Press

Introducing Roadless Media Watch

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Roadless (litigation, rulemaking, projects) seem to be of interest to our group as it involves mapping and zoning, and attempting to make some of these designations permanent, through rulemaking rather than legislation. Right now it involves local (state) versus national decision-making, the role of national environmental groups and a host of other themes of interest to us.

I’d like to contribute to this dialogue by reviewing press articles and observing 1) how closely they stay to the facts (clarity and accuracy), 2) their fairness and 3) whom they choose to speak and the accuracy of the statements quoted. I’m expecting that this will be of interest because roadless areas and polices, unlike planning rules, have distinctive facts associated with them- sometimes that may be too complex to get across in a news article.

I’d like to improve the knowledge and the quality of discourse around this issue- which can be fairly ideological. This is not to criticize members of the press; in the space they have, sometimes all they can say is something generally true with quotes from people who have varying degrees of accuracy and agenda associated with their comments. That’s where I think blogging with people interested, and knowledgeable, with varying points of view, will add substantially to public dialogue on this important subject.

Our first example will be this piece from Noelle Straub of Greenwire in today’s New York Times.

I would give it a score of 15. 5 out of 5 for clarity. 5 out of 5 for accuracy. 5 out of 5 for fairness. That’s a 15 out of 15. Congratulations, great way to start us off, Noelle! If this were an iconic American summer sport, you’d have hit it out of the park!

Welcome Visitors from the Missoulian!

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In our blog stats, I noticed a number of visitors from a link to the Missoulian, which turned out to be from a story about Martin’s place based legislation work, with a link to this blog.

Please feel free to comment or submit a blog post to Martin or me.

You might be interested in recent discussions about litigation in Montana (Region 1 of the Forest Service) and the science behind fuels treatments.

Roundtable in Juneau

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Here’s a link to a story on the Juneau roundtable.

Community leaders given a chance to comment on forest planning Tuesday during a regional roundtable in Juneau said they want more control over decisions made on public lands surrounding their towns.

The inability of the U.S. Forest Service to get projects through its system, or even make a plan to change the system, is hurting Alaska’s rural communities that depend on the forest for livelihoods and sustenance, roundtable attendees said.

“The Forest Service has an obligation to see that it helps keep local communities alive,” Petersburg Community Development Director Leo Luczak said, adding that timber revenues have fallen to such lows that “communities are dying.”

Missoulian on Rule Roundtable

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Here is the link.  Some interesting observations.

One tension point was how to balance a national rule with local authority. For Montana Mountain Bike Alliance member Greg Beardslee, local forest officials had too much leeway to allow or prohibit activities. That meant bicyclists can find open trails in one national forest but closures on another, with no regard for economic impact or sustainable activity.

At the heart of many conversations in the roundtable talks was the need to absorb all the changes the passing years have brought. From loggers seeking different kinds of trees, to the arrival of snowmobiles and four-wheelers that can penetrate much farther into the backcountry, to new constituencies for river-running and rock-climbing and caving, the national rule has lots of stretching to do before it can reflect the world it tries to constrain.

Northern Region Forest Service staff member Leslie Vaculik added some internal concerns of the agency. For example, the old rule gives little attention to existing private inholdings within public land, or the value of Forest Service maintenance for things like watersheds that neighboring communities depend on for drinking water.

Blue Ribbon Coalition Wonders About Mix of Scientific Disciplines

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In this piece, the BRC talks about the process of rulemaking thus far:

At the same time, after attending both the National Science Forums and participating in the first National Roundtable in Washington, DC, Mumm did have concerns that some segments of science may be missing from the analysis.

“I came away from the Science Forums feeling it was top-heavy with biological/ecological science and lacking data from the social/economic science side of the issue.”

Mumm concluded,

“In the end, this Planning Rule will have a dramatic affect on a great many communities across this country and I would encourage the Forest Service to broaden the science they are looking to ‘underpin’ the making of it with. ‘Science’ is a method of inquiry-not a static body of knowledge. Human communities are an undeniable part of the natural environment and more than just narrow perspectives on ‘hard’ science need to be part of this equation.”

This piece  reminds us that individual disciplines have their own scientific procedures that they determine to be “the best science,”  and there is no scientific way of determining which disciplines to include,  nor how many, nor a metascientific discipline with agreed upon rules of inquiry.  And of course, there is scientist to scientist variation within discipline. And interpersonal dynamics in committees of scientists. It’s a bountiful, diverse and wonderful community of scientific communities out there.

Religion and Public Land Zoning?- Let’s Not Go There

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Here is  an interesting story in the LA Times today about a movement to decide the right use for public lands as celebrated in a religious service.  Now, my personal opinion is that mixing religion and politics has presented more problems than it has helped.  Theoretically it should help, because religions are about goodness, but in the real world,  it sometimes has hurt because some beliefs and ideologies can make people more intractable and less willing to compromise.

Some time ago, I was invited to give a talk at a Festschrift for my adviser for my post-doctoral work, Dr. Gene Namkoong, who was then teaching at UBC (University of British Columbia). I was in a group of speakers with a medical ethicist.  He said that while people have varying strongly held moral principles, that when specific cases in the hospital occur,  people with differing principles often agree on the right thing to do.

Reflecting back on our week of  the Science Forum and the National Roundtable, and the role of collaboration, one of the tensions was the role of local collaboration compared to the need for national groups to be involved in discussions.  This discussion is likely to carry throughout the development of the Rule.   Where is the right balance between pragmatism, compromise, and ideology? And who decides what is the right balance?

As for me, my blogdom spiritual adviser is Francis of Assisi, who sought to understand more than to be understood, to bring hope where there is despair, and to seek peace where there is conflict.

Some Loose Threads Around Accountability

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Let’s take a look at this article in the Eugene Press Register Guard from this morning. Note that our fellow blogger
Andy Stahl is also quoted in this piece.

Oregon Wild, a nonprofit conservation group also has submitted written comments, said Doug Heiken, who characterized previous efforts at revision as attempts to weaken the rules and limit public engagement.
“We want to keep the agency accountable and make sure the forests are focused on clean water and biodiversity and carbon storage and recreation and all the wonderful things that come from our national forests,” he said.

This started me thinking about the concept that John Rupe originally brought up on this blog as a critical component of the Rule- accountability.

My first question was “accountability for what?” Accountability generally sounds like a good idea (we don’t want a bunch of feds running around willy-nilly getting taxpayers’ money doing whatever they feel like). Nevertheless, if you asked our colleagues in the timber industry community- they would probably also like accountability- for meeting timber objectives in plans. Do they and Mr. Heiken mean the same thing by accountability? I doubt it.

Does accountability mean to you “if the FS agrees to do something, then it should do it?”Or “when Congress funds the FS to do something, they should do it” or ??? In the context of NFMA, when people such as Mr. Heiken bring it up, I think they mean “accountability is having viability in the NFMA regulations.” But if people disagree on what they want the FS to be accountable for, how can the FS “be accountable” to meet desires that may be inherently incompatible?

The Administration has set goals for agencies for GHG reduction. Will agencies not be “accountable” for that? Congress asks the agency to do many things through the budget process. Are we “accountable” for those? Is being taken to court the only way to get the agency to do something?

While I was ruminating on the various possible meanings of accountability, our Regional Forester gave us some information from their Safety Learning Trip to Los Alamos. Note: I may not have captured this accurately.

According to what I heard, the national leadership folks were talking about how to become a learning organization in terms of safety. One thing I wrote down was something like “accountability is seen as a codeword for culpability”. I think the idea is something along the lines of “if you think you are going to get beat up for an error, you aren’t going to report it.” That does not lead to a learning organization. Safety is an important thing our agency does, we want to be a learning organization. Environmental protection is an important thing our agency does, so we want to be a learning organization in terms of this as well. In the case of environmental protection, how does accountability mesh with being a learning organization?

We assume that people want to be safe, but make mistakes through cultural habits or for other reasons. Can’t we assume that people also want to protect the environment, and examine what keeps them from doing that?

So here are three questions- 1) What does FS accountability mean to you?

2) How does this fit (if it does) with the FS becoming a learning organization, or perhaps better, the FS plus collaborators becoming a “learning community”

3) Do the above thoughts have implications for a planning rule? If so, what are they?

The New Energy Economy and Forest Plans

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The process that we determine whether public or private land for transmission lines or a combination, is environmentally, socially and economically “best” for new powerlines is critical in our new energy economy is a key policy question. See today’s story about Governor Freudenthal’s concerns. One thing that’s for sure is that forest plans in and of themselves can’t keep up with these requests, although management areas or themes or suitability (lines on maps) may be helpful concepts when these questions come up.