Politics

House Oil and Gas Proposal Contains NFMA Forest Plan Viability Provision

by

Language that supplements the species provisions of NFMA is included in the discussion draft of a comprehensive oil and gas bill being reviewed by the House Natural Resources Committee.  The latest discussion draft of H.R. 3534, the Consolidated Land, Energy, and Aquatic Resources Act (CLEAR Act) was unveiled by chairman Nick Rahall (D-W.V) last year and discussed at a hearing on Wednesday.  The proposal is getting a lot of attention and may be moving quickly because of its reforms of both onshore and offshore oil and gas management in light of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Section 228 of the draft relates specifically to Forest Service planning, and regulations that would be issued under this section are deemed to be NFMA regulations.  It says that the Secretary of Agriculture or Interior in cooperation with State fish and wildlife agencies “shall plan for and manage planning areas under the Secretary’s respective jurisdiction in order to maintain sustainable populations of native species and desired non-native species within each planning area” consistent with (a) FLPMA, (b) NFMA, and (c) all other applicable laws.   The definition of “sustainable populations” is similar to the 1982 planning rule viability language:  “The term ‘sustainable populations’ means a population of a species that has a high likelihood of persisting well-distributed through its range within a planning area based on the best available scientific information, including information obtained through the monitoring program . . ., regarding its habitat and ecological conditions, abundance and distribution.”  The Secretary would certify that each Forest Plan would comply with this provision.  If there are factors affecting wildlife sustainability that are outside of the Agency’s control, the Secretary would certify that to the maximum extent practicable any project does not increase the likelihood of extirpation from the area covered by the Forest Plan.

The draft language would also require the monitoring of “focal species” to determine their population status and trend.  The Forest Plan monitoring program would provide for both monitoring of habitats as well as population surveys.  Focal species are defined as species whose “population status and trends are believed to provide useful information regarding the effects of management activities, or other factors, on the diversity of ecological systems to which they belong, and to validate the monitoring of habitats and ecological conditions.”  This focal species concept is similar to what was used in the 2000 planning rule.

The language also requires coordination with state and local governments, other Federal agencies, and NGOs to maintain sustainable populations, develop strategies to address the impacts of climate change on species, establish linkages between habitats and discrete populations, and reintroduce extirpated species where appropriate.

FACA Frolics- Or- When an AC Has Your Back

by


While I agree that federal agencies may have too many advisory committees, and that the structure of FACA committees may involve large amounts of bureaucracy and paperwork, I think they can also serve a useful purpose. So here is my experience: I was the Designated Federal Official for the Forestry Research Advisory Committee for a year or two, and I also worked with the ACAB (Advisory Committee for Agricultural Biotechnology) and tangentially with the NAREEAB , (National Agricultural Research, Extension, Education, and Economics Advisory Board). I observed advisory committees run well and not so well, making recommendations of great, and little, utility. I experienced the frustrating paperwork requirements firsthand as a Designated Federal Official (trying to get the Office of White House Liaison to accept our nominees, and restarting the process when clearance packages got lost). My most recent experience was with the RACNAC (Roadless Area Conservation National Advisory Committee) as a staff person involved with the Colorado Roadless Rule, which entailed all the fun and none of the bureaucracy for me.

Here are a couple of reasons I think a formal collaborative group for the planning rule might be useful.
1) Commitment to the process. The formality of a FACA committee means that people (generally) take their responsibility seriously and put the time in to really work on the issue and understand it. Being a FACA committee is not the only way of getting this commitment (certainly the Colorado Roadless Taskforce had that commitment, but it was not within the federal structure) but formalizing it as opposed to having a generic kind of group seems to help. Perhaps this is because, as a FACA committee, the group can make formal recommendations.
2) Today, “bipartisan” is on the lips of many. Especially for planning rules and roadless rules, there has been a history of public policy as ping- pong ball from administration to administration. A set of recommendations from a collaborative group gives an opportunity for recommendations beyond partisanship. It also potentially gives political cover for the next administration not to mess with it. The bipartisan Colorado Roadless Rule Taskforce recommendations carried forward across governors of different parties. Most of us just want a planning rule that we can live with that will stick. The “will stick” part can be helped by a FACA committee.
3) Navigating the clearance process. Many agencies weigh in, some with strange and peculiar worldviews, and if you want your rule cleared, you have to go along or the Department has to spend political capital. If the recommendations left the FACA committee and the Department went along with them, it would be pretty transparent where the changes came in. Then advisory committee members could potentially set up educational meetings with the recalcitrant agencies, or call upon their own favor networks to facilitate progress.
4) Raising the level of dialogue. Some individuals will come to a public meeting and comments about how bad a certain idea is (along the lines of “my views are clearly based on goodness and light and yours are venal and unprincipled”). I have seen the RACNAC ask useful questions like “how would you change the proposal to improve it?” that served to focus the dialogue. In one case, a person had flown in to a public meeting who clearly didn’t know the topic and hadn’t been briefed and didn’t seem to have a clue about how to improve the proposal or on anything that would veer off the written statement. The agency itself would probably have simply felt uncomfortable asking for higher level input, as our role is not generally to question or improve public comments but be hospitable to the public and listen. Having expectations for, and hopefully, generating, substantive discourse would add greatly to an involvement process.

5) Providing media cover. Members of a FACA committee can say all the things about their recommendations in colorful ways that agencies probably can’t.. and defend their recommendations in the media. This keeps the agency from becoming either a punching bag, or perceived to be defensive and argumentative.

In summary, then, a FACA committee, in my experience, can provide all kinds of useful support and cover for a complex, divisive issue and is worthy of consideration. The only addition I would have would be to include some kind of peer-to-peer discussion with agency staff or a formal devil’s advocate, as to the practicality and economic cost of the recommendations.

Some would argue that this should be a committee of scientists, but I think the STS literature and particularly Mark Brown’s book “Science in Democracy” leads us to the conclusion that representational would be best (as was the RACNAC).

P. S. I think that Brown’s book is great, but is a bit heavy on the canon of political theorists for most casual reading. I haven’t thought about Locke, Hobbes and Rousseau since I worked on the 1995 RPA, where we tried to place them along Pinchot, Leopold and Muir to describe the “serving people” part of “caring for the land and serving people.”

Earth to FS Planning: Get a Blog!

by

Yes I know that the FS thinks it has a Planning Rule blog. But it doesn’t. Not a real blog anyway. All it has, so far, is a poor excuse for a comment aggregator. The other day I decided to leave a comment on Peter Williams’ recent post on the “official blog”. Guess what? The so-called blog won’t accept comments that include paragraph breaks. No HTML is allowed. And, best I can tell, even simple “http” references are not converted to active links. So I decided that until and unless the FS is willing to at least fix the paragraph breaks problem—or tell folks how to use the blog so that it will include “breaks”—I will just use real blogs outside the “official” smokescreen. Here is the comment I intended to post as a response to Peter, slightly edited:

Here is my “take” on Peter Williams’ final two questions, restated a wee bit:

How might the planning rule provide for an all lands approach and address the contribution of NFS lands to local communities?

  • How can the new planning rule, by itself or as a road map for developing forest plans, reflect the interdependency of social, economic, and ecological systems in a way that supports sustainable management of national forests and grasslands?
  • How can it help provide or ensure opportunities for goods and services to support vibrant rural, regional, and national economies?

My guess is that any planning rule that is developed in the long tradition of “rules” dating back to 1979 will not be helpful in achieving the goals embedded in the questions. Why? Because the focus of each “rule” has always been on developing a “Forest Plan” as if there were wide discretion in that process and “as if” the forest administrative unit made sense as an overall “catchall” for decision-making. Neither is the case.

One problem is that there can not be wide discretion in forest-level decision-making if only because the ecosystems embedded in each administrative unit of the national forest system are themselves part of broader ecosystem wholes, e.g. larger watersheds, larger “basin and range” systems, both, and more. This means that what works for sustainability (instead of against) re: “forest subsystem contributions” to ecosystems must be informed by the needs of broader wholes. So too with social systems. An “all lands approach” must be scaled, hierarchically, to guide development of plans at subscales. Maybe a NFMA “rule” can address such, but we haven’t seen one yet. Only with such an adaptive management assessment information system could forest-level decision-making begin to make any sense. And the ecosystems/social systems scale problem is but one of many problems that impede wide discretion in decision-making. Another is what I call the “wicked problem” problem.

The Forest Service has never (to my knowledge) addressed “wicked problems” (Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem. Such problems were first introduced to the Forest Service in 1986 by Allen and Gould (Journal of Forestry) and to the world by Rittel and Webber in 1973 (Policy Sciences). Anyone who has studied forest management problems knows that they are indeed politically wicked and cry out for approaches much different from the “comprehensive rational planning” approach that the Forest Service always gravitates toward. Even when dressed up with terms like “adaptive” or “adaptive management” the reality of the approaches used always have rational-planning at their core.

One thing is certain when dealing with wicked problems: You can only hope to accomplish anything when you are able to define the scope the problem (time, space, issues, etc.) into “decision containers” that people (stakeholders, administrators, etc) can get their minds around. It seems that traditional “forest plan” containers are hopelessly over-filled when land management zoning, land management goals and objectives, program goals and objectives, and related “standards and guidelines” are all in play — and “in play” in a spatial container that isn’t really relevant to many of the objectives at hand. I have long felt that rational planning approaches simply can’t work. Here is how I put it in my Epistle to the Clinton-era Committee of Scientists (link: http://www.fs.fed.us/eco/eco-watch/cos_greenplans.html) , written when I was an employee of the Forest Service:

… [W]e have failed to learn the lesson that there is a difference between complex problems and wicked problems (see: G.M. Allen’ and E.M. Gould. 1986. “Complexity, wickedness, and public forests.” J.For 84(4):20-23, also Henry Mintzberg. 1994. The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning). According to Allen and Gould, politically wicked problems can not be solved by any multi-step planning process designed to “collect more data, build bigger models, and crunch more numbers … [expecting that] surely the right answer would be forthcoming.” Allen and Gould suggest that the Forest Service’s general operating norm for planning–more data, fancier analysis, more computing power, more scientists–reflects a “naive hope that science can eliminate politics.” This problem went unresolved–is still unresolved–because [Forest Service] ‘professional arrogance’ wouldn’t allow [the agency] to admit that national forest management and planning is ‘political’.

Why not try adaptive management, better still Adaptive Co-Management (Resilience Alliance Link: http://www.resalliance.org/2448.php) when thinking in terms of an “all lands approach”. Note here that the adaptive management I’m talking about is multiple-scale oriented, addresses wicked problems, and involves double loop learning (More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizational_learning). Maybe such adaptive co-management can be and will be fit into the NFMA “rule” rewrite. But I doubt it. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I hope I am proven wrong.

Final thought: If adaptive co-management is to work, decision-makers will have to constantly check and “be checked” to make sure that decisions (cumulatively) aren’t afflicted with policy “decision traps.” E.g. a set of decisions might be afflicted with “policy drift” — a “tyranny of small decisions” that eventually runs counter to policy aims due to the cumulative effects of sequential or segmented decisions.

The Blame Game

by

Whether we are talking about planning, assessments, monitoring, or any other managerial function it is good practice to also talk about what I like to call the “p” words, psychology and politics. Here is a little tidbit I’ve been thinking about again recently.

How often do we resort to blaming others for our own problems/failings? Think first of international relations and war. Think second of our own families. Think third of the organizations we work for and with. Admittedly, everything depends on everything and relationships are a two-way street. But I still believe that much of our undiscussed, and often undiscussable conflict derives from our own inability to see ourselves as others see us. This too, is a two-way street. Anyone or any groups we are in conflict with usually have the same problem, which we might think of as a special case of “frame blindness.”

(See generally Chris Argyris’ Action Science ideas. For the Forest Service specifically, see my Catch-22 and Maladaptive Organizations, and on “frame blindness” and other decision traps, see How to Avoid Harebrained, Cockamamie Schemes.)

Not only do we too-often think of ourselves as victims, but usually “frame” ourselves as well-meaning heroes — hardworking, fair and sensitive heroes — stopped in our tracks by those who we vilify as enemies, or malcontents, who we to-often view as lazy, inconsiderate, unappreciative, and insensitive. The problem gets worse as each side digs in, nurturing a co-dependency. In organizations the problem spreads as more and more people buy into the blame game, setting up a contagion that afflicts entire organizations.

I just finished a little book, Leadership and Self-Deception (2000, Second edition 2010, Amazon.com link) that captures the organizational “blame game” well. Importantly, the authors give hints on how to move beyond victim/blame both in interpersonal relations, management and leadership, and organizational effectiveness measures.

One key toward organizational betterment is to learn to appreciate people as people, not as cogs in organizational machinery. Another key is to learn how to accept and share responsibility for organizational problems. In an afterword, the authors describe how in applying lessons learned from the book a CEO instituted a new way of tracking and dealing with problems in a company:

Whereas before, he would go to the person he thought was causing the problem and demand that the person fix it, the CEO began to consider how he himself might have contributed to the problem. He then convened a meeting including each person in the chain of command down to the level where the problem was manifest. He began the meeting by identifying the problem. He laid out all the ways he thought he had negatively contributed to the culture that had produced the problem and proposed a plan to rectify his contributions to the problem. He invited the person directly below him to do the same thing. And so on down the line. By the time it got to the person most immediately responsible for the problem, that person publicly took responsibility for his contributions to the problem and the proposed a plan for what he would do about it. In this way, a problem that had gone on literally for years was solved nearly overnight when the leaders stopped simply assigning responsibility and began holding themselves strictly accountable.

See too: Difficult Conversations (1999) (Amazon.com link) (Google Books preview)

None of this is new, of course, both the aforementioned books were written around 2000. In a 2006 Forest Policy-Forest Practice post titled Perplexed by Principles for Process Improvement , I alluded to the “power-over” v. “power-with” dilemma, and reiterated my 2003 suggestion to get us beyond gridlock by beginning the journey toward true collaboration.

Maybe I was planting seeds of thought, maybe I was whistling in the wind. Maybe the time is right now, or is yet to come. But maybe it will never come!

Why ? Despite rhetoric to the contrary, Capital P “Politics” is a power-over game, and US government agency administration is “political”. It used to be that the Timber Barons and their Congressional and Administration lackeys were never far from earshot of anything that the Forest Service did (remember especially the 1950s through 1970s or 80s). Now the game has shifted, and Fire Money (and assoicated power) has more sway, as increasingly does Recreation Money. Maybe we will get a chance for better collaboration, even adaptive co-management as the Resilience Alliance folks call it.

But I won’t be surprised if we don’t. I have been hoping for a “collaborative future” for a very long time, but I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve not fallen into the insanity trap: doing (saying) the same things over and over, and expecting different results.

Returning to more optimistic thoughts, Leadership and Self-Deception got me to thinking about other books like Argyris and Schön’s Overcoming Organizational Defenses: Facilitating Organizational Learning, (1990) and Susan Scott’s Fierce Conversations (2002). (See my 2005 Forest Policy-Practice Fierce Conversations post). Only after learning to own up to and defeat the victim/blame game do we have any chance at other important organizational learning opportunities.

A key question: Is it really possible, or remotely likely that the US Forest Service (or any other large government bureau) will ever be able to move beyond the blame game?