NEPA

Multi-Objective Forest Service Projects: Does It All Get Done?

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Lisa K. Anderson; Sandy Post' A Link Belt 3900 tears its way up an old gravel logging road. At the entrance contractors will build a berm.

Matthew Koehler raised this interesting point in our previous discussion, which was a bit off the main topic, but I think worthy of its own discussion. He said:

Also, please note that many of the “Land management activities in this decision” will not be accomplished at any point in the near future due to a lack of funding. Of course, all the logging will be completed, but most of the true restoration work (decommissioning of roads, culverts, etc) will only be completed as funding becomes available, which in our experience here in the N. Rockies might take a decade, if the work ever is completed at all. The public and the media would be wise to recognize the difference between simply signing a Decision Notice vs. actual completion of the work. Unfortunately, despite repeated requests to look into this matter, the media (and the Forest Service) continues to give the public the impression that all this work gets completed within a reasonable amount of time. That’s totally not true. In fact, I bet if someone did a comprehensive look at all the Stewardship Projects in USFS Region 1 over the last decade they’d be shocked at the amount of promised, yet unfinished, restoration work.

Knowing FS people, I know that their intention is to do the all the work in the project.

So I’ll start a series of questions of everyone.
1) Do you have an observation in your area, that the “other work” doesn’t get done?
2) If so, please ask the FS why not, and report their answer.
3) If you don’t agree with their answer or have other insights to share, please do.

From Forest Planning to Adaptive Governance

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“If planning is everything, maybe it’s nothing.” Aaron Wildavsky

[Author’s note: This is a lengthy (for a blog), partisan, historical view rant on the road from NFMA “forest planning” to “adaptive governance.”]

Let’s face it, the “forest land and resource management plan” is an anachronism—an artifact of a bygone era. That era was in its heyday when the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) reigned supreme after President Richard M. Nixon consolidated rule-making and other powers in the OMB via executive order in 1970. Economics-based, comprehensive rational planning was the rage. It is no surprise that The Renewable Resources Planning Act was passed in 1974, just after Nixon consolidated power under the banner of rationally planned and carefully audited governmental process. Twenty years later Henry Mintzberg penned The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning (1994). Mintzerberg’s classic pretty much laid a tombstone atop rational planning exercises. Or at least it should have.

The Forest Planning Era
Following passage of the National Forest Management Act of 1976 as an amendment to the Renewable Resources Planning Act of 1974, it was thought that forest program management decisions could be adequately fit into a forest plan “decision container”—that somehow each forest could develop a forest-wide plan that would integrate programs now and into the future in a such a way as to allow disclosure of environmental consequences that might flow from said decisions. Project level National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) disclosure would disappear with proper forest planning and environmental disclosure at the forest level.

Allowance was made for FS administrative region plans, and for a national RPA Program plan. Given the upper two tiers, it was believed that decisions would be integrated vertically, and cumulative effects—according to NEPA standards—could be adequately disclosed.

It was a relatively innocent era, when viewed through the “green-eyeshaded accounting lenses” of OMB over-see-ers. The innocence collapsed relative soon in the forest arena as litigation proved that the three-level administratively-bounded review was not going to pass muster in the courts. Not only were projects not going to be shielded from NEPA review by a forest plan, there was increasing evidence that at least one level of planning/disclosure might be needed between project and forest.

An initial remedy to the seemingly endless process gridlock brought about by too many levels of planning was to eliminate regional plans. I referred to this then as the Texas two-step solution (forests/projects), since at that time the Forest Service’s National Planning Director was from Texas. But that was a solution looking for a problem, or better still a “non solution” not looking for anything but an easy way out. The problem between forest and project remained. Another problem was to be found elsewhere, framed larger than forest plans but not fitting into regional plan containers.

Spotted Owls, Roadless, and more
Much time and effort was now spent in the 1970s, 80s, 90s on above-forest policy making, brought about by actors and actions taken either against the Forest Service or from within the Forest Service responding to the Endangered Species Act of 1973. They were, “Spotted Owl Management Plans,” “The Roadless Rule,” “The Northwest Forest Plan,” and more. These decision containers were bounded as regions, not FS administrative regions but geographical regions more appropriately suited to the issues and the actors petitioning for problem resolution. Note that the policy-level decision making was largely about curtailing timbering and roading, but the Forest Service chose to name the efforts after the initiating issues, not the federal actions being considered.

Forest Planning Proves Resilient, if not useful
The forest planning paradigm still captured much attention, but the three-level planning process swirling around the forest plan—projects/mid-scale/forest—was felt by forest planners and the Forest Service generally to be too cumbersome. Something else needed to be done. While the rest of the world was waking up to complex systems, wicked problems, and adaptive management, as was part of the Forest Service via the Northwest Forest Plan, the Forest Service via the NFMA rule was still stuck in the wonderful, if overly complex and somewhat bizarre world of capital P “Planning.” And the Forest Service was always trying to force-fit things into forest-level and project-level decision containers. But times were changing by 1990 and at least for a time, the Forest Service seemed to be ready to catch up to the rest of the world.

Adaptive Governance: Emergence in the Clinton Era
Adaptive management seems to be evolving in name to Adaptive Governance, following a path laid down early on by Kai Lee in Compass and Gyroscope: Integrating Science and Politics for the Environment (1993). For a time the Forest Service seemed inclined to follow. [Note: Today, the “adaptive governance” path seems already well-discussed, if not well traveled. That is if my “adaptive governance” Google search is an indication. But my Wikipedia search didn’t give me much. Recognizing that the only viable adaptive management for dealing with public lands management has to deal with both Kai Lee’s Adaptive management compass and his civic-engagement gyroscope. I’ll go ahead and use the term “adaptive governance” hereafter.]

In what we might call Clinton era management, Chief Michael Dombeck sought to bring about a Leopoldian awakening (see, e.g. here, here) to Forest Service thinking. That “awakening,” as per Leopold’s earlier thinking, was about adaptive governance. But the largely Republican-dominated Forest Service resisted. Chief Dombeck was never accepted by Forest Service managers since he was from the BLM and appointed by an environmentally left-leaning Clinton administration. Things didn’t get better under Chief Jack Ward Thomas, himself a huge fan of Leopold. The road from Pinchot to Leopold was not going to be an easy one. Adaptive governance thinking was soon on the chopping block along with pretty much all else from “new forestry” to “new perspectives,” etc. following the election of George W. Bush as a new Administration came to Washington.

Adaptive Governance: Bush/Cheney Backlash
The Bush/Cheney public lands legacy can be viewed as a legacy of war—war on the environment and war on anything the previous Clinton Administration had built under the rubric of “ecosystem management” (See generally Bob Keiter’s Breaking Faith with Nature: The Bush Administration and Public Land Policy). Under Mark Rey as Undersecretary of Agriculture, the Forest Service moved into its “Healthy Forests Initiative,” followed soon thereafter by the “Healthy Forest Restoration Act of 2003.” As Bob Keiter notes, the names could be viewed as cynical, as part of a well-orchestrated backlash against Clinton era reforms. To Keiter:

By using the Healthy Forests Initiative to expand the scope of NEPA categorical exclusions and to alter the ESA consultation process, the Forest Service has further enhanced its authority and reduced the potential for judicial review of its decisions, which is also what the [Aquatic Conservation Strategy] and species inventory revisions to the Northwest Forest Plan would have done. Congress has abetted this de-legalization effort by including NEPA provisions in the HFRA and the Energy Policy Act that either eliminate or reduce environmental analysis requirements for timber thinning and energy exploration projects.279 Add to this the Bush administration’s approach to its ESA responsibilities—which include an overt hostility to new listings, a rush to delist species, and contemplated revisions to the section 7 consultation process and critical habitat designation and critical habitat designation criteria—and the land management agencies could well be relieved from meaningful regulatory oversight. Related efforts to eliminate administrative appeal opportunities are plainly designed to further insulate management decisions from review. The net effect is to minimize opportunities to enforce environmental standards and procedures, and thus shield criteria—and the land management agencies could well be relieved from meaningful regulatory oversight. Related efforts to eliminate administrative appeal opportunities are plainly designed to further insulate management decisions from review. The net effect is to minimize opportunities to enforce environmental standards and procedures, and thus shield the agencies from any meaningful accountability. It is a return to an era when discretion reigned supreme. [Footnote in original]

All good things come to an end. So do all bad things. The Bush/Cheney regime and its war on the environment ended in January 2009, although effects (and federal judges) linger. [Personal aside: My friend from the early “planning days,” Dale Bosworth served as Forest Service Chief early in the Bush/Cheney Administration. I believe Dale did what he could to curb the worst of the what might have been done to the Forest Service during that era, but didn’t take my advice the be take a firm stand and be the first Chief since Gifford Pinchot to be fired for standing up against the powers that be. Had I been in his shoes I might not have taken that advice either. Who knows? But it wasn’t in Dale’s nature to work that way. I don’t find fault with Bosworth’s leadership/management during that era.]

Adaptive Governance: Obama’s ‘Audacity of Hope’
Unfortunately for Leopoldian dreamers, incoming President Barrack Obama’s audacious plans have not yet been focused on matters environmental, other than green energy. Nor will they likely anytime soon, even if Obama or anyone in his Administration were prone to do so—which itself is in question. Obama is too distracted with two wars, emergent unrest in the Mideast and Middle America following Tea Party elections in statehouses and the US Congress. Not to mention continued after-shocks from the near-disaster of the financial meltdown that arrived coincidentally (or not) right as Obama was entering the White House.

Obama cut his political teeth on community organizing, and that is in a sense Kai Lee’s gyroscope to accompany his adaptive management compass. So we can at least hope for endorsement from Obama if planning is replaced with adaptive governance. Whether or not it will be a good thing depends largely on whether or not untoward devolution happens—or is perceived to likely happen—under adaptive governance schemes. Time will tell. But I get ahead of our story. The Forest Service hasn’t yet embraced adaptive governance, although I hear they are flirting with it. Instead they are still wedded to capital P “Planning.” As Andy Stahl noted, the recent Draft NFMA “planning rule” (pdf) (as the Forest Service likes to call it), stages up a rational planning exercise. The difference is that this time it is driven by ecological rationality instead of the earlier economic rationality from the OMB era.

Adaptive Governance: Absent in the NFMA Draft Planning Rule
I suspect it was because the Bush/Cheney era NFMA rule was thrown away by the courts, but for whatever reason the Obama Administration chose to rewrite the “NFMA rule.” There has been a flurry of commentary on this blog and elsewhere about the rule and associated planning. But does anyone really care about this type planning anymore? What decisions are really contained by a forest-level plan? Despite the language of the draft rule, I find no “ecological resilience” decisions, neither “ecological or social sustainability” decisions, nor any “species viability” decisions, nor … that can be contained in a forest-level plan. All such considerations will well-up at scales different from forest boundaries.

As I’ve argued before, these are wicked problems. Wicked problems are not amenable to rational planning resolutions. Part of the “wicked problem” problem is that they are shape-shifters, they vary in problem identification and resolution across both time and space. They just won’t stand still, and will not be force-fit into predetermined “decision containers.”

In addressing wicked problems, I believe that scale-dependent futuring, and/or puzzle solving, is in order alongside scale-dependent assessments and monitoring. We ought to add in scale-dependent standard setting. They all fit under a header “puzzle solving.” Where scale-dependent is really the stuff of framing decisions/actions according to a “Garbage Can Model” wherein issues, actors, and arenas self-organize across the landscape into various and sundry decision containers. We all need to think hard about wicked problems and, e.g. Cohen, March, and Olsen’s garbage can decision model. Here’s a pdf of CMO’s 1972 article: “A Garbage Can Theory of Organizational Choice.”

See too Pritchard and Sanderson’s chapter in Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems (2002), “The Dynamics of Political Discourse in Seeking Sustainability.” After setting stage for adaptive governance, complete with “wicked problem identification” and “garbage can” resolution mechanisms, Pritchard and Sanderson conclude:

[Testing hypotheses and applying lessons learned] to the thorny puzzles of environmental management and governance are [noble] goals. The greatest promise lies in addressing political issues directly, rather than in avoiding or submerging them. The fondest hope might be that individuals, communities, and formal organizations engage the spirit of adaptation and experimentation, by allowing a set of contingent ideas to shape “the gamble” of democratic resource management, and citizen experts to report on the results. Of course, for such a profoundly disorganized and multiscale approach to thrive, government, market, and citizen must share a common vision—that all must address these puzzles in order that they might be engaged and worked on—not solved forever; that “expertise,” popular voice, and power are separable, and none holds the dice [from a “floating crap game” model of politics] for more than a pass.

A Few Questions Linger
Is an ecologically framed rational planning rule what we need to resolve controversy?
Or is it time to embrace adaptive management, even adaptive governance in an attempt to tame wicked problems? Yes, I know that the preamble to the Draft NFMA rule claims that forest planning will be driven by adaptive management. But, really? Read the rule and explain to me how the draft rule stages for more than rational planning.

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Related:
The Forest Service as a Learning Challenged Organization, Iverson, 1999
US Forest Service Deeply Flawed Planning Culture, Iverson, 2004

Forest Wars: From Multiple Use to Sustained Conflict

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When we sometimes tire of our “word wars” here, we need to remember that they are just one manifestation of broader holy wars being waged in and around our public lands.

Long Road to War

Utilitarian ideology has been a mainstay in forest policy development since the early 1900s when Gifford Pinchot and Bernhard Fernow introduced forestry into American government. Samuel Hays’ Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, alongside David Clary’s Timber and the Forest Service both build on self-righteousness to the point of religious fervor among many who chose to work on the land, notably foresters and engineers, and their evangelists (pundits, professors, etc). Similar books could be written — likely have been — talking about the religious-like fervor of the environmental community. [See, e.g. Environmentalism as Religion, Wall Street Journal, 4/22/2010.]

For many years, what later emerged as forest wars were never more than disagreements between mainstream forestry practitioners and malcontents like John Muir, Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall. Such “disagreements” were deep-seated ideological splits, but contrarians of that era didn’t have the political/legal muscle to make for war. Later, however, the very same disagreements intensified into ideological war with the dawn of the environmental movement.

Environmentalists gained traction in forest debates, appeals, litigation, etc. after people began to wake up to environmental concerns in the late 1960s. The first of a series of Wilderness Acts became law in 1964. The Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966 predated and set a stage for the Endangered Species Act of 1973. Earth Day began in 1970. In 1969 the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) became law. In 1976 The National Forest Management Act (NFMA) and the Federal Lands Policy Management Act added to the mix. The environmental battles gained legal footing. But it is not clear that the legal footing was ever recognized, or at least accepted by the US Forest Service. At least if actions speak louder than words, we must question whether the Forest Service and its USDA overlords ever accepted these legislative mandates.

Disdain for legislative mandates runs deep, but there is an alternative path — a road not taken. Sally Fairfax set a stage for continued disgust for NEPA among forest practitioners with her 1978 Science article titled A Disaster in the Environmental Movement. Countrast Fairfax’s view with that from Jim Kennedy’s NEPA note: Legislative Confrontation of Groupthink.

Environmental Wars

Beginning in the 1970s, environmentalists waged war on timbering, grazing, road building, mining and oil & gas development, developed recreation, and more. Warriors on the “enviro” side typically vilify corporations, else government “lackeys” for the corporations. Warriors on the practitioner side vilify the enviros. In war there is little room for thoughtful discussion or dialogue. The rift between the two camps will likely remain very deep for a long time.

It is not clear that the Forest Service ever gave much heed to the “legislative confrontation of groupthink” ideas in NEPA. It seems that the Forest Service has been evading/avoiding NEPA responsibilities from the get-go. They continued “go-go timbering” up to the point of shutdown following the Monongahela and Bitterroot controversies. After things were sort-of opened up again via NFMA, the Forest Service wanted “once and for all NEPA”, i.e. the forest plan would be a catch-all NEPA container, allowing all projects to flow without any further NEPA review. When that didn’t work, the Forest Service played various shell-games pointing either upward (e.g. forest plans, regional plans) for NEPA compliance, else downward toward projects depending on what was being challenged. Finally, during the Bush/Cheney period, they sought to “categorically exclude” as much as possible from NEPA review.

In 1999 I wrote up a little thing titled Use of the National Forests. I noted four distinct periods of Forest Service history: Conservation and “Wise Use” — 1900-1950, Multiple Use — 1950-1970, Sustained Conflict — 1970-2000, and Collaborative Stewardship — 2000+. Although we might quibble over the dates as well as the categories, I now realize that I was over-optimistic as to the dawn of the Collaborative Stewardship era. At minimum there was a dramatic backlash — not necessarly against collabortion but clearly against environmetalism — commencing with Bush/Cheney Administration and their ABC (“anything but Clinton”) campaigns. The Bush/Cheney war on the environment was a reenactment of an earlier war waged by the Ronald Reagan Administration.

Bob Keiter (Univ. of Utah Law School) chronicled the emergence of both ecological awareness and collaborative stewardship in Keeping Faith with Nature. Keiter later chronicled the Bush/Cheney reactionary footnote in a 2007 article, Breaking Faith with Nature. Taken together, the two trace certain aspects of emergent gospels that were part of the ideological wars. The former traces what I’ll call the “ecosystem awareness” movement in the Clinton era of government, and the second the Healthy Forests Initiative and the Healthy Forests Restoration Act reactions during the Bush/Cheney era.

An era of “collaborative stewardship” may yet be emerging, albeit slowly and as already seen, with pushbacks. Enviros are still quite leery of “collaborations” and high-sounding agency rhetoric. They are warriors, after all. So the wars are not yet over, and may not be for a very long time. Timbering continues, albeit a a much lower volume than in the go-go days, and reframed as “ecological restoration” or “forest restoration”. New forest evangelists appear on the stage. Now we have both Wally Covington and Jerry Franklin preaching the gospel of forest restoration. I’ll leave it for further discussion as to how the two brands compare, and as to who buys into one, the other, both, or neither.

Other Wars

Even if wars between environmentalists and industrial and government practitioners were to ever end, these are just the tip of an iceberg of forest wars. We must add in the budget and staffing wars (hereafter budget wars) that have been ongoing in the Forest Service for a long time. Timber and Engineering reigned supreme in budget wars for many years, particularly after World War Two and the housing boom that fed rapid increases in timbering and associated road-building after WWII. Recreation, Wildlife, Soil and Water, even Fire, Personnel (later, “Human Resources”), Planning, Budget, Fiscal, State and Private Forestry, etc. were always struggling for funds. After go-go timbering days were a thing of the past — i.e. Environmentalists effectively shut down “go-go timbering”, Recreation and Fire gained an upper hand in budget wars. Somehow Engineering always seemed to keep its share of the money. [Note: Someday, maybe I’ll get these budget categories approximately right. For now, they are “good enough for government work”]

Finally — not trivially — Public Lands Wars have raged more of less continuously for many years. Remember the “Sagebrush Rebellion” and the so-called “County Supremacy Movement”? Now those have transformed into more of a “States’ Rights” movement. In all cases, part of the action has been an assault on federal lands.

I’ve probably missed some of the “wars” here. But if I’ve captured any of this even partially correctly, the landscapes, biophysical and political, have been transformed in the process. Some argue, as did Fairfax way back when, that the legal-administrative gridlock that has been a reality in federal lands management during the last 30-40 years, has done significant harm to the environment, and only resulted in wasted paper (EISs and dollars/time spent on forest planning, project planning, related NEPA work, appeals and litigation). Others like me argue that sometimes it is necessary to grapple with vexing social issues, even wicked problems in a very public way. Such “civic discovery” is a necessary part of a working democracy. Would that we could move from “war talk” to “fierce conversations“.

Related:
NEPA is Not the Problem, Forest Policy – Forest Practice, Oct 2007
The Blame Game

Court Decision- NEPA for Ski Master Development Plan

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Pp 10-12 of this Ark Initiative vs. Forest Service decision deal with the “NEPA for master development plan” question. It also has a good discussion of a variety of NEPA issues and the detailed discussion of the FS approach and why the judge found it was OK. Sometimes on this blog we talk about “if the FS followed the law there would be no problem” but people can disagree on not so much the concept, but the details of following the law, especially NEPA.

Here’s a quote:

The Forest Service’s acceptance of the conceptual 2003 MPA does not meet these
criteria. The 2003 MPA merely discloses Aspen Skiing’s goals and objectives, AR
5748-50, the existing conditions, AR 5762-76, and Aspen Skiing’s desired future
conditions, AR 5778-96. The Forest Service expressly noted that the acceptance of the
2003 MPA “in no way guarantees that all elements represented here will be completed at
any time in the future.” AR 5751. Nor does the agency’s acceptance mean that all of the
elements described in the 2003 MPA will be approved in the future, that the Forest Service has completed its environmental review of elements described in the 2003 MPA, or that the Forest Service completely agrees with Aspen Skiing on all of the listed actions. AR 5898-99. Instead, the Forest Service accepted the 2003 MPA as a guiding document for Aspen Skiing’s future development of the Snowmass Ski Area that would help the agency understand Aspen Skiing’s vision for the ski area and evaluate future connected actions when analyzing site-specific projects. AR 5899. Accordingly, it is not a “definitive statement of [the Forest Service’s] position determining the rights and obligations” of Aspen Skiing or other parties. More decisions remain to be made, depending on what Aspen Skiing actually proposes and the further required NEPA analysis, which means that it is not the consummation of the agency’s decision-making process. Thus, the acceptance of the 2003 MPA is not a final agency action.

CEQ Issues Final Guidance on Monitoring of Mitigation, Use of CEs

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The Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) issued two final guidance documents today, one which requires monitoring of any mitigation included in an environmental document, and the other governing the use of categorical exclusions.

It will take a few weeks to fully digest what the guidance will mean for Forest Service planning and implementation of projects.  Both guidance papers are an outcome of CEQs outreach in 2004 to “modernize” NEPA implementation, and last year’s “40th anniversary of NEPA” review.  CEQ is saying that these guidance documents are not rules or regulations, and are not legally binding requirements or legally enforceable.  Nevertheless, the guidance expresses the intent of the Administration, and will likely be used in reviews of agency procedures and NEPA documents.

The mitigation and monitoring guidance paper reemphasizes the importance of mitigation under NEPA to minimize the potential adverse environmental impacts by avoiding, minimizing, rectifying, reducing, or compensating for an impact.  Mitigation (like requiring best practices or staying out of a particular area) is often incorporated into the proposed project design or one of the alternatives.  Sometimes, mitigation might be used to reduce the impact such that a “finding of no significant impact” is made.  CEQ wants Federal agencies to ensure that mitigation commitments are actually implemented, and that monitoring is accomplished to provide feedback on those determinations.

The guidance for categorical exclusions (from NEPA documentation like an EIS or EA) places additional requirements on agencies when they establish categories or use categories already in existence.  CEQ is encouraging agencies to provide guidance on the level of documentation required when CEs are used.

Cumulative Effects and the Five Buttes Project

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This article is provided thanks to the good folks at the Society of American Foresters (SAF) and the Forestry Source.

Here’s Five Buttes 9th Circuit Appeal – Text-1 the article.

And a quote:

Cumulative Effects
Michael Mortimer, director of the Natural Resources Program at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, is working on a study of judicial deference to agency expertise in cases against the US Forest Service in US district and appeals courts. The Five Buttes case, he said, is a good example of how the court had “reset the bar” to the appropriate legal standard for deference to agencies. However, the court engaged in the same level of fine-grained analysis of scientific and procedural detail that the court addressed in Lands Council.

“I see both the majority and dissenting opinions getting into what I think is fairly high-resolution detail on many of the issues that the agency dealt with in the case,” he said. “This notion of judicial deference can be a little bit of a trap. In court cases like these you have competing expert opinions, facts that may be presented out of context, and inherently complex scientific issues, so even if the court gives a high level of deference to the agency, they are tempted to get into the details of what the agency did, wading through agency science and process.”

Such was the case with the agency’s analysis of the cumulative effects of the Five Buttes project.

“Cumulative effects is a difficult scientific concept, it’s a difficult administrative concept, and it’s a difficult legal standard to define. And yet, both the majority opinion and the dissent were focused on cumulative effects analysis,” Mortimer said. “Instead of simply determining whether or not the agency had examined cumulative effects, the court looked at exactly what the agency did, what actions it took, how many pages they devoted to it, and so on. It’s a little troubling to see a court trying to unpack the adequacy of this type of analysis, because that’s inherently a very difficult thing for a court to get its head around.”

The Forestry Source- This is my favorite SAF publication and often has articles of interest. You don’t have to be a member of SAF to subscribe. Anyone wishing to subscribe can go to this page: and click on Subscribe. Costs $42 for individuals, $79 for institutions. This page has info for all of SAF’s publications.

The Montana Conundrum II- Joint Fact Finding

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Matthew Koehler had a very thoughtful response to the original post here.

In continuing the dialogue, there are two main topics, what we might call developing an index of vegetation treatment intensity for each forest, and a discussion of why litigation rates are relatively high in Montana (or probably, more specifically Region 1 of the Forest Service). This first post is about developing the index.

How the need for an index originally came up was my question about why some might think we need more costly and time-consuming prospective environmental analysis, if we are simply doing less of what we used to do a lot of. In other words, we have plenty of timber sales and fuels treatment projects over the past years and should have some idea of the real environmental impacts (not projected, but observed). And conceivably, some impacts should be a function of the size of the acreage treated and proximity of those treatments.

The other opportunity that we might have from these data would be to compare forests with the same levels of activity and ask the question “do their levels of appeals and litigation differ, and if so, why?”

So I think it would be enlightening to do some joint fact- finding about what the actual treatment acres are relative to the total forested acres by forest across the country.. or at least for forests in the Rocky Mountain west.

If we could agree on some key data, I would be willing to try to extract it from the relevant databases. There seem to be three main questions:

What should we use as a baseline? It would have to be total forested acres because we are using these numbers in the context of understanding the environmental impacts. Take forest X with 1 million acres and 200 K acres of suitable timber, compared to forest y with the same total number of acres and 900 K suitable acres. If we are talking about the environmental impacts of cutting, say, 10K acres on a million acre forest, the impacts should be the same. Suitability is merely a human construct and does not tell us anything about impacts.

During the development of the 2005 Rule, Chris Iverson used to call this the Chugach/Tongass difference- you don’t need to analyze as much when you don’t do as much. The concept seems pretty straightforward. I was just trying to quantify “not doing as much” by looking at acres.

What counts as a vegetation treatment?
Here’s a possible list: prescribed burns, mastication, felling without removal (precommercial thinning might fall in here), felling with removal, felling with removal using temporary roads (commercial thinning would fall in here). As a person who has spent recent weeks reviewing a roadless EIS, I can tell you they all have different impacts. I would tend to stick to counting felling with removal and using temporary roads. Another topic is whether the treatment “counts” if the trees are dead. It seems like sedimentation effects of temporary roads would be more or less the same, but dead trees will fall anyway. Then, often, more trees die while people are planning projects. So to make counting easier, I would argue that a good estimate for our purposes (how much are our treatments impacting the land?) would be the acreage of all projects that have felling with removal, either live or dead trees.

What length of time should be analyzed? Probably the last 10 years would give us a good estimate of what we are currently doing, although some might argue for five. If we go too far back, we get to a time when the world was different. If we take too few years, we could allow unusual years to unduly influence the total.

The Montana Conundrum- Guest Post by Derek Weidensee

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All decked out but no place to go: photo of roadside hazard tree removal in bark beetle country.

And then we come to Montana, which still has a timber industry. Even though many environmentalists have stopped litigating, some groups still litigate even “healthy forest” timber sales. Why hasn’t Montana succeeded in ending litigation where the other areas have? The majority of the public in Colorado, Arizona, and Lake Tahoe tend to consider themselves “environmentalists”. The majority in Montana wouldn’t. Could it be that we have a very ironic anomaly where increased logging can only occur where the majority consider themselves to be environmentalists?

Sometimes in order to better understand a hotly debated issue such as logging we get sucked into the details. This has the unfortunate result of losing sight of the “big picture”. We get so lost in the micro, we lose sight of the macro. Big numbers by themselves don’t mean anything, only percentages can lead us to perspective.

Perhaps it would be informative to discuss how much has been logged. The following percentages come from the USFS forest inventory analysis (FIA) reports (can you find the misspelling on this web page?) and the USFS “cut and sold” reports which list harvest acreage for every national forest for every year back to 1945. The following percentages are based on “forested acreage”. No water, rock, or grass acres were used in my calculations.

The following table represents the amount of “forested acres” that were logged in the past 50 years: Lolo…………………………………..17%
Kootenai……………………………..25%
Beaverhead-Deerodge……………5%
Helena………………………………..7%
Flathead…………………………….13%
Gallatin……………………………….7%
Let’s focus on the 5% that was logged on the Beaverhead Deerlodge National Forest since it’s the focus of Tester’s Beaverhead Partnership collaboration. 5% sounds pretty sustainable to me. I mentioned the above numbers to two prominent Montana environmentalists. It was the first they heard of it. I think it would help us all to learn together to start from a joint basis of facts.

The Partnership plan proposes to log 70,000 acres in ten years. Sounds like a lot-until you find out it’s only 2.5% of the “forested acreage”. If you projected that out 50 years, that would mean that 18% would be logged in 100 years. By that time the sapling that grew up in a clearcut done in 1960 would be ready for harvest. If 80% of the landscape for natural processes is not enough, what is?

In the five years ending in 2008, the BDNF logged an average of 500 acres/year. That’s .02% of the forested acreage. At that rate it’ll take 50 years to log 1%! In the last five years the Lolo harvested 2500 acres/year. At that rate it’ll take 50 years to log 7%. A lot of these groups had, in the past, advocated a “zero cut” on national forests. Isn’t 500 acres per year close enough to zero?

On forests that aren’t litigated, the NEPA mandated EA’s get pretty small. I compared one in Montana to one in Colorado. They were both MPB salvage timber sales. The one in Montana treated 1300 acres and ran to 200 pages, the one in Colorado treated 4,000 acres and ran to 57 pages!

Finally, the biggest cause of all should be knowing that environmentalists are good people at heart. They’re not evil. They’re good fathers and husbands. I’ve read the 1985 Lolo forest plan. There’s no doubt they planned to convert 90% of the Lolo to a tree farm by the year 2050. I’ve read USFS inventories from 1950. A third of NW Montana was old growth. There’s no doubt there’s less today. You’ve stopped old growth logging. You’ve set aside roadless. Our life ambition is to be successful at our work. You have been successful.

I also know that the pendulum of public policy in this country swings to the extremes. I’m sure the “zero cut” groups never dreamed they would have stopped all logging so easily. The USFS responded to “changing public values” in the 90’s by scaling back timber harvest. I’m sure they never dreamed it would go too far (I’ve always wanted to ask Jack Ward Thomas where he wanted it to be). Let’s hope the pendulum stops somewhere in the middle.

Note from Sharon. I tried to check Derek’s facts on the internet, but it wasn’t as easy as a person might think without going into corporate databases.

Montana has more litigation and appeals (as described in the GAO study) due to (here are a variety of hypotheses):

Venue shopping by organizations who want to win
The old timber industry built up an associated appeals and litigation industry which is continuing
People only trust that fuels treatments are needed if they aren’t sold to the timber industry.
People in Colorado just want those dead trees outta there and don’t care who takes them.
Other hypotheses?

I also tried to run down all the ongoing litigation of timber and fuels projects in Colorado. I could only find two. One deals with a lawyer/neighbor of the project; the other is a law school class project. So litigation does not seem like a serious problem here.

I also attended a speech by Secretary Vilsack and one by Governor Ritter on Friday in Fort Collins who were both very strongly for using the dead trees that we have everywhere in stacks in bark beetle country. If it is about using wood, as opposed to cutting trees, a biomass industry could start the litigation dynamic all over again. Yet those hazard trees in the photo could be used for various purposes, including to reduce fossil fuel usage. That’s why it would be good to understand the real reasons behind litigation in different areas of the country.

Finally, while trying to check on acreages, I ran across this link to a study that described 8-10 K acres of treatment on the San Juan (this study is entirely very interesting) with the goal of getting up to 20-30 K (only 10% mechanical, most prescribed burning). My colleagues assure me that there are plenty of environmental lawyers in Durango, yet they are not litigated on fuels treatment projects.

Also I see this AP report of a hazard tree removal project along roads on the Helena that is about 10K acres on the Helena over 5-7 years. Will the advent of bark beetle mortality make Montana become more like Colorado in terms of appeals and litigation?

What do you think about the Montana Conundrum? Is your state more like Montana or Colorado?

Ski Area Development NEPA- Two or Three Layer Process?

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Here’s a story from the Aspen Daily News about a recent case on a specific ski area development, a ski trail on Burnt Mountain East at Snowmass Ski Area.

In discussing forest planning, we talk about doing NEPA at a more conceptual level, and then at a project level (oil and gas leasing decision, travel management, fuel treatments, etc.). Here is some of the same conversation around two layers of ski area NEPA- which leaves, including forest plans, actually a three- layer analysis. Could this decision process be designed better?

Cumulative Effects Analysis – A Guest Post by Courtney Schultz

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Attached is a piece I wrote that came out of my dissertation research on how the Forest Service handles cumulative effects analysis, particularly when it involves resources that see effects over long temporal and broad geographic scales. This article came out in Bioscience this month and is a short piece that focuses especially on the limitations of how we do the analysis for wildlife species. My intention was to look at the requirement and at current practice and provide a critical assessment of where/how it falls short, where it works, and what are impediments to and opportunities for improvement. I’d be interested to hear what you all think. Having worked as a PMF (Presidential Management Fellow) for the last year, a question that looms large for me and that I would like to have addressed more is: What could practitioners (from district to regional offices) do to improve analysis with the resources available? I touch on this to some extent, but I’d like to keep exploring it. I look forward to hearing any of your thoughts and feedback.

Courtney Schultz is currently a Presidential Management Fellow with the U.S. Forest Service. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Montana in the College of Forestry and Conservation and this fall will begin work as an assistant professor of forest and natural resource policy at Colorado State University.