Uncategorized

OREGON STANDOFF: Timber collapse fuels resentment of federal policy (Greenwire)

by

From Greenwire today. Mentions that “the Forest Service banned the cutting of old-growth ponderosa pine” in 1995. The ban was a prohibition on cutting trees larger than 21 inches DBH (the “Eastside Screens” — background here), so of course that didn’t ban all old-growth, just the ones bigger than 21 inches.

The article has a photo of the old Hines Lumber Co. mill, with part of the roof missing.

http://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2016/01/26/stories/1060031154

 

OREGON STANDOFF:

Timber collapse fuels resentment of federal policy

Phil Taylor, E&E reporter

HINES, Ore. — A collapsed roof at the former Hines Lumber Co. timber mill symbolizes Harney County’s hard fall from its logging heyday.

The hulking mill at one time employed about a fourth of the county’s workforce with high-paying union salaries, but it shut down in 1995 after the Forest Service banned the cutting of old-growth ponderosa pine.

Its demise offers fodder for Ammon Bundy’s claims of federal overreach as he leads an armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge into its fourth week.

While Bundy has mainly courted frustrated ranchers, he’s recently broadened his pitch to the timber industry. He said last week that federal forests in Harney have up to a decade’s worth of downed timber that could resuscitate the mill and get loggers back in the woods — if only the federal government would loosen its grip on the lands.

In Harney, a county of 7,000 that is about three-fourths federal lands, local sentiment weighs heavily against environmental regulation.

Yet few here believe Harney will ever see a return to the logging levels of old. And despite Bundy’s promise, almost no one holds hopes of reopening the mill.

“Obviously, there are opportunities to move the pendulum back our way,” said Jim Geisinger, executive vice president of Associated Oregon Loggers. “But I don’t think it will be at that mill.”

Historical records suggest federal environmental laws are only partly to blame for killing Harney’s timber industry. The Hines mill started suffering in the 1980s as a result of stiffer competition, inefficient operations, automation and labor strife.

The derelict mill south of town on U.S. Highway 20 is a rusted shell stripped of its machinery, and was never designed to process the small-diameter trees the Forest Service sells these days.

“The Hines mill operated in the mid-20th century cutting huge, old-growth ponderosa pine trees, the likes of which we won’t see again for a hundred or more years, if ever,” said Andy Stahl, executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. “Once these valuable trees were gone, the dry and arid land, located far from major markets, proved unable to compete with southeastern U.S. and other more highly productive lumber producers.”

Yet to many area residents, the mill remains a symbol of how federal environmental rules have squeezed the livelihoods of ranchers, miners and loggers. It’s a potent symbol for firebrands like Bundy who are pushing for roughly 640 million acres of federal lands to be transferred to local control, unfettered by laws like the Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Policy Act.

“I don’t agree with what’s been going on with our government, the way they take care of our lands,” said Louis Smith of Crane, Ore., at a community forum in Burns earlier this month. “I worked in the timber industry here. I complained about when they had to take it away from us.”

According to Oregon’s Office of Economic Analysis, employment in Harney has been essentially flat for the past 40 years, even as Oregon’s employment has risen by 74 percent.

Statewide, nearly two-thirds of wood products employment has vanished since the 1970s. Yet Harney’s losses have been “significantly larger,” the office said.

Since 1978, Harney has lost 99 percent of timber industry jobs — only six logging jobs remain.

“That takes the industry’s share from more than 3 out of every 10 jobs back in the late 1970s to zero percent today,” the office said in a briefing.

It’s one reason that many residents here sympathize with Bundy’s anti-federal message, even if most disagree with the occupation.

Rise and fall

The first log rolled through the Hines mill in late January 1930, kicking off decades of prosperity.

Behind it in the woods north of town, loggers had cut an additional 20 million board feet of ponderosa pine — more wood than a foot-wide board stretching from Seattle to Miami. Federal and Hines-owned forests contained an additional 1.4 billion board feet of standing timber, according to the Burns Times-Herald.

A headline in the Jan. 31, 1963, paper read: “1962 Sees Hines Breaking Record.” The plant had churned out 134 million board feet of lumber, employment had doubled since it had opened and payroll had risen fivefold.

But hard times hit in 1980 when a Prineville sawmill outbid Hines for $6 million in timber from the Ochoco National Forest, marking what the Portland Oregonian described as “the latest in a succession of blows to Burns, one of the state’s hardest hit areas in the current recession.”

Mill employment was slashed to around 150, down from almost 1,000. Unemployment in Burns spiked above 25 percent, higher than anywhere in the state.

Among those laid off was Bob Wark, who was pictured in one newspaper with a rifle in hand looking to shoot an elk. “We need the meat for winter — and to cut down our food bills,” he said, according to the news clip.

Plans to partially reopen the mill were shelved due to “poor market conditions,” the Oregonian reported in 1980. In a letter to employees, the mill said it could not compete “unless we manage to operate much more efficiently than we have in the past.” Company officials asked the union to approve a three-year pay freeze.

The mill was purchased in 1983 and put back into operation as Snow Mountain Pine Co., but its resurgence was cut short by labor strikes in 1988.

It closed for good in 1995, laying off a workforce that had dwindled to 184.

Mill officials and the Times-Herald blamed onerous federal environmental restrictions.

“The injunctions, the appeals and the implementation of ‘screens’ on timber sales nearly brought logging to a halt this past year,” the Times-Herald reported. “And a sawmill can not operate without logs.”

Don Graves, a Snow Mountain official, was quoted as saying: “The local Forest Service personnel have been sympathetic and helpful, but the federal government’s policies are extremely restrictive.”

In a sign of local frustrations — and perhaps a harbinger of today’s refuge occupation — residents pushed to put federal lands under local control and to recall two of Harney’s top elected officials, the Bend Bulletin reported in 1995.

Mill officials said the Forest Service, facing pressure from environmental groups, had fallen short of its timber sale projections.

For example, the Malheur in 1989 had predicted it would sell 135 million board feet of timber annually for a decade. But by 1994, sales fell to 33.1 million board feet, with only 18 million going to saw timber, the Bulletin said.

Who is to blame?

Bob Ragon, who was assistant manager at Hines in the mid-1970s and is now executive director at Douglas Timber Operators in western Oregon, said the Hines mill suffered the same supply crunch as other Oregon mills that depended on federal forests.

Hines got 95 percent of its timber from the Ochoco and Malheur, he said.

“The federal government quit selling timber,” he said. “It’s quite elementary.”

He blames environmentalists, who, after halting the clearcutting of western Oregon forests to save the northern spotted owl, focused their attention on halting the harvest of large-diameter trees in eastern Oregon.

Jim Lyons, who served as President Clinton’s top forestry official and is now a top aide to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, in the mid-’90s pushed to “screen” all east-side timber sales for impacts to old growth, wildlife and rivers. Trees greater than 21 inches in diameter were generally placed off limits.

But the Hines mill’s struggles began far before the supply crunch, said Stahl of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics.

Annual timber sales in the 1980s were, on average, 50 million board feet more than in the previous four years, he said.

“Anyone who thinks the Hines mill closure had anything to do with declining Forest Service timber sale amounts needs to have their head examined,” he said.

Once the old-growth trees were gone, the Hines mill could not adapt, he added.

“The same thing happened to hundreds of lumber manufacturers throughout the interior Rocky Mountain West,” Stahl said. “They mined the old growth, shut the mills and moved their capital to faster-growing tree plantations elsewhere.”

Even without the environmental restrictions, modern technology still would have killed many timber jobs, the Oregon economic office said.

“The automation and mechanization in the logging process and in the mills, by itself, would and has resulted in a large employment decline,” it said.

Debate reignites over Colo. roadless rule exception

by

From Greenwire today….

 

Debate reignites over Colo. roadless rule exception

Dylan Brown, E&E reporter

More than 300,000 comments have flooded the Forest Service as the long-running battle over coal mining in remote Colorado forests continues to roil.

The Obama administration is trying to reinstate a section of the 2012 Colorado roadless rule — a joint effort between federal and state leaders — that set aside 4.2 million acres of Colorado national forest for conservation.

The so-called North Fork exception allows development in 20,000 acres of the Gunnison National Forest. The area is already home to the West Elk coal mine, which bankrupt Arch Coal Inc. is looking to expand.

Environmentalists have gathered more than 150,000 comments opposing the proposal, but Colorado Mining Association President Stuart Sanderson said the groups are just trying to stuff the ballot box against a compromise rule that has bipartisan support in Colorado, including from current Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper’s administration.

Environmental groups successfully blocked the exception in 2014 when a federal judge ruled the Forest Service had failed to properly account for its climate impacts (Greenwire, Nov. 12, 2014).

Instead of appealing, the Obama administration is now trying to answer the questions raised by the court in its bid to reinstate the North Fork provision (Greenwire, Nov. 19, 2015).

According to the Forest Service, expanded mining would produce roughly 1 million to 6 million tons of greenhouse gases annually and roughly 12 million to 36 million more during combustion and shipping if the full exemption was reinstated, the administration’s preferred option.

Environmentalists contend Arch mining an extra 170 million tons of coal represents 130 million extra tons of carbon dioxide — roughly equal to Colorado’s annual output.

“States are formulating efforts to comply with the Clean Power Plan,” said Anna McDevitt, lead organizer with Environment Colorado. “A mining project that will spew additional carbon pollution and displace 40,000 gigawatt-hours of renewable energy from the grid is counterproductive to both state and federal priorities.”

Earthjustice and the Sierra Club each gathered 50,000 comments opposing the North Fork exception. Friends of the Earth, the Climate Reality Project, WildEarth Guardians and the Center for Biological Diversity also gathered another 52,000 comments.

“The public has spoken loud and clear: The Forest Service’s plan threatens our children’s future on a livable planet,” said Earthjustice attorney Ted Zukoski.

Leasing moratorium, climate plan

Maintaining a contiguous roadless area not only protects wildlife, but WildEarth Guardians climate and energy advocate Jeremy Nichols argues it will not affect Arch, as the company already has 10 years’ worth of coal under lease.

“President Obama just announced a much-needed and long-overdue halt to new federal coal leasing in order to look seriously at the climate costs of the program,” said Michael Saul, senior public lands attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity (Greenwire, Jan. 15).

“It makes no sense to undermine this bold step by rushing through a costly, unneeded and polluting loophole to allow more coal mining in Colorado’s roadless forests,” he said.

The move also “makes no sense” to Friends of the Earth campaigner Marissa Knodel following Arch’s filing for bankruptcy protection last week (Greenwire, Jan. 11).

“The time for keeping dirty fossil fuels like coal in the ground is now,” she said, repeating the slogan of a mounting environmental campaign (Greenwire, Jan. 20).

Companies point to the Forest Service estimating emissions from the North Fork area would amount to less than 1 percent of national emissions.

“Clearly, mining over the life of this operation will have no impact on climate,” according to the Colorado Mining Association, which has more than 900 members in Colorado and the West.

Environmentalists also have a long history of manufacturing comments thorough online petitions to misrepresent their level of support, Sanderson said.

Not only is mining allowed in a sliver of the massive roadless area, coal remains an important global energy source, something Hickenlooper’s administration has recognized.

In a Jan. 15 letter to the Forest Service, Colorado Department of Natural Resources Executive Director Mike King said the exception was fundamental to balancing conservation and coal mines that “provide critical jobs to Coloradans.”

According to the Colorado Mining Association, North Fork coal supports 723 jobs and generates $286 million in revenue.

“The destruction of these jobs and services, which anti-coal interests seek, would devastate and impoverish rural Colorado and deprive the state and the nation of a source of clean, affordable energy essential to meeting the requirements of the Clean Air Act,” the group wrote.

A-to-Z Timber Sale a bad idea, and a bad model

by

The following piece was written by Jeff Juel, National Forest Chair of the Upper Columbia River Group of the Sierra Club, which successfully objected to the Mill Creek A-to-Z timber sale, and appeared this weekend in the Spokesman Review.

What do folks on this blog think about the fact that the Forest Service contracted a private timber company, Vaagen Brothers Lumber, to run the NEPA process from start to finish on this public lands timber sale? Or that “an agency contract expert expressed concern about the objectivity of this new process, asking how the Forest Service rationalizes the ability of the contractor to invest upfront without any guarantee of compensation and ‘without artificially deflating the stumpage value or artificially inflating the costs of other service work.’”

If this is the path that ‘collaboration’ is taking on public lands what other significant red flags does this situation raise? – mk

Privatizing our national forests doesn’t mean ownership necessarily changes hands. It does, however, mean control is handed over to a private entity.

The concern about keeping public forests in public hands was one reason why, in August, conservationists objected to a major timber sale in the Mill Creek watershed northeast of Colville: the A-to-Z Timber Sale on the Colville National Forest. In October, the U.S. Forest Service did right by withdrawing the timber sale.

The Mill Creek watershed was heavily and unsustainably logged years ago. Only about 154 acres of ancient forest remain out of 12,802 acres of national forest in the project area. That’s about 1 percent.

Given prior damage to wildlife habitats and watershed values, should further logging occur? If so, how much? Answering these questions requires careful, thorough, and unbiased analysis. Indeed, that’s what the laws protecting our National Forests require; laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and laws informed by nearly two centuries of deforestation on the American continent.

NEPA requires an objective process be completed for every proposed project and decision affecting federally managed lands and resources. Various alternatives are to be explored, environmental impacts thoroughly analyzed and disclosed, and scientific controversies and public concerns fully aired. And it’s the federal agency’s job, in this case the U.S. Forest Service, to prepare the environmental analysis on our behalf.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, the Forest Service contracted a private timber company, Vaagen Brothers Lumber, to run the NEPA process from start to finish, or from “A to Z” as this pilot project is revealingly titled. According to Vaagen Brothers, they’ve already spent about a million dollars.

In an internal document found on the A-to-Z project website, an agency contract expert expressed concern about the objectivity of this new process, asking how the Forest Service rationalizes the ability of the contractor to invest upfront without any guarantee of compensation and “without artificially deflating the stumpage value or artificially inflating the costs of other service work.” The Forest Service replied that it was presented that way by Vaagen Brothers “and supported by the collaborative group… Contractor would recoup its costs by not having to competitively bid on the timber.”

Can the public really expect a logging company’s analysis of environmental risks and benefits to be objective and thorough? Or provide a balanced exploration of the scientific controversies say, over whether logging truly restores fire-dependent ecosystems when the logging company puts up $1 million to kick-start the project?

Having private, local collaborators cheer on the privatizing of our national forests should not be comforting, even if collaborators include environmental groups. This A-to-Z sale of the NEPA process to the highest bidder represents an ominous step towards privatizing our national forests.

To make ethical decisions about our national forests and the environment generally, actual or potential conflicts of interest must be disclosed and understood. For example, it’s not widely known that The Lands Council, one of the collaborating groups, takes annual contributions from Vaagen Brothers Lumber, one of its so-called “business partners.”

Decisions must be made by professionals, subject to strict codes of conduct, after the analysis is completed, not as a vaguely implied condition of the contract granting rights to prepare the NEPA documents. We must restore ethical integrity in our government’s decision-making process in order to restore ecological integrity in our forests.

The A-to-Z also teaches important lessons nationally because Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers has touted it as a pilot process in moving legislation (HR 2647), impacting the entire national forest system, through the U.S. House of Representatives. This deceptively named “Resilient Federal Forests Act” is, as noted by the Seattle Times, “an opportunistic remedy that doesn’t pass the smell test, and the Senate needs to douse it quickly.”

This bill would exempt national forest logging up to 15,000 acres from normal NEPA analysis. Citizens challenging illegal and damaging timber sales in court would be required to post a bond upfront, making the constitutional right of judicial redress unaffordable in most cases. The bill would prohibit important watershed improvement by requiring local county commissioners to agree to the decommissioning of unneeded roads on national forests. It would also severely weaken protections for ancient forests in eastern Oregon and Washington, such as on the Colville.

Our national forests help define the Inland Northwest. The A-to-Z Timber Sale and the shenanigans in Congress are a reminder that constant public vigilance is a price we pay to keep our forests standing.

You be the forest supervisor

by

This a quote from the Lolo National Forest Supervisor included in his decision on an administrative objection to a timber project near Missoula.  It’s not an obvious case of fuel treatments in the front country vs backcountry, but rarely does the Forest Service state its priorities more clearly:

In his Nov. 9 letter, Garcia wrote “I recognize the value of treating (national forest) lands adjacent to private property, however the primary intent of the Marshall Woods project is forest restoration.”

It’s been kind of an academic question before now, but I happen to live within range of a fire that might burn through this area.  On the other hand, I don’t like arguments based on “my back yard.”  But should it be the policy of the Forest Service to risk a little private property (and maybe a life or two) to meet its (presumably ecological) restoration targets?  How would you choose and why?

It seems to me that this is a question that every forest plan should be designed to help you answer.  And the public should probably demand the opportunity to influence that in the forest plan because the decision of “where to go” is typically made before a project decision, and is likely considered by the Forest Service to be outside the scope of the project decision (and therefore outside the scope of public comments and objections).  (Which I think is what this objection decision is really saying.)

Armed Militia in Oregon Part of Long-running, Right-wing Fight Against Public Lands

by
Militants watch from a watch tower at the National Wildlife headquarters in Burns. The group, which occupied the grounds Saturday, say they have enough supplies to stay for years. In interview Sunday, they would not say what weapons they're carrying or how many people are on the grounds. Photo by Mark Graves, The Oregonian/OregonLive.com
Militants watch from a watch tower at the National Wildlife headquarters in Burns. The group, which occupied the grounds Saturday, say they have enough supplies to stay for years. In interview Sunday, they would not say what weapons they’re carrying or how many people are on the grounds. Photo by Mark Graves, The Oregonian/OregonLive.com

Below is a press release from the Center for Biological Diversity.– mk

An armed militia has taken over a federal building in southeastern Oregon as part of a long-running campaign of violence, intimidation and right-wing paranoia that has festered for decades in the West, most recently with the standoff with Cliven Bundy in Nevada in 2014. Among the demands at the latest standoff is to shut down Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, which provides crucial protections for wildlife, especially birds that migrate through the area.

“This is the latest in a long-string of armed, right-wing thugs attempting to seize America’s public lands and enact their paranoid, anti-government dream bought by guns and intimidation,” said Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. “We’ve seen it with pipebombs planted on wilderness trails and sent to the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. We saw in 2014 with Cliven Bundy and his racist and violent rhetoric in Nevada and now we’re seeing it with his sons in Oregon.”

Bundy stopped paying the federal government for the privilege of grazing his cows on public lands in Nevada and owes about $1 million to taxpayers. Bundy, who was quoted in an interview with The New York Times wondering whether black people were better off as slaves, was the center of an armed standoff with the Bureau of Land Management in April 2014 that ended with the BLM backing away and Bundy’s continued trespass on federal land. Among the anti-federal government militia who were defending Bundy at his ranch was Jared Miller who just three months after the standoff at the ranch went on a shooting spree with his wife that included the ambush-murder of two Las Vegas police officers as they ate at a restaurant. They draped the officers with a Gadsden flag — a symbol of liberty used by both the antigovernment “Patriot” movement and members of the Tea Party movement.

The latest standoff near Burns, Ore. followed a judge’s call for additional prison time for a father and son – 73-year-old Dwight Hammond and 46-year-old Steven Hammond – who prosecutors say lit a fire on federal land in 2001 to cover up the illegal slaughter of a deer herd. Both were convicted of arson and are scheduled to report to federal prison on Monday.

The wildlife refuge’s headquarters was seized by Bundy’s sons and others on Saturday. The men are armed and say they are willing to occupy the building for years if needed. According to the Oregonian, Ryan Bundy said that they’re willing to kill and be killed if necessary. Also among the armed occupiers of the wildlife fefuge building is Jon Ritzheimer, an infamous anti-Muslim activist who has repeatedly threatened violence.

“Despite their flags and patriotic overtures, don’t mistake this standoff for anything than what it is: An attempt to use guns to seize control over what taxpayers own and bully the government into acquiescing to their demands,” Suckling said. “But there’s a larger context here. What’s happening in Oregon is a logical outgrowth of right-wing rhetoric that demonizes even the concept of federal land – places like national parks and forests — and villianizes those who believe that publicly owned land should be more than just a source of profit for ranchers and corporations.”

There’s been a growing movement among politicians in the West to seize control of federal lands and hand them over to state and local government, where they’re more likely to be logged, mined and drilled for profit.

“These are special places that deserve protection for values that we all hold dear: clean air, water and refuge for wildlife,” Suckling said. “Americans, collectively, have decided that these public lands need and deserve protection. That shouldn’t be undone at the behest of men with guns and a dangerous view of how a government should be run.”

Stewart Brandborg on “Today’s Wilderness Challenge”

by
Stewart Brandborg is The last surviving architect of the Wilderness Act of 1964. He served as the executive director of The Wilderness Society from 1964 to 1976. In 2010 Brandborg was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Montana – the highest honor UM can confer upon an individual – for his lifetime of work protecting Wilderness and advocating for public lands and wildlife.
Stewart Brandborg is the last surviving architect of the Wilderness Act of 1964. He served as the executive director of The Wilderness Society from 1964 to 1976. In 2010 Brandborg was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Montana – the highest honor UM can confer upon an individual – for his lifetime of work protecting Wilderness and advocating for public lands and wildlife.

As a Montanan I am blessed to live in a place of incomparable beauty and wealth of natural resources.  In appreciation of that I find myself moved to make a plea to thoughtful citizens to resist the corrosive effects of growing threats to the quality of life we enjoy.

The Wilderness law has delivered to us who live here an irreplaceable part of our American Heritage. The quality of wildness, of autonomous and unfettered nature, was the central concern of those of us who, in the 1950s and early 1960s, wrote and worked for enactment of the Wilderness Act. Now, after a lifetime of work for wilderness, I ask its defenders to never forget: Wildness is foremost the quality of wilderness that we must seek to preserve. It is the forces of nature at full play in the absence of human intent.

Only fifty one years ago, when I helped organize the uniquely American popular movement to pass the Wilderness Act, we did not dream of the pace of change and rapid exploitation of natural resources that we face today. In this age of climate change, species extinction and all too widespread unraveling of the natural world that we all depend on, it is more critical than ever to preserve what wilderness we have left.

Wilderness is land left to be wild as well as a principled idea. It is the embodiment of reverence for nature and the humility to withhold the hand of man from exploitation. Sadly, such wild land and grace-filled humility seem to be in short supply and disappearing quickly due to dominance by moneyed self interests.

Commodification of the natural world is, as it was, often based on resource extraction. Now it is increasingly made even more pervasive by the profitable industry and expanding self interests of recreation. Humility is too often replaced by a sense of entitlement and selfishness. We are seeing accelerated loss of wilderness as well as the erosion of selfless values and actions that set the stage for Wilderness designation. The ascendancy of recreation, an optional pastime, even when at the expense of wildness is a sad comment on the state of American values.

One new vehicle contributing to this damaging trend is the increasingly popular Trojan horse of so-called ‘collaboration’. Industry and recreation interests sit down at a table sanctified by politicians beholden to industry campaign money and divide up America’s shared natural legacy. They are the self-selected deciders for all Americans and serve to displace meaningful participation by other Americans who live further away or can not afford the time to sit unpaid at the table. The way ‘collaboration’ is being used amounts to collusion by a small club divvying up valuable American public assets.

I cautioned groups like the Montana Wilderness Association and The Wilderness Society at a recent Wilderness Conference to “resist the fuzzy, fuzzy Neverland of collaboration,” and begin to advocate for real wilderness protection as the law was written and intended.

The willingness of certain conservation groups to compromise wilderness and their organization’s mission has been rewarded by lavish foundation funds, often from foundations like PEW (Sun Oil), founded with private profits derived from exploiting publicly owned resources.

We now see some well funded conservation non-profits collaborating with the Forest Service and sacrificing wilderness, then accepting taxpayer funds for ‘in-kind’ work participating in ‘partnerships’ that serve the federal agency’s goals.

We conservationists should not advocate for deals that include release of protected wildland areas or the inclusion of non-conforming, wilderness damaging uses, baked into the very enabling legislation. Exercising the necessary altruism we must continue to instill a love for wilderness and rededicate ourselves to the mission of protecting areas for their wildness, using an ecosystem approach based on conservation biology principles, while accommodating traditional recreation to the extent it does not diminish wildness or other wilderness characteristics.