Apparently the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission Report was pulled from the USDA website, but not other USG websites.
Here’s the USDA website. With all the other stuff about the Commission but not the report. But the report is still there, but not the link to the other site, apparently. I found it at the US Fire Administration website.
Intentional? Mistake? Over-reaction to some request? Does anyone know?
New Admin.. if you are reading, please set up a place to receive info from the public on missing/broken links.
As promised, this is the first of (at least) two posts on “what people can do about wildfires like those in California?”. Like many problems, there are many “little” things that can be done by a variety of people in different situations to improve the situation. In a way, these are our toughest problems, because they require focused attention over time. People from different disciplines with different interests need to be organized in some fashion to all work together toward the same goal. You have to get into the weeds to make a difference, and be comfortable listening to people with whom you might not have much in common.
We can divide the different pieces of the problem in this way:
1. Improving what suppression folks do and how they do it.
2. Improving what homeowners do.
3. Improving what wildland vegetation managers do.
4. Improving what communities do, aside from strict suppression, like code requirements and evacuation planning. Generally I’d call this “things generally found in a CWPP” (Community Wildfire Prevention Program) although CWPPs can be uneven and not updated. How is wildfire incorporated into community planning and activities?
5. Reducing sources of ignition.
Can you think of others?
On TSW, we spend a great deal of time on 3, and despite the fact that LA fires were in coastal sage-scrub and other brushlands, I think we can skip it.
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So I’ll start with improving suppression.
Turns out that suppression folks have many ideas about this, from the macro to the micro. I’ll point you first to this excellent interview by the Hotshot Wakeup with new Senator Sheehy of Montana, who founded Bridger Aerospace:
Bridger has become a leader in fighting wildfires, specializing in aerial fire-mapping operations, air attack, aerial fire suppression, and wildland firefighter technologies. We focus on providing the most effective and modern capabilities to fight fires from the air, supported by a world-class team and state-of-the-art facilities.
Our priority is to address the increasing threat of economic and environmental damage caused by wildfires and to provide support for ground-based firefighters.
The interview was interesting for a number of reasons. I asked the Sheehy media folks for summaries of his positions, because he is quite articulate on these issues, but I haven’t heard back, so you will get my interpretation (and please listen yourself, it’s not that long). First of all, Sen. Sheehy, having been a Seal and Veteran, brings the idea that “if firefighters are risking their lives, we should pay them decently and give them some of the same benefits we give veterans.” He also said something like “since so much of the FS budget goes to fire, they should have leadership from the fire community,” kind of implying that the new Chief should be from that community. Side note: ensuring casualty assistance for firefighters is included in the current Fix our Forests Act in the House.
This hearkens a bit to the old “should fire folks be put into a separate agency” which has been brewing for decades. Side note: the Fix our Forests Act requires a study by GAO which includes:
SEC. 304. GAO study on Forest Service policies.
Not later than 3 years after the date of enactment of this Act, the Comptroller General of the United States shall—
(1) conduct a study evaluating—
(A) the effectiveness of Forest Service wildland firefighting operations;
(B) transparency and accountability measures in the Forest Service’s budget and accounting process; and
(C) the suitability and feasibility of establishing a new Federal agency with the responsibility of responding and suppressing wildland fires on Federal lands; and
(2) submit to Congress a report that describes the results of the study required under paragraph (1).
Both the interview with Sheehy, and the interview with Orange County Fire Chief Brian Fennessy, had many ideas for improving suppression, including ordering difficulties, lack of communication with the water folks, and other coordination and communication issues. And some of the commenters there thought that those improvements would be good, but wouldn’t help with these kinds of fires. As a non-fire person, what I gleaned from this is that like any human institution, or inter-agency combination of such, there are tedious details about working efficiently and successfully that need to be attended to. Via after-action reviews, fire folks are better than most (I’m still waiting on the Covid response after-action review). But it requires constant attention to keep the wheels greased, the communications happening, and the old ways or systems or regulations updated. The folks who attend to this are the unsung heroes of any organization.
When catastrophic fires occur, experts often blame the so-called wildland-urban interface, the vulnerable region on the perimeter of cities and suburbs where an abundance of vegetation in rugged terrain is susceptible to burning.
Yet the fire disasters that we’re seeing today are less wildland fires than urban fires, Cohen said. Shifting this understanding could lead to more effective prevention strategies.
I agree that it’s difficult to change the narrative from “people shouldn’t build there” to “how can we make cities and suburbs manage wildfire better?”.
“We’re not recognizing, analyzing, questioning how we’re failing,” Cohen said. “We just think we need more airplanes and more helicopters flying 24 hours a day.”
More CL-415 super-scoopers or Firehawk helicopters will not help when water is being dropped into 60 mph wind gusts.
“We don’t necessarily need a trillion-dollar program and a fire czar to get control of the fire problem,” Pyne said. “What we need are a thousand things that tweak the environment in favorable ways such that we can prevent these eruptions.”
For example, municipal and fire prevention agencies must give property owners advance — and continual — warnings to clear dead vegetation and to wet dry brush within 10 feet of the house with periodic, prolonged sprinklings.
I wish the reporter had asked more questions about this:
And while climate change is increasing their frequency and severity, Pyne argues that a society dependent on fossil fuels plays a significant role as well.
“A fossil-fuel society remakes landscapes as well by affecting how humans organize agriculture, urban development, the placement of roads and power lines,” he said.
I’m not sure that that’s true. Maybe it depends on the part of the country you are from. And it’s kind of hard to imagine a fossil-fuel free society in the past, because coal was important for the development of industry and transportation. I guess another society would have stuck with horses and wood for fuel? I’m sure my ancestors came to the US on fossil-fueled ships, so maybe only immigrants from the age of sail? I’m more with Cohen on this one.
For Cohen, shifting the conversation away from climate change is important because it gives us more control over our fire environment and will ultimately make us less vulnerable to these disasters.
“We don’t have to solve climate change in order to solve our community wildfire risk problem,” he said.
Like almost all complex problems or issues, there are many moving parts that can, and should be, improved at the same time.
In the aftermath of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 — 17,000 structures destroyed and more than 100,000 residents left homeless — city planners and local governments began to focus on fire protection engineering as a way of keeping cities safe.
“The idea was not to catch the arsonist or the mythical cow that kicked over the lantern in Chicago,” Cohen said. “Experts began to consider the role that our buildings played in creating the problem.”
Yes, but if there was a new pattern of behavior that led to many more ignitions, certainly that would be a piece of the puzzle. Or if certain things, say powerlines, had a pattern of causing ignitions, you would work on reducing the hazard. You certainly would if you were a power company who didn’t want to go bankrupt from litigation.
It says photo by NASA but I found it at https://www.gallatinscience.org/
Well, we’ve all had a chance to read many wildfire news stories. Reporters of all abilities and proclivities have swarmed upon the tragedy in LA like ravens on a bison carcass.
I’ll attempt to group them here. It’s interesting to me that the blaming effort tends to be big picture, and the fixing effort tends to be lots of little things. This is not unlike our NEPA/project planning discussion. Similarly, the policy discussion tends to take place in “big picture” places, like think tanks, law schools, other academia, and political entities; while practitioners are often not involved in the discussions. We also need to pay attention for how the specific can lead incorrectly to grandiose prescriptions and vice versa. For example, these fires are not in forests… so let’s not even introduce our usual forest discussions. This seems obvious, but folks like to ride any disaster horse toward their preferred destination. Specific- not forest.
Twenty-seven years ago, Mike Davis wrote Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. One of the chapters is titled “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.” In it, he argued that the area between the beach and the Santa Monica Mountains simply never should have been developed. No matter what measures we take to prevent it, those hills are going to burn, and the houses we erect upon them are only so much kindling.
OK, as a former resident of a nearby and less well-off area, I would have liked it all turned into a park so I could visit. And that (Malibu and environs) is a specific area. But does this apply to Altadena, or other places destroyed in this set of wildfires? In fact, some people are suggesting this about all of the west, as well as the SE (hurricanes and floods). Then there are earthquakes.
(2) There’s nothing you can do. High winds, dry veg and houses, and ignitions.
Well, that’s a cheery, and not very helpful, way of looking at things. And as we shall see, there are plenty of things homeowners, communities, and suppression folks can do. In fact, other places, like the Front Range of Colorado have similar conditions in the winter (see the Marshall Fire).
(3) Various “it’s all about climate change” narratives
Then there’s “it’s all about climate change and things will get a lot worse!” and/or “it’s all about climate change so we need to change drastically to keep up.” As you can see, climate change itself can go either way.. giving up and freaking people out, or adding to the impetus for implementing a reset of the whole interlocking systems of development, home hardening, vegetation and suppression.
So many people get stuck here at climate change . but scientists disagree on the proportionate contribution as well as on what we should do about it. Most of us see some possible climate impact. But why is it so important for some to blame climate? Sure that gets politicians off the hook, but is that a good goal? And I don’t understand why the details are so important. Let’s see, what should we do differently if models predict we get these conditions 10 percent to 30 percent more often. How much would our potential fixes change? The conversation also devolves weirdly. Like Steve Koonin writes an article saying “not so climate change”; he’s got the political street cred (Undersecretary for Science at DOE under Obama) but is criticized because he’s “not a climate scientist.” So, as we have seen, Jon Keeley who studies wildfires has one view based on historical records and his own research. But we’ve also seen Dan Swain say (who now works for UC Ag and Natural Resources) quoted.
Swain is big on the “whiplash” of wet springs and dry winters (this is similar to the Marshall Fire). I thought that this was an interesting take by ABC news.
“As Daniel Swain, the lead author of the research and a climate scientists with UCLA explains, “This whiplash sequence in California has increased fire risk twofold: first, by greatly increasing the growth of flammable grass and brush in the months leading up to fire season, and then by drying it out to exceptionally high levels with the extreme dryness and warmth that followed.”
Less than a year ago, Los Angeles had historic flooding and is now facing severe drought conditions. That literally adds fuel to the fire.
Finally, it’s important to reiterate that California has and will always be particularly vulnerable to wildfires simply due to its natural climate. The state historically experiences highly variable weather and climate conditions, typically shifting from periods of very dry to very wet weather.
Across the continental U.S., California has the most year-to-year variability between wet and dry conditions. As you move down into Southern California, that variability increases even more, according to Julie Kalansky, a climate scientist and deputy director of operations at the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Conceivably, wet winters in and of themselves, are not a problem for urban areas. The LA area has a sophisticated system of flood control. An example is the watershed management plan of my home watershed of La Ballona Creek. The urban area is already managed for whiplash, so it seems to me that increased whiplashiness would mostly affect the dry wildland veg getting drier. But how much drier can they get? It seems like too much of this climate discussion gets stuck at the “it’s bad and the reason sounds vaguely plausible” rather than going deeper, into the vegetation or fuels characteristics, and how they are managed today and how that might be expected to change. Because atmospheric scientists aren’t experts on those topics. So when folks say “Koonin isn’t a climate scientist”, I’d say “impacts of climate change are mediated through vegetation, hydrology, suppression and other areas of scientific expertise. It’s the scientific equivalent of “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
(4) Then there’s the political view.. articulated by Sammy Roth, who has changed from being a reporter to a columnist.
For many Angelenos, this is our most jarring confrontation yet with global warming. But hundreds of millions of Americans have faced fossil-fueled disasters, and the politics of climate obstruction have hardly budged……………
None of those climate disasters changed the fact that the Republican Party is almost totally beholden to the fossil fuel industry. None of them changed the fact that the Democratic Party, although largely committed to climate action — see President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act — still hasn’t done nearly enough to phase out fossil fuels.
But what was running the cars that folks evacuated in? Water pumps? Fire trucks? Aviation resources? Could it be that our current physical reality needs to be dealt with alongside climate aspirations? It makes me wonder a bit about whether there is an element in the climate change advocacy movement that was never really about rational approaches to decarbonization, but about sticking it to the the industries- who have traditionally donated and voted for the wrong people in the eyes of some. Will we see big “thank you” banners hanging out for the people who supplied the energy to fight the fires?
And just like the Marshall Fire, we seldom hear “maybe houses shouldn’t be so close together”; “without cars, could people have evacuated safely?” “does it make sense to electrify everything if you have to turn electricity off in high winds?” “could intentional densification have downsides with regard to wildfire resilience?” or other questions that question currently dominant planning paradigms.
On the other side, it’s the “poor management by D Administrations” political view. The political view, in either direction, doesn’t help us at all. Like the framings above, it’s too far away from the real problems and the idea that “if you vote for us everything will be fine” doesn’t seem to be working for either party, and especially not for citizens in general.
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Maybe, just maybe, if we paid more attention to how to fix things, we would involve more people and scientists who understand the problems, practitioners and actually, mutually, improve. With less blame and more creativity; after all that’s the culture of wildfire. Learning organizations, after action reviews, and all that.
As for me, it’s the next layer down that’s interesting. What could communities, homeowners, fire suppression and allied folks, and planners do better? We’ll try to round up those news stories in the next installment.
If you have any other stories you’d like to draw attention to, of the generic persuasion, please post below and add the specific quotes, or describe what about it you think adds value or is off base.
Thanks to the Hotshot Wakeup!. THW made a case in his update today for not putting all one’s political eggs in one basket. According to THW, Sheehy is supportive of firefighter pay.
In November, Americans made clear they want political outsiders to come in and put a stop to status quo politics in D.C. The people want change, and now is the time to bring it by reining in our runaway federal bureaucracy, cutting waste, restoring common sense, and building a transparent government that is actually accountable to everyday Americans.
With President Trump leading the charge, and Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy at the helm of the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), we have a historic opportunity to radically disrupt business as usual, fundamentally reform the federal government, and reorient the mission back to serving the taxpayer.
One area DOGE should focus on: wildfire. Wildfires cost us hundreds of billions in economic impact, harming millions of Americans each year, yet our government response hasn’t changed in decades.
As an aerial firefighter myself, I know firsthand the devastation wildfires cause and have a unique perspective on how the federal government has failed on this issue.
Wildfire management system consists of a plethora of overlapping government agencies and private commercial ventures working within a splintered infrastructure that leads to delayed responses and devastating results – too many acres burned, critical infrastructure and structures destroyed, negative health impacts, lives lost, and communities devastated.
There are dozens of state and federal agencies responsible for wildfire suppression, yet there is no clear accountability nor a national wildfire suppression standard. To put that into perspective, the National Fire Protection Association sets the standard for structure fire response at five minutes and 20 seconds, which reduced civilian deaths by 70%. There is no similar standard for wildfire suppression.
We have brave, selfless public servants who put their lives on the line to fight these fires. I was water-bombing fires and protecting our communities as recently as August alongside these heroes. They are not the problem. The problem lies with bureaucratic leadership and layers of red tape failing the folks on the ground, meaning an overhaul of the federal wildfire system is a great place for DOGE to start.
Adopting a more proactive, aggressive initial attack policy across agencies would dramatically reduce costs and damages. Aggressive initial attack relies on utilizing private resources, which are usually the quickest, most effective response option if we want to limit the size and scope of wildfire damage.
The private sector always has and always will produce new innovations and better results faster and cheaper than the government. The same holds true in wildfire response. We must embrace this truth. Fostering stronger public-private partnerships with the wildland fire industry is essential.
DOGE can help the federal government embrace private partnerships to leverage investment in innovative technologies like advanced aircraft, wildfire intelligence systems, unmanned aerial systems (UAS), and even thermally equipped satellites to better accomplish the mission: protecting people, property, public lands and communities from wildfires.
Together we can incorporate the most innovative technologies and strategies, establish clear roles and missions for federal agencies serving alongside private entities, and build an inclusive national wildfire strategy that best leverages all available resources.
As the only aerial firefighter in the Senate, I look forward to working with DOGE to lead the charge on reshaping our approach to wildfire management in America.
We can streamline wildland firefighting efforts, remove outdated bureaucratic obstacles to getting the job done and cut government waste. We can fight fires better, stronger and faster. And we can do more for our communities threatened by wildfires at a lower cost for American taxpayers.
This is an area that is ripe for collaboration between folks on both sides of the aisle. It doesn’t matter what party you’re from; it’s clear that the federal government must do a better job protecting our communities and public lands from wildfires.
I will work with Republicans and Democrats to deliver commonsense solutions to more effectively fight the devastating threat of wildfires. Americans nationwide made it clear they expect more out of their government, and it’s time we seize the moment and deliver on the mandate voters gave us.
I’m always interested in people seeking agreement about forest issues, and Oregon seems to be a long-time source of ongoing controversy. Thanks to Nick Smith for this one.
There was an interview on Jefferson Public Radio, but I couldn’t find it. Here’s the description.
The so-called “O&C lands” of Western Oregon have long been a focus of contention. They are lands once given by the federal government to the Oregon & California Railroad (O&C), taken back by the feds, then managed under law by the federal Bureau of Land Management.
The bone of contention comes from the sharing of timber receipts from those lands with the 18 O&C counties, which puts pressure on those lands to produce timber.
The nonprofit Forest Bridges proposes bringing the multiple sides of the debate together, to agree on timber cutting methods, and–more importantly–which land to include in the timber base. Forest Bridges Executive Director Denise Barrett gives us an interview with an overview.
Forest Bridges has a good website with lots of info. Their Principles of Agreement are here.
Below is a snapshot of their principles of agreement. Feel free to discuss anything on the website in the comments.
I’m following up on Jon’s idea that laws help us figure out what are “right” decisions. I think the O&C story is a illustration of how the laws’ interpretation by the courts can be not particularly helpful if a decision has to be made in real time (that is, before the end of litigation, appeals and so on.) I know many TSW readers know a great deal about this..so hopefully can give us additional information and perspective. Here’s a link to this op-ed in the Mail-Tribune (from Medford? Hard to tell from website).
A federal judge’s ruling that 40,000 acres of former Oregon & California Railroad lands in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument must remain in timber production is far from the last word on this question, and even if it is eventually upheld, it would affect only a portion of monument land and perhaps much less than the 40,000 acres in the ruling.
Judge Richard Leon of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., ruled in a case filed by the American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry group. The AFRC argued that the expansion of the monument declared by President Barack Obama in 2017 improperly overturned the intent of Congress when it passed the O&C Act in 1937, designating more than 2 million acres of forest in 18 Western Oregon counties for sustainable timber production. Congress had granted title to the lands in 1866 to the railroad company as incentive to complete the Oregon portion of the Portland to San Francisco railroad. When the company failed to sell the land to settlers as required, Congress took it back in 1916, and added more acres from a similar land grant in 1919. The O&C Act placed all those lands under the jurisdiction of the Interior Department to be managed by the Bureau of Land Management for permanent forest production.
This E&E News story is also interesting with more legal details..
Here’s AFRC’s side of the story (from their newsletter):
In late 2019, the U.S. District Court in Washington D.C. issued favorable rulings in two major cases enforcing the O&C Act. (October and November 2019 newsletters). The Swanson III case seeks to
require BLM to offer its declared allowable sale quantity (ASQ) each year, which is one of the mandates of the O&C Act. The other case involves challenges led by AFRC and the Association of O&C Counties to the 2016 Resource Management Plans (RMPs) for western Oregon BLM lands.
Judge Leon ruled in September, “Every year, BLM is required to sell or offer for sale an amount of timber that is not less than the declared annual sustained yield capacity of the timberland subject to the O&C Act.” He also found that “the record establishes that BLM has repeatedly failed to comply with the O&C Act’s timber sale mandate.” In November, he ruled that the 2016 RMPs violated the O&C Act’s mandate that all O&C timberlands “shall be managed” for “permanent forest production” under sustained yield principles. This is because the RMPs set aside 80% of the land base into “reserves” where harvest is severely curtailed.
The court instructed the parties to file proposals in these cases as to the appropriate remedy, which were submitted on January 27. The plaintiffs’ proposal, incorporating both Swanson III and the RMP challenges, involves preparation of an amended or revised plan, an ongoing requirement to sell the ASQ, and interim direction on volume while the plan is being reviewed. The government’s proposals ask in large part for the Court to return BLM to an open-ended administrative process while keeping the existing plans in place. Response briefs will be filed in late February and a final order could be issued any time after that.
In the November ruling, Judge Leon also invalidated President Obama’s expansion of the Cascade Siskiyou National Monument that encompassed about 40,000 acres of O&C lands. Both the government
and intervening environmental groups have appealed the ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, also called the “D.C. Circuit.” Resolution of the appeal is likely to take at least 12-15 months.
Does anyone know why the “government” chose to appeal the decision?
Siskiyou Mountains Salmander, Plethodon stormi, (c) 2005 William Flaxington
The Center for Biological Diversity has notifiedthe U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service of its intent to sue for failure to respond to its petition to list the Siskiyou Mountains salamander as a threatened or endangered species. The species is found primarily on BLM lands, but also on the Rogue River-Siskiyou and Klamath National Forests. Prior listings were avoided largely because of provisions in the Northwest Forest Plan to protect the species:
Conservation groups first petitioned for protection of the salamander under the Endangered Species Act in 2004. To prevent the species’ listing, the Bureau of Land Management (“BLM”) and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service signed a conservation agreement in 2007, intended to protect habitat for 110 high-priority salamander sites on federal lands in the Applegate River watershed. In 2008 the Fish and Wildlife Service denied protection for the salamander based on this conservation agreement and old-growth forest protections provided by the Northwest Forest Plan.
The Western Oregon Plan Revision (WOPR) which replaces the Northwest Forest Plan, has the express purpose of substantially increasing logging on BLM lands with the range of the salamander and elsewhere (USBLM 2016, p. 20). The WOPR was originally proposed in 2008 and abandoned by the BLM in 2012 after years of litigation. In August 2016 the BLM issued a final Environmental Impact Statement implementing the WOPR (USBLM 2016).
The WOPR presents a substantial new threat to Siskiyou Mountains salamanders in Oregon because it will allow increased timber harvest in late-successional areas, decrease optimal salamander habitat, increase habitat fragmentation, eliminate requirements to conduct predisturbance surveys in salamander habitat, and allow logging of previously identified known, occupied salamander sites. The WOPR removes protections for salamander populations formerly included in species protection buffers on BLM lands. Although some of the reserves on BLM lands have been enlarged in the WOPR, timber harvest emphasis areas will often be subject to more intensive logging, and logging of known, occupied Siskiyou Mountains salamander sites is allowed.
This demonstrates again the value of including regulatory mechanisms as protective measures in forest plans: they can keep species from being listed under ESA. There is already a pending lawsuit against the new WOPR (now officially called the Resource Management Plans for Western Oregon), and the Forest Service should keep this in mind when it revises its forest plans that are now governed by the Northwest Forest Plan (especially the “survey and manage” requirement).
The trend seems to be in the other direction, however (see also greater sage grouse). And when a species is listed, regulatory mechanisms are needed in forest plans to contribute to their recovery and delisting. Yet the Forest Service is removing such mechanisms from forest plans for grizzly bears, lynx and bull trout (Flathead National Forest), Indiana bats (Daniel Boone National Forest: to “provide flexibility to implement forest management activities”), and black-footed ferrets (Thunder Basin National Grassland: “greater emphasis on control and active management of prairie dog colonies to address significant concerns related to health, safety, and economic impacts on neighboring landowners”). Since plant and animal diversity was one of the main reasons for NFMA it shouldn’t be a big surprise to see these kinds of retrograde actions ending up in court.
Oregon Wild has compiled an interactive map of logged and thinned areas on public and private lands across the state of Oregon. If nothing else, it’s hard to look at this and accuse anyone wanting to keep logging out of new parts of their public lands of being an “extremist.”
Oregon Wild intends to use this mapping tool to help advocate for forest conservation and demonstrate that while there have been temporal pulses of increased logging intensity over the years, logging is always very active on both public and private forests in Oregon. In fact, if anything, the analysis on this site underrepresents the true extent of logging taking place.
The tool is also a great visualization of the few Wilderness and roadless wild lands remaining in the state – while it does not highlight these areas, they are clearly visible by their noticeable lack of logging units. These last bastions of wild landscapes are far too rare in Oregon, a reason Oregon Wild is working to protect what is left.
We can also use the tool to push back on misinformation spouted by timber interests.
Many say that logging on public land was “shut-down” by the spotted owl and Northwest Forest Plan, first implemented in 1994, but the data shows that logging continued apace throughout the Northwest Forest Plan region after the plan was adopted.
Logging advocates also say we need the increase the “pace and scale” of logging to reduce fire hazard in the dry forests of eastern and southwest Oregon, but the data show that thinning has already occurred across vast portions of these forests.
Three environmental groups are suing the U.S. Forest Service to stop an 847-acre logging project on the Umpqua National Forest in southern Oregon, about 22 miles southeast of Cottage Grove.
Red tree vole surveys were also conducted during the fall of 2016. According to the lawsuit, the Northwest Ecosystem Survey Team found 75 vole nests in the forests slated for logging, but the Forest Service decided to proceed with the project.
The North Oregon Coast population of voles is considered a candidate for listing under the Endangered Species Act by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, from the Siuslaw River north to the Columbia River, due to habitat loss and fragmentation.
(A candidate species is warranted for listing, but precluded by higher priorities.)
But here’s the part I thought might be interesting: “The Bureau of Land Management also lifted survey and management guidelines for the species in 2016.” As things get worse off for a species everywhere else, the national forests will necessarily be under more pressure to provide regulatory mechanisms to protect the species, and conditions external to a national forest will make it harder and more important to provide conditions on the national forest that promote a viable population. (Implications for revising the northwest forest plans?)
Lone Rock Timber Management Company has asked the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office for additional patrols in response to a threat made against the company by conservationists, according to the sheriff’s call logs.
The call, made just before 6 p.m. Thursday, said a group of conservationists are upset that Lone Rock is logging in the Susan Creek area, land managed by the Bureau of Land Management, and are threatening to burn Lone Rock “to the ground.”
Posted on Facebook on May 7, 2018 by Francis Eatherington:
“Yesterday we hiked into the BLM forest that Lone Rock Timber had threatened to cut down for a new road, and we found it just cut down. Very sad. All the big trees were horizontal on the ground. We counted the rings on some stumps and found them to be 400 years old. On the hike in we went past LRT’s 19-acre plantation they had just cut and yarded, and we could see about an acre of tiny trees they had left to cut at the top of their unit. Even though it was clearcut 40-years ago, this time LRT insisted they had to cut this 70’-wide road through BLM land to get a mechanical harvester into that little acre they had left. They couldn’t cut it manually like they did before. This is an obvious scam by Lone Rock – they will get far more timber from our public old growth forest then they will access from their land. Not only are the old-growth trees gone, a new road bulldozed across this ancient forest will be a horrible scar, spreading it’s edge-effect far into the remaining old growth forest.”
Posted on Facebook on May 7, 2018 by Doug Heiken:
“The reason that Lone Rock Timber gave for needing access through this stand of ancient trees, was they needed to get a mechanical harvester (tree killing robot) into the area so they could log a stand of small trees on their own land. However, before the road even got built Lone Rock was able to log all but about 1 acre of their land. Which means these ancient trees fell just so they could bring their robot in to fell an acre of second growth. This is SO wrong! I smell a scam. The timber industry is to blame and BLM is complicit.”
[ADDITIONAL INFORMATION BELOW, POSTED BY SF]
Here seens a fair-minded piece that looks at (and talks to) both sides (and explains the O&C rights of way). But be careful, as there are a couple of interesting stories and you only get five free ones.
In this case they claim that BLM has embarked on a ‘back-room deal with Lone Rock Timber to log ancient forests,’ when the truth of the matter is that Lone Rock Timber has the legal right under our reciprocal right-of-way agreement with the BLM to construct the road to gain access to our property,” Luther said, adding some of the trees in the posted photos are outside of the proposed logging area.
If I lived in the area, I would be tempted to go see for myself (and share the photos here).