The latest on Montana, giving credit where credit is due (i.e. there’s nothing ‘grassroots’ about it):
“The American Lands Council is leading the charge on this. I’m not a member, but I do appreciate that they’re helping elected officials get better educated on this,” Fielder said.
I’m sure that education includes these facts:
ALC bases much of its justification for lands transfer on sections in the Western states’ Enabling Acts that say the federal government “is obligated to extinguish title to additional lands.”
But a University of Utah legal analysis published in October found that phrase applied only to Indian lands, not public lands. The analysis also outlined several laws and Supreme Court decisions that firmly establish federal control of public lands.
“As the owner of public lands, the United States holds the public lands ‘in trust for the people of the whole country,’ not solely for the benefit of adjacent landowners,” the report said.
Someone came up with a new financial twist – give states the land, federal tax dollars keep paying for the upkeep:
Fielder said the state wouldn’t need that much money if the federal government were required to pitch in. “This catastrophic wildfire condition has grown on their watch. So keeping the federal government on the hook for helping with fire suppression is something we ought to look at,” Fielder said.
And these folks don’t like to collaborate:
But Fielder dismissed collaboratives as ineffective. “Citizens have very little chance to get their objectives inserted in federal land management plans because paid lobbyists are there at every meeting. They pretty much drown out the local community’s voice,” Fielder said.
I’m sure that’s based on a good set of facts, too.
New Congress, new ideas.. we could take this project and ask the question, how could we do better with justice for all and still follow the existing laws? Ideas? When I retired, the solution to this was “collaboration”- folks have been doing this, and spending a great deal of time and energy… but the same result seems to be occurring (in some cases). It is certainly not the solution that some believed.
Now we have some very experienced and smart people on this blog, plus many of the people who like to talk about these kinds of things over a beer or two. Now I realize that there are folks out there like Guy who think things are fine the way they are and “if the FS would only follow the law, there wouldn’t need to be litigation.” I know others may not agree with that framing. So those of you who think the current situation is sub-optimal, please put on your thinking caps and propose some ideas for solutions.. and I’d like to go with ones that keep the land in federal ownership, because the end result would be something we could try to sell to Congress. NePA nerds of all stripes are requested to chime in..
Thanks to Craig Rawlings of the Forest Business Network..here’s the link.
The Oman-based Good Earth this week announced a partnership with Flagstaff-based Roots Composting to combine household waste from Williams with mountains of sawdust and wood chips from thinning projects to produce rich, organic soil suitable for gardens and farmland throughout the region.
The partnership to produce rich, organic, bagged topsoil could provide a way to get the thinning effort jump-started, given the huge quantities of brush and small trees that dominate the approved thinning projects in the Flagstaff area ready to cut.
The more comprehensive effort that includes larger trees and other products will mostly await construction of new mills in Williams and elsewhere capable of producing biofuel, furniture, oriented strandboard and other products from the small trees that pose a huge fire danger to the whole region.
Roots Composting Chief Executive Officer Kevin Ordean said, “We want to change the way that people think about waste and we want to produce as much high-quality soil as we possibly can for a region that needs it desperately.”
Good Earth Power Spoils Division Director Martin Gillard said, “This partnership will redefine the role that biomass plays in assuring forest health and in improving environmental quality throughout the region.”
The soils project would end up reducing the emission of planet-warming, greenhouse gases, added Gillard.
Currently, many organic household wastes go to landfills, where they decompose and produce large amounts of methane. This gas traps heat in the atmosphere 21 times more efficiently than carbon dioxide.
However, the soil-making operation will combine biomass from thinning projects with the household waste, add oxygen and therefore greatly reduce the production of methane as the material decomposes. The mix will essentially ferment for three to four months before workers bag it at the Williams facility.
“We are hoping to have products ready for the spring markets,” said Gillard.
Good Earth Chief Executive Officer Jason Rosamond said, “Using the outputs of forest restoration to benefit soil and air quality provide alternative energy sources and create sustainable economic growth.”
The announcement comes on the heels of a previous Good Earth press release announcing plans to build a mill in Williams that can handle the small trees that not only fuel intense, ground-sterilizing wildfires, but provide a fuel ladder for fires to climb up into the tops of the remaining old-growth trees.
All.. I am glad to be back from a rigorous quarter of Christianity in Antiquity, Pastoral Care, and Spiritual Leadership. I can tell you that I learned in Antiquity that the world hasn’t necessarily gone downhill. When Christian sects don’t gouge each others’ eyes out .. the world is improving in at least one way :)! If you want to know more about my experiences in Spiritual World, I started another blog “IndieCatholic.com”
Anyway, enough about me. Here’s a link to Ron’s post on Not Without a Fight (PS if you read NWAF and want me to share a post here, just email me).
Ron’s note: This no-nonsense op-ed comes to us from Salem, Oregon’sStatesman Journal; it was authored by Mickey Bellman and published Dec. 12th.
And so, another year passes, another U.S. congressional session parades into history and there is still no forest plan to address the management of our national forests.
Rep. Greg Walden blames the senators for the forest debacle. Both he and Rep. Peter DeFazio had authored bills to settle the quagmire of federal harvest levels.
Meanwhile, over in the Senate, Sen. Ron Wyden authored a bill to settle the federal timber issues and he blames those guys over in the House for not following through.
And so gridlock — nothing happens. No cures, no panaceas, no solution, no resolution to the forest debate that began when the spotted owl was declared to be “the canary in the coal mine.” What does remain is forest management by padlock.
For three decades, the controversy over forest management and timber harvest has continued in Western Oregon. While the federal harvest has shrunk to less than 10 percent of what it was in the 1980s, sawmills have closed, jobs have been lost, loggers have gone bankrupt and logging equipment suppliers now sell farm machinery. The tourist industry — touted by the eco-groups as our employment salvation — has indeed opened a few new REI and Cabela’s stores, but that is all.
As for the aforementioned northern spotted owl, its numbers and population continue to decline. Could the invading, aggressive barred owl be preying upon the more docile spotted owl? Or might it be the increasingly devastating forest fires that incinerate vast tracts of federal forest?
Blacktail deer populations have declined every year since Clinton’s 1994 forest plan was passed. Without timber harvest to open the dense forest canopy, there is less browse at deer level on the forest floor. So, fewer deer for hunters to harvest, less revenue for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.
The O&C Counties of Oregon — counties that once received 25 percent to 50 percent of federal timber sale revenues to replace property taxes — now receive little or nothing, forcing Curry and Josephine counties to teeter on the brink of bankruptcy. Even the miniscule federal subsidies that were paid to prop up county budgets until the tourist dollars rolled in have now been discontinued by Congress.
Thank you, Congressmen. Your concern and support of federal forest management and Western Oregon is truly underwhelming!
Mickey Bellman of Salem is a professional consulting forester. He can be reached at [email protected].
I’m interested because I don’t think folks on this blog agree on 1) if there is really a problem, let alone 2) what to do about it.
Right now I’m curious from the folks who think things are fine.. what do you have to say to this op-ed?
Gov. John Hickenlooper, left, and Republican challenger Bob Beauprez debate over Western Slope issues at the Club 20 debates in Grand Junction Saturday night. photo by Lauren Glendenning/[email protected] | Normally I pretty much tune out the hoopla around elections (truth is not usually found anywhere in the vicinity), but thought these two op-eds were of interest, in the sense that sage grouse has come out in gubernatorial politics. Probably would not happen with an endangered species in Texas, Florida, or New York, and maybe not California. These issues are a big thing to our people and hence to our governors. It could be about federal to private land ratios.. it could be due to people trying to make a living from natural resources compared to the proportion of people in the state as a whole. Or ????
Last Sunday there were these two op-eds in the Denver Post yes Colorado could manage federal lands better
and no.
Here is the “no” one on sage grouse (written by a member of the Hickenlooper administration):
This doesn’t mean acquiescing to every federal decision. Colorado has the expertise and clout to push against the federal government when we disagree. The Hickenlooper administration has done so on numerous occasions, most recently in protecting sage grouse habitat.
Hmm. if it is really about following the law on ESA, then states shouldn’t be able to “push back” when they disagree.
Here is the “yes” one on sage grouse:
Need another example? The feds have now threatened to list the Gunnison sage grouse after years of hard work, compromise, and collaboration with farmers, ranchers, neighborhoods and local governments. It took nearly three years for Gov. John Hickenlooper to finally realize what a disaster the listing could be to all involved. He hired a friend of mine to run interference at a cost of additional hundreds of thousands of dollars to stay the efforts of bureaucrats who have no appreciation of our Western way of life or culture of self- reliance and responsibility for the land.
First, the fact that this is political this year raises the complex situation that we all understand to the simplistic “take over public lands by states” idea and that dog won’t hunt. That’s why we know it’s political and not real.
We have states winning lawsuits because they weren’t consulted the right way (California southern land management plans). We have courts supporting the feds not allowing Wyoming to be a cooperating agency on 2001 Roadless. BLM has (or did have) formal discussions with the governor’s staff on management plans. I sat in on these, a presentation to the DNR Executive Director (Harris Sherman at the time, small world!) during the period we had a joint FS/BLM management plan. The FS does not (last I looked, have such a formal process). Seems to me that if your interest is good public policy and not political theater, there are a great many choices of how to involve states in federal decision-making that have not been explored, or seem to be more or less random depending on agency history, case law, etc.
I think this article was an offshoot of the recent surge in discussion of transferring federal land to Montana (and other western states). (A number of the articles linked in the sidebar are about that.)
This article ends up making an important point, but also shows how people can take that point and run the wrong way with it. The important point is that a local land use plan is essential for having a discussion with the Forest Service about how a forest plan may affect local land use (and vice versa). NFMA requires the the Forest Service planning process be “coordinated with the land and resource management planning processes of State and local governments and other Federal agencies.” The 2012 planning rule requires the forest supervisor to “review the planning and land use policies” of other governments.
Here are the problems. A local consultant states that, “federal land management must be consistent with local plans to the greatest extent possible.” There is no such requirement; coordinating the process does not mean consistency with the results. A county commissioner says, “more tangible issues, like whether a forest road gets maintained or how energy exploration and wilderness designations get decided, are what residents really care about.” Local land use plans have no jurisdiction over federal lands and should not be addressing management activities that occur there. Putting that kind of thing in a local plan does not bring it within the NFMA coordination requirement. On the other hand, there may be need of coordinated planning of connected infrastructure like roads (or where subdivisions occur in relation to NFS management).
I’d like to think that whatever it takes to get local planning to occur is a good thing. But I think that circulating the idea that local land use plans can govern federal land use will do more harm than good.
Natural gas drilling, seen here on top of the Roan Plateau, already encircles the wildlife-rich area. (Zach Ornitz | Special to the Denver Post)
While we’ve been having this discussion about settlements, I’ve been thinking a couple of things and following the newspaper on oil and gas in Colorado.
Let’s say there is way “a” of looking at things. NGOs have policy objectives. Litigating on NEPA, NFMA and ESA is a way of meeting those objectives. NEPA is convenient because you can find holes if you are smart and careful enough. This can delay people or make them give up, or negotiate with you, or if you wait long enough the material can lose its value, or the price of say, coal, can be too low and the project will not happen. NEPA claims seem to be used as a tool to delay or stop projects or make plans more in line with the plaintiff’s views.
Way “b” is articulated by others on this blog better than I, but is along the lines of “the FS does not follow the “rules” and NGO’s make them enforce the rules (related to the environment). Environmental impacts are said to depend on the intensity of impact, the frequency and the area impacted, so I am curious why some NGO’s choose the projects they do to worry about enforcing the rules. For example, hazard tree projects are a yawn in Colorado and a Big Deal in Montana. It doesn’t seem to me to do with the environmental impacts being all that different, nor the quality of the NEPA documents. So there must be a different explanation.
I thought some comparisons with oil and gas in Colorado might be helpful. Here there is some on the federal estate as well as private. There is no doubt about the value of the jobs and the funds given to communities and states.
First, here is a settlement discussed for the Roan Plateau. Now if the BLM has been working on this for all these years (since way before I retired) it seems like they could have done any NEPA that a judge required. Seems more like “A” to me; see my italics as to those “in the room.” Here’s a link to the story.
A proposed settlement that could free up some oil and gas leases within the Roan Plateau study area for drilling and do away with others should not come at the expense of future mineral lease payments to local governments, Gov. John Hickenlooper has pledged.
“The Hickenlooper administration believes a settlement that allows some energy development to proceed while protecting other areas of the Roan Plateau is in the interest of all parties,” Henry Sobanet, director of Hickenlooper’s Office of State Planning and Budgeting, wrote to state Rep. Bob Rankin.
Rankin, R-Carbondale, has been working with the governor’s office on a deal to prevent future federal mineral lease dollars from being withheld from local entities in order to refund about $28 million to Bill Barrett Corp.
The proposed settlement involving Barrett, environmental groups and the federal government has been touted as a potential “win-win” by those involved.
The exception has been local governments, including Garfield County, which have asked that they be held harmless in the deal.
Of particular concern is the state’s practice of withholding future federal mineral lease dollars, including royalties from producing wells, that normally would be distributed to local governments to help pay for impacts from energy development, instead of asking those entities to refund money that already has been paid out.
The deal could end several years of litigation over natural gas drilling on the Roan Plateau northwest of Rifle, where the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has reopened the federal environmental impact review that led to leases being issued in 2008.
Under the proposed settlement, Barrett would be reimbursed some of its federal leases in the more pristine areas atop the Roan Plateau.
In exchange, Barrett and other lease holders would be allowed to develop less-controversial leases, including in areas that already have active gas wells.
There is also an issue of oil and gas development and regulations for towns and communities. Recently it looked like Governor Hickenlooper tried unsuccessfully to broker a solution. But what was on the table was litigation and legislation. Now, this is under the state’s jurisdiction, hence the legislation alternative. Here’s the link to one story:
At the statehouse news Monday conference, Hickenlooper and Polis outlined the compromise, which involves four steps.
The governor create the commission to make recommendations to the legislature — by a two-thirds vote.
Hickenlooper had tried for months to broker a legislative compromise, but that effort collapsed in July.
“This may be the template for what happens in the rest of the country,” Hickenlooper said, noting similar conflicts are roiling in Texas, Wyoming and Pennsylvania. “This is the way we do things in Colorado. We work through our differences and difficulties. Maybe no one is perfectly happy, but it serves all parties.”
Polis said it was “better to address these issue in rule or by legislation, but if that doesn’t work, you’ve got to go to the ballot box.”
Private land.. many people including diverse representatives of the public need to agree. Public land.. NGO’s Barrett, and the feds need to agree.
The best way to protect rainforests is to keep people out, right? Absolutely not. The best way to keep the trees, and prevent the carbon in them from entering the atmosphere, is by letting people into the forests: local people with the legal right to control what happens there.
Given the chance, most communities protect rather than plunder their forests, says a new study by the World Resources Institute and Rights and Resources Initiative, both in Washington DC. The forests provide food, water, shelter, medicines and much else.
The report, Securing Rights, Combating Climate Change collates many existing studies. It concludes that forest communities only have legal control over one-eighth of the world’s forests. The rest is mostly controlled by governments or leased for logging or mining, often in defiance of community claims.
But community-owned forests are often the best-protected. In the Amazon rainforest, deforestation rates in community-owned areas are far lower than outside.
Hand it over
Since 2000, annual deforestation rates in Brazil have been 7 per cent outside indigenous territories, but only 0.6 per cent inside. The report estimates that indigenous territories in the Brazilian Amazon could prevent the emission of 12 billion tonnes of CO2 between now and 2050.
Brazil’s indigenous territories are an important reason why deforestation rates there have fallen by two-thirds in the past decade. The country is a leader in handing over forests to local people, having recognised some 300 indigenous territories since 1980. Almost a third of all community forests are in Brazil.
Likewise, in Guatemala’s Peten region, which includes the Maya Biosphere Reserve, deforestation is 20 times lower in community areas than those under government protection. In Mexico’s Yucatán state, deforestation is 350 times lower in community forests.
“We can increase carbon sequestration simply by transferring ownership of forests from governments to communities,” says Ashwini Chhatre of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who was not involved in the report. He led a 2009 study that reached similar conclusions (PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0905308106).
Not happening yet
However, global progress on recognising community claims has slowed since 2008. Governments, especially in Asia and Africa, are reluctant to give up control. In Indonesia, which recently overtook Brazil as the country that is deforesting fastest, the report found that only 1 million of its 42 million hectares of forests are formally under the control of their inhabitants.
“No one has a stronger interest in the health of forests than the communities that depend on them for their livelihoods and culture,” says Andy White of the Rights and Resources Initiative. “It is tragic that this has not yet been fully adopted as a climate change mitigation strategy.”
That could change. This year’s round of international climate negotiations will be in Lima, Peru, near the Amazon. Agreeing how to protect forests and the carbon they contain will be a central focus. “Strengthening community forest rights is critical to mitigating climate change,” says Jennifer Morgan of the World Resources Institute.
This map got my attention because of the disproportionate amount of “green” in the rural intermountain west. In this case it means counties have a disproportionately high number of employees in jobs like management, finance, technology, engineering, science, sales, entertainment and non-primary education (and of course lawyering).
“The creative-class thesis holds that communities that attract and retain more workers who are in creative occupations will fare better in today’s economy.”
From the background paper linked to this article:
“Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class makes a compelling argument that urban development now depends on novel combinations of knowledge and ideas, that certain occupations specialize in this task, that people in these occupations are drawn to areas providing a high quality of life, and that the essential development strategy is to create an environment that attracts and retains these workers. While developed with urban areas in mind, this thesis may be particularly relevant in rural areas, which lose much of their young talent as high school graduates leave for college, the armed forces, or “city lights.” Our analysis of recent development in rural U.S. counties, which focuses on natural amenities (for which ERS has also computed county-level scores) as quality-of-life indicators, supports the creative class thesis.”
So, perceived natural amenities attract creative workers who improve local economies. With a caveat that “growth and success among creative-class workers doesn’t necessarily extend economic benefits to other parts of the economy, such as blue-collar and service workers, at least in metro areas.” (All wages go up, but housing costs go up more.)
So maybe all this is saying is to get the right kind of education so you can do well and live in a nice place, but it might also paint a promising picture for these rural “green” counties.
