Pyramid Mill Closure- Seeley Lake Montana and Rural Gentrification

Thanks to a TSW reader for this story. This fits into our ongoing theme of housing difficulties and the exodus of the working class in some Western communities. And if the economy is based on tourism, which doesn’t have high-paying jobs in general, it seems like these communities may be moving to a two-tier society. Perhaps with lower-end retirees and work-from-homers in the middle.  Also there is the idea that at some point, with these kinds of pressures, the timber industry could go belly-up just when people are coming around to it being helpful in keeping fuel treatment material from being burned into the atmosphere.  Meanwhile we have a housing crisis in many areas, more people are moving to these places (both migrants from other states and other countries), and wood is needed as a building material.  And we don’t want new communities to “sprawl,” (get larger), so densification is cool,  and yet ideas like Accessory Development Units don’t allow people to build equity via ownership.  And many increases in density come with decreases in urban trees.  Reminds me that old Thomas Sowell quote “there are no solutions, only trade-offs.” But is anyone looking at the big picture here?

It seems like a tangled ball of policy yarn, with no clear loose end to begin to unravel it.

Over the last five years, a “Now Hiring” sign has been posted along U.S. Highway 83, and the starting wage at Pyramid has been creeping up, Browder said.

He said other workers will be affected as well, such as loggers who are independent contractors and brought raw mateerial to Pyramid.

But he said getting mill employees and finding them places to live is difficult.

Housing creates costly employee attrition, because the company might train a worker who only stays six or eight months, Browder said: “That person leaves because they’re living in some crappy little trailer.”

He said it’s a problem for smaller merchants and retailers, too.

“We just have a serious housing problem in Seeley Lake, and it doesn’t just affect them,” Browder said of Pyramid.

The “blue collar demographic” will take a hit as a result, and Browder said he isn’t sure what young mill workers or couples will do instead because there’s little else in western Montana for them.

“All the working class people are being squeezed out,” he said.

Tourism has become a larger part of the economy, and more retirees who don’t rely on a local job for their income are part of the change in Seeley Lake, Browder said. But he volunteers at the food bank, and he said he anticipates a spike in demand there.

Generally, he said, attendance at community council meetings is low, and he hopes the news will at least bring more people with new ideas to the discussions.

**********

Kier, with the Missoula Economic Partnership, said if the mill closes, it will have ripple effects on the wood products and forest industry. He said he believes the Seeley Lake mill is one of the few that takes Ponderosa logs, which are plentiful in the region.

A couple of other businesses in Montana depend on byproducts from the mill, he said, including Roseburg in Missoula, which produces particleboard, and Weyerhaeuser in Kalispell, which offers plywood panels, among other products.

“Having adequate supply is important for those large manufacturers in terms of a regional system,” Kier said. “So it’s a really fragile system right now.”

He said it’s clear Pyramid intends to shut down, but a lot of people are emerging “by the hour” and talking about whether options exist for others to keep the facility open given it’s an important part of managing healthy forests. But Kier said it’s “premature to suggest there’s any real solution.”

“I hope that the folks who are in Seeley and the folks who are working at the mill know a lot of people care about what is happening to them,” Kier said.

In their closure announcement, Pyramid said “there’s no better solution” for the owners than to shut down the mill permanently. They were advised to close it in 2007 and didn’t, but this time, they said, the financial crisis is worse.

“The owners would like to thank our employees, both past and present, for their hard work and professionalism over the years,” Pyramid said.

“Their dedication has truly been the difference between Pyramid and its competitors. The owners would also like to thank Seeley Lake and the surrounding communities for their support over the years.”

A Tangled Web Indeed: Wilderness, the Amenity Economy, and the Environment

From the Canyon Country Zephyr

I don’t mean to pick on Congressperson DeGette, she is just echoing what many have said,  but reading this quote:

“If we’re going to be serious about combatting the climate crisis, we absolutely must start by preserving more of our public lands,” DeGette said. “Those of us who have been to the magical places included in this bill know how special they are, and why they must be protected for future generations to enjoy. While preserving more of our public lands is important for our environment and economy, it’s also important to the millions of outdoor enthusiasts who visit these majestic areas every year.”

It reminds me a bit of the piece on the Virtuals and Physicals last Friday. Words can do anything. In words, you can say preserving public lands is good for climate. In reality, though, renewable energy projects, powerlines, and mining for minerals needed for low carbon technologies do not lead to “preservation.” So if we were really being honest, we wouldn’t say that.  Or perhaps again it’s a different degree of literalness needed when we interpret politicians’ statements.

But when I saw “preservation” and “millions of outdoor enthusiasts”, I thought of Conundrum Hot Springs and the broader issue of how so-called “industrialized recreation” fits into the concept of “preservation.”

Which reminded me of this quote found in Jim Stiles’ piece here from 2008 in the Canyon Country Zephyr.  The Zephyr, like TSW, is run via contributions, so if you appreciate their reporting, please donate. The whole piece is worth a read:

Almost a decade ago, Bill Hedden, then head of the Grand Canyon Trust’s Arches/Canyonlands office, now its executive director, wrote an essay for the Trust’s Advocate magazine. His observations about the ever-growing recreation ‘amenities economy’ could not have been more compelling or insightful.

In part he said:

“Throughout the region…visitation has grown by more than 400 percent since 1980. This surge of interest has coincided with a proliferation of new recreation technologies–some exotic like modern ATVs, humvees, mountain bikes, climbing gear, jet skis and hangliders; and others prosaic like water filters, sunscreen and dry suits. Armed with these new toys, today’s legions of visitors can exploit every niche in familiar areas and enter terrain that previously was protected by remoteness…And though it is common to blame the destruction on a small percentage of lawless visitors, my experience brings to mind the old joke that a mere 99 percent of users give a bad name to all the rest. Make no mistake–we are in this together.

“The Grand Canyon Trust has just completed a major strategic planning exercise… Everywhere we looked, natural resource professionals agreed that industrial-strength recreation holds more potential to disrupt natural processes on a broad scale than just about anything else. It’s a very tough problem affecting all of us. We will be actively searching for ways to deal with it.”

But that was in 1999. The phrase, “amenities economy” was just becoming familiar to environmentalists. They were searching for a response to rural Westerners’ claim that wilderness designation and other restrictions on the West’s public lands were destroying its economy—an economy based in the traditional extractive industries like mining, ranching and timber.

Some within the conservation movement latched onto recreation and tourism—and the amenities that they demanded, as a “clean” economic solution. But Hedden’s concerns, in 2008, are almost antiquated notions, even to his own organization.

Hedden said that in 1999. And here we are in 2022, just yesterday wondering whether better maps would lead to overuse. And from this piece, also by Stiles:

But in 1998, as environmentalists grew increasingly frustrated by their efforts to protect wildlands in the West, their strategies shifted. At a landmark ‘wilderness mentoring’ conference that May, attended by scores of the country’s environmentalist leaders, a more aggressive, down-and-dirty strategy was proposed. A prominently displayed quotation by Michael Carroll, now of The Wilderness Society, established the tone and direction of all that would come later:

“Car companies and makers of sports drinks use wilderness to sell their products. We have to market wilderness as a product people want to have.”

That, in its most succinct essence, was the theme of the conference. While the organizers of the event paid tribute to the wilderness activists who had come before, clearly the purpose of the meeting was to propose a new approach. “Although it is important to pioneer new wilderness strategies,” the report explained almost as an afterthought, “we must do so with knowledge of what has come before.”

With that token nod to the “importance of history” and to the “philosophical and political contexts” of the wilderness movement, the conference explored the new territories of salesmanship, marketing and media manipulation to win the legislative wilderness battle. One might think you were being taught how to sell a new Buick.

By 2003, GCT’s Hedden, seemed ready to accept and even embrace the changes. In a Zephyr interview he admitted, “We’ve had some of the most spectacular country in the world, and no one else in it. The fact that those days are just about over is sad, but there are many more people in the world, and they have found this place, and there’s no keeping them away.” And so, suddenly, the idea of embracing an unbridled recreation/amenities economy that had once worried the most enthusiastic supporters of wilderness, achieved political, if not moral, acceptability.

 

Coordination with Counties – Lincoln National Forest Plan Revision

Since Sharon has invoked my name twice recently, and not particularly correctly, with regard to the role of local interests in national forest management, I thought I would refocus that discussion on how this is supposed to work for local governments during forest planning using a current example that came along.  It involves the participation (or lack thereof) by a county in New Mexico in the forest plan revision process for the Lincoln National Forest (where a final revised plan is expected soon).

The 2012 Planning Rule §219.4 requires “coordination with other public planning efforts.”  It requires a review of “the planning and land use policies of … local governments, where relevant to the plan area,” which must be displayed in the EIS for the revised forest plan.  It concludes, “(3) Nothing in this section should be read to indicate that the responsible official will seek to direct or control management of lands outside of the plan area, nor will the responsible official conform management to meet non-Forest Service objectives or policies.”

On March 1, the Eddy County Board of County Commissioners approved a resolution opposing the revised plan.  They stated that, “it is clear that the USFS failed to review, consider and identify planning conflicts between Eddy County and the proposed plan.”  Those alleged conflicts include:

  • would increase restrictions for cattle ranchers with reduced cattle grazing levels and increased financial burdens on cattle producers
  • “creates large areas restricted and potentially inaccessible to the County to fulfill its public health and safety duties”
  • “creates areas that will no longer allow proper wildlife management control increasing the danger to Eddy County citizen’s lives and property”

Eddy County’s resolution asked for a “coordination agreement” between the County and the Forest Service, “To establish roles and responsibilities for both parties, ensuring the citizens of Eddy County are still provided with the necessary services they depend on.”

I would agree that these are all arguably things that should be considered by the Forest Service, depending on what the specific plans or policies of the County say regarding these issues.  (Unlike some earlier attempts at county “coordination,” they do not attempt to claim they have their own plans for national forest lands.)  There is also nothing wrong with a “coordination agreement” to establish roles and responsibilities for “planning efforts,” but this is not something recognized by the Planning Rule, and is not a requirement.  Moreover, the roles and responsibilities for national forest management are established in federal law and regulations; what local residents “depend on” does not dictate national forest management (as indicated by the highlighted language above from the Rule).

In this case, it appears that the County is also trying to close the barn door too late.  According to the Forest, “In 2019 we reached out to Eddy County, inviting them to become a cooperating agency (in accordance with NEPA), which would have allowed them to be more deeply involved in the process of developing the plan, however we received no response from the county. Additionally, Eddy County did not provide any official comments on the forest plan to us.”  (Failure to comment on the plan about the omissions they claim here would disqualify them from filing an objection and probably from suing.)

 

 

Conservation groups should be able to lease land to protect it

(I figured this from High Country News originally came from the Property and Environment Research Center, “the home of free market environmentalism,” and I wanted to make that clear.)

In much of the rural West, environmental groups have a reputation for suing to stop natural resource development. But some, like the Wyoming group, are attempting a new strategy: purchasing what they want to protect. The approach, sometimes called conservation leasing, could bolster “30 by 30,” the Biden administration’s ambitious conservation plan to conserve 30% of the nation’s lands and waters by 2030, without ending the leasing revenue that state governments have long derived from resource extraction.

The only problem: It’s often illegal.

These century-old “use it or lose it” requirements were designed to deter speculation and encourage white settlement. But today, they can bias resource management in favor of extraction.

We may have discussed this before, but not in the context of “American the Beautiful.”  (Note: they seem to assume that not all federal lands would automatically qualify, and that at least those committed to energy or grazing would not.)  Why not change the rules to allow non-consumptive/preservation interests to pay to prevent development (for a contractual time period that would count towards 30 x 30) on publicly owned lands?  I suppose a couple of answers are that 1) they shouldn’t have to pay, and 2) that money could be better used for something else.  But would just removing the legal barriers to allow that option to be considered in lieu of energy or grazing for areas where environmental protection is more valuable be that bad of a thing?

Science is clear: Catastrophic wildfire requires forest management

Science is clear: Catastrophic wildfire requires forest management” was written by Steve Ellis, Chair of the National Association of Forest Service Retirees (NAFSR), who is a former U.S. Forest Service Forest Supervisor and retired Bureau of Land Management Deputy Director for Operations—the senior career position in that agency’s Washington, D.C., headquarters.

I have extracted a few snippets (Emphasis added) from the above article published by the NAFSR:

1) Last year was a historically destructive wildfire season. While we haven’t yet seen the end of 2021, nationally 64 large fires have burned over 3 million acres. The economic damage caused by wildfire in 2020 is estimated at $150 billion. The loss of communities, loss of life, impacts on health, and untold environmental damage to our watersheds—not to mention the pumping of climate-changing carbon into the atmosphere—are devastating. This continuing disaster needs to be addressed like the catastrophe it is.

2) We are the National Association of Forest Service Retirees (NAFSR), an organization of dedicated natural resource professionals—field practitioners, firefighters, and scientists—with thousands of years of on the ground experience. Our membership lives in every state of the nation. We are dedicated to sustaining healthy National Forests and National Grasslands, the lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service, to provide clean water, quality outdoor recreation, wildlife and fish habitat, and carbon sequestration, and to be more resilient to catastrophic wildfire as our climate changes.

3) As some of us here on the Smokey Wire have been explaining for years, the NAFSR very clearly and succinctly states:
Small treatment areas, scattered “random acts of restoration” across the landscape, are not large enough to make a meaningful difference. Decades of field observations and peer reviewed research both document the effectiveness of strategic landscape fuel treatments and support the pressing need to do more. The cost of necessary treatments is a fraction of the wildfire damage such treatments can prevent. Today’s wildfires in overstocked forests burn so hot and on such vast acreages that reforestation becomes difficult or next to impossible in some areas. Soil damage and erosion become extreme. Watersheds which supply vital domestic, industrial, and agricultural water are damaged or destroyed.

4) This summer, America watched with great apprehension as the Caldor Fire approached South Lake Tahoe. In a community briefing, wildfire incident commander Rocky Oplinger described how active management of forestlands assisted firefighters. “When the fire spotted above Meyers, it reached a fuels treatment that helped reduce flame lengths from 150 feet to 15 feet, enabling firefighters to mount a direct attack and protect homes,” The Los Angeles Times quoted him.

5) And in a Sacramento Bee interview in which fire researcher Scott Stephens was asked how much consensus there is among fire scientists that fuels treatments do help, he answered “I’d say at least 99%. I’ll be honest with you, it’s that strong; it’s that strong. There’s at least 99% certainty that treated areas do moderate fire behavior. You will always have the ignition potential, but the fires will be much easier to manage.” I (Steve Ellis) don’t know if it’s 99% or not, but a wildfire commander with decades of experience recently told me this figure would be at least 90%. What is important here is that there is broad agreement among professionals that properly treated landscapes do moderate fire behavior.

6) During my career (Steve Ellis), I have personally witnessed fire dropping from tree crowns to the ground when it hit a thinned forest. So have many NAFSR members. This is an issue where scientist and practitioners agree. More strategic landscape treatments are necessary to help avoid increasingly disastrous wildfires. So, the next time you read or hear someone say that thinning and prescribed fire in the forest does not work, remember that nothing can be further from the truth.

Dr. Taylor’s Definition of Internal Colonialism and its Application to the Interior West: Does Partisan Politics Distract Us From Justice?

Yesterday, the Colorado Springs Gazette ran an essay by Vince Bzdek. It was about Governor Polis disagreeing with Biden Admin policies on Covid and agreeing with (some previous) Trump Admin policies. I really liked one quote which I think it particularly relevant to TSW topics:

Not all problems have a left and a right. Some problems are just problems, and the minute we Velcro ideology onto some problems, they often become bigger, uglier, less solvable problems.

It will be interesting to look through that lens at various topics. One that comes to mind is the question of what we might call domestic imperialism (I think I first heard that from Matt Carroll at WSU, a rural sociologist). Another related topic was raised by Patrick McKay in this comment. I see actually two levels here: (1) justice (social and environmental) implications of distant folks making decisions with impacts on local communities, and (2) given that this is our current political/legal system, to what extent are the “on the ground” decisions made by the personal predilections of local officials? I see the first as more of a political science question, and the latter as more of a “how does this work in practice?” question. Both are worth reflection and discussion, I think. For this post, I’ll stick to #1.

In Dr. Dorceta Taylor’s, of Yale School of the Environment, book “The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection“, she traces the history of race, gender and class

Let’s look at what she calls “internal colonialism”.

In addition to colonial expansion, countries seek to bring their hinterlands or peripheral regions under the control of the central government. Such moves toward internal colonization result in tensions or conflict between the country’s core or center and its periphery. The core develops exploitive relationships with the periphery, using the hinterland’s natural resources and cheap labor to enhance or sustain the development or expansion of the core. If the periphery has indigenous or culturally distinct people, the core often discriminates against them. The core monopolizes trade and commerce, thus forcing the peripheral region to develop as a complementary economy of the core. The economy of the core typically relies on one or a few exports. The movement of laborers in the periphery is determined by forces outside of the region. Economic dependence of the internal colony is reinforced by legal, political and military measures. The periphery is often characterized by lower levels of service and low standards of living than the core (Blauner 1969, 1972, 1982; Hechter 1994; Horvath 1972; Taylor 2014.

While Taylor focuses on the role of peripheral regions in providing natural resources, it may be just as IC (internal colonialist) to require peripherals to provide certain kinds of recreation by limiting land uses.

Which reminds me of a personal story:

When we started the journey that would become Colorado Roadless, Senator Hickenlooper was Mayor Hickenlooper of Denver. We had a public meeting in Denver and Hick spoke about how important it was to protect recreational opportunities because those opportunities attract businesses and people to Denver. I was standing next to our Regional Forester and said something like “he seems to be forgetting that rural people have their own agency.. sounds colonialist to me!”. Of course, that was Hick’s job as Mayor, to make sure his own folks’ interests were taken into account. Still, this can easily be the modus operandi for any state with urban and rural populations. That not only are urban interests prioritized, but their views on what should occur on rural lands imposed via having the majority of voters.

Circling back to Bzdek’s comment, here’s a question: if the Interior West were not occupied by people who vote Republican, would ENGO’s, the media and other opinion leaders be more sensitive to their quest for (we can disagree about how much) autonomy and political power over the lands they inhabit?

Timber Wars Peace Breaking Out in John Day, Oregon: New York Times Op-ed

Thanks to Bob Sproul for finding this New York Times story about Susan Jane Brown and efforts to reach consensus around logging on the Malheur National Forest by Nichols Kristof. Since it’s so relevant, I’m posting the entire piece. I do like the idea that our humble forest work could “offer lessons for a divided country.” It’s also interesting that this is posted as an opinion, while other pieces, which seem similar to me (interviews with people supplemented by statistics), are counted as news stories. The comments are also interesting; I see some from three hours ago, but it says they are now closed. Susan Jane Brown, member of our own TSW community, plays a prominent (and dare I say heroic) role in the story.

April 10, 2021
JOHN DAY, Ore. — One of the most venomous battles in our polarized nation is the one that has unfolded between loggers and environmentalists in timber towns like this one in the snow-capped Blue Mountains of Eastern Oregon.

Yet, astonishingly, peace has broken out here. Loggers and tree-huggers who once loathed and feared each other have learned to hold their noses and cooperate — and this may have saved the town. It may also offer lessons for a divided country.

The timber industry, by far the biggest employer in John Day, survives here only because environmentalists led by Susan Jane Brown, a Portland lawyer, fought to save these workers’ jobs by keeping chain saws active. John Shelk, who owns the town’s sawmill, and might be expected to eat environmental lawyers for breakfast, says simply, “Susan Jane is my hero.”

This collaboration between environmentalists and loggers is often grumpy, incomplete and precarious, but it’s also inspiring. It offers America a model of a process to sit down with antagonists, seek common ground, register progress (punctuated with eye rolls and moans) and knit this country back together.

The timber peace process began in 2003 at a bitter meeting over forest policy. Loggers were furious at Brown for having halted logging in local national forests by suing to protect species like woodpeckers and redband trout and by tying the U.S. Forest Service in procedural knots — but they were also desperate to save their livelihoods. A delegation of burly woodsmen approached Brown, who is 5-foot-2, and invited her to go out into the forest with them.

“My life flashed before my eyes,” Brown told me. But she took a deep breath, overcame her fears and eventually spent three days with the loggers (she brought a very large friend as a bodyguard), visiting forests and arguing about whether trees should be cut.

“It was very tense,” she remembered. But while the two sides didn’t agree, each was surprised to find the other not entirely diabolical.

“We thought, ‘Well, we haven’t killed each other, so maybe we should keep talking and let’s see what happens,’” she said. In 2006 they formalized the dialogue by naming it Blue Mountains Forest Partners.

The word “partners,” though, was mostly aspirational. The timber industry was collapsing, with a 90 percent plunge in the harvest from national forests in Oregon between the 1980s and the 2000s. Workers were losing well-paying jobs and in some places the human toll was catastrophic. I wrote recently about an Oregon friend of mine, Mike Stepp, whose life disintegrated into homelessness and early death when he couldn’t follow his dad into a good sawmill or factory job. Brown says that back when she started to talk with the loggers she didn’t really think of the human cost.

“My attitude was, ‘You deserved it,’” she said. “‘You cut down all the old growth.’”

John Day reciprocated the hostility. The area was already deeply conservative — it had voted overwhelmingly to withdraw from the United Nations — and the closure of two of its three sawmills left people fearful and furious.

Then, with almost no new logs coming in, Shelk announced that he would have to close the last sawmill, just as he had already closed his two other sawmills in Eastern Oregon. The entire town was teetering.

Yet this was also a crisis for environmentalists. In their meetings with the foresters, Brown and her colleagues had gradually been persuaded that some logging was necessary to make the forests healthy again.

That’s because nearby forests were dangerously overgrown. For thousands of years, fires had burned the forests every decade or so, clearing out the underbrush but not harming large trees. Decades of fire suppression had ended that natural balance, leaving the forests full of tinder just when climate change was also making them drier and hotter.

“This is not natural,” Pam Hardy, who works with Brown at the Western Environmental Law Center, told me as we walked through a national forest full of saplings and brush west of John Day. If a fire broke out in a place like this, she explained, there was so much fuel that the fire would burn hot and incinerate everything — destroying forests, rather than keeping them healthy.

The best hope to revive the forests, Hardy and Brown concluded, was to hire loggers to clear out small trees — and that meant there had to be a sawmill to take the logs. “I need the mill,” Brown explained.

So the environmentalists and loggers joined forces. With the help of Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, they won a 10-year stewardship contract to subsidize forest thinning and restoration of the traditional landscape, and this saved the mill and kept the town alive.

“Without her, we wouldn’t be,” said Mark Webb, a county commissioner. “It’s as simple as that.”

Yet this kind of cooperation is brutally difficult. Small logs are less profitable for the sawmill than large ones, and many people on all sides see those participating in the dialogue as sellouts.

Webb, who has a Ph.D in philosophy but was drawn to rural spaces, joined the forestry collaborative, as the process is called, but instead of being rewarded for saving the mill, he was defeated in his re-election bid. Hardy was nudged out of another environmental organization for her openness to logging to reduce fire danger. And Shelk, the owner of the mill and an active member of the collaborative, says, “I’m kind of an outcast in the timber industry.”

There are other forest collaboratives around Oregon that are also trying to sustain dialogue between loggers and environmentalists, with varying degrees of success and frustration. In John Day, the group is tussling over how much salvage logging to allow after forest fires, and how many roads should be allowed in the national forests. But members are making progress, and Brown has built a weekend home in John Day.

What advice do they offer for bridging hostilities and creating a peace process? A starting point is finding people from each side who are equipped with humility and empathy. Then when disputes arise, both sides need to agree to defer to science — and if the science doesn’t exist, then to conduct experiments to gather evidence. They say it doesn’t hurt if after meetings everyone relaxes over dinner together.

“It helps to have alcohol, and it helps to have food,” Brown said.

I normally cover people who are exchanging insults, occasionally gunfire. So there’s something exhilarating about being in Brown’s home in John Day, with loggers and environmental lawyers arguing amiably around a dinner table, antagonists who have also become friends.

They roll their eyes in fond exasperation at things the others say, and across town, because of them, the sawmill is still spitting out boards and keeping John Day humming. Maybe there’s something the rest of the country can learn from this handful of sellouts who saved a town.

Budd Falen: Standing Up for Rural Constituents

Salon

Karen Budd Falen was the Deputy Solicitor for Parks and Wildlife in the Department of Interior for three years, and she left with the rest of the Trump administration, capping off a notable career in opposing public lands.  She appears to come by that view honestly, being raised on a Wyoming ranch and representing ranchers as an attorney (including the Bundys).  She reflects in this short piece on her legacy of changing the Endangered Species Act regulations and National Environmental a Policy Act regulations to promote more “local control” (as well as with the Land and Water Conservation Fund).

I take issue with her arguments in both cases that the laws the regulations implement (ESA and NEPA) were intended to allow social and economic considerations to play the role she has provided for them.  These statutes are both clearly aimed at the “natural environment,” and not local “custom and culture.”  Remarkably, she appears to admit that, “the listing of a species should be based only on science,” but then she has made it harder to do that with various changes in the ESA implementing regulations (which go beyond those she describes here in relation to critical habitat).

My fundamental disagreement with her and those she represents concerns this statement (and I suspect it may be a reason for differing opinions on this blog):

In my view, local elected officials should have more sway on issues directly affecting them than someone from midtown New York who has never faced the realities of making a living from the land.

The major gloss-over here is that endangered wildlife and federal lands don’t belong more to local people and their elected officials.  Her view that local interests should have more influence is not supported by either of these laws, and it is not the view held by most of the people that these resources do belong to.  Should the Biden administration not reverse these regulations, courts will have another opportunity to slap down the misinformation from her, and organizations she has worked for like the Mountain States Legal Foundation, that has led to ideas like “county supremacy” limiting how national forests are managed.

(Here is a little background from just before Trump decided she could not get confirmed as BLM Director.)

Western Governors’ Association Survey for Working Lands Working Communities Initiative


Seems like TSW folks might be interested in this..

The Western Governors’ Association in July will launch Working Lands, Working Communities, the central policy initiative of incoming WGA Chair, Idaho Gov. Brad Little.

The Initiative will examine the interdependent relationships between western communities and state and federal land /resource management entities, and the role that local communities play in successful land planning and management processes.

As part of this Initiative, WGA will convene stakeholders and policymakers to discuss emerging issues, share best practices and success stories, and provide a forum for the development of bipartisan policy solutions.

WGA has developed this survey to help design the Initiative by identifying: (1) priority issues for gubernatorial leadership; (2) best practices for improving cross-boundary resource management in the West; (3) federal policy issues for potential WGA advocacy; and (4) individuals or organizations interested in participating in workshops and other opportunities for engagement.

Survey Instructions
Responses are requested by March 5 but will be accepted after that date. You do not need to answer every question to submit your survey. You may answer “Not Applicable” or leave the response blank. Recognizing that natural resource issues vary widely across western states, please indicate whether answers are specific to a certain resource issue. If you have additional information or any questions regarding this Initiative, please contact Bill Whitacre, WGA Senior Policy Advisor ([email protected]).

Please Note: Incomplete surveys cannot be saved and finished later. We recommend that you read all the questions before you begin entering answers. The survey contains two questions for each topic of land management and planning, cross-boundary collaboration, forest and rangeland management, and rural development.

Here’s the link.

Sabelow Series in the Sacramento Bee. I. ‘We can’t just walk away.’ California’s wild places are under siege and dying:

A sunrise over a flooded wheat field at Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge, the nation’s first federal sanctuary for waterfowl. RYAN SABALOW [email protected]
For those who aren’t familiar with NE California and Tulelake.

From Emily Dohlansky (many thanks!):

“The Sacramento Bee recently published a five-part series on Northeastern California that challenges the concept of “wild” places in the state. I found all of the articles fascinating and well-balanced. The one on wild horses garnered a lot of negative feedback from advocates, and wild horse management isn’t something that I see mentioned here often. I thought it would be interesting to have a discussion about the articles, their shortcomings, and a path forward in this “post-wild” world.”

I think each one is interesting enough to deserve a separate post, so let’s start with the first one:

WE’RE NOT GOING BACK TO THE STATE OF NATURE’
State and federal regulators and scientists, meanwhile, are largely paralyzed to do anything about any of it, thanks to a constantly growing array of regulatory demands that suck up their budgets and staff time. There is very little innovation in the public’s lands and wildlife management these days.

The threat of lawsuits from the competing interest groups makes restoring even a few acres of habitat a years-long process of expensive studies, planning and lawyering. Deviate one inch from a “management plan” that’s already been hashed out in the courts, the agency will almost certainly get sued again, or some politician loyal to a faction will come in and pass a law or change a rule to make the agency’s job even harder.

And the places I love are worse for it.

To try to save some of what’s left of these habitats, it will require a clear-eyed look at how we think about, fund and manage our lands and wildlife. It also will need to come with an acknowledgment from those living in major cities that these places aren’t truly “wild,” and they haven’t been for more than a century.

“We can’t just walk away,” former California Gov. Jerry Brown told me. “We’re not going back to the state of nature, but we should try to advance environmental goals, and at the same time we have to respect people, their livelihoods and their traditions. It’s a messy process.”

At their heart, these stories are about how the land-use decisions of the past have collided with divisive partisan politics, lack of funding, inattention and bureaucratic paralysis to create crises that are only going to get worse for both the ecosystems and the impoverished rural towns that make up my favorite corner of the state.