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Letter in the Flathead Beacon supporting the Swan Forest Initiative, summarized on the project’s web page:

The approximately 60,000 acre forest would be established on the Flathead National Forest. All lands are within the LCCD boundaries and Lake County.

The Conservation Forest will be managed in trust by Montana’s Department of Natural Resources and Conservation (DNRC). The beneficiary of the trust is the LCCD.

The laws, rules and regulations governing the management of Montana’s State forest will be used by DNRC to manage the Conservation Forest.

All lands included in the Conservation Forest will continue to be owned by the United States Government. The people of the United States will continue to have the right to all lawful uses of these forest lands.
The Conservation Forest will revert to United States management 100 years after Congress approves establishment of the Conservation Forest.

All net revenues generated from proactively managing the Conservation Forest will be invested in conservation work in Lake County. The conservation work can occur on federal lands, State of Montana lands, private lands and tribal lands. Net revenues will most likely be invested in the Swan valley for a few decades.

Today, a federal appeals court ruled that the U.S. Forest Service is liable for toxic waste clean-up costs from mining on national forest land. The appeals court remanded the case back to the district court to determine how much the Forest Service would have to pay of the $1 billion in clean-up costs associated with a single molybdenum mine in New Mexico. The case is the first to conclude that the 1872 Mining Act, which gives mineral claimants the right to mine federal land, does not relieve the Forest Service from its CERCLA (“Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act”) responsibility as landowner for the cost of cleaning up toxic wastes.

The unanimous opinion by Reagan, G.W. Bush and Clinton appointees, scolds the Forest Service for dereliction of its duty to regulate mining to avoid spendy clean-up costs:

There is no dispute that the United States held fee title to relevant portions of the Questa mining lands during the time of hazardous substance disposal, part of the area that today comprises the Questa Site. We do not doubt that it could have exercised greater powers, regulatory or otherwise, over the lands if it wanted to do so.

This decision could be a game changer. No longer can the Forest Service and BLM hide behind the 1872 Mining Act and ignore the environmental costs of the mining operations they approve on public lands. Just the existing liability for past mining waste could put a big dent in the Forest Service’s budget, which has a sum total of $0 appropriated for CERCLA clean-up costs.

From here on out, when the Forest Service approves surface occupancy plans for 1872 mining act claims, it had better look carefully at its clean-up liability. Under some scenarios, the Forest Service, as landowner, could be stuck with 100% of the clean-up costs.

In a case brought by FSEEE, a federal district court judge ruled that forest fires are emergencies; and, as such, firefighting actions are exempt from any form of NEPA documentation. FSEEE filed the case in response to concerns raised by Wenatchee national forest employees that a 30-mile long fuels break logged through spotted owl critical habitat and riparian corridors was unnecessary. The fire stopped six miles from the logged line when rain and snow put it out.

FSEEE will appeal.

This article in the Smokey Mountain News looks at the draft forest plan for the Pisgah-Nantahala National Forest, which is “still nearly a year away.”

“I can’t commend the Forest Service enough on how they’ve rolled this out and how transparent they’ve been,” said David Whitmire, a hunter and outfitter who is also a member of the Stakeholders Forum for the Nantahala and Pisgah Plan Revision. “I think it’s fantastic.” …

The three main management types form a sort of gradient across the forest. Interface areas, generally about 1 mile wide, follow existing roads and are the places where human impact and population are likely to be the highest. The matrix area contains the most acreage and serves as a “connective tissue” between the interface and the backcountry. The backcountry, meanwhile, is managed to be remote and often roadless, with large blocks of relatively undisturbed forest.

More fodder for discussion. The article includes a link to an Interior memo on the topic.

The goals include finding “better ways” to partner federal land-use planning efforts with “state planning efforts,” seeking “opportunities to avoid delays caused by appeals and litigation” and developing a process to “right size” environmental review documents, “instead of defaulting to preparing an Environmental Impact Statement in circumstances when such a document is not absolutely needed,” according to the memo.

Russ Vaagen posted a video of a hearing of Alliance for the Wild Rockies vs. Jim Pena, the A to Z timber sale lawsuit. I haven’t listened to it all yet….

Article published today, June 28….

“Pointing to ‘significant dissatisfaction’ with the management of national forests, the Western Governors’ Association yesterday approved a resolution that calls in part for overhauling the Forest Service.

The seven-page policy resolution was adopted after a yearlong review of best practices and policies for forest and rangeland management in an effort spearheaded by current WGA Chairman and Montana Gov. Steve Bullock (D).”

….

Key paragraph from the resolution:

“Today, the Forest Service’s forest management program is primarily a byproduct of restoration projects intended to reduce wildfire risk and/or improve forest resilience, water quality, watershed health, key wildlife habitat, and/or intrinsic value. Western Governors recognize and support these forest values, but also believe it is reasonable to expect that some portion of the federal landscape will be focused on long-term, ecologically-sound forest management — where jobs, forest products, and revenues are priorities and generated through sound stewardship.”

Of course, “some portion” already is being managed as they describe, but….

“There is significant dissatisfaction in the West among many stakeholders with the current level of National Forest management. There is a general sense that the current level of forest management is not meeting anyone’s needs, whether it’s putting logs on trucks, protecting water quality, addressing fire risk, protecting key habitats and landscapes, providing for recreation, or other important community needs. Successful forest management reform will achieve a balance among all of these important objectives, and provide the opportunity for certainty such that diverse interests will be encouraged to work together to achieve shared outcomes.”

Having grown up in the science biz, the business models seemed a little iffy to me.  But I’ve never heard the scientific publishing models so clearly critiqued as this Guardian article. Below are excerpts.

 

But Elsevier’s business model seemed a truly puzzling thing. In order to make money, a traditional publisher – say, a magazine – first has to cover a multitude of costs: it pays writers for the articles; it employs editors to commission, shape and check the articles; and it pays to distribute the finished product to subscribers and retailers. All of this is expensive, and successful magazines typically make profits of around 12-15%.

The way to make money from a scientific article looks very similar, except that scientific publishers manage to duck most of the actual costs. Scientists create work under their own direction – funded largely by governments – and give it to publishers for free; the publisher pays scientific editors who judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar, but the bulk of the editorial burden – checking the scientific validity and evaluating the experiments, a process known as peer review – is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis. The publishers then sell the product back to government-funded institutional and university libraries, to be read by scientists – who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place.

It is as if the New Yorker or the Economist demanded that journalists write and edit each other’s work for free, and asked the government to foot the bill. Outside observers tend to fall into a sort of stunned disbelief when describing this setup. A 2004 parliamentary science and technology committee report on the industry drily observed that “in a traditional market suppliers are paid for the goods they provide”. A 2005 Deutsche Bank report referred to it as a “bizarre” “triple-pay” system, in which “the state funds most research, pays the salaries of most of those checking the quality of research, and then buys most of the published product”.

FYI, shipmates:  http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article157921889.html

Ron

FYI, here’s Russ Vaagen’s blog post on the A to Z sale, which has been discussed on this blog here and here. The former said that “The “A to Z” Mill Creek Pilot Project sets up a 10-year contract on 50,000 acres in the Colville National Forest. It allows a private company to use private dollars for everything after the timber sale is laid out, including the pre-sale environmental requirements and NEPA. With private funds and local management, the Colville National Forest can be managed for healthier forests and stable, sustainable revenue.”

Anyone have a link to the court decision?