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More grist for trhwe discussion mill: A new Science Findings report from the PNW Research Station, “What people value: an ecosystem services approach to managing public lands.”

Description: Since 1960, the Forest Service has been guided by the multiple-use concept, which recognizes five major uses for public lands—timber, water, range, recreation, and fish and wildlife habitat—and mandates that all five should be equally considered in management plans. In recent decades, however, it has become evident that people also value many other benefits offered by the natural world, such as support for indigenous cultures and sustainable communities, protection for endangered species, and carbon sequestration. The “ecosystem services” concept has emerged as a way to describe a much broader suite of goods and services, including those that are more difficult to quantify than the traditionally recognized major uses.

The 2012 Forest Service planning rule requires that ecosystem services be addressed in assessment and planning. Researchers at the Pacific Northwest Research Station are working nationally and with individual forests to apply ecosystem services approaches to operations and management decisions. They are working to characterize commonly overlooked values, provide incentives for sustainable practices, and encourage inclusive, collaborative policymaking methods to ensure that input from stakeholder groups and individuals is considered prior to implementing management actions. In a recent general technical report produced by station scientists, the Deschutes National Forest is used as a case study to explore the application of the ecosystem services concept as described here.

I worked out of Hamilton for many weeks, not that many years ago. People SHOULD be horrified that this was the first 4 hours of the Roaring Lion fire.

The following is a press release from the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council. Back in March 2016 we had this blog post about the secret clearcut on the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest in Montana. You can view photos of the logging project here. – mk

On July 28, 2006 the Federal District Court in Missoula granted the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council’s request for a preliminary injunction in their lawsuit filed a lawsuit against Leann Marten, the Regional Forester of the Forest Service in Federal District Court in Missoula, after discovering a secret logging project, named Moosehorn Ditch Timber Sale, that logged an unknown number of acres of the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest near Wisdom, MT, without any public involvement or legally-required environmental analysis. A copy of the order is here.

“When I happened upon this, I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Dr. Sara Jane Johnson, Director of Native Ecosystems Council explained.  “I was visiting the area to monitor some aspen livestock fencing projects when I came across the massive clearcut. The area looked like it had been hit by a nuclear bomb.”

Dr. Johnson has a Ph.D. in wildlife biology from Montana State University and was a wildlife biologist for the Forest Service for 14 years.  “Lynx are listed as ‘protected’ under the Endangered Species Act and the Forest Service has documented at least seven lynx sightings within 15 miles of this clearcut.  Even the agency’s own studies show that logging destroys habitat for lynx,” Johnson continued. “Yet, despite clear legal requirements to consider the effects of logging projects on National Forest lands, the Forest Service arbitrarily decided to ignore the requirements of our nation’s environmental laws.  The only thing they did was give this secret clearcut a name, Moosehorn Ditch Timber Sale.”

“This logging is particularly egregious because of the numerous other sensitive species that have been sighted within a 15-mile radius of the timber sale,” Johnson explained. “Goshawks and a nest, wolverines, sage grouse and a lek, Northern Rockies fishers, gray wolves, black-backed woodpeckers, pileated woodpeckers, northern bog lemmings, Brewer’s sparrows, and great gray owls have all been documented in the area.”

“The shocking thing is to see what the Forest Service will do if they think no one is watching,” Johnson concluded. “It was just pure luck that we found this illegal timber sale.”

Apparently the Forest Service got so tired of losing court cases on their timber sales that they now are pretending that our nation’s laws don’t apply to them,” added Mike Garrity, Executive Director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies.  “When we asked the Forest Service for a copy of the legally-required environmental analysis for this secret timber sale and documentation of how the public was involved, the agency responded that there was neither.”

“We are please that the court ordered logging stopped on this secret timber sale. Fortunately for the American public, the National Environmental Policy Act, the National Forest Management Act and the Endangered Species Act are still on the books,” Garrity continued. “We are a democracy and only Congress can change laws, not federal agencies.”

“Congress passed these laws because the Forest Service was destroying our public lands by putting clearcutting ahead of preserving habitat for biodiversity, preservation of species, hunting, fishing and the clean, vital watersheds national forests provide,” Garrity concluded. “Bureaucrats can’t just pretend laws don’t exist when they get in the way of clearcutting the National Forests that belong to all Americans.  In our nation everybody has to follow the law and that certainly includes the taxpayer-funded Forest Service.”

Here’s a July 26, 2016, AP article about an Oregon town that has survived the federal timber bust: Prineville, which is home to several Facebook and Apple server farms, as well as the venerable Les Schwab Tire distribution center. There are lots of construction jobs now, but will server farms provide a level of employment comparable to the former timber industry? I doubt it.

Former Oregon lumber town rides digital wave to a comeback

For perspective, you might read these articles about other towns where things aren’t as rosy. Sweet Home, where “The patchwork that resulted — some people with money, many people without and few ways to earn a wage — now defines much of rural Oregon.”:

Town That Thrived on Logging Is Looking for a Second Growth

And Oakridge, where “About 1,600 people — nearly half the town’s population — come to the Oakridge food bank each month to pick up free supplies.”:

Former Oregon Lumber Town Tries To Reinvent Itself

Homework assignment: Read “Is There a Place for Legislating Place-Based Collaborative Forestry Proposals?: Examining the Herger-Feinstein Quincy Library Group Forest Recovery Act Pilot Project,” Journal of Forestry, July 2016.

Focuses on the Quincy Library Group. Was anyone on this blog involved with the group? I’d like to hear your comments on the paper.

Here’s the abstract:

In 1993, a group of national forest stakeholders, the Quincy Library Group, crafted a proposal that intended to reduce wildfire risk, protect the California spotted owl (Strix occidentalis occidentalis), restore watersheds, and enhance community stability by ensuring a predictable supply of timber for area sawmills and biomass for energy plants. The Herger-Feinstein Quincy Library Group Forest Recovery Act of 1998 codified this proposal, directing the USDA Forest Service to conduct forest treatments on 40,000 – 60,000 acres per year by creating defensible fuel profile zones and logging by group- and individual tree-selection methods. The law also designated an Independent Science Panel to review monitoring studies, administrative studies, and research to assess efficacy of the implementation and achievement of goals. Although several goals were achieved, implementation fell short of treatment and volume goals, and evidence was lacking to make conclusive judgments about environmental impacts. Shortcomings were due to differing interpretations of the Act’s prescriptive intent, changes in management direction, compounding economic factors, appeals and litigation, variation in site-specific forest conditions, and variation in approaches among national forests and districts. Most notable was a lack of monitoring of the treatment effects on California spotted owl populations and other environmental concerns. These findings suggest that attempts to legislate prescriptive, collaboratively developed proposals may not account for the complex biophysical, management, social, and economic contexts within which national forest management occurs. These findings also suggest that current national forest policies and directives promoting collaboration should also be accompanied by a commitment to monitoring and adaptive management.

Today’s Seattle Times reports on a 5 million board foot timber sale conceived and consummated as a part of fighting the Wolverine Fire near Lake Chelan in Washington State. The sale, which cut a 50-mile long, 300-foot wide “community protection line” through spotted owl critical habitat and over streams, was logged primarily after rain had stopped the fire’s advance 8 miles from the Lake Wenatchee and Plains communities it was intended to protect. Contemporaneous Forest Service and FWS employees’ objections to the logging were overridden by the Wenatchee River district ranger.

Under normal circumstances, the National Environmental Policy Act would have required the Forest Service to assess this logging in an EA or EIS. But, Forest Service rules include an exception to NEPA analysis “[w]hen the responsible official determines that an emergency exists” and the actions are “urgently needed to mitigate harm to life, property, or important natural or cultural resources.” 36 CFR 220.4(b). In this instance, there is no written record of that determination having been made by “the responsible official,” or anyone else, for that matter. That’s the norm for Forest Service firefighting, which seeks to fly under NEPA’s radar using this regulation without ever following the regulation’s own terms itself. To the best of my knowledge, at no time does a Forest Service responsible official document that “an emergency exists” and that a particular action is “urgently needed.”

In the Wolverine Fire, the Forest Service’s behavior and facts on the ground belied any urgency to log this timber. If an urgent need to protect life or property had existed, the Forest Service would have warned the Lake Wenatchee and Plain communities to be prepared to evacuate. There are three levels of evacuation alert – Level 1 (Be Ready), Level 2 (Leave Soon) and Level 3 (Leave Immediately). At no time did the Forest Service put these communities on even the lowest level (Be Ready) evacuation alert. In contrast, Holden Village and Lucerne, which the Wolverine Fire actually threatened, received evacuation alerts and were evacuated.

When a wildfire threatens national forest visitors, the Forest Service also closes the area to public visitation. But here, when logging began, the Forest Service began relaxing public closures in the Wolverine Fire area, including reopening the Pacific Crest Trail to hikers.

Unaddressed in the news article is whether this 50-mile fuel break would have prevented the fire from spotting over the line. Had weather conditions been such that Lake Wenatchee or other communities actually been threatened (which they were not), it’s a fair bet that the fire could have jumped the line readily. In fact, the Forest Service warned that the Wolverine Fire might even jump Lake Chelan, which is a lot wider and less flammable!

The following press release is from Wilderness Watch. – mk

New Legislation is an Assault on the Very Idea of Wilderness and the Values of the Wilderness Act

The Sustainable Trails Coalition is attempting to amend and weaken the Wilderness Act

MISSOULA, MONTANA – Last week Utah Republican Senators Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee introduced the so-called “Human-Powered Travel in Wilderness Act,” a piece of legislation that would ride rough-shod over the Wilderness Act of 1964 by opening up America’s National Wilderness Preservation System to mountain bikes and other machines. The bill would also allow chainsaws and wheeled devices like carts and wheelbarrows in Wilderness.

For over 50 years the Wilderness Act has protected wilderness areas designated by Congress from mechanization and mechanical transport, even if no motors were involved with such activities. This has meant, as Congress intended, that Wilderness has been kept free from cars, trucks, ATVs, snowmobiles, bicycles, and all other types of motorized and mechanized transport.

“We see this for what it is—an assault on the very idea of Wilderness and the values of the Wilderness Act. Make no mistake, the goals of the Sustainable Trails Coalition are one of the biggest threats to the National Wilderness Preservation System,” said George Nickas, executive director of Wilderness Watch. “At a time when wilderness and wildlife are under increasing pressures from increasing populations, growing mechanization, and a rapidly changing climate, the last thing Wilderness needs is to be invaded by mountain bikes and other machines. “

It’s noteworthy that the Sustainable Trails Coalition had to enlist the help of some of the most anti-environmental and anti-wilderness members of Congress to carry their legislation. According to the League of Conservation Voters (LCV), Senator Orrin Hatch and Senator Mike Lee each have a lifetime environmental voting score of just 10 percent, while the most recent LCV scorecard gave Senator Hatch a zero percent and Senator Lee four percent.

Earlier this year, over 110 conservation and Wilderness organizations from across America wrote all members of Congress urging them to oppose attempts to amend and weaken the Wilderness Act and Wilderness protections by allowing bicycles in designated Wilderness. A copy of that letter is here: http://bit.ly/1VFoL1U

In the letter, the groups wrote: “These mountain bikers erroneously claim that mountain bikes were allowed in Wilderness until 1984, but then banned administratively by the U.S. Forest Service. This claim is simply not true.”

“Mountain bikes are exactly the kind of mechanical devices and mechanical transport that Congress intended to keep out of Wilderness in passing the Wilderness Act.  Bikes have their place, but that place is not inside Wilderness areas,” explained Kevin Proescholdt, Conservation Director of Wilderness Watch.

“We believe that this protection has served our nation well, and that the ‘benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness’ would be forever lost by allowing mechanized transport and other machines in these areas.”

# # #

Happy 4th of July, everyone! George Ochenski, the Monday morning columnist for the Missoulian (and a tremendous mountaineer, backcountry adventurer, hunter and fisherman), has this piece in today’s paper.

There will be a lot of blustering about freedom by politicians today, but you can bet there won’t be any talking about one of the greatest opportunities for true freedom in the United States today. Namely, our incredible system of designated wilderness areas where anyone can roam free under the open sky and take in what’s left of nature “untrammeled” by mankind.

It’s been more than half a century since Congress passed the 1964 Wilderness Act and President Johnson signed it into law. Much like Yellowstone National Park, the preservation of large blocks of public land as wilderness is an American idea of which each and every American should be proud. These are not the king’s hunting reserves, these are public lands open to all to enjoy, but not destroy.

While many individuals and organizations were involved in the passage of the original Wilderness Act, Montana enjoys the distinction of being home to one of the main movers – Stewart “Brandy” Brandborg, who was the head of the Wilderness Society when the act was signed into law. Born and raised in Montana, his father the forest supervisor for the Bitterroot National Forest for 20 years, Brandy’s dedication to the preservation of wilderness for future generations has never flagged and continues to this day with tremendous energy, despite heading into his nineties while still living surrounded by the beauty of his beloved Bitterroot Valley.

What Brandborg and his cohorts understood then – and what is even more evident now – is the tendency of human beings to overrun the natural world in their seemingly never-ending quest for wealth and resources. But those very activities that have taken mankind to unheard of heights of civilization have not been kind to our fellow creatures on the planet.

Road-building, massive clearcuts, damming rivers and dewatering them for irrigation, mines, gas and oil wells, fencing, extensive overgrazing, and development have all seriously reduced the once continent-wide wildlands to a mere fraction of their former size. Now, thanks to mankind’s intrusion into the natural world, species hover on the brink of extinction, migratory routes used by wildlife for millennia have vanished under concrete and steel. Meanwhile, the spawning runs for anadromous fish such as salmon that provided vital streams of life to both man and wildlife are now disrupted by enormous dams that turn cold, clean, flowing waters into still, warm and often stagnant reservoirs.

These are are all very real, very well-documented impacts and easily observable to anyone who will take the time to look. The one place you will not find these harsh intrusions on the natural world is in wilderness, which is why it is the only true solution to the problems now facing so many species.

Unfortunately, although Brandborg and his fellow wilderness advocates stood strong and proud to support wilderness for wilderness’ sake, that’s not the case with many of today’s wilderness groups. Having largely abandoned championing wilderness as the last bastion of the world that once was, many of today’s large and well-funded wilderness groups have turned to justifying wilderness designation by lauding the economic benefits rather than the preservation of still-existing ecosystems and the plethora of natural life they contain.

But pandering to the interests of resource extractors under the rubric of collaboration is a losing game. Nothing illustrates that more clearly than the recent announcement by Weyerhaeuser to shut down the former Plum Creek mills in Columbia Falls and then plead a “log shortage” as the cause. That Montana’s highest elected officials bought that line without doing any research is shameful.

The truth is Weyerhaeuser hasn’t bid on timber sales since its takeover of Plum Creek. Instead, the mega-corporation found it more convenient to blame environmentalists for trying to preserve what’s left of Montana’s forest ecosystems. And if anyone doubts the condition in which Plum Creek left its lands, a quick trip up Gold Creek off the Blackfoot will reveal the miles of weed-infested stumpfields that remain as Plum Creek’s rapacious legacy.

On this Independence Day, we should be proud of the freedom wilderness provides us. Free to hike, camp, fish, hunt and wander in the mystery, beauty and silence of the natural world without intrusion from today’s hectic, mechanized society. Wilderness needs no justification – and it would do a world of good for our politicians and their collaborator pals to understand that. As wilderness hero Brandy Brandborg still espouses, we need more, not less, wilderness in which we can all be free for generations to come.

Posts and comments in this and other forums reveal widespread misunderstanding of, and sometimes disrespect for, the viewpoint of others.  The graphic may help to make clear the difference between two world views, recognizing that both are strongly held and that both have merit.

Application of these opposing philosophies to land management results in totally different outcomes.  While short-term effects may be readily apparent, long-term impacts are often unpredictable. To make matters more complicated, the “goodness” of each outcome is dependent on the viewpoint of the observer, as the graphic’s text demonstrates.

The land on left side, of the photo, while controlled (but virtually unmanaged) by the U.S. Forest Service, belongs to you.  Study the photo and ask yourself “On how much of my land do I want Nature to take its course?”.    Al of it?   Some of it?  None of it?   If  “some”, what percentage?

Your land managers (Congress and the Forest Service), and your fellow readers, await your decision.

Factoid:  National Forests contain 36 million acres of formally designated wilderness areas or ~19% of the land area.

The editor of the Flathead Beacon has a new column following up on Weyerhaeuser’s announcement last week that they were shutting down two mills and a large administrative office in Columbia Falls, Montana.

You can read: “What Changed? A lot happened between then, when Weyerhaeuser spent $8.4 billion on Plum Creek, and now” here.

It was interesting to see that in May Weyerhaeuser sold its pulp business to International Paper for $2.2 billion. So too, it was interesting to see that earlier this month Weyerhaeuser sold it’s liquid packaging unit to (Japan-based) Nippon Paper for $285 million. I didn’t know about either of those transactions.

The Flathead Beacon and most of the media coverage in Montana continues to largely ignore another important piece of the puzzle here: something called Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs).

Ironically, Dave Skinner (sometimes a commenter on this blog) is also a regular Flathead Beacon columnist and he wrote this piece for the Flathead Beacon on REITs and the Weyco-Plum Creek merger back in December 2015.

As I recently pointed out, while Dave and I don’t agree on much, I do agree with much of Skinner’s analysis of REITs, and specifically how it pertained to the Weyerhaeuser-Plum Creek Deal.

Here are some important snips not to be missed in Dave’s article:

“That Weyerhaeuser and Plum Creek are merging might have surprised some Montanans. Not me. Why not? Well, I guess it’s time to remind everyone America’s timber beasts are dead, replaced by a new kind of beast – Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs)….

REIT’s must pay 90 percent of untaxed annual profit to shareholders, who are then taxed 15 percent on their capital gain. All things being equal, a dollar in a REIT pays back 35 percent more to an investor than a dollar in an otherwise-identical integrated company. In the Wall Street universe, where billions chase hundredths of a point, that was a big fat hairy deal….

Significantly, America’s all-time greatest integrated timber barony, Weyerhaeuser (Weyco for short), held out the longest … in fact, lobbying Congress for tax treatment that would render the company equivalent to a REIT in terms of tax burden and shareholder return. For that effort, in 2008 Weyco scored a reduction in income tax to 17 percent, saving $182 million.

Nonetheless, with REITs paying zero – Weyco kept spinning off mills (and people) in order to get under the REIT manufacturing-asset threshold, converting to REIT in 2010….

REITs aren’t focused on timber, except as a means of generating what stockholders crave – cash.”

Regarding the notion from the Flathad Beacon editor that in 2013 “there was a level of optimism in the [timber] industry” and “housing starts were up”….I’m not sure that’s true.

Well, housing starts may have slowly inched in a slightly upward direction by 2013, but as this chart from the U.S. Census Bureau clearly illustrates, U.S. housing starts are still just a fraction of what they once were.

A rough estimate is that during the period 2000-2006 the U.S. had about 12.45 million housing starts. During the same time frame, but from 2009 to 2015, the U.S. had about 5.95 million housing starts.

That means that the U.S. had a whopping 4.7 MILLION LESS housing starts from 2009-2015, compared with pre-housing bubble burst period of 2000-2006.

Please, let that number sink in for a second. That’s a lot less demand for 2-x4’s, plywood and building materials.

Also, in 2013 the U.S. timber industry knew full well what was coming down the pipe – the October 2015 expiration of the U.S.-Canada Softwood Lumber Deal. Of course, I can’t recall one single timber mill owner, logging lobbyist or politician telling Montana citizens about this. Nope, they were too busy telling the public how a handful of pesky “environmental extremists” were the reason for the timber industry’s problems. In fact, the public was basically keep about the expiration of the deal until the weeks leading up to it.

The Beacon did run this article in September 2015, in which the Montana timber industry finally starts to come to grips with the expiration of the Softwood Lumber Deal with Canada, and also the weak Canadian dollar, which was making the U.S. market much more attractive to Canadian timber corporations.

In fact, in that September 2015 article, Todd Morgan of the very-much pro-industry Bureau of Business and Economic Research at the University of Montana said the economic aftershock will continue to weaken the industry for some time.

“I wouldn’t be surprised to see mills taking some down time, either by shortening shifts or through curtailments,” Morgan said.

Well, that’s exactly what happened. At the end of September 2015 the Beacon reported that “Executives at Tricon Timber announced that roughly half of the mill’s workforce was being laid off Sept. 25, citing the tumultuous American timber market.”

Tricon’s VP said “said low lumber prices, the declining Chinese market and the looming expiration of the softwood lumber agreement between the U.S. and Canada all played key parts in the company’s decision.”

Even Julia Altemus, with the Montana Wood Products Association, who never misses a chance to blame environmentalists, admitted in the article:

“The state’s entire industry is struggling amid this situation. She said the industry has laid off a total of 235 positions since March. ‘People are just trying to do more with less,’ Altemus said. ‘It’s a matter of economics.’”

Also in September 2015, Julia Altemus told Montana Public Radio this:

“If you go back to March 1, about 235 lumber or mill workers have been laid off. That’s a huge hit to the industry and all the mills are suffering about a $2 million to $3 million loss in the first 6-months of the year. [It’s not] been that bad since the first part of the great recession back in 2007/2008….the markets are terrible.”

So just like the Flathead Beacon’s editor asks in his column “What Changed?” I must ask the same exact thing. What DID change from the dire situation outlined above – the results of which were entirely of the result of global economic realities and “terrible” markets.

Well, what changed in one of the largest wood products companies in the entire world came into Montana and purchased Plum Creek Timber Co for over $8 billion, making Weyerhaeuser a $25 billion new kid on the block. Weyerhaeuser’s purchased came with those 880,000 acres of (largely cut-over, entirely unsustainably logged) Plum Creek private timber lands and Weyco jumped whole hog into the REIT shell game that Skinner described so well.

What else changed? Well, we’re in the middle of a heated election cycle so of course all the politicians had to blame someone. So both republicans and democrats seized the opportunity to blame Weyco’s closures of two mills and an administrative office on “activists,” “fringe environmentalists” and the federal government.

I’ve said it before, so might as well say it again. If we’re going to continue to let politicians and big business incorrectly identify the problems, and just blame all the world’s problems on ‘fringe environmentalists,’ how in the world will we have good solutions? Or sustainable communities? Or science-based management of our National Forests, including budgets needed to do all the backlogged bona-fide restoration work?

Maybe that will change too…but I’m not counting on it.