Old Growth

A Revisit with Chief Thomas on the Eve of a New Journey Down the Old-Growth Trail

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Jack Thomas in the Eagle Cap Wilderness, Oregon, August 1996.

 

Since this could be 2023’s Old Growth Week, based on a stakeholder update planned for tomorrow with news of some MOG policy, I thought it might be fun to go back in time to the 90’s, 92, to be exact, and see how far we’ve come on the Old Growth issue. We can revisit Chief Jack Ward Thomas’s 1992 Albright Lecture. It’s interesting to think about what has or has not changed, with the increased focus on climate change, carbon and wildfire- and what hasn’t, in the last thirty years.  And to think about where the issue will be in the next thirty years.  Will we still be fighting about it?  Will old growth be dead from climate change or burned up or …? Or will we have finally reached some kind of peace, in the direction that Chief Thomas describes.

It’s got a bit about planning and is worth rereading in its entirety, but I picked out a few excerpts below.

HA! Things Are Not What They Seem

Perhaps, further down line, it will be possible to discern exactly the attributes of owl habitat. If so, perhaps such habitat can be provided through innovative silviculture (Thomas et al. 1990).

Aha! So it is simply a question of habitat for spotted owls. If we can provide for owls with appropriate silviculture, there will be no need for reserving mature and old-growth forests. But, on the other hand, other species of plants and animals have evolved with or are disproportionately associated with old-growth. Some of these species will, almost certainly, end up in threatened status.

Aha! This is not only a question about owl habitat. It is, really, a question of old-growth management. But, the attributes of old-growth that provide the niches that support the animal species interact in mysterious ways to make up a forest ecosystem.

Aha! So, it is not really an old-growth question. It is an ecosystem question.

But, increasing knowledge indicates that the sizes, distribution, and connectivity between habitat patches are critical variables to consider in ensuring that the peculiar ecosystem retains the full inherent complement of species and ecological processes (Thomas 1979, Nass 1983, Harris 1984, and Probst and Crow 1991).

Aha! The issue is not just an ecosystem question. It is an ecosystem question and at landscape scale.

But, some people devoted to the preservation of old growth know or care little about the biological aspects of the issue. They simply see great beauty in the old-growth forests. Some perceive a spiritual value in the contact with and the existence of such forests.

Aha! So, it is not only a question of biological attributes but also of aesthetic and spiritual values.

But, if it is an ecosystem question that must be addressed at the landscape scale, what must this landscape accommodate? There are people in that landscape – part and parcel along with the plantations, the “ancient cathedral” forests, clearcuts, the elk and owls, and the streams and fish.

These people have desires, differing values, and untold aspirations that demand satisfaction. Each sees and wants different things from the landscape of which they too are part. And, they want their children and grandchildren to have these same things.

Aha! Then it really is an ecosystem sustainability question at a geographic scale where protection of nature, the production of goods and services for people, and the lifestyles of forest users must strike an enduring balance.

How do we do that?

And this..

Will the path we have been on for 50 years take us and our forests to a desired future state?

Consider the following. The first word in the pairs of words is where we have been and are. The second word is what we need to cultivate within ourselves to do a better collaborative job of stewardship. These word pairs are:

functional-interdisciplinary;
competitive-cooperative;
reductionist-holistic;
deterministic-stochastic;
use-value;
linear-interdependent;
rain in g-education;
simplify-diversify;
short term-long term;
site-landscape;
individuals-communities;
gladiator-diplomat;
rigid-flexible;
clever-wise; and
narrow-broad.
But, the fighting goes on and accelerates infrequency and intensity. The people, our sense of community, and the forest are bruised and battered in the process. The gladiators never tire of the fight – it is what they do. The fight itself provides their sustenance. I detect, however, that many concerned about forests we collectively own have long since approached exhaustion.

That may be good news, for with exhaustion, there may come a willingness to seek an answer to the statement made earlier, “There must be a better way.”

That better way can be built on new knowledge and past experiences and on changes in personal and societal concepts. And, that better way can be embraced because the old way has led us to a place where we cannot stand for long.

Shakespeare said (Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 2) “…the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves…”

If the fault lies within us, the solution also resides in us as well.

Jack, .. we’re still on the path you laid out.. still looking for the diplomats. If you and your upstairs associates can help, we’d like to put in a request for more of these.

MOG Proposal-Soon To Come Out as Plan Amendments Not Regulation

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Despite MOG not being on the regulatory agenda as I posted yesterday, within minutes I heard that it is coming out soon. Because it won’t be a regulation but rather a bunch of plan amendments, so that explains it, I guess.  I was hoping, based on climate and wildfire emergencies  for each forest to do a fire plan amendment focusing on delineating and maintaining PODs and fuelbreaks, plus fire use, so maybe there is some of that in there.

Here’s a story from E&E News.

The Biden administration is closing in on a proposal to protect old-growth forests on federal land while allowing some tree thinning and timber harvesting, groups familiar with the basic outlines of the plan said.

While the fine details of the proposal, to be published in the Federal Register within days, are closely guarded, policy groups said they expect the Forest Service to pursue forest plan amendments across the 193 million-acre national forest system that would limit — but not necessarily eliminate — logging in remaining old-growth stands.

The Forest Service referred questions to the Department of Agriculture, which didn’t immediately return a request for comment. The actions stem from an April 2022 executive order from President Joe Biden directing an inventory of mature and old-growth forest on federal land and measures to protect those areas for carbon sequestration and other purposes.
By amending forest plans — which are the guiding documents for managing each forest — the USDA would avoid the more lengthy route of proposing a formal rulemaking that would go past the current Biden administration. Still, forest plan amendments are subject to public comment periods that would stretch a few months, and there’s no guarantee that they’ll
proceed free of legal challenges that could delay or derail the process.
The environmental impact statement associated with a forest plan amendment would also take considerable staff time for an agency that’s already acknowledged being stretched.
Groups in contact with the Forest Service said they don’t expect the administration to address “mature” forests — or those that haven’t quite reached old-growth status — at length in this proposal, which would be a disappointment to environmental organizations that say those forests, too, deserve greater protections.
The administration’s actions could bring more consistency to managing old growth around the country, said Sam Evans, senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center in Asheville, N.C.
“Protecting and restoring older forests is mission critical for the Forest Service. Across the board, it’s the single best way to protect rare species, store carbon, provide clean water and increase resilience to wildfire,” said Evans, who leads the organization’s national forests and parks program. Evans said forest plans are “wildly inconsistent” in how they treat areas of old growth, which can be areas that were never logged or have over time taken on similar characteristics.
The plan for the Nantahala and Pisgah national forests in North Carolina allows for logging old growth to encourage the creation of younger forest, for instance, while the Custer Gallatin National Forest in Montana requires projects to “retain old growth characteristics” while allowing projects in old-growth areas as part of meeting that objective, he said.
“There’s really no excuse for the lack of consistency. Cutting old growth in some places while protecting it in others will never make any real progress toward restoring our forests,” Evans said.
Seeking a consistent approach from one end of the country to the other presents its own challenges, advocates of a more intensive management approach say, because protecting an old-growth forest in fire- and drought-prone California, for instance, may require different approaches from protecting old growth in the rainforests of Alaska or the hardwood forests of the eastern U.S. And while some environmental groups say logging is the greatest threat to old-growth forests, the Forest Service is casting threats such as climate change and associated drought, wildfire, disease and pests as the main dangers — which can be addressed through a more intensive approach to managing forests.

In some places, the Forest Service continues to pursue timber sales in old-growth stands even though Biden pledged through an executive order to protect old-growth forests as a pillar of his climate policy.

I keep hearing this on various webinars and have asked the individuals for names of projects.  With regard to ones I’ve looked at, thinning in old forests, it’s intended to protect old trees in old-growth forests.

A lobbyist who works with the wood products industry said revising forest plans to reduce management — which can include thinning to reduce the spread of wildfire as well as larger-scale logging — misses an industry point: that healthy forests and such projects go hand in hand. “Millions of acres of forests of all ages are vulnerable to fires, insects and disease — which the Forest Service says are the leading causes of forest loss across the National Forest System,” said the lobbyist, who was granted anonymity to protect relationships with the administration. “Yet the administration is forcing the Forest Service to revise over 120 forest plans to impose further restrictions on management. This is an intentional distraction from the mission Congress has assigned to the Forest Service, which is reducing hazardous fuels and protecting communities from wildfires.”

There are lots of us out here that, again, don’t have a timber industry, but still want fuel reduction projects to go ahead.  Maybe we need to start an interest group (Wildfire Resilience Forever?) so we’ll get interviewed?

Forest plans have already become a battleground on the mature and old-growth issue, as critics of large-scale logging say the Forest Service is taking an overly permissive approach that collides with Biden’s executive order, which promised to “institutionalize climate-smart management and conservation strategies that address threats to mature and old-growth forests on Federal lands,” and will be the basis for how the Forest Service determines how and where trees can still be cut to meet the goal.

In October, for instance, the Center for Biological Diversity filed an objection to the new forest plan for the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison national forests in Colorado. Among other complaints, the CBD said the forest plan — which was being developed at the time Biden issued the executive order — doesn’t do much to protect old-growth areas, although it does discuss retaining areas for wildlife habitat and says older trees store the most carbon.

On the other hand, the CBD said, the forest plan doesn’t include an accounting of how much old growth is present on the forests, and it specifically calls for removal of larger trees that the agency said may be most susceptible to beetle infestation. The Forest Service said in the forest plan, “This will temporarily reduce the live tree carbon pool but may increase the rate of carbon uptake and resilience to future disturbance.”

The idea that the GMUG didn’t count the old-growth seems unlikely to me but I will check.

However the administration proceeds, Congress will be tracking the issue as it crafts a new five-year farm bill in 2024, delayed from this year. That legislation’s forestry provisions will protect broad uses of national forests, including for timber production, House Agriculture Chair Glenn “G.T.” Thompson (R-Pa.) told E&E News on Tuesday.
“We want healthy forests, and that means regular harvesting and replanting,” Thompson said. “We’ll see what they say, and then we’ll tell them what they need to do with the farm bill.”

Can’t wait to see what they came up with!

MOG Update and Reporting: The 80’s Are Calling and They Want Their Controversies Back

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Here’s a link to the webinar and they have more stuff posted on their website.

Our friends at E&E News had a piece on it. What was interesting to me is the framing.

The Forest Service’s approach has rankled opponents of old-growth logging and those who say even forests that aren’t quite that old shouldn’t be heavily harvested. But the timber industry and its allies in Congress say the findings underscore a point they’ve made for years: that cutting down trees for wood products from time to time is a part of keeping forests healthy.

Coming from what we might call the areas with much need for fuel treatments and little timber industry (like much of the interior west), it seems like our voices aren’t heard in this debate. I don’t think the timber industry is looking for “heavy” harvests.. I think they are saying that they can use some of this stuff that is removed. This is the old dichotomy.. “logging” supported by “timber industry” and leaving things alone. I feel like the discussion could be back in the 80’s. The other people that aren’t heard in this framing are all those collaborative folks working on zones of agreement and trying to find common ground.

I’m going to quote from the E&E news summary which I think is good (but haven’t double-checked numbers).

1. Logging for timber is not as big a threat to old growth and mature forests as are wildfires, insects and disease.

In slides shared with forest industry representatives and provided to E&E News, the Forest Service said wildfires have eliminated 2.6 million acres of mature forest and 689,000 acres of old growth since 2000 on lands managed by that agency and the Bureau of Land Management. The agency defines old growth as areas that haven’t been logged, for instance, and mature forest as areas that may have been logged in the past and have grown back substantially on the way to becoming old growth again.

In the same period, 1.9 million acres of mature forest was lost to insects and disease, while 134,000 acres of old growth suffered that fate.
“Tree cutting,” which the agency said includes logging but might include other actions, took 214,000 acres of mature forest and 10,000 acres of old growth on Forest Service and BLM lands, the agency said. “Currently, wildfire exacerbated by climate change and fire exclusion is the leading threat, followed by insects/disease,” the Forest Service said in the slides. “Tree
cutting (any removal of trees) is a third relatively minor threat.”

But is, say thinning, a “threat” or is it “protection” from climate-change exacerbated drought or wildfires?
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Sidenote:

Meanwhile, this was not explicitly stated by anyone, but reminds me of an argument I’ve heard in different contexts.

Even if certain activities have only a little impact, those are the ones we can control, so we should further reduce them. Something like bats and white-nosed syndrome, or or many species and climate. It tends to be the same old activities that need to be reduced, based on this argument.

Or wildfire smoke and other sources of pollution.. “Smoke, Screened: The Clean Air Act’s Dirty Secret” as per this article, or this one.

The wildfires, though, could force the EPA’s hand. They could compel the agency to bump Chicago and East St. Louis to a higher nonattainment level and, as a result, trigger tougher remedial actions.

But obviously the remedial actions wouldn’t involve stopping the Canadian wildfires, it would involve ratcheting down the usual PM 2.5 suspects in that state.
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2. Back to the E&E news article:

In total, the inventory shows the 193 million-acre national forest system has about 25 million acres of old growth, 70 million acres of mature forest and a little more than 50 million acres of younger forest. The system includes grasslands and other landscapes.

Older forest is likely to increase over time as younger areas age, the Forest Service said. The increase, estimated at 5.5 percent by 2070 on Forest Service and BLM lands, will slow after that point, officials said, based on agency modeling.

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3. Timber Wars Redux…

To logging critics, the Forest Service’s analysis doesn’t offer much relief. “Current rates of logging are not the only indicator of the precarious state of older forests in the nation,” said Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist at Wild Heritage, a Berkeley, Calif., project of the nonprofit Earth Island Institute.
DellaSala said less old growth is being lost recently because harvests in decades past “nearly liquidated the entire ecosystem.”

Barely a quarter of the nation’s old forests are in protected areas, as in designated wilderness, said DellaSala, who’s called for a halt to logging in old-growth areas. The U.S. needs a “national rulemaking process that protects all remaining older forests and large trees from logging as they are not safe from ongoing or future threats,” he said.

But about 30% are in Roadless, which are not apparently protected to DellaSala. Some people say this because they are not “permanent”. To my mind, as a person who has worked on a tediously litigated (no offense to readers who litigated) Roadless Rule, this is not a meaningful distinction. And 18% of NFS is Wilderness. So that adds up to 48%.

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4. “As much as 81 percent of mature and old growth is in areas with little logging capacity, according to the agency.”

This is an interesting number. It could be interpreted as:
1. The timber industry wouldn’t have that much of an impact if we let them have at the 20 percent (not a popular interpretation, I grant you).
2. Folks who want to thin for mature and old growth protection (either fuel reduction or increasing drought resistance) are going to need megabucks,  because currently there are not markets and viable substitutes for burning into the atmosphere. (We know this)
3. Maybe this isn’t really about logging? So maybe the controversy is between dry forest folks who want thinning (even with no industry available) and wet forest folks who don’t? It’s interesting that the article mentions the Tongass and not the millions of acres of MOG pinyon juniper from this fact sheet.

Pinyon and juniper woodlands are the most abundant forest type in the federal inventory of mature and old-growth forests, with 9 million acres of old-growth pinyon-juniper across BLM and Forest Service lands and an additional 14 million acres of mature pinyon-juniper.

4. Another framing than the aged and decrepit Timber Wars would possibly that Some Mesic/Coastal ENGOs exert an outsized influence over dry forest policy in their quest for a national MOG rule.

Other interpretations welcome.

ANPR Climate Resilient Forests and Grasslands- Update Webinar Link

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I know, I know. A person could get confused because “climate resilience” sounds like its about adaptation, and the MOG discussion seems to be mostly about carbon, or at least the arguments for not cutting trees.. which we have been listening to for 40 years or thereabouts.. are now centered about carbon.  And of course, every little thing the FS does on the landscape needs to have some kind of climate considerations, and has for at least 15 years or so. So the ANPR seems to be asking for “suggestions about anything that the FS does.” I wonder how many other agencies have had a rule making that opens up “everything it does.”

In fact, the FS has what I consider to be an excellent document about climate adaptation.   And many of the people on these calls talk about MOG.  But I’ve been told by internal and external People Who Should Know that it’s really about resilience and not about MOG. Meanwhile ENGOs are working on a MOG policy solution with CEQ, the FS and others.

I’m a general fan of the FS, as you all know, but I would point out a couple of my concerns.   They used an abstraction in the webinar-  “active management” -regularly without defining it.  Fire suppression is active management, prescribed fire, planting trees, timber harvest and so on are all active.  Based on the views of the form letters I read in response to the ANPR and the views of people on our webinars, I’d say that most people with concerns did not want commercial timber harvest, although they said “logging”, which is not exactly well defined at the project level.  Tree cutting, or tree cutting and removal using heavy equipment, or tree cutting and pile burning, or  just commercial timber harvest but maybe not commercial firewood.. So that’s one thing.

My other quibble was with analyzing comments using AI (in this case, natural language processing).  I recently had a bad experience with AI so perhaps am a bit grumpy about it.  You’ll remember I FOIAd both CEQ and USDA for documents with “fire retardant” in them.  USDA gave me the documents they had, as far as I know,  including messages from key people at CEQ.  CEQ did not give me those messages, but did give me a DOE annual report and a mass of unrelated material.  Apparently, that was due to their AI, or perhaps someone did not type in exactly the right search term. It seems to me that using AI is not necessarily increasing transparency nor trust.  I’d argue that to build citizen confidence, each AI application during a test period should have the standard human approach run concurrently and both sets of results published and open for comment (aka Lessons Learned).  I have noticed that contractors and I didn’t always pick the same way of analyzing comments either, so perhaps there’s not one “human” way.  But the results would then be compared in one document that the public could view.   I would see this as needed only for rule making; in my experience, projects are not as complex for content analysis. Also the decision makers for projects and even plans tend to be close enough to the disagreements that they have a base understanding of them.  I am not so sure that’s true of the politicals involved in rule-making.. if they only listen to their friends, then the public comment summaries are key element of their understanding of opposing views.

I’d bet that “double coverage” would be expected and required, say, in fire suppression applications. To increase trust, accountability is also important.  AI, without careful management, could also be an escape valve for accountability, as in “Sorry, folks, the AI did it.” Similar to “it’s not our fault, it’s climate change.”

Anyway,  here’s a link to the presentation. I’m curious what strikes you about it.

E&E News: Forest Service Flooded With Comments on MOG ANPR

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As Jon noted earlier in a different thread, it’s hard to know what exactly groups mean by no “logging”.. so I’d like to bring this discussion to the forefront, because it seems important that we understand what words mean. We can’t even tell if we disagree or not if we don’t use the same definition.

It is confusing..from this Earthjustice press release:

“The public wants the nation’s mature forests and trees to be protected from the chainsaw, and with good reason,” said Garett Rose, senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). “They store carbon. They protect imperiled species. They safeguard key waterways. It’s well past time for the federal land managers to adopt a rule that durably protects these climate-critical trees — and lets them be a key ally in the climate right.”

(I think Rose  meant “fight.”) But chainsaws can’t distinguish if felled trees are going to the sawmill or not.

So let’s look at an E&E story..

The agency reported that more than 495,000 comments came through regulations.gov, and environmental groups say they delivered additional comments in person Thursday as the comment period ended on an advance notice of proposed rulemaking.

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“The primary threat to mature and older forests is logging, not wildfire or climate change,” the Pacific Northwest chapters of Great Old Broads for Wilderness said in a letter typical of advocates for limiting timber production. The organization called for a halt to logging on mature and old-growth forests while the service contemplates a formal rulemaking procedure.

So the GOB group made that claim. That’s not what the data show in the ANPR, though. Unless “primary” has another meaning.


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Agency officials haven’t said how they’ll proceed on regulations or even whether they plan to offer new limits on timber production. But because the call for comments follows President Joe Biden’s executive order directing an inventory of mature and old-growth forest, the timber industry and advocates for more intensive forest management said they worry the latest moves are the first toward heavier restrictions.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Sierra Club and Environment America said preventing the logging of mature and old-growth forests on federal land should be a “cornerstone of U.S. climate policy.” While federal protections such as wilderness designations and roadless-area limits on timber operations prevent logging in many areas of national forests, as much as 50 million acres of mature and old-growth forest on federal land doesn’t have such designations, they said, referring to the recent Forest Service inventory. “If the government lets timber companies chop them down, it will eliminate one of the most effective tools for removing the atmospheric carbon that exacerbates climate change. In addition, it would eliminate essential habitats for countless species and degrade the land,” the groups said in a news release.

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Environment America’s public lands campaign director, Ellen Montgomery, said Friday that while it’s not clear how the Forest Service will proceed, she doubts the administration would put such effort into the matter without planning to propose specific regulations. Time is short, though, she acknowledged, with Biden facing reelection in 2024 and the outcome uncertain. Although the rulemaking could touch on many issues, limiting timber production from national forests is an obvious choice, Montgomery said. “Logging is pretty simple to address,” she said. “We have complete control over what trees get logged or don’t get logged.”

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From the discussion in this news article, it seems like this is the old “no commercial harvest” discussion. But in many places, there is no market or infrastructure and trees are burned in piles. So it’s not clear what these groups mean exactly (we’ll look into their actual comment letters); if a fuels reduction project/thinning is proposed, would it be OK  to fall the thinned material and burn it  in piles rather than allow feds to sell it and be used? And it seems to be about “timber” and perhaps not so much about use for fuelwood or bioenergy? Because the Forest Service and other parts of USDA are researching uses for small diameter heretofore unsaleable material from both private and public lands. So does it really mean no cutting, no using at all, no commercial use, or no using for sawtimber?

The confusion about what “logging” means led in the Colorado Roadless Rule to us using the term “tree-cutting” to clarify that trees can be cut without being removed.  So that gets us into details of the prescription and the harvesting (or not) plan.  Many years ago (fortyish?) the silviculturists in our area went on a field trip to Lake Tahoe, where they were removing fire-wood sized chunks  in wheelbarrows because residents didn’t want the smoke from burnpiles.  On the other hand, many of the people currently involved in MOG (in some interest groups)  don’t have backgrounds in on-the-ground practices, so maybe they’re not aware of all these possible complexities.

Heller also quotes NAFSR (the Forest Service Retirees’ Organization)

The National Association of Forest Service Retirees, in a comment letter, said retaining and expanding mature and old-growth forest isn’t a goal grounded in law.
The association cited the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act of 1960, which established that all forest uses must be considered in planning and management of the land, and said further restrictions on harvest of mature and old-growth trees may go against parts of a 2012 planning rule that’s supposed to govern Forest Service policy.
Drawing on more recent legislation, the retirees group said the potential rulemaking could run against the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, which provided money for stepped-up thinning of federal forests to reduce wildfire threats, including creation of forest fuel breaks.

Now I can’t speak for NAFSR nor other retirees (remember Jon and Jim Furnish and so many more are all retirees!) but I will add my own perspective (and I hope other retirees and others) do as well.

The Congress, at least the House, is interested in spending fuel treatment dollars wisely and getting the funded work done. Remember this “counting fuel acres accountability” bill from spring this year?

As for me, I really don’t care if such a proposed rule would be against MUSYA except for the fact that it would likely be litigated on that basis.  What I mind is asking the agency and partners to revise or terminate the fuel reduction and resilience treatments they’ve been dutifully working on. We know that the Forest Service is having trouble finding skilled employees. It seems like setting them up for even more morale-busting confusion now and down the road.   I want the few of them available to be working on PODs and prescribed and managed fire plans on my neighboring forests, and giving recreation the attention it deserves.

And if such a “no logging” proposal were to go through, then they would be placed in the weird “maybe-yes we can, maybe-no we can’t” space when AFRC and others litigate and at the same time Congress reacts.  Which to my mind wouldn’t be good for employee nor partner morale.

Finally, where do the collaborative groups fit into such a proposed rule? Such a rule could potentially nationalize decisions and override agreements made with local and practitioner knowledge in specific places- as different as the Tongass and the Ocala.

Open Forest Service MOG Engagement Session Monday at 2PM ET

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Here’s the link:

The public is invited to attend a virtual informational engagement session about the mature and old-growth forests initiative on Monday, July 24 at 2pm ET. Information will be shared about where we were, where we are, and what is next. The session will be an opportunity for you to share your thoughts, concerns and to ask questions. We value your time and aim to make the 2-hour session informational, interactive, and worthwhile!

To attend, please register for the virtual Zoom meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation with a meeting link.

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Several of us attended one today for specific kinds of partners.  It was very helpful to understand where the FS is coming from.   I’m still confused about how data that is not ground-truthed (not actually true) can be used to make national and regional decisions, but that’s kind of a more epistemological question.  Also I’m getting fairly leery of mapping exercieses.. data has confidence intervals associated with it… map colors not so much.  Anyway, I think it’s well worth it. It’s also interesting to hear others’ points of view and realize how very different different parts of the country are and how hard it will be for the FS to develop a regional or national policy that makes any sense.

 

Last Day for ANPR Comments: II. How Can the FS Respond to Rapidly Changing Conditions? (Associated with Climate-Amplified Impacts)

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The comments requested in the ANPR seem to me to be pretty much about everything the FS does.  Which is great, in a sense, because I think it’s an open door to make any comments you think would improve the FS.  For example, you could make an argument …. unknown climate changes=changing quickly=flexibility for FS to respond=more trust= better data for the public and more transparency= the People’s Database.

I copied the questions from the ANPR so you can check them out in this post.

Some of it seems like the same old problems.. like adaptive management. Remember Chief Thomas and the inception of the Inventory and Monitoring Institute?  And I think many TSW readers have had their own experiences and ideas which you could write up and send in today, if you haven’t. For me adaptive management always goes down to “how structured? and by whom, to what end?”  We also have examples like the Watershed Condition Framework- how did that work out? Some of us were on the front ends of these efforts.. some seem to have fizzled out and maybe we never hear what happened. Michael Ligquri had an interesting comment on that here when I first posted about the ANPR questions.

Two comments:

1) we tend to bog ourselves down with these kinds of open-ended, subjective, and unanswerable questions. All great questions, no doubt. But they tend to promote more “analysis paralysis”, and often fail to advance any significant “adaptation” to management. I’ve participated on several multi-year committees assigned to resolve these types of questions, and while we end up wordsmithing complex answers, little changes. To anyone who understands design theory, such “overconstrained, over-complex problem sets” is an inherently poor frame for solutions.

2) An effective approach that I’ve used to inform “adaptive management” is using performance-based monitoring/research approaches. This starts with structured working hypotheses that are both measurable and testable. It also includes specific targets and action thresholds based on objectively measurable existing conditions and trends analysis. Ideally, such approaches must include an understanding of geographic diversity. Watershed Analysis was originally designed to help inform such standards, but failed in its implementation (for many reasons, too complex to elaborate here).

And the more structured the framework, the less able to adapt to “rapidly changing” concerns and impacts. Not easy. But here are some quotes from the front end of the ANPR:

Climate change and related stressors, such as wildfire, drought, insects and disease, extreme weather events, and chronic stress on ecosystems are resulting in increasing impacts with rapid and variable rates of change on national forests and grasslands. These impacts can be compounded by fire suppression, development in the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI), and non-climate informed timber harvest and reforestation practices.

Multiple Forest Service plans, policies, and regulations already include direction on climate adaptation. However, given (1) increasing rates of change, and (2) new information and ways of assessing and visualizing risk, USDA and the Forest Service are issuing this ANPRM to seek input on how we can develop new policies or build on current policies to improve our ability to foster climate resilience, recognizing that impacts are different in different places across the country.

There’s a couple of interesting things about this framing.  First of all, apparently according to this, everything bad is climate or climate-related that needs to be adapted to.  So.. if we have a new introduced invasive insect, does that only require attention if it’s “climate-related”? If that’s the case, you can see people making the argument why it is climate-related, even when it isn’t.  Pretty soon everything is climate-related.  Even Covid-related recreation pressure (if it’s hotter in the cities, then more people will go to the mountains?).  If we keep going, then, all resilience is climate resilience, and we’re gone from multiple-use to ecological sustainability to ecosystem integrity to climate resilience, and at the end of the day it’s all the same stuff the FS has been doing with different words. You might also notice that after multiple use in this line-up, people and the social sciences seem to take a backseat. And yes, I understand that “without ecosystem/climate resilience, there would be no recreation” that’s kind of the “ecological sustainability is primary” 2001ish argument. But do all these definitional meanderings actually help any employees and users and neighbors make better decisions about the problems that confront them every day?

The other thing that struck me about this is the “development in the WUI and non-climate informed timber harvest and reforestation practices”.  I retired quite a while ago, and even then silviculturists, fuels practitioners and reforestation folks were considering climate in their work.  And one of the first papers on reforestation strategies and climate was in 1992, over 30 years ago. I also don’t see how “development in the WUI” contributes to “wildfire, drought, insects and disease, extreme weather events, and chronic stress on ecosystems” except for the obvious way that people who live in the area may start fires (but maybe homeowners are more careful than recreationists because it’s their properties.. do we know?), and neighbors not treating their trees could lead to more insects and disease? But why WUI folks and not other neighbors?

The concern about matching adaptation to “rapid and variable rates of change” reminds me of Chief Jack Ward Thomas on forest plans:

“Land use planning should be a meaningful – a guide to management action and funding – achieved within a year at much less costs. Before embarking on new efforts in planning it is critical to determine why such planning has failed so miserably and short comings rectified. Flexibility should be a component so as to deal sudden alteration in conditions – fires, markets, economics, and, insect and disease outbreaks.”

I think he said this about 30 years ago.. but note he mentions fire and insect and disease outbreaks.  Anyway, perhaps this is a good time to consider amending NFMA to help the FS be able to  respond to “rapid and variable rates of change”  and use the latest science at the period a project is proposed.

Recreation doesn’t play much of a role in this ANPR for some reason and it’s probably the #1 important use of National Forests now, so that’s also interesting.  Anyway, if you think they are asking “hey climate resilience is a new and different thing, how should we manage it?,” it seems like an opportunity to respond with any ideas you have for improvement in general.

You can post parts of your comments below or email me.  I’m curious about what people come up with.

 

Last Day for ANPR Comments I. The MOG Thing

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Today is the last day for comments on what I used to call the Mature and Old Growth ANPR.  First let’s give the Forest Service some kudos for the differences between it and the BLM proposed rule.  Like the IMBA letter suggests, the BLM could have benefited from collecting ideas (through an ANPR) and then further honing the proposal in a proposed regulation as the next step. Also when time periods were extended the BLM’s were shorter and the BLM had the close on July 5, right after when most people had a holiday weekend.  The BLM had a few public meetings and some online..the Forest Service approach was different, but then there is not a proposed rule yet, they’re collecting ideas in the ANPR.

Since I first posted on the ANPR, I’ve had much time to reread the Federal Register notice and look at some individual and group responses.  It remains puzzling to me as there seem to be two basic threads.  One is the mature and old growth question.. should some regulation be promulgated about not cutting trees in mature and old growth, as recommended by many ENGO’s?  Check out the Climate Forests Campaign here.

There are many ENGO heavy hitters (in the Biden Admin) like Earthjustice, NRDC, and the Sierra Club among the group. Their argument seems to be.. this is the rationale folks are sending in based on  the “take action” letter:

In addition, older forests and trees are far more adaptable to the impacts of climate change, especially compared to industrial tree plantations. Nationally, carbon losses from clearcuts and other logging are up to 5 times higher than emissions from fire and other natural forest disturbances combined. Logging older forests grossly undercuts these benefits.

We urge you to include in any future administrative rules an end to ecologically harmful logging of mature and old growth forests and trees on federal land. While there are certainly other threats to our older forests, including wildfire and drought, the threat of logging is fully under your control and can be quickly acted on.

The first few sentences appears to conflate federal and private lands (I can’t get their link to check it), and the alternative on national forests is not “industrial tree plantations.”

The second is that however tiny the proportion of disturbance due to timber harvest (regardless of purpose, including ecological restoration and fire risk reduction) that is what can be controlled so you should stop.  Presumably even for fire risk reduction and ecological restoration.

The ANPR has some interesting tables for those who haven’t read it, so I thought I’d put them in this post.

There are difficulties though, with the argument of stopping any tree-cutting in mature and old growth forests.  For one thing,  the bipartisan Congress has asked the Forest Service to cut some mature trees for fuels reduction, in part to increase the possibility of protecting old growth trees and stands.  Then there is the need for early successional habitat for diverse tree (species like some oaks and pines) and wildlife species, as biodiversity is thought to be a good thing, and is in the 2012 Planning Rule.

Given the desire and appropriations by a bipartisan majority in Congress for fuel treatments, I don’t see how any such no-cutting mature and old trees rule would end well (except for work for litigators). And for environmental lawyers here at TSW, no, I don’t think that making more work for you all is why these ENGOs are doing this.  Sure, you can say that the Sierra Club has wanted to end commercial logging since 1986 -ish, so perhaps climate is just the latest justification for this same point of view.  And the Biden Admin may seem like a good opportunity to run this up the flagpole.  But I can’t see an endgame where no-cutting trumps fuel reduction treatments and openings for biodiversity at the end of the “separation of powers” day.  And I know that folks in the ENGOs  know more than I do about this, and for sure are smarter and more politically astute than I am.  So what is this really about?

On the other hand,  some Forest Service folks have told me that the “no-cutting rule” idea isn’t going anywhere and the ANPR is really about how the FS should respond to climate adaptation.   But based on the FOIAs I’ve received, the FS isn’t necessarily calling the shots with regard to forest policy in this Admin (nor is USDA).  So I would be inclined to include your thoughts on MOG in any comments you want to send in today.  Next post: the rest of the questions in the ANPR.

 

Court vacates Colville NF project and parts of its revised forest plan

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This was going to be a “featured” case in a litigation summary post, but it turned out to be long enough for its own post.  Besides, forest plan litigation is rare, especially Forest Service losses, and this case covers a number of NFMA and NEPA issues that are frequent topics on this blog.  (And, full disclosure, I had something to do with it.)

  • Court decision in Kettle Range Conservation Group v. U. S. Forest Service (E.D. Wash):  Sanpoil clean

On the first day of summer, the district court vacated the decision for the Sanpoil Project on the Colville National Forest, and also vacated the relevant portions of the 2019 revised forest plan.  The portions of the revised plan at issue replaced the Eastside Screens 21-inch diameter limit with a guideline to protect large trees, but included many exceptions.  It also did not designate a minimum amount of old growth habitat to retain.

The court held that, “the agency failed to explain how the 2019 Forest Plan maintains the viability of old-growth-dependent species.”  More specifically, “the agency erred by failing to demonstrate that its data and methodology reliably and accurately supported its conclusions about the viability of old-growth dependent species under each planning alternative, and depicted the amount and quality of habitat.”  (Note that the Colville plan was revised under the 1982 planning regulations, which had somewhat different language describing wildlife viability.  However, this court did not rule on substantive compliance with the NFMA requirement, but rather found a failure to demonstrate compliance due to an inadequate administrative record based on the APA.)

The Forest stated that the selected alternative, Alternative P, provided a “high” viability outcome for these species and that the no-action alternative would not improve viability outcomes.  However, in the EIS, the data showed that “the No Action alternative provides more habitat than the selected alternative for three of the surrogate species,” and “creates the most late structure of any alternative.”  The Forest relied instead on an appendix in an associated Wildlife Report that employed a Bayesian belief model to assign letter grades to viability, which supported the rationale for selecting Alternative P.  The court explained:

Neither the EIS nor the Wildlife Report describe how the agency came to these scores for each species and action alternative. The agency did not define its methodology for assessing the letter grades, such as what factors it considered and the weight they were given. The grades assigned to each planning alternative lack explanation…  the agency acted arbitrarily and capriciously when it offered explanations that ran counter to the evidence before the agency and failed to satisfy the requirements of the NFMA.

The court also found that the Forest failed to discuss the amount and quality of habitat and population trends (a requirement of the 1982 regulations).

The court also held that the forest plan EIS violated NEPA by failing to meaningfully address the original Eastside Screens Report.  The Forest simply argued that it needed more flexibility to achieve the desired conditions, including avoiding numerous site-specific amendments to deviate from the diameter limit in the Eastside Screens.  The Forest failed to include the original Eastside Screens Report in its administrative record, and did not adequately respond to public comments about the Eastside Screens.  The court stated:

Its absence demonstrates that the agency failed consider the scientific rationale for adopting the 21-inch rule before deciding to discard it. The agency did not respond to viewpoints that directly challenged the scientific basis upon which the final EIS rests…  In doing so, the agency violated the NEPA. The absence of the Eastside Screens Report also demonstrates that the agency did not consider an important aspect of the issue, as required by the APA.

… the agency did not consider negative impacts, if any, from (1) elimination of the 21-inch rule or (2) retention of the exceptions in the new guideline. The NEPA requires the agency to discuss and not improperly minimize negative effects of a proposed action…  In this case, the EIS did not assess how often the new guideline’s exceptions will be invoked and how the exceptions may impact the agency’s conclusions about the environmental effects and species viability.”

The Sanpoil Project also violated NEPA.  The EA simply assumed that the new forest plan guideline would protect old-growth trees.  The court held:

This conclusion was contrary to the evidence. The Sanpoil Project EA did not specify the frequency of which the new guideline’s exceptions would be invoked, despite the 2019 Forest Plan’s stated objective of preserving old-growth trees. The agency is not required to catalogue specific trees that will be removed, but in this case, the agency was required to provide site-specific details at the project planning stage to provide a sufficient picture of the Sanpoil Project’s cumulative effects… Without sufficiently specific information about site impacts, the Sanpoil Project’s impact to old-growth trees and their dependent species is speculative.”

(This overlaps to some degree the issues surrounding “condition-based NEPA.”  The court even cites the Forest Service Handbook: “If the Agency does not know where or when an activity will occur or if it will occur at all[,] then the effects of that action cannot be meaningfully evaluated.”  It also is difficult to demonstrate consistency with the forest plan if the project documentation does not provide information about how a project is meeting forest plan requirements.)

The project also violated NEPA and NFMA by conducting “cursory analysis” of the effects of the project on gray wolves, wolverine, sensitive bat species, northern goshawk, and the western bumblebee.  Finally, the court found that NEPA requires an EIS for the Sanpoil Project because it “creates uncertain risks to old-growth forests and the wildlife dependent on them, and “sets a precedent for future actions that utilize the new old-growth guideline, each of which may be individually insignificant, but create a cumulatively significant impact when applying the new guideline.”  Moreover, the lack of quantified or detailed information about the Sanpoil Project’s impacts in this respect “is also highly controversial due to the same questions about its size and nature and effect of the action on old-growth dependent species.”

The court found that this “case” was ripe for judicial review “when the agency issued RODs for both agency actions” “because the Sanpoil Project is a site-specific action governed by the 2019 Forest Plan.”  The plaintiff had argued that forest plan decision challenge was ripe because it dealt with a forest-wide viability requirement rather than timber sale requirements found not ripe by the Supreme Court in its Ohio Forestry decision.  However, the plaintiff also argued that ripeness of forest plan issues could be based on this project decision implementing the plan.  It is not completely clear which rationale the court is employing.  The court also found that the plaintiff had exhausted administrative remedies by identifying large, old trees, wildlife viability and the Eastside Screens “thoroughly and consistently during the public comment process.”

Comment Period Extended For MOG ANPR (July 20)- Opportunity to Post Your Comments Here

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The comment period for what I call the Mature and Old Growth Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (the MOG ANPR) has been extended to July 20th. A nice gentleman at the Forest Service told me that it’s really called the ANPR on “climate-informed forestry” which would be different from the actual title at the Federal Register (Forest Service Functions). Anyway, it could be confusing if you just look at the main page which shows the old date and the number of days is wrong (see second screenshot above). This seems needlessly confusing IMHO.

If you’re interested in finding out about extensions, you can always subscribe for updates. Here’s where the the extension is posted.

As a non-paid person who often is asked to write or help with letters, I like to browse other people’s comments and see if they have interesting ideas. It would be handy if there were a search box that would not bring up form letters, or perhaps if you could set it to only include letters from organizations. Maybe more experienced people know if there’s a search possibility to do that?

Anyway, if you or your organization has submitted comments on either rule you would like to share, please link below.

Thanks!