Lands

The Next Rim Fire?

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http://www.news10.net/story/news/local/eldorado-hills/2014/09/18/king-fire-burns-27930-acres-el-dorado-county-thursday/15816425/

The King Fire is experiencing growth like we saw in the Rim Fire, last year. There are important similarities but there is also a main difference. The fuels are much thicker in this more northern landscape. The fire behavior was so extreme that even the airtankers could not fly their missions. The south fork of the American River features a canyon that is steep, and over 2000 feet deep. The fire has been fought aggressively along Highway 50, with 1000’s of homes nestled into un-firesafe neighborhoods. Like most people, they seem to prefer their shade over fire safety. The fire has now burned about 50,000 acres in one 24 hour period and there is only 5% containment. A weak cold front approaches and will increase the winds, even more than they have been in the last two days. After the cold front blows through, there might be a change in the wind direction, too. There seems to be a new gap in the Sierra Nevada, where old growth is being incinerated. A drive up to south Tahoe along Highway 50 shows the now-interconnected wildfires in recent history. The Wrights Fire, the Pilliken Fire, the Cleveland Fire, the Freds Fire and now, the King Fire. Change has been very harsh upon the Highway 50 corridor.

When will Congress do “something” that is effective against wildfires?

The Rim Fire: Landscape View

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Here is a view of the Granite Creek watershed, and a peek at the Tuolumne River canyon, too. The Rim Fire burned all the way to those most-distant ridgetops. For scale, you can see a vehicle in the middle of the picture. That road is the Cherry Oil Road, which connects Cherry Lake with Highway 120. That greenish tint is the vast growth of bearclover, easily reclaiming their “territory”. Bearclover is one of the reasons why clearcutting has been banned in Sierra Nevada National Forests since 1993.

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Forest Supervisor speaks out on behalf of public lands

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Kudos to the Forest Supervisor on the Cleveland National Forest for engaging in the local planning process and pointing out the threats to the national forest of increased housing density on its borders.  This is one way the Forest Service can attempt to both protect its resources and manage its costs, but it’s not something I’ve seen very often.  (In fact, I once saw a forest supervisor retract similar comments for political reasons.)

The Forest Conservation Initiative was a voter-approved initiative which required that private lands within the Cleveland National Forest in San Diego County have a minimum lot size of 40 acres. The FCI was originally approved in 1993 and expired in 2010.  An unusual history maybe, but it’s not unusual for local governments to allow increased development density (by either re-zoning or lack of zoning).  The responsibility of the Forest Service to speak up for our national resources exists regardless.

Elliot State Forest Parcels Are Sold

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old growth doug-fir

Photo by www.facebook.com/LarryHarrellFotoware

An update from Bob Z.

Elliot State Forest Sale Closes Amid Controversy

Elliott State Forest Sale

Statesman Journal 
The Oregon Department of State Lands has completed the controversial sale of three parcels of Elliott State Forest totaling 1,453 acres to Seneca Jones Timber and Scott Timber Co.
The Wednesday sale fetched $4.2 million despite the promise from environmental groups to file a lawsuit to halt logging over the alleged existence of federally protected marbled murrelets in the parcels.
The East Hakki Ridge parcel was purchased by Seneca Jones Timber for $1.89 million, while Adams Ridge 1 was purchased by Scott Timber for $1.87 million. Benson Ridge was purchased for $787,000.
In December 2013, the State Land Board approved selling about 2,700 acres within the Elliott. Managing the Common School Fund land within this forest —which in recent years generated annual net revenues in the $8 million to $11 million range — cost the fund about $3 million in fiscal year 2013.
Losses are projected to continue in fiscal year 2014 and beyond, due to reduced timber harvest levels as a result of litigation over threatened and endangered species protection.
“The Land Board realizes the Common School Fund cannot continue to have a net deficit from managing these Trust lands,” DSL director Mary Abrams said in a press release. “This first effort to sell three small parcels was to gauge interest in these properties, as well as determine the market value of land within the forest.”
The sale, which will benefit the Common School Fund, represents less than two percent of the 93,000-acre forest near Reedsport.
Even so, the sales have become a flashpoint in the lingering dispute between environmentalists and timber companies.
“These parcels, which once belonged to all Oregonians, should never have been sold in the first place,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity in Portland, in a press release announcing the notice to initiate a lawsuit. “Now that they’ve been sold, we’re not going to allow them to be clear-cut and contribute to the extinction of the unique marbled murrelet.”

“Standardizing” Recreation Residence Fees- House Bill

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So my understanding is that it’s hard to figure how much market value really is for some of these properties; however, I wonder about the rationale for reducing fees because owners “can’t afford” them. I’m sure National Park access fees are high for some people, .. how about means testing them? If the problem is that different forest units interpret the regulations differently, well, that’s another problem.

It seems like this group might be considered to have “undue political clout” even though they are not a corporation, which would feed into our previous discussion of what is “appropriate” political clout. But to them, it’s just an organized grassroots strategy, which you can check out at their website here.

Given the people on this blog’s different experiences with recreation residences, what do you think the problems are, as well as solutions? (if you are currently working, you can use an alias). Some have suggested that just selling these parcels would be better for the public, due to the costs of administration and the fees never being able to keep up.

I’m also curious as to whether Environmental Groups who Use Litigation as a Frequent Tactic or EGULFTs have ever turned their attention to these folks and the Recreation Residence program. Seems like the continuing presence of these folks in the forest might have environmental impacts as significant as, say 500 acres of thinning…

Here’s the Examiner.com story.

Here’s a link to the bill.

IdeaFest in Boulder CO This Week

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I would like to attend all these but may not be able to.. if anyone else on the blog would like to attend and submit a post, let me know. The below seminar sounds interesting, especially for us bloggers, but conflicts with a vet appointment for my dog.

CSTPR Noontime Seminar: The Contrarian Discourse in the Blogosphere – What are blogs good for anyway?
CSTPR Noontime Seminar
Fall 2012 Series
Thursdays 12:00 – 1:00 PM
The Communications-Policy Nexus
Media, messages, and decision making

* Tuesday September 11, 2012

THE CONTRARIAN DISCOURSE IN THE BLOGOSPHERE: WHAT ARE BLOGS GOOD FOR ANYWAY?

by Franziska Hollender, Institute for Social Studies of Science, University of Vienna

CSTPR Conference Room, 1333 Grandview Avenue

Free and open to the public

The media serve to inform, entertain, educate and provide a basis for discussion among people. While traditional media such as print newspapers are facing a slow decline, they are being outpaced by new media that add new dimensions to public communication with interactivity being the most striking one. In the context of climate change, one question has arisen from recent events: what to do with the contrarians? Some propose that the contrarian discourse is merely an annoying sideshow, while others think that it is science’s responsibility to fight them. Blogs, being fairly unrestricted and highly interactive, serve as an important platform for contrarian viewpoints, and they are increasingly permeating multiple media spheres.

Using the highly ranked blog ‘Watts up with that’ as a case study, discourse analysis of seven posts including almost 1600 user comments reveals that blogs are able to unveil components and purposes of the contrarian discourse that traditional media are not. They serve as extended peer communities as put forth by post-normal science, however, blog users themselves do not see post-normal science as a desirable goal. Furthermore, avowals of distrust can be seen as linguistic perfomances of accountability, forcing science to prove its reliability and integrity over and over again. Finally, it is concluded that the climate change discourse has been stifled by the obsession of discussing the science basis and that in order to advance the discourse, there needs to be a change in how science as an ideology is communicated and enacted.
Tuesday, 11 September, 2012
12:00 PM – 01:00 PM

Then there is the Culture Politics and Climate Change International Conference from Sept. 13-15
the program is here. Even if you can’t attend the titles sound interesting and you could, more than likely, find a written paper on a related topic by the same authors that would be of interest.

Finally there is the The Nation Possessed conference I mentioned previously on this blog. Here is the link. It is the 12th to the 14th.

If you want to be stimulated by new ideas about the same old topics, head to Boulder this week!

Op-ed on “The Nation Possessed” Conference

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Hmm.. some other folks are seeking to reach across the divide..Here’s a link to Patty’s op-ed in the Sunday Denver Post. Bolding mine. Good on the Center for the American West and the presenters.

More important, you will have the rare, almost exotic experience of hearing people of different partisan affiliations consider a national issue in a civil, thoughtful and lively conversation. As the conference title’s direct reference to “conflicting claims” makes clear, the conference organizers have made no effort to deny or suppress the reality of conflict. On the contrary, our goal — to use the phrasing of natural scientists — is to separate “signal” from “noise,” carefully and thoughtfully laying out areas of both agreement and disagreement.

Presenting at the conference will be former Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, a Democrat, and former Utah Sen. Bob Bennett, a Republican who lost office when challenged by a Tea Party candidate. Speaking at a session — on the challenge of making science-based decisions while being shouted at and litigated against by agitated constituents — will be Mike Dombeck, former chief forester and director of the Bureau of Land Management under Democratic presidential administrations; and Lynn Scarlett, former deputy secretary of the Interior in the George W. Bush administration. All of these individuals are people who have chosen forthright, substantive expression over the alternative of vilification, blame, and demonization.

After years of transforming public land into private property, the federal government’s land management underwent an enormous change. Fears and worries about unregulated extraction of resources led to the creation of new institutions: the Forest Service, the National Park Service, and the agency with the largest domain of all, the under-recognized Bureau of Land Management (the BLM). For years, the BLM carried the nickname, the Bureau of Livestock and Mining. Over two centuries, the BLM and its ancestor agency the General Land Office have served as a political and cultural seismograph, recording the nation’s changing attitudes toward and uses of land and resources.

There is no better focal point for a study of the paired and intertwined questions of how we live with nature and how we live with each other.

Over the last two decades, I have had the good fortune to occupy a prime seat on the 50- yard-line, watching the federal land management agencies as they navigate through times of dramatic change. Attending the “Nation Possessed” conference will position you in a comparably well-placed seat.

Nibbled to Death By Neighbors: The Future of Public Lands?

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One of the issues that you usually don’t hear much about in the press are “lands” issues. Lands people, in my opinion, are among the unsung heroes of the Forest Service.

If you talk to them, you will find out some of the problems facing public lands-
neighbors attempting to cut off access to the public, through
land exchanges, trespass and subsequently being granted the land through efforts of their Congresspeople, putting gates on public roads, signing public roads as private, removing Forest Service signs, and probably other approaches I have not yet heard about.

Because of the relative tininess of each individual action, it is difficult to get a handle on the overall size of the problem. I have heard that it is difficult to get the courts involved, again, due to the individual size of each incursion and the workload of the Justice Department- although some are successfully litigated. My understanding is that there simply aren’t enough people funded to keep an eye on these kinds of things to keep up with the need.

Here’s a discussion about the roads problem- the question raised was “how can you tell if the “private” signs are accurate?”

Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to tell. In Wyoming, you can check the commissioners’ records at the local courthouse to find out the surveyed route of all the county roads, and get copies of the easements (or orders) establishing the road. Even then, you can get into issues regarding whether the county road has been abandoned, and reverted to private.

The forest service roads are not so easy, because the forest service is so bad about either maintaining their roads, or keeping records regarding which ones are public and private. It is not uncommon for private inholders in the forest who block a road through their property, which was built and maintained by the public long before their property was private. The Forest Service (or the public) is left to file suit to enjoin the blockage, and they usually conclude it is not worth the money to bring suit.

I just finished working on a lawsuit where this precise issue was involved, and the forest service won the suit, but they had allowed the road to remain blocked for over a decade. If they hadn’t convinced the U.S. Attorney to bring suit to establish a trail along the old railroad bed passing through the same property, they would never have sued just to reopen the road.

There are several theories under which the forest service, the local county commission or the public can sue to enjoin a landowner from blocking a public road. (prescriptive easements, R.S. 2477, implied easement, simple lack of right) Sadly, the amount of historical research necessary to prevail in those suits means that few ever get brought, due to the cost. The private landowners know this, so they routinely just block the roads, and dare anyone to do anything about it.

The worst abuse I’ve seen in Wyoming is where a private landowner (with buddies on the county commission) will grant an easement for a county road, get the county to pay to build the road, then convince the commissioners to abandon the road later. The landowner, in the process, just got the taxpayers to build him a nice long driveway, thank you very much. I can point to a couple of these in my county.

Here’s a story in the Denver Post yesterday about a land exchange. It’s not clear to me why one individual’s desire to join pieces of property is more important than traditional rights of access for the public.

At the root of the controversy is the fact that the swap is being carried out with legislation rather than through an administrative process as most of the land swaps in the country are done.

That means there is no environmental review process before the trade takes place: There are no formal public hearings that would put a spotlight on the trade rather than making it just another item on a county commission’s agenda.

That is one reason a national watchdog group devoted to overhauling the way the government trades public land is looking askance.

The Western Lands Project in Seattle is questioning the transparency and is troubled that Koch included land in two states (Colorado and Utah) and land involving two federal management agencies. Those factors guarantee the trade must be done through legislation.

“The thing that bothers me about this bill — it appears to me this whole thing was engineered to keep it out of the normal public process. All of our questions could have been answered if this hadn’t been done legislatively,” Western Lands director Janine Blaeloch said.

Goldstein said Koch is only interested in having a much larger ranch in Gunnison County so he can hunt and ride horses and have a place to put his extensive collection of Western memorabilia. He has had enough of people trespassing from the quarter-mile-wide strip of public land that runs through the ranch. The trade would fix that.

Hmm. If there is public access, and people trespass on nearby private land, and the proposed solution is to cut off public access, then there is not much hope for much public land. Another solution would be to not buy (or sell) land that is adjacent to roads with public access.

Readers: do you have these kinds of problems in your neck of the woods?