culture has included diverse folks..this Smithsonian story says that one in four were black.

And originally cowboys (vaqueros) were of both Spanish and Native origin. Think of words like bronco and reata.

While classic Westerns have cemented the image of cowboys as white Americans, the first vaqueros were Indigenous Mexican men. “The missionaries were coming from this European tradition of horsemanship. They could ride well, they could corral cattle,” says Rangel. “So they started to train the native people in this area.” Native Mexicans also drew on their own experiences with horsemanship and hunting buffalo in order to refine vaquero techniques further, says Rangel.

In addition to herding cattle for Spanish ranchers as New Spain expanded westward, vaqueros were also enlisted as auxiliary forces in skirmishes between native communities and others.

This stereotype of “westerners” are always rural sometimes well-off, sometimes not (interesting to watch) people ( I don’t think they mean Cher or Steve Jobs), thought to be ignorant and violent.

Lest you think the Coastal Gaze is something new, I ran across this statement in a book written in 1891 by a Mr. W. L. Holloway.

“There are two classes of people who are always eager to get up an Indian war-the army and our frontiersman”. I quote from an editorial on the Indian question, which not long since appeared in the columns of one of the leading New York daily newspapers.  That this statement was honestly made I do not doubt, but that instead of being true it could not have been further from the truth I will attempt to show. I assert, and all candid persons familiar with the subject will sustain the assertion, that of all classes of our population the army and the people living on the frontier entertain the greatest dread of an Indian war, and are willing to make the greatest sacrifices to avoid its horrors.”..

“As to the frontiersman, he has everything to lose, even to life, and nothing to gain by an Indian war. “His object is to procure a fat contract or a market for his produce” adds the journal from which the opening lines of this chapter are quoted?…First our frontier farmers, busily employed as they are in opening up their farms, never have any produce to dispose of, but consider themselves fortunate if they have sufficient for their personal wants. .. The supplies are purchased far from the frontiers, in the rich and thickly settled portions of the States, then shipped by rail and boat to the most available military post..”

So seeing (some rural) Westerners as the “bad guys” is nothing new. And writing op-eds about what people  in the “rural West” should be doing from New York.

I find this all, and its longevity through time, somewhat puzzling. Especially since various places in the Interior West are increasingly full of people from elsewhere..who may find these stereotypes laughable. Oh, and there’s the LDS folks in Utah, for whom we should feel a great deal of compassion due to their history as a religious minority persecuted by the US Federal Government. Or not?

It sounds a bit like “othering”

On an individual level, othering plays a role in the formation of prejudices against people and groups. On a larger scale, it can also play a role in the dehumanization of entire groups of people which can then be exploited to drive changes in institutions, governments, and societies. It can lead to the persecution of marginalized groups, the denial of rights based on group identities, or even acts of violence against others.

So.. when a story talks about “the West” what part are they talking about?  And what’s up with Bundobsessing, and why is it such a popular activity among some in the journalism community?

Dr. Taylor’s Definition of Internal Colonialism and its Application to the Interior West: Does Partisan Politics Distract Us From Justice?

Yesterday, the Colorado Springs Gazette ran an essay by Vince Bzdek. It was about Governor Polis disagreeing with Biden Admin policies on Covid and agreeing with (some previous) Trump Admin policies. I really liked one quote which I think it particularly relevant to TSW topics:

Not all problems have a left and a right. Some problems are just problems, and the minute we Velcro ideology onto some problems, they often become bigger, uglier, less solvable problems.

It will be interesting to look through that lens at various topics. One that comes to mind is the question of what we might call domestic imperialism (I think I first heard that from Matt Carroll at WSU, a rural sociologist). Another related topic was raised by Patrick McKay in this comment. I see actually two levels here: (1) justice (social and environmental) implications of distant folks making decisions with impacts on local communities, and (2) given that this is our current political/legal system, to what extent are the “on the ground” decisions made by the personal predilections of local officials? I see the first as more of a political science question, and the latter as more of a “how does this work in practice?” question. Both are worth reflection and discussion, I think. For this post, I’ll stick to #1.

In Dr. Dorceta Taylor’s, of Yale School of the Environment, book “The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection“, she traces the history of race, gender and class

Let’s look at what she calls “internal colonialism”.

In addition to colonial expansion, countries seek to bring their hinterlands or peripheral regions under the control of the central government. Such moves toward internal colonization result in tensions or conflict between the country’s core or center and its periphery. The core develops exploitive relationships with the periphery, using the hinterland’s natural resources and cheap labor to enhance or sustain the development or expansion of the core. If the periphery has indigenous or culturally distinct people, the core often discriminates against them. The core monopolizes trade and commerce, thus forcing the peripheral region to develop as a complementary economy of the core. The economy of the core typically relies on one or a few exports. The movement of laborers in the periphery is determined by forces outside of the region. Economic dependence of the internal colony is reinforced by legal, political and military measures. The periphery is often characterized by lower levels of service and low standards of living than the core (Blauner 1969, 1972, 1982; Hechter 1994; Horvath 1972; Taylor 2014.

While Taylor focuses on the role of peripheral regions in providing natural resources, it may be just as IC (internal colonialist) to require peripherals to provide certain kinds of recreation by limiting land uses.

Which reminds me of a personal story:

When we started the journey that would become Colorado Roadless, Senator Hickenlooper was Mayor Hickenlooper of Denver. We had a public meeting in Denver and Hick spoke about how important it was to protect recreational opportunities because those opportunities attract businesses and people to Denver. I was standing next to our Regional Forester and said something like “he seems to be forgetting that rural people have their own agency.. sounds colonialist to me!”. Of course, that was Hick’s job as Mayor, to make sure his own folks’ interests were taken into account. Still, this can easily be the modus operandi for any state with urban and rural populations. That not only are urban interests prioritized, but their views on what should occur on rural lands imposed via having the majority of voters.

Circling back to Bzdek’s comment, here’s a question: if the Interior West were not occupied by people who vote Republican, would ENGO’s, the media and other opinion leaders be more sensitive to their quest for (we can disagree about how much) autonomy and political power over the lands they inhabit?

The Slovenly Wilderness: Anatomy of a Zoom Town by Stacy Young

Gmap of St. George, Utah.

There has been a great deal of migration to the Interior West as part of the response to Covid. An example from Wyoming is here. People are moving out of the Bay Area in California, either to other parts of California, or away from California entirely. There’s an interesting interview here on WBUR Boston on this. People want to move away due to commuting and expense, but also I think possibly they don’t want to live in densely built cities next to public transit.. and don’t have to, if jobs are remote.

I think of them as maybe generational or some other kind of dimension of the challenge, because we know how to build houses. We have the technology elevators for more dense urban areas. We know how to do lots of things, including transit. But for some reason, the political structure isn’t allowing us to do any of those things that basic planners, basic economists have figured out.

Maybe it’s time to ask people if they want to live in those kinds of places, and press “reset” on the current planning paradigm. Maybe rents and home prices would naturally decline if only the people who had to physically be at work were in cities.

The relevance of all this to the Forest Service is clearly mega-increases in recreation, and the need for management of recreation impacts. It also affects the ability of employees to purchase homes in some amenity communities (of course, this has long been the case for employees in places like Jackson, Wyoming).

Having said all that, one of the most thoughtful pieces I’ve seen on this is by Stacy Young in the Canyon Country Zephyr in an article focusing on St. George, Utah. The article starts with a reference to pre-Covid and then looks at Covid-induced enhancement of those trends. Check the whole piece out, it’s a topic that isn’t written from the “moved to” places’ perspective all that often.

A year ago, I wrote about the development of the Little Valley area of St. George in southwest Utah. What I tried to do in that piece was use words, pictures and numbers to provide a specific example of what happens when good intentions and visionary land use plans are overwhelmed, as they usually are, by the dual pressures of industrial tourism and amenity in-migration, on the one side, and recalcitrant NIMBYism, on the other.

That piece was meant to be a case study pushing out on my running argument that the relatively recent phenomenon of permanent tourism is turning the ordinary, historical understanding of cities-as-labor-markets on its head. And to show, in effect, that it is almost certainly technocratic wishcasting to think that Good Planning will save a place from the cataclysmic money that is rushing into parts of Utah’s canyon country.

That essay was written in the Before Times and so it may be worth checking in to see what, if anything, has changed in the St. George area in the intervening year. What follows may also count as a partial reply to a comment left by reader Chris Patterson to that earlier piece:

What do people do for work in St George? I’m curious what all the new migrants do to pay for those 400k+ homes.

And what is the water source for this clearly water-intensive form of development?

And at what  point will “amenity migration” stop because the amenities are ruined?

Thanks for an informative, and depressing, article. I wonder when this ideal of the over-large home on the plot of irrigated grass will finally just die out…

Many of us who have worked in Forest Service jobs have experienced this phenomenon directly and not just recently (remember Oregon’s efforts to encourage people not to move there? check out this Bill Moyers video from 1973 (yes, almost 50 years ago now).  I like Young’s point #3. In our own states we all have examples of, say, Florence CO is not Aspen, it’s not even Meeker.

The existence of an “amenity” in a place is a necessary but insufficient condition for amenity migration. The capacity for move-ins to decouple their economic well-being from the local labor market is also imperative.

  1. What constitutes an “amenity” is far more subjective than ordinarily presumed. The opportunity for capitalistic manufacture of amenities is nearly endless. But do not expect amenitization’s synthetic flexibility to be evenly or constructively employed. Count on this feature not to ameliorate social problems but to exacerbate them.

  1. “Amenity migration” is a nice, clean term that implies a more uniform phenomenon than exists in practice. There are certainly commonly observed features, but the differences matter and they are pronounced. One community may grow in more or less normalish ways. Another may not grow its permanent community at all and instead simply become an ever more exclusive enclave of dilettantes and consumers. Most places will fall outside either of these two extreme descriptions.
  1. It is the epitome of technocratic arrogance to suppose that amenity migratory patterns will readily yield to planning or analysis. Human civilization is more like an organism than a machine; it is complex rather than merely complicated.

Coda. Californians*, having ruined their own primary housing markets, are no longer content to export just a bit of their dysfunction onto one rarified second-home destination or another, but instead appear set to entirely wreck any number of housing markets across Texas and the interior West. Let’s dissect the process, using figures from San Mateo County in the Bay Area to help illustrate.

Step one: Create a massive housing gap. “Between 2010 and 2019, 102,500 new jobs were created in San Mateo County, while only 9,494 new housing units were built, a 11:1 ratio.”

Step two: Wait patiently as the extreme imbalance between housing demand and its supply causes home values to become an exercise in absurdity. Between the mid-90s and now, the median home price in San Mateo County skyrocketed from the mid-$300,000s to about $1,700,000, a roughly 5-fold increase.

Step three: Engage in a little harmless arbitrage. Use the internet tools invented in and around San Mateo to remain attached to the Silicon Valley labor market while detaching from its dysfunctional housing market.

Step four: After selecting your Zoom Town of choice, cash out your home equity and reinvest all or most of it in your lucky new hometown. It’s almost like an early-stage investment in an exciting new startup!

Bonus step five: Charm new acquaintances by expressing shocked delight at what a nice house $1 million gets you.

Bonus step six: Continue your old home voter ways in your new hometown by furiously and without a trace of irony lobbying your local elected officials to clamp down on housing production lest the place “turn into California.”

[* Here, the terms “California” and “Californians” stand for something broader than the named state and its residents. This is an attempt to describe a macro process and I’m simply using these specific labels because they represent the most visible and most clearly distilled example of the phenomena.]

Forest Management Direction for Large Diameter Trees in Eastern Oregon and Southeastern Washington

One of the many things that went into the Trump dump the last couple of weeks was the amendment of the Forest Service Eastside Screens old growth protection standard:  “Forest Management Direction for Large Diameter Trees in Eastern Oregon and Southeastern Washington.”    We discussed that at length here.  The Forest Service documentation for the amendment is here. The standard prohibiting harvest of trees >21” dbh has been replaced by this guideline (“LOS” is late and old structure, and it refers to “multi-stratum with large trees” and “single-stratum with large trees”):

Outside of LOS, many types of timber sale activities are allowed. The intent is still to maintain and/or enhance a diverse array of LOS conditions in stands subject to timber harvest as much as possible, by adhering to the following plan components: Managers should retain and generally emphasize recruitment of old trees and large trees, including clumps of old trees. Management activities should first prioritize old trees for retention and recruitment. If there are not enough old trees to develop LOS conditions, large trees should be retained, favoring fire tolerant species where appropriate. Old trees are defined as having external morphological characteristics that suggest an age ≥ 150 years. Large trees are defined as grand fir or white fir ≥ 30 inches dbh or trees of any other species ≥ 21 inches dbh. Old and large trees will be identified through best available science. Management activities should consider appropriate species composition for biophysical environment, topographical position, stand density, historical diameter distributions, and Adapting the Wildlife Standard of the Eastside Screens 5 spatial arrangements within stands and across the landscape in order to develop stands that are resistant and resilient to disturbance.

The proper way to read a guideline is that its purpose is a standard: “Managers must maintain and/or enhance a diverse array of LOS conditions in stands subject to timber harvest as much as possible.”  It’s not clear to me how you maintain LOS “outside of LOS,” so maybe only “enhance” is applicable, but even that term assumes what you are enhancing is already there to a degree.  This is also weakened by the qualifier “as much as possible.”  This could be interpreted to allow timber harvest even if enhancing LOS conditions is not possible.

The rest of the boldface language should be interpreted as actions that would always be allowed because they would always promote the LOS purpose.  This means that a decision to NOT retain all old and large trees could only be made if it is demonstrated that LOS is enhanced.  “Generally emphasize” allows probably unlimited discretion regarding recruitment.  A decision to NOT prioritize old trees (i.e. to log any old tree before logging large trees) could also only be made if it is demonstrated that LOS is enhanced.  This could be reasonably effective, but it puts a significant burden on project analysis and documentation to deviate from the terms of the guideline.  This is as it should be.  The last part of the guideline lists things that “should be considered,” which shouldn’t be given much weight.

There are also changes in standards and guidelines for snags, green tree replacement and down logs.

The last part of the “decision” is to adopt an “Adaptive Management Strategy.”  This strategy proposes monitoring and thresholds intended to trigger additional restrictions on large tree removal:

  1. If large trees are not increasing in number with appropriate composition, the Regional Forester will impose the Age Standard Alternative across the whole analysis area or by national forest or potential vegetation zone.

  2. If effectiveness monitoring does not occur, the Regional Forester will impose the Age Standard Alternative across all six national forests.

However, under the Planning Rule, these are not plan components and are not mandatory.  While there are “requirements” for regional forester review every five years, this is not a plan component either.  Since none of this “strategy” is enforceable it is of much less benefit than if it had been included as plan components like standards.

(For those interested in how the “natural range of variation” (NRV) is used in forest planning, there is a desired condition for the amounts of LOS in different habitat groups and it is based on NRV.  These new amendments leave in place the desired conditions for LOS previously determined in accordance with the original amendments in 1995.   An appendix in the decision notice includes a “Table 3” that is “only an example” of NRV because, “The number and kind of biophysical environments and the historic and current distribution of structural conditions vary by landscape.”  In order to fully understand the effects of this amendment on a particular landscape, we would need to see the definitions of LOS and actual desired conditions for LOS incorporated into a plan for that landscape.  I didn’t find them in or see them referred to in the amendment documentation, I suppose because they are not changing).

 

John Freemuth, Boise State professor and expert on public lands policy, has died at 69

John Freemuth at WGA 2018 Western Working Lands Forum

 

What a loss to so many involved with federal lands policy!  Here’s what the Idaho Statesman had to say on this:

For decades, Freemuth worked closely with former Democratic Idaho governor and Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus, Tracy’s father. Tracy Andrus said they were “pragmatic conservationists” committed to facilitating agreement.

“John believed strongly in dad’s legacy … of a common sense approach,” Tracy Andrus said. “They were both always voices of reason on issues that politically charged.”

Freemuth had a skill for seeing issues from both sides. His objectivity earned him a spot as a moderator at numerous debates and on many panels, where he talked about environmental issues alongside the likes of Bureau of Land Management Director William Perry Pendley.

“He was always so extraordinarily balanced,” said Rick Johnson, retired former director of the Idaho Conservation League.

Johnson serves on the Board of Governors for the Andrus Center, where he worked with Freemuth. Johnson said Freemuth found a way to “blend the practical and the academic on politics.”

Idaho Rep. Scott Bedke, R-Oakley, said he saw Freemuth’s mediation firsthand when the two served on then-Gov. Phil Batt’s federal lands task force — Bedke as a representative of the livestock industry and Freemuth as an intermediary.

“Scott and John always got along — and people would’ve thought that we wouldn’t have,” said Bedke in a phone interview. “I think that speaks to the man, it speaks to the type of person he was.

“When you’re talking about managing federal lands or natural resources in the West … it’s a complex issue,” Bedke continued. “There are a lot of stakeholders, and everyone has their bias. And yet we’re expected to get along in this multiple-use regime, and John was able to bring good perspective to all of that and balance it out — but not to the elimination of one use or another. It was in a way of finding room for everybody.”

John was my go-to political scientist and friend of  The Smokey Wire.  He was a gracious source of help and encouragement for us, as well as so many others, students, colleagues and all kinds of workers in the public policy arena.

People who work this middle ground tend to be invisible compared to political appointees, or the drama of federal lands warfare.   But they are still out there, every day working to make the world a better, and less hateful, place. Probably getting disparaged by those on each side.  IMHO, these folks are unsung heroes.  And we have lost one of the best.

Helena project clears the 9th Circuit, except for some “WUI”

Fine specimen of a real antique Morse code telegraph machine.Copyright: Photowitch | Dreamstime.com

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the Telegraph Vegetation Project on the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest, except for one question about the location of the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI).  The case was previously described on this blog here.  That description included this allegation by plaintiffs:

Agency used non-federal definition of the Wildland Urban Interface 


“While the lynx amendment allows logging in the Wildland Urban Interface, it also defines the Wildlife Urban Interface to be within one mile of communities,” Garrity explained. “But the Forest Service used a new definition provided by local counties and then remapped the Wildland Urban Interface to include areas over five miles away from communities.”

The court remanded the decision for 50 acres of the 5000-acre plus area to be treated, and left the record of decision in place while the Forest Service completes its reevaluation:

“The Forest Service has acknowledged that it erred in calculating the wildland-urban interface for the project area. The Forest Service estimates that, once it has corrected its error, 50 acres of forest that it had planned to treat may no longer be eligible for treatment. If that estimate proves correct, the Forest Service represents that it will not treat those 50 acres. We grant the government’s request for a voluntary remand to allow the Forest Service to undertake the necessary reevaluation.”

I have been interested in how WUI is identified, by whom, and using what process under what authority – especially the role of non-federal parties.  WUI is generally  identified based on the Healthy Forest Restoration Act of 2003 (HFRA).  Areas identified using that process qualify for streamlined projects in accordance with HFRA, and may be eligible for particular funding.  However (in accordance with HFRA), WUI projects are still subject to requirements of the governing forest plan.  Management direction for lynx is part of the forest plan, and this article (like plaintiffs) suggests it imposes greater restrictions on part of this project:

“In the second portion of the court’s order, the Forest Service proposed logging and thinning in areas defined as the “wildland-urban interface,” which is where houses or cabins meet the forest. Regulations related to lynx allow the removal of some trees and vegetation in lynx habitat if it falls within the wildland-urban interface and if the agency shows it is part of a wildfire mitigation project. The alliance inspected the area and reported only a handful of houses. The Forest Service conceded in court documents that it erred in calculating the size of the wild-land urban interface based on discrepancies between what qualifies.”

However, this actually indicates that the problem was in the definition of “community” (based the on number of houses), rather than the distance from one.  In fact, the Northern Rockies Lynx Management Direction refers to WUI “as defined by HFRA.”  Those definitions and criteria for “WUI” and “at risk community” are summarized by the Forest Service here.  Although which communities are to be included (they can self-identify) are mostly listed in the Federal Register, that doesn’t address their boundaries.  The district court opinion upheld the Forest Service WUI designation, stating that, “The Powell County Plan does not begin with the HFRA definition; it creates its own, “and “the Court is not persuaded by Council’s attempt to discredit the map provided by the Forest Service in the Telegraph Project EIS” based on that county plan. Yet it sounds like the map may have been wrong in this case.  This all reminds me of my take-home from my Forest Service days that “WUIs are fuzzy.”

Here’s why this might be important to planning.  I agree with the idea that forest plans (like the lynx direction) should identify areas with differences in long-term management that result from a wildland-urban influence.  However, if the WUI definition refers to another source (HFRA and a local plan), instead of being specifically defined in the plan itself through criteria and/or a map, there may be confusion about where and how the plan applies (as seems to be the case here).  (Yes I’m criticizing the lynx strategy for doing that; they didn’t take my advice.)  In addition, if external decisions about WUI locations change, the Forest Service may have to publicly consider whether to adopt that change in its forest plan (that situation wasn’t addressed in this case).  I’m also contrasting “decisions” with new “information” that affects how an existing decision applies (e.g. someone building a new house), which must be considered in a planning context but doesn’t necessarily trigger a plan amendment.  (A court has held that even changes in something like criteria for maps of lynx habitat must be considered in a public planning process when forest plan direction is tied to it.)

(The other issue addressed by the 9th Circuit in its short opinion was the ESA consultation process for grizzly bears.  The court approved a consultation process that tiered to forest plan decisions and consultation, which lead to streamlined project consultation.  The value of forest plan consultation has been questioned, but that value is evident here.)

 

Recovery planning for the Gunnison sage-grouse

The U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service has released a draft recovery plan for the Gunnison sage-grouse in Colorado and Utah.  The Center for Biodiversity doesn’t like it, but more to the point, they like less how the BLM is managing Gunnison sage-grouse.  More to the point because recovery plans are not mandatory, while federal land management plans can be – and plan components must be mandatory to be considered “regulatory” enough to carry much weight in ESA listing and delisting decisions.  As the FWS said, “Establishing durable regulatory mechanisms that are binding and enforceable, such as revised land use planning amendments, will be important for recovery.”

CBD:

The recovery plan comes on the heels of BLM decisions not to designate any Areas of Critical Environmental Concern for Gunnison sage-grouse in the Tres Rios and Uncompahgre Resource management plans, and to adopt inadequate safeguards for the birds’ habitat in recent land-use plans. For example, although the draft recovery plan calls on federal land-management agencies to improve their resource management plans and protect suitable habitat within four miles of breeding sites, the BLM’s August 2019 proposed resource plan for its Uncompahgre Field Office protects only habitats within 0.6 miles of breeding sites. The BLM admits this would “fall short of minimum protection standards to maintain sage-grouse viability.”

“Bringing the Gunnison sage-grouse back from the brink requires decisive and concerted action, but instead we have two federal agencies working against each other,” said Michael Saul, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The Fish and Wildlife Service is urging federal land managers to improve protections for public-land habitat, but the BLM is moving in the opposite direction. This is a recipe for extinction for this beautiful bird. We’ll do everything possible to keep that from happening.”

The timing is also such that BLM plans were released prior to the draft recovery plan.  That means that the BLM should start taking another look at how their plans address this species and take into account the new information and recommended measures.  The same is true for the 10% of sage-grouse habitat that occurs on national forest lands. BLM is not subject to NFMA, so its obligation to maintain species viability to avoid listing under ESA is not as clear as for the Forest Service.  Forest Service plans must “contribute to recovery” of listed species, so failure to address elements of this recovery plan when it is final should raise serious questions.

In addition to specific conservation measures like the four-mile buffers for breeding leks, the draft recovery plan provides some specific desired conditions that could be included in land management plans:

2. Regulatory mechanisms or other conservation plans or programs, such as land-use management plans, reduce and ameliorate threats associated with habitat loss and degradation in all populations, such that:

A. Habitat in Dove Creek is improved and maintained at a quantity calculated to support a HMC of 30, although this criterion is not measured by achieving the target HMC.

B. Habitat in CSCSM is maintained at a quantity calculated to support a HMC of 7, although this criterion is not measured by achieving the target HMC.

C. Habitat is improved and maintained in Gunnison Basin, San Miguel, Piñon Mesa, Crawford, and Monticello at a quantity calculated to support the target HMCs as listed in Table 1.

At a minimum, the land management agencies will need to explain how these plans contribute to meeting their requirements under ESA to manage their programs to promote recovery of listed species, which should include how they are implementing the final recovery plan.

The New York Times on Rich People Buying Large Acreages in the West

Logs taken from the Trinchera Ranch wait to be processed at Blanca Forestry Products, a sawmill outside of Blanca, Colorado on Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. The mill employs some 70 people. Nathaniel Minor/CPR News[/captions] This is the mill billionaire Louis Bacon, owner of the 172,000 acre Trinchera Ranch in Colorado, built to process material from the ranch. Here’s a link to the story.

The New York Times did a story here on rich people buying up and blocking off land in the Interior West. This is not news to us, but they have some interesting perspectives. Here is the story.

Some of the new owners have been welcomed. The cable magnate, John Malone, for instance, has been praised by the Nature Conservancy for his family’s conservation efforts, and other buyers have helped to clean up trails and restore pristine acres.

The arrival of this new class of landholders comes as the region is experiencing the fastest population boom in the country, which is driving up housing prices and the cost of living and leaving many residents fearful of losing their culture and economic stability.

In Idaho, Rocky Barker, a retired columnist for The Idaho Statesman, has called the conflict a “clash between two American dreams,” pitting the nation’s respect for private property rights against the notion of a beauty-rich public estate set aside for the enjoyment of all.

The clash, he said, is part of a larger transformation of the region — from an economy rooted in extraction to one based on recreation; from a working class culture to a more moneyed one. “Big landowners,” he said, “are just another new force.”

In the intermountain West, the purchases come amid a population boom that has exacerbated local concerns about the loss of space and culture. Last year, Idaho and Nevada were the fastest growing states in the nation, followed closely by Utah, Arizona and Colorado.

These new buyers have become a symbol of a bigger problem: The gentrification of the interior West.

In 2018, more than 20,000 Californians arrived in Idaho; home prices around Boise also jumped 17 percent. This has meant not just new subdivisions and microbreweries, but also packed schools, crowded ski trails and heightened anxiety among teachers, plumbers and others, who are finding that they can no longer afford a first home.

Many landowners are engaged in conservation and have entered into easements that limit future development on their parcels, and also provide them with significant tax breaks.

But setting aside land for conservation has not always staved off criticism.

In Idaho, the Wilks brothers did more than gate a few roads. They also revoked road-use contracts that propped up the region’s multimillion-dollar snowmobile industry, shut down hunting on their land and told timber companies to pull crews from the area. About 100 people lost their jobs.

No one claimed that those actions were illegal, but they heightened fears that local residents were losing control of the region. A 2017 video of a roadside argument between an armed Wilks guard and a local ATV rider traveled quickly around the state.

What is interesting to me about this is

(1) the idea that rich people buying private land and blocking access is bad (timber, snowmobiles and ATVs), but efforts to block the same activities on public lands (e.g. a certain National Monument) are good, because it’s good for the environment and ATVers tear up the landscape and so on.

(2) Maybe “rich people ownership” is good for the environment as the property won’t be recreated upon by lots of people nor subdivided?

(3) Also, perhaps part of the reason some in San Juan County are not fans of Monumentizing Bears Ears has to do with not wanting gentrification nor a “more moneyed culture.” Here’s a link to two points of view on urban gentrification (is it saving or ruining LA). Do the arguments sound familiar?

Should dry forests be considered suitable for timber production?

Recent research is showing that lower elevation forests are not regenerating after fires as they have historically.  From the abstract of the research cited in this article:

“Results highlight significant decreases in tree regeneration in the 21st century. Annual moisture deficits were significantly greater from 2000 to 2015 as compared to 1985–1999, suggesting increasingly unfavourable post‐fire growing conditions, corresponding to significantly lower seedling densities and increased regeneration failure. Dry forests that already occur at the edge of their climatic tolerance are most prone to conversion to non‐forests after wildfires. Major climate‐induced reduction in forest density and extent has important consequences for a myriad of ecosystem services now and in the future.”

One of those consequences should flow from NFMA requirements for sustainability and ecological integrity.  To put that in simplistic terms, if the land “wants” to be non-forest in the future climate, we have to let it be non-forest.  And non-forested lands are not suitable for timber production, regardless of whether we could plant and maintain a plantation there.  I don’t recall seeing any discussion of this in forest plan revision material I have reviewed recently.  There is also requirement to use the best available scientific information, so a suitability evaluation of low-elevation forests should go beyond what is currently growing there to address what would be expected there in the future.  Many national forests could end up with fewer suitable acres.