Press

Investigating the Investigation: “Big Money Bought the Forests” I. What Story Would You Tell?

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Some of  the photos in this OOPro story seem unusually dark. There also look to be many sticks in this barren industrial forest. Is that really a sapling?

As my professors used to say when I’d critique something… “if you’d written the paper, you could have done it your way.”  Even if we agree on facts, calculations, or projections, they don’t necessarily lead to only one possible narrative.  One of the things I like to do on TWS is to explore different ways of looking at the same facts. So let’s look at the OPB/Oregonian/Propublica piece titled Big Money Bought the Forests:Small Logging Communities are Paying the Price.

In this case, the numbers aren’t really “facts” but calculations. I’m not enough of an economist to dig in to how they were calculated, but  Here’s a link to a piece describing it.

I will say this, though. The tagline on the webpage is “A data investigation by OPB, The Oregonian/OregonLive and ProPublica  found that timber tax cuts have cost counties at least $3 billion in the past three decades”, but they also later explain, adding “Since then, the department estimates the total loss from forestland property taxes to be about $806 million.”  Since most states tax agricultural and forest land at lower rates, I’m not sure that adding this amount in is appropriate for this analysis, so I’ll call it “severance+.” Here’s Polk County’s explanation of the farm and forest deferrals.

I copied the analysis, and calculated a difference and a ratio of fed/severance+ losses for each county.  It would be appreciated if someone would check my figures. After a while of looking at them, I wondered if the differentials (between fed and severance+ losses) could be attributed to the proportion of federal to private land in each county.  I couldn’t find that, but I could find the % public land here. A problem with that data for our use here is that State land is also included.  Even so, there seems to be a high correlation between bad impacts to counties with lots of federal land from the fed payment loss, and bad impacts to counties with lots of private land from the severance+ tax loss. If someone has just the federal land %, I will fix the table.

You could conclude, as the authors did, that half the counties did just as badly from severance as they had from federal payment loss.

Half of the 18 counties in Oregon’s timber-dominant region lost more money from tax cuts on private forests than from the reduction of logging on federal lands, the investigation shows.

You could conclude that taken across counties, more was lost to Oregon counties from lost federal payments than from severance+.

You could conclude that some counties have had a really bad double whammy.  Douglas, Lane and Linn. It would have been interesting to interview people in those counties.

But I haven’t lived in Oregon for a long time, and never on the west side, so I’m hoping others will weigh in with other ideas and conclusions.

 

Estimated Revenue Losses in Oregon’s Western Counties Since 1991Est Fed Payment LossEst Severance+ Tax LossDifferenceRatio Fed/Sev%Public Land
Benton$51.7m$85.0m-$33m.6024.4
Clackamas$252.4m$94.1$158.32.6854.5
Clatsop *$-334.7k$170m-$170.3?29
Columbia$29.9m$135m-$105.1.228
Coos$88.2m$208.9m-$120.7.4228.8
Curry$162.1m$63.8$98.32.5461.7
Douglas$968.7m$355.0m$613.72.7252.2
Hood River$68.2m$13.7m$54.54.9774.9
Jackson$414.6m$72.4m$342.25.7252.1
Josephine$223.9m$21.1m$202.810.6168
Lane$981.1m$368.4m$612.72.6658.5
Lincoln$108.3m$122.1m$-13.8.8834.6
Linn$287.0m$189.6m$97.41.5139.6
Marion$116.3m$51.8m$64.52.2529.2
Polk$28.7m$106.0m-$77.3.2711.9
Tillamook$63.6m$72.1m-$8.5.8873
Washington$9.1m$93.4m-83.9.1014.8
Yamhill$25.3m$82.2m-56.9.3116.5
$1607.9

*Clatsop County’s federal payments are estimated to have increased slightly since 1991.

Coverage of the Great American Outdoors Act- Giving Senator Gardner His Due (or Not)

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Yesterday I posted this asking the question, why 15% of the total backlog $ to the Forest Service? But let’s not lose track that everyone worked together to achieve this, and it made its way through an otherwise divided Congress by amassing support through the work of a coalition and politicians of various stripes doing their legislative thing. So you would think that this would be a time to celebrate! And it is.. and I think the cosponsors in the Senate, Gardner and Manchin, especially deserve to be congratulated.

My favorite story was this one from Outsider Magazine by Frederick Reimers.. I think he got both the celebration for all of us, and the responsibility of Senator Gardner right.

Earlier today the Senate passed the Great American Outdoors Act, allocating billions to support outdoor recreation in two separate ways. The first is by providing $9.5 billion over the next five years to help the National Park Service and other federal land-management agencies address their maintenance backlogs. Federal public lands are suffering from $20 billion in deferred maintenance costs, with $12 billion of that accumulated by the National Park Service. The second is to mandate that the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), widely considered the nation’s single best funding tool for outdoor recreation, be permanently financed to its maximum allotment of $900 million annually. In March the president called for such a bill to land on his desk.

It’s a remarkable breakthrough at a time when the White House has been hostile to federal conservation and land-management agencies and to the LWCF; Trump’s proposed 2021 budget slashed the Park Service budget by $587 million and allocated just $15 million to the LWCF, a mere 1.6 percent of its allotment. The bill passed by a vote of 73 to 25. Proponents, including the bill’s sponsor, Republican Cory Gardner of Colorado, tout the Great American Outdoors Act as a way to get people back to work after millions have been laid off in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Years of bipartisan work have led to this moment and this historic opportunity for conservation,” says Gardner. “Today the Senate passed not only the single greatest conservation achievement in generations but also a lifeline to mountain towns and recreation communities hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic.”

(Sharon’s note: Colorado is full of “mountain towns and recreation communities.”)

A bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced their version of the legislation in the House of Representatives on June 4, and passage of that version is expected in the coming weeks, clearing the way for the president to sign the bill into law.

“We are going to have to rebuild the economy, and this can be a really big part of that,” says Democratic senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, noting that nationally, outdoor recreation contributes $778 billion in consumer spending and supports 5.2 million jobs, yet “our trails and campgrounds aren’t in the shape that they should be, which directly impacts economic activity on public lands and in gateway communities.”

In May, more than 850 signatories representing conservation organizations, local governments, and state and regional tourism boards urged congressional leaders to support the bill. “The Great American Outdoors Act will ensure a future for nature to thrive, kids to play, and hunters and anglers to enjoy,” they wrote.

Senator Heinrich of New Mexico, in addition to Gardner and Manchin, appears to be a special hero to Forest Service fans:

Heinrich lauds Republican senators Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Rob Portman of Ohio, in addition to Gardner and Daines, with being tireless champions of the Great American Outdoors Act, which he says was named “to appeal to the White House.”

Heinrich, who most observers credit with driving the effort to expand maintenance funding beyond the Park Service, explains that while the Bureau of Indian Education doesn’t have a recreation mission, it was included in the bill because, by “historical accident,” the agency was placed in the Department of the Interior, and therefore, he says, “time and again their funding levels get left out. Sometimes you have to deal with the history that puts us where we are.”

Disappointingly, IMHO, the Paonia, Colorado-based High Country News reprinted a piece from the HuffPost that focused on the “vulnerable” Republicans and implied that they only supported the bill because they are “vulnerable.” It was part of an effort called Climate Desk, although the link between the GAOA and climate is less than direct IMHO. I recognize that partisan politics is one lens to view the news. It shouldn’t be the only lens, though, even if it’s easier to acquire that reporting from NGO-funded news sources.

“It is a desperate attempt to convince their constituents that they aren’t working on behalf of corporations and that they care about what the American people care about,” said Jayson O’Neill, director of public lands watchdog group Western Values Project.

We discussed the Western Values Project in this post, which also has a link to Dave Skinner’s writing in the Flathead Beacon, and an E&E News story.

I hope every state has an outlet like Colorado Politics. It helps us understand who is funding whom to what end, always of interest.

Based on CoPo stories, the Sierra Club has taken a particular dislike to Senator Gardner, from this CoPo piece from November.

“The organization notes that Gardner has introduced a bill to reauthorize of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, but his heart isn’t really in it. “[H]is apparent goal is not to pass full funding for LWCF, but rather to maximize the number of positive press hits he gets talking about full funding of LWCF,” according to the Sierra Club. “He has put forth an amendment he knows will not get a vote and in reality does little to move the ball forward.”

Given the outcome with the Great American Outdoors Act, that statement seems remarkably non-prescient. Or this one from CoPo in December:

“Sen. Gardner sits in the majority in the Senate, sees himself as a leader in his party, so there is no good reason for him not to get full funding completed by the end of this year,” said Emily Gedeon, conservation program director for the Colorado Sierra Club. “He puts himself out as an ardent conservationist, but talk is not enough, and he needs to be calling on Senate leadership to get this done.”

After rolling out five critical billboards around the state — including along the main road to the incumbent Republican’s hometown, Yuma — the environmental advocacy organization announced Tuesday that it has another $150,000 in TV ads on network stations in Colorado Springs, Denver and on the Eastern Plains to run through Dec. 20.

I understand that the Sierra Club must think that a D majority in the Senate would be a good thing for the environment, but can we all just take a deep breath and celebrate something good for a few days? And consider, for a minute, that it’s conceivable that Gardner is representing our state’s and people’s interests, and the idea that it’s a political ploy may be worth a few sentences, but is certainly not the whole story.

The Challenges of Foundation-Funded Journalism for Journalists and Readers

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It seems sometimes as if there are people who do things (write EA’s, produce goods and services) (doers) and people who review what doers do. Those include academics, judges, reporters and so on. The Smokey Wire is full of those stories.  I think it’s also important for people familiar with doing to review what academics, judges, and reporters do in their work and how they do it- especially when it concerns topics we know about.   To do that, we need to look at their own literature and try to understand how they perceive things and how their professional systems operate.  One example is  “Practice of Science Friday” and the sociology of science.

Thanks to Matthew for posting this Propublica OPB Oregonian piece on timber companies in southwestern Oregon.  I’ve got some points to make about the piece, but I’ve written one of the reporters  to get more information before I dive in.  I was interested in the fact that it was funded by Propublica and the timing was interesting, since apparently the issue of reduction of severance taxes has been around for a while.

This came across today from E&E news  “A Republican who made his name fighting a suspected terrorist in France thinks he can unseat longtime incumbent Democratic Rep. Peter DeFazio in southwest Oregon by channeling decades of rural anger over the decline of the timber industry.”

So I became curious about Propublica and its funders, and wondered what kind of stories they would fund and whether they might be biased in a certain way. Of course, we are all biased, and even the bias watchers themselves are biased. For example two bias sites have mildly different views of Propublica.  Media Bias/Fact Check and Influence Watch both indicate that it is left-leaning, though Media Bias says left-center.  What’s a reader to do? First, buy a subscription to your local paper!

We all know that journalism has had difficulties, and Covid has made them worse.  But it is troubling that the replacement for local people reporting on topics of interest may funding if their is a particular point of view imbedded in the selection and framing of the story. It might lead to seeing the country as more divided than it really is, and possibly lead to even more division.  Simply because we don’t get different points of view examined fairly, so it’s easier to see people who disagree as stupid, malevolent and so on.  But apparently that is only one of the issues around foundation funding and journalism that journalism scholars have found.

I did a very brief review of some literature and came up with these.

How Foundation Funding Changes the Way Journalism Gets Done

and this interesting one from scholars in the UK.

In summary, we argue that foundation funding shapes what we understand journalism to be. This is important because it suggests that foundations are changing the role that journalists play in democracy. In the case of non-profit international news, foundations direct journalism (both intentionally and unintentionally) towards outcome-oriented, explanatory journalism in a small number of niche subject areas. We do not make a normative claim about whether these changes are “good” or “bad” for journalism. However, we are concerned that such important decisions about journalism – a vital institution to democracy – are being made by a small number of generally un-transparent organisations, controlled by powerful individuals, which are rarely scrutinised or held accountable by any larger or democratic body.

Outcome-oriented sounds like “successful in changing people’s views.”  Which, in my view, is not exactly the same goal as “explaining clearly to people what’s going on.”

The last sentence particularly resonated with me. It’s good to have watchdogs, but what if no one’s watching the watchdogs?

Australia and US Wildfire, Similarities and Differences: III. Coverage of Negative Impacts of Wildfires on Wildlife and Water

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A boom floats across a small bay near the dam wall at Warragamba Dam in Warragamba, Australia, on Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2020. Although there have been no major impacts on drinking water yet from the intense wildfires, authorities know from experience that the risks will be elevated for years while the damaged catchment areas, including pine and eucalyptus forests, recover. (AP Photo/Rick Rycroft)

In the last post in this series, we talked about “to what extent do models show that Australia and US wildfires are impacted by climate change?” Although that scientific work did not show Australia’s fires as necessarily having a big climate imprint, most of the stories I have read have focused on the climate angle. What is interesting to me is that that lens has led to many stories about the negative impacts of fires on wildlife and watershed.

In this AP story, the narrative is that bad/intense/hot fires lead to drinking water problems and flooding. The author even mentions the efforts of Denver Water to “clear trees and control vegetation” albeit perhaps not only in “populated areas” as the story says. There were also the stories (e.g., here in Scientific American) on wildlife deaths and burns. It’s true that Australia has many more unique species, so the loss in terms of biodiversity is different, but if you are a deer or elk or bear or raccoon, it would be equally unpleasant to be burned or killed by fire.

It seems that in the US there was a certain school of thought that fires were “natural” and so unpleasant effects to wildlife and water were just part of the deal, and in fact were particularly good for some species (while obviously not good for others, at least in the short term).

However, if you thought that the fires were “unnatural” due to previous fire suppression policies, then perhaps it might be more OK to intervene in terms of fuel treatments? Another question that perhaps was never discussed was how do you weigh making more habitat for one species compared to the deaths and injury to individuals of other species?

Looking back on the coverage, it looks to me like the narrative goes “climate change is bad and watershed and wildlife impacts from hot fires will be really bad” is a popular way to frame the Australian case. (If we don’t solve the international problem of climate change, the future looks worse and there are many negative impacts).

But in the US case, when the challenge was to do fuel treatments to help with suppression, (if we do prescribed burning and mechanical fuel treatments, it will help suppression folks deal with fires and lessen the likelihood of these negative impacts to wildlife and water) the same kinds of negative impacts to wildlife and water did not get as much press.

I’ve noticed in the press and in many climate science papers, as we shall see, predictions are made about bad things happening without acknowledging the efforts of other communities to dampen these effects. Some of these communities include fire suppression, plant breeding, water managers, and so on- each of whom have their own scientists who understand the mechanisms of responses and relevant uncertainties and unknowns. At the same time, other factors, such as fire suppression policies, or changes in prescribed burning practices, in the Australia example, may be overlooked in stories designed to attract attention in relatively small space. My concern is that it could make people more despairing and fearful about the future than they might be given what is known by all these scientific communities. Fear leads to anger at “the other” and the idea that the ends justify the means, and the accompanying unpleasant impacts to our society of that worldview.

Does anyone doubt that the western US and Australia would still need to deal with wildfires if there were no climate change? Hint: existence of fire-adapted plant and animal species.

Journalist Request for Stories and Contacts on National Forest Conflicts

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Here’s a chance to help out a journalist:

From Larry Parnass: A hearty hello to ‘The Smokey Wire’ community. I am an investigative reporter examining conflicts regarding management of our national forests. I am eager to expand the range of my reporting through contact with people immersed in these issues. I’ve been struck by the variety and depth of views shared on The Smokey Wire and believe I can learn a lot from participants. Anyone willing to be in touch can email me at “[email protected]”.

Center for Western Priorities: Pushing the Boundaries of Partisan-Hood

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John Persell raised an interesting question here. It was pretty “out there” for me to say that folks like the Center for Western Priorities are “not of our world”. Certainly I can’t speak for everyone who read on The Smokey Wire.

But most of us have been involved in federal lands issues for years.  When new groups come on the scene, claiming to be non-partisan but funded by the New Venture Fund and staffed by people who worked as political staff for D candidates…er… it does raise some questions.

My experience on the Hill as a staff person, and having briefed many Congressional staff people over the years, is that some are political animals,who may not be as interested in resolving an issue as getting opportunities for their party to look good and win. That’s not to be critical, it’s just their world.  I don’t think anyone who reads what the current Congress is up to, or not up to, would disagree with this. You can’t look to Congress for technical knowledge, accuracy in their statements, nor humility about their own views. That’s not what we select them for.

This is from the Hewlett Foundation’s website:

This renewal grant will continue support for the New Venture Fund’s Center for Western Priorities. The Center is a West-wide communications effort designed to educate the media, public, and decision makers about the impacts of fossil energy development on public lands. The Center builds relationships with reporters, draws from the best polling to craft persuasive messages, rapidly responds to arguments advocating for the elimination of public land protections, steadily generates reports and news, and enlists a broad array of westerners as spokespeople. The Center also works closely with conservation organizations across the West to fill gaps in communications capacities.

Here’s what the Center for Western Priorities says about themselves:

The Center for Western Priorities is a nonpartisan conservation and advocacy organization that serves as a source of accurate information, promotes responsible policies and practices, and ensures accountability at all levels to protect land, water, and communities in the American West.

Based in Denver, Colorado, the Center advances responsible conservation and energy practices in the West. We encourage open, public debate and work to advance those discussions online, in the media, and throughout Western communities by promoting responsible solutions and original research.

Have they changed what they do since their 2015 grant from the Hewlett Foundation? That sounded like a propaganda machine with a certain end in mind. Their own description sounds more like The Smokey Wire.

I do think they do a super job of generating information. I wish The Smokey Wire had those kind of bucks to investigate things, do FOIA’s, hire journalists, develop relationships with reporters, and all that. Nevertheless, we need to ask what kind of slant they put on what they do report, and how careful they are about checking facts that support their narrative. So I think it’s fair to say “communication campaigns run by political operatives” are not the usual federal lands policy suspects. I think of them as newsfeed generators. That’s definitely not like our environmental group friends, who often are seen in the trenches participating in the various policy processes, or even our litigatory environmental group friends, whom I all consider to be “part of our world.”

The New Venture Fund organizations (Center for Western Priorities and the Western Values Project) also came upon the federal lands policy scene recently (since campaign finance reform?) and seem to be mostly about oil and gas (and, of course, denouncing all things Trump Administration.)  One wonders whether their interest in public lands policy will go away in 2020 if a certain event occurs..

Citizen Journalism, Information Reformation, The Smokey Wire and An Invitation

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The previous info revolution

 

One of our goals at The Smokey Wire is to hear both sides of issues. Sometimes that’s easy, as we can simply call and ask. Sometimes, the FS is in litigation, and the cone of silence has descended, and we have to make do with reading EIS’s RODs and objection letters.  Sometimes people of all stripes don’t return our phone calls or emails. Many of us know something about whatever the issue is from our work lives, and have a knowledge base to build on.  Sometimes we have to start from scratch.  One of us (Steve Wilent) is a professional journalist, and most of the rest of the usual crowd are not.

So I’d like to encourage readers to help out with this.  In looking for grants to support our effort, I found that what we do is called “citizen journalism” and is actually part of a movement. One of my favorite write-ups on it is by Mark Glaser in 2006, called Your Guide to Citizen Journalism.

Here’s a quote: One of the main concepts behind citizen journalism is that mainstream media reporters and producers are not the exclusive center of knowledge on a subject — the audience knows more collectively than the reporter alone. Now, many of these Big Media outlets are trying to harness the knowledge of their audience either through comments at the end of stories they post online or by creating citizen journalist databases of contributors or sources for stories.

Some of the citizen journalism literature focused on the death of local newspapers and the need for local news. Our situation is different. Our issues are very complex and to hear both sides fairly may take weeks/months/years  of research and more space than a standard news article or blog post. Of course, citizen journalists can be as, or more biased, than professional journalists. That’s why it’s both key, and difficult, to get both sides. I don’t mind if we get one side from a press story and present our own info to get the other side. I just want to encourage readers  to write their own stories about news that isn’t covered in the press for whatever reason.

Here’s an example of how that works in East Lansing, Michigan.

Below is a quote from Kenneth Neil Cukier, a technology correspondent for The Economist in London (in the Glaser piece):

I acknowledge the problems but welcome the development of the ‘amateur journalist,’ akin to the ‘gentleman scientist’ of the 18th century, which did so much to advance knowledge. I believe journalism is undergoing its ‘reformational moment.’ By that I mean that the Internet is affecting journalism just as the printing press affected the Church — people are bypassing the sacrosanct authority of the journalist in the same way as Luther asserted that individuals could have a direct relationship with God without the intermediary of the priest. The Internet has disintermediated middlemen in other industries, why should journalism be immune?

The tools of broadcast media have gone from owning paper mills, presses, million-dollar transmitters and broadcast licenses, to having a cheap PC or a mobile phone in one’s pocket. That gives everyone the ability to have a direct rapport with the news as either a consumer or a producer, instantaneously. This is like the advent of literacy: it threatened elites and sometimes created problems. But it empowered individuals and led to a far better world. The new literacy from digital media will do the same, even as it creates new problems. Ultimately, I believe it is a positive thing for journalism, because it enables something journalism has lacked: competition from the very public we serve.

Yes, Virginia, Political Appointees Do Meet With Interest Groups: The Importance of Context in News Stories

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Secretary Zinke meets with
Outdoor Recreation Industry Roundtable (ORIR)
Photo credit: Tami Heilemann

Ruben Navarrette, a syndicated columnist who shows up in the Colorado Springs Gazette op-ed page, recently wrote a column in which he talks about the importance of context in news stories. I like to think of news stories as newborn babies, and the work of NCFP regulars as wrapping the stories in a warm, fluffy blanket of context. Navarette gives some examples and concludes:

Context changes a minor story from what one president is doing wrong into a major story about what’s wrong with our political system.

What he is saying is that our fluffy blankets of context can add not only to fairness and accuracy, but ultimately also to framing problems differently. Here’s an easy example from our own subject area.

This is from Greenwire via the Society for Environmental Journalism here.

“Andrew Wheeler met with a range of companies and trade groups with interests before EPA after he took charge at the agency….

Wheeler was scheduled to call or meet with executives for the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, BP America, Delta Air Lines and Valero Energy Corp. during that month, according to the document. In addition, he was slated to take meetings with agricultural interests, like the American Soybean Association and CropLife America.”

Wheeler met with groups with “interests before EPA”. Oh my goodness. This news story seems to assume that the best regulation is done without speaking to the regulated about their views and concerns. Logically, then Secretaries of the Interior should not meet with members of the Outdoor Recreation Industry? If, on the other hand, we want to add context, as Navarrette suggests, to “what’s wrong with the political system” we can look across administrations, and also in the eyes of state and local government officials.

Here’s a link to quotes from a letter by former Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal (D), of Wyoming, to then Secretary of the Interior Salazar about changes in oil and gas regulations.

“I appreciate your stated intentions to restore balance to the leasing program. Unfortunately the proposed changes potentially hand significant control over oil and gas exploration, development and production to the whims of those that profess a ‘nowhere, not ever’ philosophy to surface disturbance of any kind,” Freudenthal wrote Salazar on Jan. 8.

“I have always been a strong proponent of balance” but “Washington…seems to go from pillar to post to placate what is perceived as a key constituency. I only half-heartedly joke with those in industry that, during the prior administration, their names were chiseled above the chairs outside the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Lands and Minerals. With the changes announced [by Interior earlier this month] I fear that we are merely swapping the names above those same chairs [with] environmental interests, giving them a stranglehold on an already cumbersome process,” Freudenthal said.

Freudenthal seems to wonder whether citizens are well-served by disruptive flip flops on policy associated with administrations who change the advisory input from “lots of x” to “never, nohow, no way x” based on listening predominantly to one set of interest groups. The impacted states might prefer a more pragmatic and less ideological middle path, with a focus on reducing impacts rather than removing industry. They were good questions in 2010, IMHO, and remain good questions today.

Slanted News?

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I found an LA Times article regarding the Rim Fire, as well as the future of forest management within the Sierra Nevada. Of course, Chad Hanson re-affirms his preference to end all logging, everywhere. There’s a lot of seemingly balanced reporting but, there is no mention of the Sierra Nevada Framework, and its diameter limits. There is also the fact that any change to the SNF will take years to amend. There was also no mention that only about 20,000 Federal acres of the Rim Fire was salvaged, with some of that being in 40-year old plantations.

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-rim-fire-restoration-20180718-story.html

There might also be another ‘PictureGate“, involving Chad Hanson displaying supposed Forest Service clearcut salvage logging. His folks have already displayed their inability to locate themselves on a map. If he really had solid evidence, he SURELY would have brought it into court

Additionally, the comments are a gold mine for the misinformation and polarization of the supposedly ‘progressive’ community of readers.

Trump “demands” more logging. Really? Does he ever request, suggest or ask for information? I’m tired of hearing of Trump’s “demands.” It could be that some logging would be beneficial but the minute Trump “demands” it, it is suspect. One of his friends will be making millions on the logging and probably giving a kickback to a Trump business. Trump is the destructor of all things beautiful or sacred, the King Midas of the GOP.

A tiny increase in logging of small trees is very unlikely to generate “millions”.

You have no idea what “forest management” is. You want to clearcut all of the old growth forests and then turn them into Christmas tree lots and pine plantations. That is industrial tree farming, not forest management. That is the dumb dogma, speaking, not actual management of the forests.

Most people in southern California don’t know that Forest Service clearcutting and old growth harvesting in the Sierra Nevada has been banned since 1993. The article makes no mention of that.

Riddle me this, Lou. How did the forests manage before we spent $2.5 billion dollars a year on fire suppression? Are we the problem or the cure? Is this just another out of control bureaucracy with a life of its own?

Of course, no solution offered.

Denver Post Op-ed: Finding a Middle Ground on Protecting Greater Sage Grouse

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John Ruhs, left, acting deputy director of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, talks to Patrick Donnelly, Nevada state director for the Center for Biological Diversity, during a public meeting on federal management of the greater sage grouse in 11 western states on Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2017 in Sparks, Nev. Federal scientists and land managers who’ve been crafting strategies to protect sage grouse habitat across the West for nearly two decades are going back to the drawing board under a new Trump administration edict to reassess existing plans condemned by ranchers, miners and energy developers. (AP Photo/Scott Sonner).

Last week I posted that the Denver Post is going through some hard times. Last Sunday, the entire opinion page was composed of different columnists stressing the importance of, and basically asking for someone to buy the paper. So that is the context for this piece on sage grouse, an op-ed published by the Post by its former editorial editor Vincent Carroll. If I were a paranoid person, I might think that the Russians were behind this, so that middle stories in Purple States would not get told and our country would get further divided.

He starts with what’s out there in the news:

The stock story line goes as follows: The Obama-era plans were the culmination of a careful compromise representing years of negotiations that satisfied a national task force of stakeholders from government, conservation, sporting and extraction interests. What possible reason could Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke have for reopening the process other than to kowtow to energy, mining and agricultural lobbies?

Note that even the photo caption (!) from the AP, above even carries that message.

But here’s what a person working on it for the State says (note that Colorado has a D Governor)- and as is so often the case, the truth is more complicated than the standard narrative but that requires asking the question, talking to people, and having a place to publish the “other side” of the story.

As it happens, the truth is more complicated. Many state and local officials throughout the West who did indeed collaborate with federal officials in devising sage-grouse protection plans were profoundly dismayed by last-minute additions made in 2015 by federal officials. Even those now warning against wholesale changes to the Bureau of Land Management plans, such as Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, weren’t happy.

“We fought back on a couple of things,” says John Swartout, who coordinates Colorado’s efforts on behalf of the sage grouse. “One was this idea of ‘no surface occupancy’ (in priority habitat regions). It may make sense to limit surface occupation but in the Piceance Basin, for example, there are deep ravines, so if an oil or gas rig is down in the ravine and the birds are off on the plateau you’re actually not disturbing the birds at all. We drew up our plan to accommodate terrain features; the idea was to avoid disturbing sage grouse habitat, but to be smart about it.

“There is state, private land and federal land and all of us need to work together to make sure that if we push activities off federal land we aren’t pushing them onto private land where they could do more damage to sage grouse habitat,” he said. “We tried to look at it holistically and our plan reflected that. So it got to D.C. and they made a bunch of changes and they took some of that flexibility away from us.”

…… There are some other quotes of interest to the State/Federal responsibility question we’ve been discussing, and he ends with..

The greater sage grouse population is significantly smaller than it once was, but hundreds of thousands of the birds still reside in 11 states and, what is more important, those states in the past decade have poured unprecedented resources into preserving habitat and tackling problems such as invasive plant species, fire and encroaching development. And with noticeable effect, too. The overall 2017 sage grouse count in Colorado, for example, was up 28 percent above the 10-year average (although favorable weather is clearly a factor).

Meanwhile, for those who relish the ironies of public policy, consider this: The sage grouse remains a legal game bird. Hundreds are “harvested” every year in Colorado, while Wyoming last year authorized nearly 5,000 hunters to slaughter 10,526 sage grouse.

If the sage grouse were truly facing extinction now or the foreseeable future — which the federal government in 2015 concluded was not the case — you’d think hunting would be one of the first things to go.