timber

More research on less tree growth after fire

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(RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post)

 

 

This article summarizes some recent research on the topic:

Among Stevens-Rumann,’s work was a 2017 study of nearly 1,500 sites charred by 52 wildfires in the U.S. Rocky Mountains. Her research found that lower elevation trees had a tough time naturally regenerating in areas that burned between 2000 and 2015 compared with sites affected between 1985 and 1999, largely due to drier weather conditions.

More recently, a 2019 study written by her colleague Kerry Kemp found that both Douglas fir and Ponderosa pine seedlings in the Idaho’s Rocky Mountains — just south of B.C. — were also struggling in low-lying burned areas due to warmer temperatures, leading to lower tree densities.

Both studies attribute climate change to be the lead cause of why the trees are struggling to grow back in certain fire-scarred areas.

As a result, some ecosystems will no longer be able to support tree species. Instead they may convert to grasslands, she said.

We’ve talked about this before (for example, here).  But I would like to know how this kind of information is being incorporated into long-term planning for timber harvest levels. In accordance with the requirement for sustainability on national forests, we should be assuming forest growth consistent with the natural range of variation, which should reflect the effects of climate change on future forests.  What I would expect to be seeing based on this kind of research is reduced area suitable for timber production because it would become too dry, and reduced volume resulting from reduced density, slower growth rates and more frequent fires.  “Sustained yield” means that projections of lower future timber yields may lead to reduced near-term volume. I’ve looked at the timber volume documentation for a few forest plan revisions, and I haven’t found anything there about climate change (there’s usually an unconnected section on the effects of climate change somewhere).  (Projected timber harvest volumes are not tending to go down in revised forest plans.)  Maybe that just requires digging deeper than the public-facing documents or maybe it’s not happening.   Does anyone know more about this?

Public land developers getting financial pushback

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An interesting observation from the Washington Post.  As investors become more enlightened about the financial risks caused by climate change they are starting to hold corporations accountable.  That includes their operations on public lands – and litigation is part of the risk.

A dozen-and-a-half senators wrote letters to 11 of the largest U.S. banks asking them to back down from financing any oil and gas activity in an unspoiled expanse of Arctic wilderness.

“The scale of your banks’ assets individually, let alone together, give you the ability to drive change in protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and in shifting towards a U.S. financial sector that effectively analyzes and plans for climate risks,” the group of a senators, led by Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), told Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and six other banks in a letter sent last Thursday.

Democrats hope these banks follow the lead of one key peer: In December, Goldman Sachs said it is ruling out financing new drilling or oil exploration in the entire Arctic.

The world’s largest asset management firm, BlackRock, said last month it would divest from coal burned in power plants and make climate change a “defining factor” of its investing strategy.

And just last week, a group of investors representing nearly $113 billion in assets under management issued a similar letter to energy, mining and timber companies. Their warning: Don’t invest in certain federally controlled areas once protected but now open to development by the Trump administration.

These areas include not only the oil-rich Arctic refuge but also Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the largest intact temperate rainforest where the U.S. Forest Service wants to allow new logging, (discussed here) and Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (the Twin Metals mine litigation is discussed here), a popular lake-pocked forest near where the administration wants to allow a copper and nickel mining operation.

The institutional investors, which include several religious funds as well as a fund established by the late oil heir David Rockefeller, warned companies that many of the administration’s rollbacks of public land protections are legally precarious, and may be struck down by the courts or the next presidential administration. The letter went out to ExxonMobil, the timber company Weyerhaeuser and 56 other firms, according to Reuters.

“Many of these projects are mired in litigation,” the letter stated, “challenging the legality of any current or future industrial activity initiated in these regions and providing evidence of the risks associated with conducting commercial development on lands that the American public has deemed valuable for protection.”

The institutional investor letter also mentioned other areas, including protected sage grouse habitat (litigation discussed here) and the national monuments that have been reduced in size by the Trump Administration that are also under litigation (discussed here).  Here’s the latest on that.

Mid-Rise Urban Buildings and CLT_ Carbon “Bank Vault”? New Yale/PIK Study

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mjostarnet building in Norway
Here’s a link to a new study by some folks at Yale and PIK on the potential for mass timber to sequester carbon.

The steady rise of the world’s urban population will drive an immense demand for new housing, commercial buildings, and other infrastructure across the planet by midcentury. This building boom will likely escalate global carbon emissions to dangerous levels and intensify climate change — particularly if it relies on traditional materials such as concrete and steel.

But if society is able to use more wood-based products to meet this building demand, this urban growth might actually present an opportunity to mitigate climate change, according to a new paper led by researchers at Yale and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

Writing in the journal Nature Sustainability, a multidisciplinary team of researchers and architects predicts that designing mid-rise urban buildings with engineered timber — rather than relying mainly on carbon-intensive materials — has the potential to create a vast “bank vault” that can store within these buildings 10 to 68 million tons of carbon annually that might otherwise be released into the atmosphere.

Simultaneously, society would drastically reduce carbon emissions associated with the construction sector, said Galina Churkina, who led the collaborative research while she was a visiting fellow at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES).

“Since the beginning of the industrial revolution we have been releasing into the atmosphere all of this carbon that had been stored in forests and in the ground,” said Churkina, who is a senior scientist at PIK. “We wanted to show that there can be a vision for returning much of this carbon back into the land.”

Beyond that, achieving a large-scale wood-based construction sector has the potential to create a new “symbiotic relationship” between natural systems and cities, said Alan Organschi, another author, from the Yale School of Architecture and Gray Organschi Architecture in New Haven.

This article from last year also in Yale Environment, looks at some concerns of people in Oregon.

The forestry part is what has some skeptical of how ecologically sound mass timber is and, if and when it’s scaled up, whether it will truly provide a planetary climate solution. In a letter to the city of Portland last year, representatives of Oregon environmental groups — including the Audubon Society, the Sierra Club, and Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility — raised serious doubts about mass timber as a green climate solution and questioned the city’s plan to use it.

First and foremost, they said, is the need to certify that wood is logged sustainably and certified as such. “Without such a requirement,” the letter stated, the city “may be encouraging the already rampant clear-cutting of Oregon’s forests… In fact, because it can utilize smaller material than traditional timber construction, it may provide a perverse incentive to shorten logging rotations and more aggressively clear-cut.”

Such industrial-type forestry — large-scale plantings of trees selected to grow fast — creates a “biological desert,” said Talberth, of the Center for Sustainable Economy. “And it’s driving the extinction of thousands of species. Mass timber is mass extinction.”

“We must ensure that mass timber drives sustainable forestry management, otherwise all of these benefits are lost,” agreed Mark Wishnie, director of forestry and wood products at The Nature Conservancy. “To really understand the potential impact of the increased use of mass timber on climate we need to conduct a much more detailed set of analyses.”

Wishnie said The Nature Conservancy, the U.S. Forest Service, and a dozen universities and other research institutions are launching a new analysis of mass timber.

At the same time, he said. “there is enough data to say the [CO2] savings are significant.” He said the substitution of concrete and steel with wood and the long-term carbon storage in mass timber buildings make up about 75 percent of the total benefit, and the forestry end, if executed sustainably, about 25 percent.

I’m not sure about the logic that industry folks would more aggressively clearcut or shorten rotations.. it would be interesting to sit down with them and see how their management might or might not change. Since a great deal of Oregon is public lands anyway, that management would be unlikely to change. Perhaps if federal lands were certified? Oh, but the Sierra Club doesn’t support commercial harvesting there. Seems like CLT is between a rock and hard place with them.. on federal lands they don’t want trees sold, and we can’t trust the people on private lands.

Or there could be a separate new kind of “waste wood certification” where folks certify that otherwise the material would be left or burned.

Still Against Commercial Logging After All These Years: Should the Sierra Club Update its ECL Policy?

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I was curious about the claim that “forests can’t sell trees from areas that are not in the timber suitable acres in a forest plan”, as we discussed for this project here. Further exploration yielded the information that the Sierra Club is one of the plaintiffs in the current litigation. Which made me wonder whether they had ever changed their policy with regard to selling trees from National Forest. I looked on their website and it appears that they still have this 1996 policy.

The Sierra Club support[s] protecting all federal publicly owned lands in the United States and advocate[s] an end to all commercial logging on these lands.
Adopted in the Sierra Club Annual Election, April 20, 1996

Now 1996 was 24 years ago, and perhaps some things have changed since then. Especially in California, where the Sierra Club headquarters are located, many folks think that if wood from fuel treatment projects (or salvage) could be sold, it should be, and that would be better, say, for climate than burning it in piles.

I also found this clarification from 2012.

Commercial logging is the removal of trees from federal lands as commodities — whether for lumber (or other building materials), pulp/paper, energy, or other commodity production — regardless of the stated rationale for the logging project, or whether some term other than commercial logging is used to describe the project.

There has been a great deal of pushback in various op-eds that environmental groups’ efforts and lawsuits have nothing to do with ability to get fuel treatments (and prescribed burning, where pre-treatment is necessary) done on federal lands. (My view is that it’s one of many factors).

But in an effort to be logical, for that to be true then:

(1) The Sierra Club has been completely unsuccessful with this policy over 24 years, that is, it has no effect because no fuel treatments would potentially incorporate commercial logging (in this case, they might want to reconsider the policy), or

(2) Number of acres treated for fuels is invariant to whether trees are sold or not. (I think there are two piles of funding one for fuel treatment and one for timber, and if you can do both you can fund a project from either or both pots, but I’m sure it’s more complicated and would like to hear from some TWS experts on this.)

But with what we know today, the alternatives to selling trees from fuel treatments (because many trees can’t be sold, and the FS still does fuel treatment) is to pile and burn them, or chip and mulch or …

It’s an advantage of interest groups, unlike federal agencies, that they can say what shouldn’t be done, without being clear about what they think should be done instead. It’s a great position to be in, because you don’t have to consider how technically realistic the alternatives are, nor do you have to produce a document describing them, and the environmental pros and cons of each. Nor put those out for comment, or debate what the best available science says.

Perhaps it boils down to “you can’t trust those people to be honest about the reasons for cutting trees, and we’re going to assume that all tree cutting that might be sold is really for commercial timber production.” It seems to me, again,  that in 24 years, there might be other ways of dealing with these concerns.

When the FS was exploring getting wood certified by FSC, I heard that the FS couldn’t do it because the Sierra Club was against it. I was surprised that one organization could have enough clout to put an end to an idea. I’ve heard this several times, but did not sit in on the meetings myself, so can’t vouch for it. But that idea was for making the case that if people use wood, the NFs can produce it just as sustainably as anyone else. It makes perfect sense that to the Sierra Club  ECL means ECL no matter how gentle the practices used.

What I’m thinking about is an independent certification body that could say “we have looked at this and these folks are cutting trees for other reasons. The choices are leaving stacks and burning versus selling them and having people use them (substituting for Canadian imports or ??).” It seems to me a certification body would be cheaper, and better, and with my design incorporate public comment, so more transparent,  than going to court and having folks digging through federal employees’ emails for signs of hidden commercial intentions.  And at the end of the day the judge may well end up ruling on something completely different, leading to appeals and more court cases and so on.

I think that such a body might also help folks in the Sierra Club who might be puzzled by the complexities of the 2012 memo. If, when I worked for the FS, I had gotten a memo like that, I would have interpreted it “you are free to do what you think is right, unless someone more important than you finds out and disagrees, and then you will have to walk back agreements you made and possibly get in a lot of trouble.” Been there…

Helena project clears the 9th Circuit, except for some “WUI”

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Fine specimen of a real antique Morse code telegraph machine.Copyright: Photowitch | Dreamstime.com

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the Telegraph Vegetation Project on the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest, except for one question about the location of the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI).  The case was previously described on this blog here.  That description included this allegation by plaintiffs:

Agency used non-federal definition of the Wildland Urban Interface 


“While the lynx amendment allows logging in the Wildland Urban Interface, it also defines the Wildlife Urban Interface to be within one mile of communities,” Garrity explained. “But the Forest Service used a new definition provided by local counties and then remapped the Wildland Urban Interface to include areas over five miles away from communities.”

The court remanded the decision for 50 acres of the 5000-acre plus area to be treated, and left the record of decision in place while the Forest Service completes its reevaluation:

“The Forest Service has acknowledged that it erred in calculating the wildland-urban interface for the project area. The Forest Service estimates that, once it has corrected its error, 50 acres of forest that it had planned to treat may no longer be eligible for treatment. If that estimate proves correct, the Forest Service represents that it will not treat those 50 acres. We grant the government’s request for a voluntary remand to allow the Forest Service to undertake the necessary reevaluation.”

I have been interested in how WUI is identified, by whom, and using what process under what authority – especially the role of non-federal parties.  WUI is generally  identified based on the Healthy Forest Restoration Act of 2003 (HFRA).  Areas identified using that process qualify for streamlined projects in accordance with HFRA, and may be eligible for particular funding.  However (in accordance with HFRA), WUI projects are still subject to requirements of the governing forest plan.  Management direction for lynx is part of the forest plan, and this article (like plaintiffs) suggests it imposes greater restrictions on part of this project:

“In the second portion of the court’s order, the Forest Service proposed logging and thinning in areas defined as the “wildland-urban interface,” which is where houses or cabins meet the forest. Regulations related to lynx allow the removal of some trees and vegetation in lynx habitat if it falls within the wildland-urban interface and if the agency shows it is part of a wildfire mitigation project. The alliance inspected the area and reported only a handful of houses. The Forest Service conceded in court documents that it erred in calculating the size of the wild-land urban interface based on discrepancies between what qualifies.”

However, this actually indicates that the problem was in the definition of “community” (based the on number of houses), rather than the distance from one.  In fact, the Northern Rockies Lynx Management Direction refers to WUI “as defined by HFRA.”  Those definitions and criteria for “WUI” and “at risk community” are summarized by the Forest Service here.  Although which communities are to be included (they can self-identify) are mostly listed in the Federal Register, that doesn’t address their boundaries.  The district court opinion upheld the Forest Service WUI designation, stating that, “The Powell County Plan does not begin with the HFRA definition; it creates its own, “and “the Court is not persuaded by Council’s attempt to discredit the map provided by the Forest Service in the Telegraph Project EIS” based on that county plan. Yet it sounds like the map may have been wrong in this case.  This all reminds me of my take-home from my Forest Service days that “WUIs are fuzzy.”

Here’s why this might be important to planning.  I agree with the idea that forest plans (like the lynx direction) should identify areas with differences in long-term management that result from a wildland-urban influence.  However, if the WUI definition refers to another source (HFRA and a local plan), instead of being specifically defined in the plan itself through criteria and/or a map, there may be confusion about where and how the plan applies (as seems to be the case here).  (Yes I’m criticizing the lynx strategy for doing that; they didn’t take my advice.)  In addition, if external decisions about WUI locations change, the Forest Service may have to publicly consider whether to adopt that change in its forest plan (that situation wasn’t addressed in this case).  I’m also contrasting “decisions” with new “information” that affects how an existing decision applies (e.g. someone building a new house), which must be considered in a planning context but doesn’t necessarily trigger a plan amendment.  (A court has held that even changes in something like criteria for maps of lynx habitat must be considered in a public planning process when forest plan direction is tied to it.)

(The other issue addressed by the 9th Circuit in its short opinion was the ESA consultation process for grizzly bears.  The court approved a consultation process that tiered to forest plan decisions and consultation, which lead to streamlined project consultation.  The value of forest plan consultation has been questioned, but that value is evident here.)

 

Now what happens when a new species on a national forest is listed under ESA?

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Once upon a time, when a new species was listed under ESA, the Forest Service was required to reinitiate consultation on its forest plan regarding the effects of the plan on the species.  Projects were often held up while this was occurring.  As a result of the Cottonwood litigation, involving a new designation of critical habitat for Canada lynx, the law was recently changed so that neither new critical habitat nor listings require new consultation on existing forest plans (as discussed here).

The candy darter (CBD photo) was listed as endangered in late 2018 and it is found on the Monongahela National Forest.  The Center for Biological Diversity provided this news release regarding a proposed timber sale in a watershed where the species is found and where critical habitat for it is being considered:

The U.S. Forest Service this week announced it will withdraw a 2,400-acre logging project in West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest following objections raised by conservation groups about harm to an endangered fish.

The project would likely have caused significant erosion and sent sediment into rivers and streams, threatening the rare fish and other animals.

“Friends of Blackwater and all of our supporters are very pleased that the Monongahela National Forest supervisor has withdrawn the Big Rock Timber Project proposal,” said Judy Rodd, director of Friends of Blackwater. “Hopefully this is a step toward fully protecting the candy darter, a tiny jewel of a fish found in the timbering proposal area, near the world-famous Cranberry Glades.”

The Forest Service announcement said the project would have been the first of its kind to require formal consultation under the Endangered Species Act for the brightly colored candy darter, which was listed as endangered in November 2018. The Fish and Wildlife Service would have had to calculate how many, if any, candy darters could be killed or harmed by the proposed project. The Fish and Wildlife Service also plans to include portions of the logging project area in its final designation of the fish’s critical habitat. Those issues contributed to the decision to pull the project.

Presumably the Monongahela has come to a full stop on projects that may affect the darter, while they figure out a strategy for consulting with the Fish and Wildlife Service.  This is pretty close to the same result that would have occurred without the “Cottonwood fix.”  This is a situation where consultation on a forest plan has proven beneficial.  It should result in a species conservation strategy that “fully protects” the species’ habitat on the forest that the FWS supports and that can be included in the forest plan.  The FWS may then rely on the forest plan decisions and their biological opinion for analysis of its overall effects, which would simplify and streamline the consultation process for projects.

Post-Cottonwood, they could now choose instead to proceed on an individual project-by-project basis, but why?

(PS – This looks like an example where the administrative objection process prevented the Forest Service from losing a lawsuit.)

Forest Service: Forest Products Modernization Effort and Followup to Appraisal Question

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Steve Wilent recently asked a question here

The Forest Service is developing a “market based” approach to timber sale appraisals that will aim to improve alignment between local market conditions and appraisal metrics.

I assumed that they’d been doing this all along. Anyone have insights?

I contacted the Forest Products Modernization team, and they responded promptly with much good info. Thank you! Here’s a link to their information. Also, they have newsletters, and you can get them by signing up with them at “[email protected]”. I attached newsletters from July and November FPM_At_A_Glance_November2019

FPM_AtAGlance_July2019_final  here. Note to Larry: there is a great deal about the workforce.

Where We Are Going?
• People: We are partnering with Human Resources Management to improve recruitment and retention of employees, developing and expanding training resources including academies and task books for career advancement, addressing qualification disparities in the forester and forestry technician series, and increasing the capacity of existing staff through consolidation and streamlining of certifications.

• Technology: We are modernizing the Timber Information Manager application; deploying new technologies (handheld data recorders, tablets, and lasers); expanding the use of geospatial and remote sensing (e.g., Light Detection and Ranging and unmanned aerial systems) for inventory, monitoring, boundary designation, and volume estimation; and partnering with the Chief Information
Office to expand Wi-Fi and broadband access to forest and district offices to support digital and networking capabilities.

• Business Change: We are simplifying contracts and appraisals to mitigate challenges associated with low-value material and increase timber sale outputs; leveraging employee, partner, and private industry expertise to improve program and project management skills across the agency; establishing a cross-deputy working group focused on forest products markets and utilization to help us better evaluate timber sale viability and mitigate issues with low-value material; and scaling up lessons learned and best practices for use of GNA, stewardship agreements, and designation by prescription.

• Policy: We are updating our timber management directives to reflect new authorities and provide clear direction and technical guidance on new procedures; coordinating with the Environmental Analysis and Decision Making (EADM) team to streamline the integrated resource analysis, proposed action development, and National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) analysis steps of timber sale planning; and working with the Office of Regulatory Management Services to maintain a searchable, web-based agency policy library.

Now onto the detailed technical appraisal answer:

Answer:
The Forest Service has been researching a market-based approach as an alternative to using the results of past sales for establishing the Base Period Price (BPP) for the Transaction Evidence Appraisal (TEA) System. The TEA system is used in all Regions of the Forest Service except Region 10 (Alaska).  TEA uses a BPP as a starting point for the appraisal that is based on high bids from sales in the recent past. [More precisely, the BPP is the volume weighted average high bid for sales in the base period.]  When there are insufficient sales to develop a reliable BPP or when there is a lack of competition for sales, it is reasonable to doubt whether “fair market value” is being established by the normal transaction evidence procedures.

An appraisal is an estimate of fair market value (36 CFR 223.60) and is used to establish the minimum stumpage value for the sale of National Forest timber (36 CFR 223.61). The research led to pursuing alternative methods for establishing that base period price, such as using a market based approach.  The approach that was taken was not to develop an entirely new appraisal system, or build a single, national appraisal system.  Instead, a process was developed to establish BPP based on the relationship between lumber market indices and stumpage prices.  The resulting market-based BPP represents the fair market stumpage value that would otherwise have been established by the high bids the Forest Service received from actual sale transactions.  The BPP, however it is established, is further adjusted by sale specific and local market conditions to approximate a fair market value, and establish a rate for advertisement.

The new approach has shown value in test cases where the current TEA approach resulted in no bid sales due to price, and where competition or the number of previous sales was lacking for a  reliable appraisal of fair market value.

Now, I am going on the proverbial limb here as to my understanding, so please correct or add if this context is incorrect.

1) There is some requirement to try to sell trees that might be cut for say, fuel treatments or hazard trees. To do that the FS has to jump through required “timber sale” hoops.
2) However, there may be no current history to use and there might only be one potential purchaser.
So they had to figure out some other way to derive fair market value.

 

Why Don’t Environmentalists Just Buy the Land They Want To Protect? Because It’s Against the Rules

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WEG worked to retire a permit for 50 cows on the 8,454-acre Alamocita allotment.

This is a thoughtful piece by Shawn Reagan of PERC in Bozeman, Montana about some of the same NGO’s we see litigating on federal lands trying approaches of buying and retiring leases to stop activities they don’t like, say grazing or oil and gas. As he says, in many places environmental groups feel that they can’t just buy land (as the example yesterday) because the land of interest is owned by the feds or state.  He has examples from grazing, oil and gas and timber, so it’s too long for me to excerpt meaningfully. I’d recommend reading the whole thing. He also has a more in-depth journal article with a co-author, Bryan Leonard of Arizona State University in the Natural Resources Journal.

Disputes between environmental activists and developers often have a predictable result: litigation. Environmental activists have perfected a zero-sum game of suing, suing, and then suing some more to halt development projects or other land-use activities they don’t like. An alphabet soup of environmental laws—from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Endangered Species Act (ESA) to the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) and the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA)—gives groups ample opportunities to stall projects with legal challenges or to thwart them entirely.

But increasingly, environmentalists are testing the strategy of bidding for the rights to natural resources instead. In recent years, activists have attempted to acquire oil and gas rights in Utah, buy out ranchers’ public grazing permits in New Mexico, purchase hunting tags in Wyoming to stop grizzly bears from being killed, and bid against logging companies in Montana to keep trees standing.

“It’s a market-based approach,” says Judi Brawer of WildEarth Guardians, an environmental group that has negotiated several grazing permit buyouts from ranchers in the Gila National Forest in New Mexico. “And it’s way more effective at the end of the day.”

Environmentalists paying to protect landscapes isn’t itself new. Nonprofit organizations such as the Nature Conservancy do it all the time, raising millions of dollars in donations to buy land or easements to protect important landscapes from development. But the extent of these voluntary market-based exchanges is often limited to private lands. On federal and state property—which makes up most of the land in the American West—such deals are much more complicated, if not outright prohibited.

I’ll share some of my own perspectives on the topic:

1)  The oil and gas industry hires working-class (as well as other) people and pays them good wages, which leads to other purchases and taxes and so on, plus federal money goes to states which they use for education, etc.  So for the people, the county and the state, it’s not just the cost of the lease itself.  Example from this article: “The check, for $486,000,000, represents the portion the state receives from federal oil and gas lease sales. In total, the New Mexico has received revenues exceeding $1 billion in 2018 from BLM’s mandated quarterly lease sales.”  On the other hand, environmental groups might not pick the leases most likely to be developed, because of the cost.

2) This is a bit philosophical, but as Shawn points out, the original laws regarding federal land were to promote use of the land.  Are we that rich a country that we don’t need to use our own natural resources anymore? Would we feel the same way about buying out a ski area lease, or a wind or solar farm lease? It is a good thing to depend on international trade and the good will of other countries to provide energy and shelter? If we use things and don’t produce them ourselves, are we in effect exporting environmental damage to other countries, and is that the right thing to do? Do we trust those other countries or are there national security implications of not producing them here? Perhaps importing wood from Canada yes, perhaps oil from OPEC, no.

3) We could change from however flawed (as we at The Smokey Wire are very aware) planning decisions made by federal employees, with the input of the public, to planning decisions made by boards of some not-for-profit.  Some not-for-profits are sometimes funded by rich people from elsewhere (though again, not always).  Nevertheless, it’s clearly less transparent and less open to public opinion than the flawed federal decision-making process. Of course, they may be the same groups who tend to  “get their way” via litigation, as in Shawn’s piece.

4) I see grazing/ranching as a different situation due to the private and public land linkages (if groups bought the home ranch property and the federal permit, that would work better) , as he points out. There is also a difference in the people employed both in numbers and pay, and the fact that the US many other food sources. Still, ranchers provide financial and social capital bonuses to many struggling rural communities in a way that leaving it alone does not.

5) In the related realm of water rights NFWF (Nif-Wif) did an extensive review here.

Much for discussion here. Other thoughts?

Reimagining The Rural West – WGA Workshop- Today !!

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This is going on today in Post Falls Idaho… you can watch it on Youtube.

You can also make comments on Youtube. But I’m interested in your thoughts here.  Which one did you watch and what did you think? You can watch them later as well.

Here are a couple of that look interesting (including participation by sometime commenter Chelsea McIver, and two R-1 FS folks):

10:15 a.m. Natural Resource Management and Infrastructure Challenges: Responsible management of forests and rangelands relies on high-quality local infrastructure. The lack of sawmills, timber processing machinery, and adequate roads all reduce the business case for forest and rangeland management activities – from traditional timber sales to innovative forest thinning and rangeland management projects. Panelists will discuss historical changes to natural resources markets, strategies to create markets supporting ecosystem-based goals, and federal programs that can aid rural infrastructure challenges. Moderator: Idaho Governor Brad Little. Panelists: Matt Krumenauer, Vice President Special Projects, U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities; Chelsea Pennick McIver, Research Analyst, Policy Analysis Group, University of Idaho; Cheryl Probert, Forest Supervisor, Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forests, U.S. Forest Service; Tom Schultz, VP of Government Affairs, Idaho Forest Group.

2:30 p.m. Community Collaboration and Revitalization in North Idaho: Through the North Idaho Tourism Alliance (NITA), 12 communities are working together to capitalize on their region’s assets, including spectacular scenery, access to outdoor recreation and local history. Panelists will discuss how their communities have evolved and how collaboration is helping to build a more vibrant economic future. Panelists: Stephanie Sims, Executive Director, International Selkirk Loop & NITA Board Chair; Colleen Rosson, Executive Director, Silver Valley Economic Development Corporation & NITA Board Vice Chair.

1:00 p.m. Broadening the Outdoor Recreation Economy: Outdoor recreation draws people from urban areas to rural communities, bringing economic benefits and bridging the urban-rural divide. To grow the outdoor recreation economy, rural communities need infrastructure, workforce, and businesses to support visitors and local residents. This panel will explore how different organizations are working to build and strengthen recreation economies. Moderator: Jim Ogsbury, Executive Director, Western Governors’ Association Panelists: Lindsey Shirley, University Outreach & Engagement Associate Provost, Oregon State University Extension Service; Jorge Guzmán, Founder and Executive Director, Vive NW; Tara McKee, Program Manager, Utah Office of Outdoor Recreation; Joe Alexander, Region 1 Director of Recreation, Minerals, Lands, Heritage, and Wilderness, U.S. Forest Service.

2:10 p.m. Cooperative Models Across the Rural West: Cooperative ownership and funding systems support local food systems, infrastructure assets, housing initiatives and a host of other critical efforts in the rural West. Panelists will discuss how cooperative models can support diverse rural development goals and examine how federal and state policies influence cooperative efforts. Moderator: Jim Ogsbury, Executive Director, Western Governors’ Association. Panelists: Lori Capouch, Rural Development Director, North Dakota Association of Rural Electric Cooperatives; Tim Freeburg, Board Member, Pacific Northwest Farmers Cooperative; Kate LaTour, Government Relations Manager, National Cooperative Business Association; Tim O’Connell, West Region Coordinator, Rural Development Innovation Center, U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Check it out and tell us what you think!

 

What Do People Mean When They Say “Clearcut”?: Colville Example

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I think we could all agree that this is a “traditional” clearcut.. CanWel, Fernie, BC

Maybe the term “clearcutting” means so many things to so many different people, that it’s not helpful in understanding people’s specific concerns with forest practices.  Let’s go to a case we’ve discussed recently on the Colville. Here’s a statement in the KRCG press release that Matthew posted here:

The plan signals a significant increase in logging – including a large areas of clearcutting – as much as 25,000 acres per year across the 1.1 million acre Colville Forest and above prior recommendations.

Now, if we assume that the Colville will clearcut in the same proportions it currently does, FACTS  shows (if my extraction is correct) about  90 acres of clearcuts since 2000. Those are in ski areas, rights of way and a rock pit.  Those are not actually clearcuts in the timber harvesting sense, although timber was probably harvested.  So we don’t know exactly what KRCG considers a “clearcut”.  For example, clearing rights of way could be considered clearcutting because all trees are removed.  But it is not clearcutting in the regeneration sense.  The word clearcutting has a long association with timber harvesting and not with clearing land for other purposes.  That’s how it’s defined in the Dictionary of Forestry (Helms).  That’s also what the famous clearcutting controversies were about, which lead to NFMA, which lead to planning rules and plans and so on. The Forest History Society has a brief history of those clearcutting controversies by Jerry Williams.   I know some readers lived through those years, I’d be interested in your perspectives on that history.

When I worked in south-central Oregon in the 80’s, I remember a field trip with Weyerhaeuser and a professor from OSU about how we should make our clearcuts larger, as that was more efficient.  That was the “latest science” of the time.  We had just stopped doing selection (“pick and pluck” and Keen’s classification of ponderosa pine) and were not too inclined toward  the whole clearcutting idea, which originally came from the Wet West Side.  But we got into it, and then came along some people now saying you should make clearcuts smaller for apparently good reasons.  Then Jerry Franklin came up with “big messy clearcuts,” for more good reasons.  These, I think, were bigger than the previous small ones, and perhaps bigger than the original large ones, but they had more different kinds of material left.  Anyway,  all these clearcutting trends were always about timber, not clearing for rights-of-way nor subdivisions or whatever else. The alternatives were always shelterwoods or uneven-aged management- other silvicultural choices.  I’m also not sure that “small clearcuts” had a defined size that distinguished them from group shelterwoods or group selection, or “wildlife openings” or…  The idea of all these different choices seemed to be making sure the right conditions were present for regeneration to be successful. Perhaps the way the word is used today, it means something else. But what exactly? Is a clearcut in the eye of the beholder?

Given all that history, when Jim Coleman says in this comment:

“clearcutting is happening now and this year 5-60 acre clearcuts have gouged out of the Sherman Pass area up to 5,500′ elevation – and in full view of the Pacific NW National Scenic Trail and adjacent a Forest Service Scenic Byway.”

And yet the EA for the Sherman Pass Project says (in response to one of Dick Artley’s voluminous comments on the project).  (The FS had 50 pages of responses to his comments out of a 238 page EA).

“Silviculture: No clearcuts are planned for this project. While the purpose and need for this project is to protect the highway and powerlines from wildfire impacts, visual quality objectives have been considered. “

What are we to make of it?  I don’t think of hazard tree removal along roads or powerlines as “linear clearcuts” because of my history with the term. But perhaps some people do.  Or maybe it depends on the size of the opening, either relative to tree height or not, or the size of the trees that remain.   How do you think about the term?