Planning

Bitterroot Front Project draft

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The Bitterroot National Forest is going to try out “condition-based” NEPA with the Bitterroot Front Project.

The project anticipates 54,046 acres of prescribed burning alone; 35,575 acres of non-commercial logging coupled with prescribed burning for whitebark pine restoration; 27,477 acres of commercial logging with prescribed burning; 16,019 acres of vegetation slashing and burning; and 3,163 acres of non-commercial logging and prescribed burning… It will take dozens of miles of roadwork to do all that.

The project is expected to take four years.  “Condition-based” means they don’t know where any of these things are going to happen until they get there.  From the EA, as the project proceeds …

Information about proposed activities, including maps, treatment unit tables, and the activities’ relationship to the Bitterroot Front project’s overall treatment thresholds, would be available on the Bitterroot National Forest website. The responsible official would finalize proposed activities only after field review of existing conditions. The responsible official would retain the authority to make final decisions about the location, extent, and types of activities planned and completed under the Bitterroot Front project.

Nothing said here about the process they’ll follow to evaluate and disclose that new information they find when they get there, in particular about site-specific effects. They seem to be taking the position that “this is it” for NEPA compliance:

By preparing this environmental assessment (EA), the Forest Service is fulfilling agency policy and direction to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requirements and to determine whether the effects of the proposed action may be significant enough to require the preparation of an
environmental impact statement (EIS).  (EA, p. 1)

The EA says, “if an EIS is required, the Forest Service will prepare an EIS consistent with 40 CFR section 1501.9(e)(1).”  I know this is the theory, but how often does a draft EA get redone as a draft EIS after public comment makes the case for significant effects?  Usually the agency makes that call early enough to not create the extra step of an EA.   The agency has plenty of examples of timber sales much smaller than this that had “significant” environmental effects documented in an EIS, but they seem kind of committed to an EA.

This years-long project is being pursued under emergency authority, so there will be no administrative review.  So if the Forest stays this EA course here, the emergency determination would allow local officials to make the call on whether they think this EA would hold up in court.

The “implementation plan” in the EA says that the obligation during implementation is to “Demonstrate that the effects of implementation would be within the scope of activities and the range of effects described in the EA and authorized in the Decision Notice.”  This would be an effects analysis, which would trigger consideration of NEPA.  It could answer the question of whether the effects have become significant (triggering an EIS for the whole project), but apparently is not intended to address the question of whether the site-specific effects have been accounted for pursuant to NEPA after the locations and treatments are known, and whether they are “consequential” (in a NEPA sense).

Where courts have approved of approaches like this it has been where the “conditions” are very specifically defined in the initial decision so that there is not much flexibility in implementation and the site-specific effects can be determined and evaluated.  It doesn’t look to me like the Bitterroot Front is similar to the two favorable court examples I’ve read, but it does feel like the familiar pushing of the envelope to see how far they can take this approach.

So, while I think an EA (with no administrative review) in these circumstances seems like kind of an outrageous idea, I actually wanted to focus on another familiar issue this article brings up:

Critics of the proposal argue that the significant removal of vegetation — including live trees and brush and standing and downed dead timber — will actually promote wildfire spread by allowing uninhibited wind to whip flames through opened-up forest that’s been dried by more wind and sun penetration…

A body of science supports the idea that “forest treatments” — a regime of logging, thinning and burning — can reduce wildfire risk on a landscape and make firefighting efforts more successful. But critics of widespread forest treatments can point to other studies that cast doubt on their efficacy, and on the idea that forests in western Montana used to be dominated by spread-out Ponderosa pine with frequent low-severity fire.

I hope the EA has a good discussion of the science on both sides.  But that last point is a new one to me.  Several national forests in Montana with dry forest habitats have revised their forest plans, and included desired vegetation conditions, which are supposed to be derived from historic conditions.  I don’t think I’ve heard much disagreement with establishing “spread-out Ponderosa pine with frequent low-severity fire” as a desired condition for places similar to the Bitterroot.  Have I missed something?  (Or did the author misinterpret something?)

Here’s what I find in the EA (based on “a geospatial analysis of the Bitterroot Front project area to prioritize communities at risk from large wildland fire growth”):

Modeling results of the current conditions within the project area show that the forest is at extreme risk of a catastrophic fire. The modeled outputs from the present fuel arrangement conditions do not mimic the natural fire spread type for sustainable ecosystem management in the Bitterroot National Forest.

Part of the proposed action is:

Restoring and maintaining ecosystem health by continuing to move the fire regime condition class toward the desired future condition through continued treatments that create disturbance.

Most of the discussion in the EA seems to be about the existing fire risk rather than whether that risk is “natural fire spread type.”  According to the Vegetation Specialist Report, “Overall, the desired future condition includes forest structures, composition, and processes that would have been present historically.  It proceeds to offer a description of “warm/dry” and “cool/moist” vegetation types.   If there are truly disagreements about the desired condition of vegetation or fire regime for these types or areas, alternatives should be considered.  (Under the 2012 Planning Rule, these desired conditions should be found in the forest plan.)

Then there is the question of, “whether the forest plan should be amended for elk habitat objectives, snags, old growth, and coarse woody debris standards to accomplish the project objectives.”  This all comes off looking like they are revising their (very old) forest plan for half of the forest, with new desired conditions and standards, using a project EA.

 

 

House of Representatives v. BLM – monuments and the public lands rule

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Grand Staircase – “visitutah.com” (Larry C. Price)

Dismissal of a lawsuit against President Biden’s proclamation restoring the boundaries of the Grand Staircase and Bears Ears national monuments allows the NEPA process to develop a management plan for these areas to proceed unhindered.  Biden ordered the BLM to work on replacing the Trump Administration’s resource management plan, and the BLM published its draft RMP on August 11 for public comment.

BLM may proceed unhindered, that is unless Congress decides to hinder them.  The FY2024 Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Bill the House Appropriations Committee passed in July, which the full House of Representatives is expected to vote on in September, includes a rider that would require the BLM to manage the Grand Staircase NM in accordance with the plan finalized after Trump reduced the monument.

Which is the better planning process – RMPs based on public involvement through NEPA or RMPs based on appropriations riders?

The bill would also deny funding to implement the BLM’s public lands rule (a popular topic with many posts here from Sharon).  Another bill would force BLM to withdraw the rule (without considering all those public comments).

Kya Marienfeld, wild lands attorney for SUWA, called the Utah congressional delegation’s lack of support for the state’s public lands disappointing but adds that opposition is offset by more enlightened members of Congress who actively support the Grand Staircase and other public lands.

Appropriation riders seem to be kind of crap-shoot in the turmoil of budget negotiations, so I have no idea what the betting line would be on President Biden signing off on this one.  The “more enlightened members of Congress” may have more of an influence on defeating the withdrawal proposal.  Is that a bad thing?

 

 

Surprise! Not: Lawsuit Filed on Pisgah-Nantahala Plan and the Prophetic Andy Stahl

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Normally, this is Jon’s area,  but I thought that this is an interesting example.. just on the forest planning side.  Apparently forest planning has been going on since 2014 (for almost 10 years) to make a 15 year plan.. which should be a “30 year plan” according to this article.  And of course, there will be many changes in those  years from climate and other factors, and hopefully the plan will be flexible enough to adapt to these new situations or be easily amended.

In the notice of the lawsuit, filed Wednesday, lawyers for the Southern Environmental Law Center say the forest is home to 28 federally listed endangered and threatened species, as well as 29 other species that are candidates for that recognition. Many of those species have declined dramatically over past decades and require more stringent protection than the final forest plan offers them.

“For example, the northern long-eared bat, which relies on mature forested habitat in the [forests], has declined by more than 90% over the past few decades,” attorneys for the SELC said in the notice. “These declines should not be secondary considerations, subordinated to timber or game wildlife management. Instead, reversing these declines is central to the Forest Service’s mission.”

The filing also alleges that the Forest Service years ago provided incomplete or incorrect information to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which subsequently issued an official opinion that the additional logging planned would have little impact on the listed species.

“We cannot sit back while this irresponsible forest plan ignores the science, breaks the law, and puts these remarkable species at risk.” Sam Evans, leader of SELC’s National Forests and Parks Program, said in a news release. “Forest plans are revised only every 20 years or so, and our endangered bats won’t last that long unless we get this plan right.”

I am reminded of a prophetic statement by Andy Stahl here on The Smokey Wire in 2011.

The big difference between the old (1982) rule and the new proposal is that the new eschews any pretense of “rational” economic planning. The old rule regarded the national forests as factories of goods and services from which planners could divine, with the help of linear programming models, an optimum allocation and schedule of harvests. Each output was assigned a value; each input was assigned a cost. When the model didn’t give the desired answer, planners tweaked the numbers. When the tweaks didn’t work, planners made-up the numbers.

The edifice came crashing down in the late 1980s. A quarter-century later, the Forest Service is still digging itself out from under the rubble.

The new rule replaces economic rationality with ecological rationality. The old gurus (e.g., Krutilla, Hyde, Clawson and Teeguarden) have been deposed by Soule, Ehrlich, MacArthur and Wilson. Leopold is the new God (is it coincidence that the Forest Service released this month a new Leopold biopic?); Pinchot is history.

Perhaps ecologically rational planning will be more successful. But I doubt it. The new forest planning process still pits bitter ideological enemies against each other with the Forest Service serving as self-interested arbiter. The modern-day critic will turn from deconstructing FORPLAN to deciphering HexSim. Every plan will be appealed and most will be litigated.

Perhaps in another quarter-century the FS will abandon any pretense of rational comprehensive planning and consider the incremental, on-the-ground K.I.S.S. approach I suggested. I should live so long.

Andy’s comment was in a post on Pete Nelson’s views on the wildlife provision, posted by our old friend Martin Nie.  And now Pete has been hired by the Forest Service to help with policy options for MOG..  and folks are writing in about needing Martin’s specific triggers determined beforehand based on monitoring, and the Forest Service circle of planning to plan continues…

Personally the biggest problem I see is the tension between “with climate unknown emergencies could arise at any time, forests will burn up and or convert to grasslands or brushfields and management will need to be flexible with these unforeseen futures” and “we need planning that’s based on ideas from the past (reference conditions) and is highly structured with many many sideboards. ” Maybe the conversation we need to have is… why don’t you trust federal employees to make the right conservation decisions in the moment? Can we have both, flexibility and trust, without lengthy and protracted exercises that are just another opportunity for “ideological enemies” as Andy says, to attempt to renegotiate previous agreements?

Pew Report: Check Out Their Mapping Tool for Your Area and Some Ideas for Co-Designed Co-Produced Research and Monitoring

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This is a map of total carbon southeast of Roxborough State Park. Yellow is lots, black is not much (hover over each indicator to see what the colors mean).

Steve posted about this Pew piece yesterday, so I thought I’d take a closer look. He quoted:

The USFS can better incorporate climate change-ready practices in four ways.

1) Use the best available science.
2) Identify specific climate change-ready management tools.
3) Monitor and adapt to changing conditions.
4) Engaging communities and Tribes.

I think the FS is already doing all those things.. so wondered if Pew had any different views. Let’s look at #1. Use the “best available science.”

New management approaches adopted by the Forest Service should encourage the continual incorporation of sound scientific and climate-informed information, as well as collaboration among the agency, Tribes, governments, and stakeholders in the design and development of new research projects to address identified knowledge gaps.

To support this management approach, The Pew Charitable Trusts and Conservation Science Partners (CSP) have released new research that can be used to help inform management decisions with climate change effects in mind, an approach known as climate-ready management. This publicly available data can be viewed with a user-friendly, interactive web map. Designed with input from USFS, the research identifies:

  • Areas of relatively high ecological value (HEVAs), such as places with high biodiversity, resilience to climate change, and significant carbon storage. Such prime locations would contribute most to sustaining forest health if managed with conservation as a priority.
  • Areas where proactive forest management projects would mitigate the risk of large, severe wildfires, which would help to protect communities, ecologically valuable areas, and the provision of ecosystem services.

Together, this data can improve return on investment by identifying places where the right management or the right activities will provide the greatest set of benefits across multiple considerations.

It seems to me that these data would have been improved by “collaboration among the agency, Tribes, governments, and stakeholders in the design and development of new research projects to address identified knowledge gaps.”  Perhaps the HEVA mapping effort is putting the cart before the horse? In fact, it seems like the “right management” and the “right activities” to provide the “greatest set of benefits” is exactly what the forest planning effort is designed to do.. via throwing different approaches, data, observation, and kinds of knowledge around and discussing it.  And maybe jointly, as Pew suggests, investigating new lines of research.  Perhaps Pew could fund some co-designed, co-produced research in support of each forest’s collaborative groups- so take those less  privileged forests (no CFLRP) and provide that capability to them? Similar to the Blue Mountain Forest Partners.. and no need to schedule a plan revision. Pew could help forests develop their own research and monitoring with stakeholders.

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How Useful is This Mapping Exercise? Open Ground-truthing Exercise

I encourage everyone to play with the mapping tool and the indicators for their own area. Here’s the link.  Please comment on what you found for your own area. Check out their Protected Areas and IRA “context” layers, if I read them correctly in my area, they look a little odd.

Anyway, you can check out this spring report from Pew on how protecting high value forest in Colorado can secure over $1.2 billion annually in ecosystem services. It sounds like each NF has had such a report developed.  Maybe recent revision forests can weigh in on whether there were any new insights derived from this way of looking at the forests.

Pew seems to suffer from a degree of plan-olatry:

Updating these plans will also benefit local communities. NFS lands received a record 168 million visits in 2020, an increase of 18 million from the previous year. These visitors contribute approximately $12.5 billion to the U.S. economy each year and support about 154,000 full- and part-time jobs. But this growth in visits also carries challenges, particularly for the wildlife that live in these places. Revising forest plans can help balance where and when tourism and recreation activities are occurring and ensure that infrastructure, such as functional trailhead facilities, supports human visitors and healthy wildlife habitat.

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The rest of the recommendations sound like things the FS is already doing..

2) Identify specific climate change-ready management tools.

Using the best available science, the Forest Service should identify specific strategies to help ecosystems and species resist or adapt to the impacts of climate change and related stressors. Such strategies include:

  • Directing managers to prioritize HEVAs—after considering other important social and economic considerations—for strong conservation-oriented management. (not to speak of Tribes, resource professionals, and community involvement)
  • Promoting connectivity by retaining or restoring migration corridors for species such as mule deer. (the FS works with state wildlife agencies on that)
  • Replacing or removing culverts to allow aquatic species to move throughout streams.(hydrologists and fish bios do this regularly)
  • Restoring forests to their historic mix of young, mature, and old forest types where today’s conditions differ. (NRV, but with litigation from some ENGOs when it involves tree-cutting)

3) Monitor and adapt to changing conditions.

To understand the impact of management choices and trends of ecological conditions, the agency should develop more robust monitoring policies that regularly measure key indicators, such as annual rainfall and population of key species. Monitoring is critical and when science indicates a needed change, the USFS must pivot to incorporate a new management direction in a timely manner. Updated forest plans can serve as the starting point for this adaptive management approach.

(Like I said above, Pew could fund this by helping stakeholders ( a la Blue Mountain Forest Partners) develop research and monitoring; the adaptation by the FS can occur organically with that jointly developed information.)

4) Engaging communities and Tribes.

During the development of management plans, project design, and monitoring programs, the USFS must reflect the needs and desires of communities and Tribes that have a connection to national forests. Such meaningful engagement at every step of these processes will increase the quality and durability of the results.

(I think the FS already does this.. but communities and Tribes can disagree among themselves and with each other. Pew could model this by with involving communities and Tribes in developing ideas and measures for areas they want specially protected perhaps for HEVA 2.0.)

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Sequoia and Sierra Forest Plans- E&E News Story

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This is a long and comprehensive story but I can only quote excerpts, sadly, due to the paywall. I’ll highlight a few points..

The title of the article is “In California forest plan, a hint of climate fights to come.” They seem like the same old fights to me, but with climate issues as a new set of arguments (carbon sequestration, leave them alone vs. if we leave them alone lots of good things, including them, will burn up). Can you imagine a forest plan that says “since most people who recreate on the national forests currently use oil and gas products to get there, or charge their vehicles using electricity at least partially sourced from fossil fuels, we are ceasing recreation except for those who can prove they charge with their own solar panels”.. now that would be a real “climate” fight. Not “let’s thin trees or not.”

For all the rhetoric politicians and policymakers throw at the nation’s growing wildfire crisis, real-life changes in managing the nation’s fire-prone forests are about to play out in a series of dry documents found on the Forest Service website.
These are the land management plans federal law requires the Forest Service to update every 15 years — a deadline that’s rarely met — across the nation’s 175 national forests and grasslands. Two recently completed plans in California reflect the agency’s growing emphasis on climate change as it revises the plans, as well as the hurdles the federal government faces in tackling changing conditions throughout the landscape.
Drafted over the course of a decade, the updates for the Sierra and Sequoia national forests took so long that wildfires tore through some of the areas in question and severe drought killed trees in others, forcing further revisions by forest managers.
“Scientists estimate, based on data collected between 2012 and 2019, that there are now approximately 60.2 million dead trees in the Sierra and Sequoia National Forests killed by drought, insect, and disease,” said Forest Supervisor Dean Gould in the agency’s record of decision in May.

How many times have we pointed out that the plan revision process can’t keep up with real-world changes? It’s too grandiose and unwieldy. Even the Committee of Scientists suggested a loose-leaf notebook approach instead in 1999.

The Forest Service has a total of 128 management plans. Of those, 99 are more than 15 years old, meaning they’re overdue for revision, according to the Forest Service.
Worsening drought and wildfire are pushing the Forest Service toward a more intensive approach, through cutting and removing trees and increasing the use of fire as a tool to naturally reduce potential fuel. The plan update embraces letting some naturally occurring fires burn with monitoring, for ecological benefit — a practice that’s drawn criticism from some groups and Republican lawmakers.

What all sides appear to agree on is that the updated plans in California carry broader lessons for forests throughout the West.

I think the use of managed fire or WFU is a broader policy than what’s in forest plans, since it occurs in many places. And I don’t know any forest plans that don’t allow fuel treatments.  And the GMUG did a fire use amendment so it doesn’t seem necessary to revise to update. Does anyone know exactly what the SS plans do differently specifically on Managed Fire/WFU?

The forest plans for the Sierra and Sequoia, as well as the nearby Inyo National Forest, were among the earliest to go through a process spelled out in a 2012 federal forest planning rule that was supposed to make the process faster and in collaboration with the communities around them. The Sierra and Sequoia updates have good provisions, said Susan Jane Brown, a principal attorney with Silvix Resources, an Oregon environmental law firm specializing in forest issues — but they weren’t in place to deal with the fires and other challenges that arose during the drawn-out revision.

“The fact that it still took the Forest Service more than a decade to get these forests across the finish line is pretty hard to stomach, especially given that part of the selling point of the 2012 rule was to get plans done in two to three years,” Brown told E&E News.

Whoa! Let’s see if we think of the FS as a pack mule, the 2012 Rule was loading the mule up with more weight, assessments, analyses of NRV, and so on.  I don’t know exactly where optimism becomes untruth, but many of us thought that that statement (that plans could be done in two to three years) was quite a ways over the untruth line.  I don’t believe anyone believed that you could put more weight on the pack mule and somehow magically it would move faster.

The revisions in California illustrate the need for regular updates to forest management plans, Brown said. But the Forest Service is slowed by staff turnover, and Congress for years has freed the agency of a legal requirement to update plans every 15 years, through a provision that appears in annual appropriations bills.
“In my experience at the collaborative table, stakeholders are desperate for updated, science-based plans: Most of us are working with plans written in the late 1980s or early 1990s, which were based on information gathered in the 1970s,” Brown said.

My experience, living next to a Forest with a very old plan, is that they are not hindered from doing what needs to be done. Because each plan for actually doing something on the land requires updated info.    It seems after 11 years, the Admin could set up a new Planning FACA Committee to review 2012 Rule implementation, something like the EADM effort with partners who had been involved in plan revisions.  Responding to climate change, both mitigation and adaptation,  requires flexibility. Forest planning is a relic of the planning mindset of close to 50 years ago.

If the updates in California are any indication, forest plan revisions aren’t about to resolve some of the thornier debates about how best to manage forests in the face of climate change. Two questions continue to challenge forest managers: Are relatively frequent high-intensity fires normal in the region, and does thinning and logging forests pose a greater, or lesser,
risk to spotted owls than wildfire?

This is kind of my Pandora’s box argument; a plan revision is an opportunity to open Pandora’s Box of all the disagreements people have, and are working on, project by project. And, does the fact that Chad Hanson disagrees make something a “thorny” debate?

And yes, the Forest Service has a new planning implementation model to speed things up which I described here in 2021. I was never able to access any write-ups describing it, so if anyone has those, please email me.

Last but certainly not least, here’s a big shout-out, congratulations and thank you (!!!) to the folks on the Sierra and Sequoia Forests for having completed their plan revision!
And to those stakeholders, partners and plain old members of the public who kept with it, especially those who weren’t paid, and read those documents anyway.

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.”

Friday the 9th on the Flathead

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On June 9th, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed an appeal in a lawsuit against its revised forest plan.  The appeal involved questions about ESA consultation on the plan’s effects on grizzly bears, and the proper environmental baseline for the amount of roads used in the consultation process.  After the district court opinion found flaws in the analysis conducted for consultation, the Forest reinitiated consultation with the Fish and Wildlife Service, which has now been completed.  The 9th Circuit held that the new biological opinion made that issue moot.  (A new lawsuit was filed against the new biological opinion, discussed here.)

However, Kurt Steele won’t be overseeing the Flathead Forest Management Plan. As of Friday, USFS Region 1 press officer Dan Hottle said Steele “was offered and accepted” a new post as deputy director at the regional office that involves “environmental planning,” according to the Flathead Beacon. It is unknown who will be Steele’s replacement.

This was also announced on June 9th, but I assume there is no connection between the Flathead Forest Plan and Steele’s move to the regional office forest planning staff (he wasn’t hired by the Flathead until after the plan was done).  However, there may be a connection to his work on Holland Lake (discussed most recently here), since it’s hard to imagine that a forest supervisor would consider a deputy position on a regional office planning staff to be a great career move.  That connection is denied by the Forest Service.

“There’s no correlation with this (personnel change) and Holland Lake,” Hottle said. However, he said he did not know whether Steele had initiated applying for the position or if the Forest Service offered it to him first. Hottle characterized the change in position as a “lateral move” with a salary that should stay the same.

This is interesting to me because the regional planning staff didn’t have a deputy director position when I left, and the current agency directory does not show that there is such a position to apply for.  It’s not unheard of for the agency to create a position to place someone where they will be out of the way, and I’ve observed that planning staffs tend to be seen as places to put people who need putting (and of course, anyone can be a planner).  Or maybe there is some kind of vindication going on because he will nominally be overseeing the revision of the Lolo National Forest Plan, and the Lolo is where a lot of the same people who oppose the Holland Lake development like to hang out.

 

 

 

 

 

The Forest Service role in fire adapting communities

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https://planningforhazards.com/wildland-urban-interface-code-wui-code

It’s rare when I run across reporting about the Forest Service taking an official position on development of private land.  Yet the importance of doing so is increasing in a world where more frequent and dangerous wildfires on national forests are affecting human developments.  Here is one of those rare examples.

Grand Targhee Resort in Idaho has proposed adding cabins to its base area of private land, 120 acres surrounded by the Caribou-Targhee National Forest.  This has been controversial, in particular because of concerns about limited access and how the Resort would plan for and respond to wildfire.  The Forest Service has expressed concerns to the county commissioners about the ability to fight wildfires there.

Asked where Targhee fell in his list of wildfire priorities, Jay Pence, Teton Basin District Ranger for the Caribou-Targhee National Forest, said the resort was “towards the upper end.”  “It’s always been that way,” Pence told the Jackson Hole Daily. But, he added, “the new development just adds additional people and additional values at risk.”

To mitigate wildfire risk, Pence asked commissioners to require a few things of Targhee. It would be “helpful,” Pence said, to have “a clear and agreed-to emergency plan for the entire resort” as well as a “loop road” within the resort, and more information about “how the entire development is envisioned to be constructed.”  He also asked for fuels reduction work to be done while the cabins are built.  And Pence asked commissioners to “insist” on a 300-foot setback from the U.S. Forest Service’s property line, hoping to prevent the forest from having to clear vegetation on public land to protect the cabins from fire.

But Pence said any fuels reduction done on the forest will require separate permitting under the National Environmental Policy Act. It would likely require a separate analysis from the ongoing analysis of Targhee’s request to expand its boundaries.

This commercial development of an inholding is kind of an extreme case, but the kinds of things the Forest Service is asking for should be considered in any WUI development.  The National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy identifies “fire adapted communities as one of three goals, and “Protecting homes, communities, and other values at risk” as one of the four “broad challenges.  The Forest Service has a “Fire Adapted Communities Program,” which includes “tools of fire adaptation” like, “Wildland urban interface codes and ordinances can define best practices for construction and location of new development in a WUI community …”

I would like to know if there is also any agency guidance for Forest Service land managers for how to promote achieving these desired outcomes.  They need to be able to effectively participate in local planning for private land developments that will become “values at risk” for national forest fire management.  This ranger is doing the right thing, but is there any agency leadership that would encourage more of it?

 

Are large, eastside grand firs friend or foe?

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Large-diameter grand fir (Abies grandis) in a mesic, mixed-conifer forest of northeast Oregon. Credit: Conservation Science and Practice (2023).

A new release from a some of our favorite authors about the proposed amendment to the Oregon and Washington Eastside Screens forest plan requirements – the “21-inch rule.”  The primary focus is summarized here (and there is a link to the research paper):

“Interest is growing in policy opportunities that align biodiversity conservation and recovery with climate change mitigation and adaptation priorities. The authors conclude that “21-inch rule” provides an excellent example of such a policy initiated for wildlife and habitat protection that has also provided significant climate mitigation values across extensive forests of the PNW Region.”

Until I saw this photo, I had imagined an army of evil grand fir trees sneaking up under pines and larch, and stealing their water and threatening to burn them up.  They seem to be the Forest Service’s Enemy #1 these days in eastern Oregon and Washington.  So dangerous, in fact, that the agency undertook another dreaded forest plan amendment process to give the agency more weapons to fight off this scourge.

This paper portrays them in a much different light, as providing benefits to both carbon storage and resilience to fire (along with their original wildlife protection benefits targeted by the original Eastside Screens amendment) – and NOT posing a substantial barrier to fuel treatment.

“The key rationale for amending the 21-inch rule is that increased cutting of large-diameter fir trees (≥53 cm DBH and <150 years) is needed to facilitate the conservation and recruitment of early-seral, shade-intolerant old ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) and western larch (Larix occidentalis) by reducing competition from shade-tolerant large grand fir (Abies grandis) (USDA, 2021).

This represents a major shift in management of large trees across the region, highlighting escalating tradeoffs between goals for carbon sequestration to mitigate climate change, and efforts to increase the pace, scale, and intensity of cutting across national forest lands. The potential impacts of removal of large grand fir on wildfire are unclear, although a trait-based approach to assess fire resistance found that the grand fir forest type had the second highest fire resistance score, and one of the lowest fire severity values among forest types of the Inland Northwest USA (Moris et al., 2022).

Large ponderosa pine co-mingle with large grand fir about 14% of the time (259 plots), leaving 86% of plots with large ponderosa pine without large grand fir (1616 plots). Similarly, large western larch co-mingle with large grand fir about 56% of the time. Large ponderosa pine and grand fir are found together on only 8% of all plots in the region, while large larch and grand fir are found together on only 4% of all plots in the region.  (I added the emphasis for clarity.)

Enhancing forest resilience does not necessitate widespread cutting of any large-diameter tree species. Favoring early-seral species can be achieved with a focus on smaller trees and restoring surface fire, while retaining the existing large tree population.”

If nothing else, these conclusions clearly refute the Forest Service argument that reducing fire risk is “impossible” without logging the few (but important) large grand fir trees.