Rise of the Grass (and Tree) Roots: Timber Unity’s Side of the Story

Here’s the “other side of the story” from Julie Parrish, a board member of Timber Unity. Matthew posted a link to the Mother Jones story here.

I feel sympathetic, as I’ve worked on FS projects targeted by dark, or at least gray, money groups with associated media campaigns. In addition, the thought of being responsible, in some way. for every comment made on our own site, The Smokey Wire, is a bit scary, or silly, depending on your perspective. As to the policy, as I followed Washington State’s cap’n’trade initiative, I think it’s a no-brainer to return the tax to the people, and not put it in slush funds if you want it to pass. Atmospheric scientist and University of Washington professor Cliff Maas has a good discussion of that here, so it’s not just folks in natural resources who have concerns about that feature of some cap’n’trade bills.

From Julie:

I think the key takeaways are – there are some very powerful special interests out there, and for two legislative sessions in a row, Timber Unity frustrated their purpose of creating a complex wealth transfer scheme whereby every day working Oregonians would be taxed and the money would launder through the state and back into the hands of a few politically-connected organizations who will be the beneficiary of a cap and trade plan that is shrouded in secrecy as the plan disallows public records once enacted. As a former state lawmaker for nearly a decade, I understand well that when groups like this want to discredit a person or a movement, they do so through a carefully coordinated attack that starts with something like this “report” from Oregon Wild, handed to a local outlet, then rolled to a national outlet, to filter back into local social media and news outlets with “outraged” letters to the editors and Facebook posts/ads spread back again by these same groups.

It’s why I put out a forceful statement calling them on their nonsense and setting the record straight.

Timber Unity page and Timber Unity group discussion are two different things entirely. The main page is forward facing where only admins can create posts. In the group, anyone can post and our moderators (who are volunteers) strive to balance out the right to have free speech at the individual member level with the need to keep our page on topic to issues. If people post things that are incongruent with our stated message and community terms of service, their comments are removed, all the way to a member being blocked for violations of those terms of service. We get that people as individuals have other affiliations to groups on any other topic from knitting to other political groups. We have one mission – protect the jobs and rights to economic security for our members.

In another universe, I used to do online community management for a company I owned and here’s what I learned from nearly a decade of managing large forums (one of my communities had over 300,000 active users)….

1.The words of individuals on any topic do not reflect the words of our board. We operate based on the stated mission and that’s our mission, not any other person’s group or personal agenda.
2. Have community rules from the onset so that you have something to point to when you have to modify people’s posts based on inappropriate things they write or share.
3. People are always going to say or post inappropriate things in a group this size. See Bullet Point #1 again, and delete accordingly.
4. In a group this size, unless the community is policing itself, a board of seven members and a handful of volunteer moderators will never catch every little comment.

But at the end of the day, there are groups and individuals out there who would love nothing more than to be able to point to an article like the Mother Jones one, and make that a definitive authority for the purpose of being able to say in this election cycle where we have candidates running that the people we’re supporting are racists or bigots or right wing nuts. We actually did endorse some Democratic candidates who sought our endorsement as our group is non-partisan. And the diversity of our board cannot be understated – we seek to be a welcoming group to any person, regardless of their beliefs or other affiliations, who wants to stand up with us to protect jobs and kill bad legislative policies that impact the natural resource economy.

And the dark-money special interests are just really pissed off about it, as are quite a few politicians who couldn’t get their pet project bills passed.

And in a separate note she said:

Timber Unity’s board is made up of a majority of women. It is racially and religiously diverse, and several of us have LGBT family members. And our group is filled with veterans who have fought for the right for all of us to have free speech. Board member Todd Stoffel is one of those veterans who served his country, was disabled for his country, and has borne the brunt of this smear campaign.

No different than how Mother Jones is not responsible for every comment left on their Facebook, neither are we responsible for what every one of the 60,000 group members say. Yet we still try to ruthlessly moderate the group with volunteers, not paid staff, and we rely on the community to report things that violate the terms of service. Moreover, when we see things that are beyond the pale, we have blocked people, and even reached out to the state police for advice. So I reject that these left-leaning hypocrites want to hold us to a standard to which they do not hold themselves. Except that in their case, it’s apparently OK to leave hate filled comments about Republicans, people of faith, and even anti-police/law enforcement rhetoric.

To that end, I called the writer of this story out on that on his own hypocrisy. I also asked him why he spared not one sentence for the fact that Timber Unity has its own plan for carbon reduction. Or mention that the person who made our supposedly offensive rally posters is a Hispanic Jew with an African American daughter. His non-answers prove that wasn’t his agenda. His agenda was to paint the people who grow our food, fish our oceans, log our forests, and haul our goods to market as racist haters.

Here’s a link to a local story on Oregon State legislature deliberations, which apparently were incorporating ideas from Timber Unity. Here’s a story about the Governor’s approach and Timber Unity’s response.

Validated Science versus Unproven Scientific Hypothesis – Which One Should We Choose?

In a 6/13/18 article, David Atkins provides a critique of the assumptions behind the Law et al article titled: “Land use strategies to mitigate climate change in carbon dense temperate forests” and shows how hypothetical science can and has been used, without any caveat, to provide some groups with slogans that meet their messaging needs instead of waiting for validation of the hypothesis and thereby considering the holistic needs of the world.

I) BACKGROUND

The noble goal of Law et. al. is to determine the “effectiveness of forest strategies to mitigate climate change”. They state that their methodology “should integrate observations and mechanistic ecosystem process models with future climate, CO2, disturbances from fire, and management.”

A) The generally (ignoring any debate over the size of the percentage increase) UNCONTESTED points regarding locking up more carbon in the Law et. al. article are as follows:
1) Reforestation on appropriate sites – ‘Potential 5% improvement in carbon storage by 2100’
2) Afforestation on appropriate sites – ‘Potential 1.4% improvement in carbon storage by 2100′

B) The CONTESTED points regarding locking up 17% more carbon by 2100 in the Law et. al. article are as follows:
1) Lengthened harvest cycles on private lands
2) Restricting harvest on public lands

C) Atkins, at the 2018 International Mass Timber Conference protested by Oregon Wild, notes that: “Oregon Wild (OW) is advocating that storing more carbon in forests is better than using wood in buildings as a strategy to mitigate climate change.” OW’s first reference from Law et. al. states: “Increasing forest carbon on public lands reduced emissions compared with storage in wood products” (see Law et. al. abstract). Another reference quoted by OW from Law et. al. goes so far as to claim that: “Recent analysis suggests substitution benefits of using wood versus more fossil fuel-intensive materials have been overestimated by at least an order of magnitude.”

II) Law et. al. CAVEATS ignored by OW

A) They clearly acknowledge that their conclusions are based on computer simulations (modeling various scenarios using a specific set of assumptions subject to debate by other scientists).

B) In some instances, they use words like “probably”, “likely” and “appears” when describing some assumptions and outcomes rather than blindly declaring certainty.

III) Atkins’ CRITIQUE

Knowing that the modeling used in the Law et. al. study involves significant assumptions about each of the extremely complex components and their interactions, Atkins proceeds to investigate the assumptions which were used to integrate said models with the limited variables mentioned and shows how they overestimate the carbon cost of using wood, underestimate the carbon cost of storing carbon on the stump and underestimate the carbon cost of substituting non-renewable resources for wood. This allows Oregon Wild to tout unproven statements as quoted in item “I-C” above and treat them as fact and justification for policy changes instead of as an interesting but unproven hypothesis that needs to be validated in order to complete the scientific process.

Quotes from Atkins Critique:

A) Wood Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) Versus Non-renewable substitutes.
1) “The calculation used to justify doubling forest rotations assumes no leakage. Leakage is a carbon accounting term referring to the potential that if you delay cutting trees in one area, others might be cut somewhere else to replace the gap in wood production, reducing the supposed carbon benefit.”
2) “It assumes a 50-year half-life for buildings instead of the minimum 75 years the ASTM standard calls for, which reduces the researchers’ estimate of the carbon stored in buildings.”
3) “It assumes a decline of substitution benefits, which other LCA scientists consider as permanent.”
4) “analysis chooses to account for a form of fossil fuel leakage, but chooses not to model any wood harvest leakage.”
5) “A report published by the Athena Institute in 2004, looked at actual building demolition over a three-plus-year period in St. Paul, Minn. It indicated 51 percent of the buildings were older than 75 years. Only 2 percent were demolished in the first 25 years and only 12 percent in the first 50 years.”
6) “The Law paper assumes that the life of buildings will get shorter in the future rather than longer. In reality, architects and engineers are advocating the principle of designing and building for longer time spans – with eventual deconstruction and reuse of materials rather than disposal. Mass timber buildings substantially enhance this capacity. There are Chinese Pagoda temples made from wood that are 800 to 1,300 years old. Norwegian churches are over 800 years old. I visited at cathedral in Scotland with a roof truss system from the 1400s. Buildings made of wood can last for many centuries. If we follow the principle of designing and building for the long run, the carbon can be stored for hundreds of years.”
7) “The OSU scientists assumed wood energy production is for electricity production only. However, the most common energy systems in the wood products manufacturing sector are combined heat and power (CHP) or straight heat energy production (drying lumber or heat for processing energy) where the efficiency is often two to three times as great and thus provides much larger fossil fuel offsets than the modeling allows.”
8) “The peer reviewers did not include an LCA expert.”
9) The Dean of the OSU College of Forestry was asked how he reconciles the differences between two Doctorate faculty members when the LCA Specialist (who is also the director of CORRIM which is a non-profit that conducts and manages research on the environmental impacts of production, use, and disposal of forest products). The Dean’s answer was “It isn’t the role of the dean to resolve these differences, … Researchers often explore extremes of a subject on purpose, to help define the edges of our understanding … It is important to look at the whole array of research results around a subject rather than using those of a single study or publication as a conclusion to a field of study.”
10) Alan Organschi, a practicing architect, a professor at Yale stated his thought process as “There is a huge net carbon benefit [from using wood] and enormous variability in the specific calculations of substitution benefits … a ton of wood (which is half carbon) goes a lot farther than a ton of concrete, which releases significant amounts of carbon during a building’s construction”. He then paraphrased a NASA climate scientistfrom the late 1980’s who said ‘Quit using high fossil fuel materials and start using materials that sink carbon, that should be the principle for our decisions.’
11) The European Union, in 2017, based on “current literature”, called “for changes to almost double the mitigation effects by EU forests through Climate Smart Forestry (CSF). … It is derived from a more holistic and effective approach than one based solely on the goals of storing carbon in forest ecosystems”
12) Various CORRIM members stated:
a) “Law et al. does not meet the minimum elements of a Life Cycle Assessment: system boundary, inventory analysis, impact assessment and interpretation. All four are required by the international standards (ISO 14040 and 14044); therefore, Law et al. does not qualify as an LCA.”
b) “What little is shared in the article regarding inputs to the simulation model ignores the latest developments in wood life cycle assessment and sustainable building design, rendering the results at best inaccurate and most likely incorrect.
c) “The PNAS paper, which asserts that growing our PNW forests indefinitely would reduce the global carbon footprint, ignores that at best there would 100 percent leakage to other areas with lower productivity … which will result in 2 to 3.5 times more acres harvested for the same amount of building materials. Alternatively, all those buildings will be built from materials with a higher carbon footprint, so the substitution impact of using fossil-intensive products in place of renewable low carbon would result in >100 percent leakage.”
d) More on leakage: “In 2001, seven years after implementation, Jack Ward Thomas, one of the architects of the plan and former chief of the U.S. Forest Service, said: “The drop in the cut in the Pacific Northwest was essentially replaced by imports from Canada, Scandinavia and Chile … but we haven’t reduced our per-capita consumption of wood. We have only shifted the source.”
e) “Bruce Lippke, professor emeritus at the University of Washington and former executive director of CORRIM said, “The substitution benefits of wood in place of steel or concrete are immediate, permanent and cumulative.””

B) Risks Resulting from High Densities of Standing Timber
1) “The paper underestimates the amount of wildfire in the past and chose not to model increases in the amount of fire in the future driven by climate change.”
2) “The authors chose to treat the largest fire in their 25-year calibration period, the Biscuit Fire (2003), as an anomaly. Yet 2017 provided a similar number of acres burned. … the model also significantly underestimated five of the six other larger fire years ”
3) “The paper also assumed no increase in fires in the future
4) Atkins comments/quotes support what some of us here on the NCFP blog have been saying for years regarding storing more timber on the stump. There is certainty that a highly significant increase in carbon loss to fire, insects and disease will result from increased stand densities as a result of storing more carbon on the stump on federal lands. Well documented, validated and fundamental plant physiology and fire science can only lead us to that conclusion. Increases in drought caused by global warming will only increase the stress on already stressed, overly dense forests and thereby further decrease their viability/health by decreasing the availability of already limited resources such as access to minerals, moisture and sunlight while providing closer proximity between trees to ease the ability and rate of spread of fire, insects and disease between adjacent trees.

Footnote:
In their conclusion, Law et. al. state that“GHG reduction must happen quickly to avoid surpassing a 2°C increase in temperature since preindustrial times.” This emphasis leads them to focus on strategies which, IMHO, will only exacerbate the long-term problem.
→ For perspective, consider the “Failed Prognostications of Climate Alarm

In Search of Common Ground II – It Takes Two: Forest Management and Social Management

Here are two current articles that get some things wrong but if we ignore those items and focus on the big picture that they present rather than on the details, I believe that we will find that we have more in common than we thought.

Between the two articles we see the full picture for PRIORITIZED actions to begin the long battle ahead to recover from national ashtrays, lost lives, lost homes and infrastructure, significantly decreased health of both humans and forests. It is a two pronged battle that includes both sound forest management and social management.

A) Using Forests to Fight Climate Change – California takes a small step in the right direction.

“The state’s proposed Forest Carbon Plan aims to double efforts to thin out young trees and clear brush in parts of the forest, including by controlled burning. This temporarily lowers carbon-carrying capacity. But the remaining trees draw a greater share of the available moisture, so they grow and thrive, restoring the forest’s capacity to pull carbon from the air. Healthy trees are also better able to fend off bark beetles. The landscape is rendered less combustible. Even in the event of a fire, fewer trees are consumed.

The need for such planning is increasingly urgent. Already, since 2010, drought and beetles have killed more than 100 million trees in California, most of them in 2016 alone, and wildfires have scorched hundreds of thousands of acres.

California’s plan envisions treating 35,000 acres of forest a year by 2020, and 60,000 by 2030 — financed from the proceeds of the state’s emissions-permit auctions. That’s only a small share of the total acreage that could benefit, an estimated half a million acres in all, so it will be important to prioritize areas at greatest risk of fire or drought.

The strategy also aims to ensure that carbon in woody material removed from the forests is locked away in the form of solid lumber, burned as biofuel in vehicles that would otherwise run on fossil fuels, or used in compost or animal feed.”

B) Why are California’s homes burning? It isn’t natural disaster it’s bad planning

This Op-ed by Richard Halsey (director of the California Chaparral Institute who sometimes posts on NCFP) is well written and, though I would disagree on some statements in his post, I present those that I do agree on in an attempt to show that there are specific components that are middle ground that we all should be able to agree on and focus on rather than focusing on what won’t work. Once we change our emphasis, hostility between opposing sides should decrease and progress should increase.

“Large, high-intensity wildfires are an inevitable and natural part of life in California. The destruction of our communities is not. But many of the political leaders we elect and planning agencies we depend upon to create safe communities have failed us. They have allowed developers to build in harm’s way, and left firefighters holding the bag. ”

“others blame firefighters for creating dense stands of chaparral in fire suppression efforts—when that’s the only way chaparral naturally grows, dense and impenetrable.”

“”we need to recognize that fire disasters aren’t natural, they’re social. And they require social solutions.”” (quote from University of Colorado geographer Gregory Simon)
–> Pay attention to the statement “fire disasters aren’t natural, they’re social”. My first reaction was “not true” but in the context of the Op Ed, I think that the author is making an appropriate distinction between the words “Catastrophic” and “Disaster” by reserving “Disaster” for those situations where the catastrophe falls mainly on humans.

“We also need to examine the best practices of other fire-prone regions. Communities in Australia often install external, under-eave/rooftop sprinklers, which have proven quite effective in protecting structures during wildfires. (Australians understand that wet homes do not ignite.) Such systems should be standard in all new developments in high fire hazard zones. It is likely they would have protected many of the homes consumed in Ventura’s Thomas fire this week.”

“As we do with earthquakes and floods, our goal should be to reduce the damage when wildfires arrive, not pretend we can prevent them from happening at all. That mindset starts at the planning department, not the fire station.”

C) Relevant Prior Posts with included references:

1) Finding Common Ground
IN SEARCH OF COMMON GROUND
Frustration: Will It Lead to Change?

2) Wildfire
Fuels management can be a big help in dealing with wildfires
Air Pollution from Wildfires compared to that from Prescribed burns
Inside the Firestorm
The Impact of Sound Forest Management Practices on Wildfire Smoke and Human Health
Humans sparked 84 percent of US wildfires, increased fire season over two decades
More on Wildfire and Sound Forest Management
Scientific Basis for Changing Forest Structure to Modify Wildfire Behavior and Severity
Articles of Interest on Fire
The Role of Sound Forest Management in Reducing Wildfire Risk
15 Minute TED Talk: “Forest Service ecologist proposes ways to help curb rising ‘Era of Megafires’”

Conservation Triage – How a Math Formula Could Decide Fate of Endangered U.S. Species

The title says it all. Considering that US citizens pay more in taxes than they do for food and clothing, is it any surprise that a lot of us want lower taxes. Here are some selected quotes from an article titled How a Math Formula Could Decide Fate of Endangered U.S. Species

It’s all about the 80/20 rule or, to put it another way, picking the low hanging fruit.

1) “Arizona State University ecologist Leah Gerber presented a plan to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials that would use a mathematical formula to direct government money away from endangered and threatened species she calls “over-funded failures” and toward plants and animals that can more easily be saved.”

2) “Gavin Shire, a spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said in an email to Reuters that the agency is examining the controversial proposal.

“We have worked closely with this group of scientists as they developed this new conservation tool, and while we have not made any determinations yet, are impressed with its potential,” Shire said. “We will be exploring further if and how we may best use it to improve the effectiveness of our recovery efforts.””

3) “The Endangered Species Act bars the government from deciding which animals and plants become extinct. But funding one species over another could let some decline or die out.

“I just don’t think it’s possible to save all species even though I would like to,” said Gerber, a self-described Democrat and environmentalist. “That’s an uncomfortable thing to say and I don’t like it but that’s the reality.”

Gerber said as many as 200 additional species could be saved by directing funds away from species such as the iconic northern spotted owl – whose numbers have declined despite millions of dollars spent on conservation efforts – and toward those with a better chance of survival.”

4) “So-called conservation triage is already being used in New Zealand and the Australian state of New South Wales, but Gerber has developed a specific algorithm for the United States that considers the expense and needs of local species as well as rules laid out by the Endangered Species Act.”

5) “Gerber came up with the idea for a U.S. model while Democratic former President Barack Obama was in office, pitching the concept to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials before her algorithm was developed. Given the proposed budget cuts, some proponents say it may have a better chance of adoption under the Trump administration.”

6) “Despite protected habitat and about $4.5 million, adjusted for inflation, that Gerber calculates has been spent annually between 1989 and 2011 to help the owl recover, federal statistics show its numbers have declined by about 4 percent per year. About 4,800 northern spotted owls are left in North America, according to the environmental group Defenders of Wildlife.”

7) “One proponent is Hugh Possingham, an Australian scientist and an architect of the policy in that country. Now the chief scientist for U.S. environmental group The Nature Conservancy, Possingham wants to see similar policies adopted in the United States.

“I’m always amazed that this is a contentious issue. I’ve had people discuss it with me and end up with a fit,” he said. “But the mathematics and the economics of doing the best you can with the resources you have – I don’t know why that’s contentious at all.”

The Australian state of New South Wales, which in 2013 adopted a strategic prioritization algorithm, decided to keep funding recovery efforts for some species that the model ranked as low priorities, said James Brazill-Boast, senior project officer with the New South Wales Office of Environment and Heritage.

For example, he said, the koala would be ranked low, but Australians would never support letting the beloved creatures, listed as vulnerable by law, become extinct.

Gerber said U.S. officials could similarly decide to continue supporting species that her algorithm might reject – or non-profits could step in to help.

“I don’t think the agency wants to let things go extinct,” Gerber said. “I don’t want to let things go extinct. … But we can actually achieve better outcomes by being strategic.””

The response of the forest to drought

This post provides some on the ground research and consistent but separate modeling results that demonstrate the importance of stand density in coping with climate change and therefore the importance of sustainable forest management. Hopefully this will change some minds on the importance of strategically managing density.

A) The response of the forest to drought: the role of stand density and species diversity This article is an attempt to quantify previously established science.

1) “Droughts affect wood formation through the reduction in photosynthetic rates due to stomatal closure, reducing the amount of carbohydrates available for building new cells.”

2) “used tree-ring data from long-term forest plots of two pine species, ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) and red pine (Pinus resinosa). The experiments were distributed in different geographical areas in the USA and they covered a large aridity gradient. They quantified growth responses at the population level to express both resistance and resilience to drought in relation to the relative tree population density, finding out that reducing densities would enhance both growth responses to drought. Trees growing in denser populations were more negatively impacted by drought and this has been shown in all three biogeographical areas.”
NOTE from “Climate Change Research Focuses on Great Lakes Forests”: “ASCC is monitoring the growth, health and survival rates of the trees in these forests, and focusing on three key qualities: resistance, resilience and transition. Resistance measures a species’ ability to remain stable and productive in a drought situation, resilience is a tree’s ability to return to normal productivity after experiencing an environmental change and transition refers to circumstances that encourage ecosystems to adapt to changing conditions.”

3) “This study confirms once more that the vulnerability of monospecific coniferous forests to increasing drought can be reduced through thinning interventions, which represent a viable adaptation strategy under climate change.”

4) “investigated the drought response of 16 individual tree species in different regions of Europe and evaluated if this was related to species diversity and stand density. Based on previous findings indicating that combining species with complementary characteristics is more important than simply increasing species diversity to cope with drought, their results indicate that species growing in a mixture are not always less water stressed than those growing in monoculture.”
See also: a) “Species composition determines resistance to drought in dry forests of the Great Lakes – St. Lawrence forest region of central Ontario” b) “SPECIES RICHNESS AND STAND STABILITY IN CONIFER FORESTS OF THE SIERRA NEVADA” c) “Functional diversity enhances silver fir growth resilience to an extreme drought”

5) “Investigating these effects at the level of species identity (i.e., different combinations of species) is more advisable than doing it at the level of species richness (i.e., abundance of species), because different mixtures respond differently depending on the region. If we consider that different provenances of the same species can show different adaptation strategies to cope with drought, the situation may be even more complex.”

B) Ecosystem services, mountain forests and climate change
Note: This modeling effort passes the #1 smell test in that it agrees with already established scientific principles while adding quantitative measures that support the previously known trend but shouldn’t be taken as absolutes.

1) “it is estimated that about half of the global human population depends – directly or indirectly – on services delivered by mountain forests. It is therefore essential to assess whether multiple ecosystem services can be provided to human societies in the future. Given that climate is changing fast, the consideration of climate change in scientific assessments is a must! Let’s not forget that European forests are managed since centuries (check out this nice book about the history of European forests). Thus, changes in management regimes must be considered as well.”

2) “in the Iberian Mountains their simulation results indicate that forest management, rather than climate change, is responsible for a reduction in carbon storage and biodiversity. On the contrary, in Western Alps changes in climatic regimes could induces large alterations in the supply of several ecosystem services, particularly under the most pessimistic future climate scenarios. In other areas (e.g., in the Slovenian Dinaric Mountains) climate change would strongly affect ecosystem services, albeit differently depending on elevation and stand conditions.”

3) “This confirms that management is a strong driver of forest dynamics in European mountains, and it can highly modify the future provision of ecosystem services (i.e., more than the direct effects of climate change!).”

The Impact of Sound Forest Management Practices on Wildfire Smoke and Human Health

– Some would have us turn our forests back to a time before any of mankind inhabited North America.
– Some suggest that we should limit our management of forests to that done by native Americans pre European times.
– Some of us see a problem with limiting ourselves to these past practices because of the current population level.
– Some of us even see that properly validated forest science carried out in environmentally sound ways can improve the sustainability of our forest ecosystems and all of the species that depend on them for habitat, store carbon and reduce our dependence on the use of non-renewable, environmentally unfriendly resources which are being extracted from their long term, safe, natural storage underground.

This article (J. For. 115(●):000–000 http://dx.doi.org/10.5849/jof.16-042
Copyright © 2017 Society of American Foresters) “fire & fuels management Aligning Smoke Management with Ecological and Public Health Goals” seems to me to be a good starting point for a much neglected discussion on why mankind has to manage our federal forest better just from the point of protecting human health.

A) Motivation for the study comes from:
1) “mismatches between the scale of benefits and risks make it difficult to proactively manage wildland fires to promote both ecological and public health.”
2) “A recent update to wildfire smoke policy proposed by the US Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) recognized the need to restore and maintain more frequent fire regimes through intentional use of fire, while asserting that protecting human health remained the agency’s “highest priority” (Office of the Federal Register 2015). Therefore, addressing both forest restoration and air quality objectives remains a central challenge.”
3) “Hurteau et al. (2014) found that under a business-as-usual climate scenario, this escalation in fire potential is likely to increase wildfire emissions in California by 50% by the end of this century unless agencies take a more proactive approach to fire use.”
4) “… current policies have permitted regulators to curtail fires intentionally managed for resource objectives in response to nuisance complaints by a few individuals, despite the potential for such
fires to have long-term collective benefits (Engel 2013). Because the impact and likelihood of smoke increase the longer that fire is kept out of the system, extensive fire suppression can result in a vicious cycle that becomes more and more costly to escape until the system fails, as represented by extreme
wildfires (Calkin et al. 2015).”
5) “Smoke and wildfires can impact public health in ways other than particulate pollution, including ozone pollution, increased stress during and after wildfires, and strains on medical services and communication systems (Fowler 2003, Kumagai et al. 2004, Finlay et al. 2012). Despite these broader
considerations, public health regulations for smoke typically focus on a 24-hour average of PM2.5. Values that exceed 35ug/m3 are considered unhealthy for sensitive groups, which include pregnant women, young children, elderly individuals, smokers, and people with chronic respiratory problems such as asthma (Delfino et al. 2009, Kochi et al. 2010, Moeltner et al. 2013).”

Please note that this study was not offered as a be all and end all study. In my opinion, the main objective was achieved. That objective being to give order of magnitude numbers to justify further research and further stimulate the process of rethinking current regulations and forest management policies.

B) Known Facts:
1) California: “The wildfire emissions in 2008 represented 68% of all PM2.5 emissions in the state, and they caused notable public health impacts (Wegesser et al. 2009, Preisler et al. 2015)”
2) “An important spatial mismatch results from the fact that large wildfires can create smoke impacts on distant urban populations. The risk to urban populations from regional-scale smoke impacts has increased as California became the most urbanized state in the United States, with 90% of its population residing within cities that have more than 50,000 people and another 5% living in smaller urban clusters (US Census Bureau 2015). Many of those urban areas are situated in valleys or basins that have poor air quality due to human activities as well as natural conditions that often trap pollutants (Ngo et al. 2010, Nakayama Wong et al. 2011). For example, the four metropolitan areas in the United States with the highest levels of particle pollution are all located in California’s Central Valley (American Lung Association 2015). Because many urban populations already experience poor air quality during the summer, they are particularly vulnerable to health impacts from wildfires (Delfino et al. 2009, Cisneros et al. 2014)”
3) “Within the study area, daily emissions from both prescribed burns and resource objective wildfires remained well below 500 tons PM2.5 , whereas the Rim Fire had 20 days exceeding that threshold (nearly half of its entire period of active fire growth) and peaked at nearly 11,000 tons PM2.5 /day on Aug. 26, 2013 (Figure 2). During the late summer, air quality is already problematic in downwind areas such as the Lake Tahoe Basin and San Joaquin Valley”
4) “Ground-level monitoring indicated that these large smoke plumes coincided with highly polluted days in Reno, which occurred on August 23–25 and again on August 28–29, when PM2.5 values exceeded the “unhealthy for all populations” standard (55.5ug/m3) (Figure 4F). Such high levels are such a serious health concern that people are advised to avoid going outdoors. Navarro et al. (2016) reported that very unhealthy and unhealthy days occurred at 10 air monitoring sites in the central Sierras, northern Sierras, and Nevada during the Rim Fire.”

C) Data – Smoke Plume data was used to “compare differences in smoke impacts between resource objective wildfires and full-suppression wildfires within the San Joaquin River watershed in California’s Sierra Nevada, the Sierras that burned between 2002 and 2013, including 10 resource objective wildfires (totaling 20,494 acres), 17 prescribed fires (totaling 6,636 acres), 4 small wildfires (totaling 12,025 acres), and the exceptionally large Rim Fire (257,314 acres). … the limited availability of smoke monitoring data, particularly before 2007, requires a focus on modeled emissions.”

D) Findings: Reasonable Expectations from the use of increased forest management to reduce the impact on human health of catastrophic wildfires include:
1) “Our results indicate that the 257,314-acre Rim Fire of 2013 probably resulted in 7 million person-days of smoke impact across California and Nevada, which was greater than 5 times the impact per burned unit area than two earlier wildfires, Grouse and Harden of 2009, that were intentionally managed for resource objectives within the same airshed.”
2) “The combination of a warming climate and accumulation of forest fuels ensures a future with more large fires and smoke in dry western US forests. We have outlined framework to more directly account for regional-scale smoke impacts from these events using surface monitoring and satellite observations of smoke. Managing large fires for resource objectives can shift the release of inevitable emissions to conditions that minimize large-scale smoke impacts, by controlling fire spread based on available dispersion and monitored impacts and creating anchors for containing future hazardous fires. When well supported by firefighting, air quality monitoring and modeling, and public communications resources, this approach can overcome existing disincentives for achieving ecological and public health goals.”
3) “August 31 … Altogether, medium- and high-density HMS smoke from the Rim Fire on that day covered a large area (251,691 mi2) with a population of 2.8 million people, more than 2 million of whom resided below high-density smoke … In contrast, the Grouse and Harden Fires burned slowly over the early summer of 2009, with very modest emissions until the last week of June … Our analysis of HMS maps indicated that there were only 2 days when medium-density plumes overlaid substantial populations in California and Nevada, amounting to 25,000 person-days”
4) “the Rim Fire burned 55 times more area (257,213 acres) than the combined footprint of the Grouse and Harden Fires (4,695 acres), but our analysis suggests that it had at least 275 times greater impact in terms of persondays, or 5.5 times greater impact relative to area burned.”
5) “Our analyses help to illustrate and begin to quantify many of the potential benefits of resource objective wildfires compared with those of extreme fires:
– 1. Reduced fuels and reduced consumption. … We accounted for this effect within the 10,385 acres of the Rim Fire’s footprint that had experienced prescribed fires or resource objective wildfires since 2002 by changing “typical” fuel loads to “light,” which reduced estimated emissions in those areas by 53%.
– 2. More favorable dispersion and potential for less ozone. As maintenance burns reduce fuel levels over time, managers may be able to burn more safely earlier in the summer and or later in the fall, when dispersion is often more favorable and ozone concentrations are lower (Jaffe et al. 2013). Fires managed for resource objectives are less likely to result in the greater lofting and concentrations of smoke reported from extreme fires, which often deliver pollution to distant, large urban populations in lower-elevation valleys (Colarco et al. 2004, Peterson et al. 2015).
– 3. Greater ability to regulate fire spread. Because wildfires would be managed for resource objectives when weather and fire behavior conditions are more moderate than under extreme wildfires, their slower fire spread can curb daily emissions. In addition, managers can employ the push-pull tactics burn described for the Grouse Fire to regulate daily emissions based on monitored concentrations fire will become increasingly important for reducing the likelihood and extent of large-scale, extreme fires like the Rim Fire (Westerling et al. 2015).”

Humans sparked 84 percent of US wildfires, increased fire season over two decades

How should we deal with the new math on forest fires?

If this article published in the February Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is not a fluke then it would seem to me that our expanding population dictates the need for more forest management not less. The less desireable alternative would be to severely restrict access to our federal forests. The main conclusion of the article is that humans sparked 84 percent of US wildfires and caused nearly half of the acreage lost to wildfire. This number excludes intentionally set controlled burns.

From the above, I would deduce that human initiated fires caused proportionally less acreage loss because they were closer to civilization and to forest access points and therefore closer to and more easily accessed by suppression resources. The fact that nearly half of the wildfire acres lost occur in these areas suggests that we would get more bang for our tax dollars if we increased and focused federal sustainable forest management around high traffic areas easily accessible to humans.

Knowing that humans who cause wildfires are, by definition, either careless or malicious, we might deduce that they are generally not inclined to put great effort into getting to their ignition set points. This would lead us to consider that human caused fires might prove to be in less difficult terrain areas with high human traffic. Fires like the Rim fire being the exception. That, if true, would suggest that forest management for risk reduction on these sites could be done at lower costs per acre than other less accessible forest acreage. Focusing forest management efforts on these high benefit to cost areas would have the biggest bang per tax dollar expended in order to lower the total cost of federal wildfire control. If my thinking is correct, this should play a large part in setting the priorities as to where we should: 1) apply controlled burns to reduce ground and other low fuels, 2) utilize commercial thinnings to reduce ladder and proximity fuels or 3) use commercial regeneration harvests to create greater variation in tree heights between stands in order to provide fire breaks for crown fires when appropriate for the site and species. The net effect would be positive for all species including endangered and threatened species. There would still be plenty of lightning caused wildfire, controlled burn hotspots/breakouts and a significantly reduced acreage of human caused fires to satisfy those who don’t mind national ashtrays. Reducing the number and size of human caused fires would also free resources to attack lightning fires earlier and harder when allowing the fire to burn was not an option.

Pertinent Quotes:

  1. “After analyzing two decades’ worth of U.S. government agency wildfire records spanning 1992-2012, the researchers found that human-ignited wildfires accounted for 84 percent of all wildfires, tripling the length of the average fire season and accounting for nearly half of the total acreage burned.” Italics added
  2. “”These findings do not discount the ongoing role of climate change, but instead suggest we should be most concerned about where it overlaps with human impact,” said Balch. “Climate change is making our fields, forests and grasslands drier and hotter for longer periods, creating a greater window of opportunity for human-related ignitions to start wildfires.”” Italics added
  3. “”Not all fire is bad, but humans are intentionally and unintentionally adding ignitions to the landscape in areas and seasons when natural ignitions are sparse,” … “We can’t easily control how dry fuels get, or lightning, but we do have some control over human started ignitions.””

IN SEARCH OF COMMON GROUND

It seems like an exercise in futility for the “New Century of Forest Planning” group to be discussing and cussing forest planning &/ policy when we haven’t even agreed to the scientific fundamentals that serve as the cornerstone and foundation for any such discussions.

Below, I have developed a tentative outline of the high level fundamentals which any Forest Plan or Policy must incorporate in order to have a reasonable chance of meeting the desired goals. Until we can come up with a version of these “Forestry Fundamentals” that we generally agree to, we are pushing on a rope and wasting each other’s time unless our objective here is simply to snap our suspenders and vent on each other.

In your comments, please note the outline Item that you are responding to. Maybe we can revise my initial effort and come to some common ground. In doing so we would perform a service and make a step forward that would be useful outside of this circle instead of just chasing our tails. Coming to such an agreement would be a step towards developing a priority hierarchy and eliminating the internal conflicts which make current federal forest policy and law ambiguous and self-contradictory. Until we reach common ground, the current obviously unworkable policies will continue to doom our forests to poor health and consequentially increase the risk of catastrophic loss of those forests and the species that depend on them for survival.

– FORESTRY FUNDAMENTALS – 1st Draft 12/15/16

ESTABLISHED SCIENCE WHICH MUST BE INCORPORATED IN PLANNING FOR

THE SUSTAINABILITY OF FOREST DEPENDENT SPECIES

I) The Fundamental Laws of Forest Science which have been repeatedly validated over time, location, and species. They include:
— A) plant physiology dictating the impact of competition on plant health,
— B) fire science dictating the physics of ignition and spread of fire and
— C) insects and pathogens and their propensity to target based on proximity and their probability of success being inversely proportional to the health of the target.

— D) Species suitability for a specific site is based on the interaction between the following items, those listed above and others not mentioned:

— — 1) hydrology, the underlying geology and availability of nutrients in the soil.

— — 2) latitude, longitude, elevation, aspect and adjacent geography.

— — 3) weather including local &/ global pattern changes.

 

II) The Fundamental Laws controlling the success of endangered, threatened and other species dependent on niche forest types (ecosystems):

— A) Nesting habitat availability.

— B) Foraging habitat availability.

— C) Competition management.

— D) Sustainability depends on maintaining a fairly uniform continuum of the necessary niches which, in turn, requires a balanced mix of age classes within each forest type to avoid species extinguishing gaps.

— E) Risk of catastrophic loss must be reduced where possible in order to minimize the chance of creating species extinguishing gaps in the stages of succession.

 

III) The role of Economics:

— A) Growing existing markets and developing new markets in order to provide revenue to more efficiently maintain healthy forests and thence their dependent species.

— B) Wise investment in the resources necessary to accomplish the goals.

— C) Efficient allocation of existing resources.

 

IV) The role of Forest Management:

— A) Convert the desires/goals of the controlling parties into objectives and thence into the actionable plans necessary to achieve the desired objectives.

— B) Properly execute the plans in accordance with the intent of: governing laws/regulations and best management practices considering any economies.

— C) Acquire independent third party audits and make adjustments in management practices where dictated in order to provide continuous improvement in the means used to achieve goals.

— D) Adjust plans as required by changes: in the goals, as required by the forces of nature and as indicated by on the ground results.

— E) Use GIS software to maintain the spatial and associated temporal data necessary for Scheduling software to find and project feasible alternatives and recommend the “best” alternative to meet the goals set by the controlling parties.

What did I miss, what is wrong, what is right, what would improve this list of Forest Fundamentals?