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According to this information complied by Michael Kellett of RESTORE: The North Woods, the U.S. Forest Service’s wildland fire budget is about 10 times larger per acre than the National Park Service fire budget.

Kellett writes: “There are some differences in the details of each agency’s budget. But the big-ticket items appear to correlate to each other. Regardless, it is clear that the Forest Service fire budget is magnitudes larger than the NPS fire budget. (And this does not include ‘restoration,’ much of which is supposedly for ‘fuel reduction,’ or post-fire ‘salvage’ logging, which together total more than $800 million of the USFS budget.)”

Today, NASA posted this image of forest fires burning around Siberia’s Lake Baikal, the largest freshwater lake in the world. A drought has gripped the region throughout 2015. As in Alaska this year, these boreal forest fires are burning unchecked.

Question for our readers. Would fuels treatment, thinning or other logging have prevented these fires?

This is about the coal industry and climate disruption, but it reminded me of the changing policies on national forest lands and their effects.  Not the same, but some common threads.

One is the idea that is hard to talk about solutions when there is still hope that the problem will go away.  Forest planning has an important role to play in establishing common, reasonable expectations.  I think it could do better than it’s done.

Every now and then, Cato Institute senior fellow Randal O’Toole returns to his public land policy roots. Today he plays a familiar riff on firefighting spending.

Twenty years ago, one could have imagined a congressional coalition of Blue Dog Democrats and sensible Republicans working together to come up with a new fire policy. No longer. The Blue Dogs are almost extinct, now numbering only 15 members and “sensible Republican” is an oxymoron. Which leaves the legislative arena to western senators of both parties who want the CNN air show to continue, welcome the federal dollars spent in their states, and are scared to death of offending heroic firefighters (they remember that Conrad Burns lost his Montana seat after dissing a firefighting crew).

This article describes a lawsuit by the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council over the East Deer Lodge Valley Landscape Restoration Management project on the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest in Montana. It is interesting that the project is “part of a restoration effort that began in 2006. That’s when the Forest Stewardship Program — made up of eight entities including the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks; Powell County commissioners; and Trout Unlimited — approached the Forest Service about the idea of working together to improve the banks of the Clark Fork River.”

The project area is about 40K acres, and commercial salvage and commercial thinning would occur on about 2,500 acres.

Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council lay out their objections in detail in the complaint. They oppose the project for a number of familiar reasons — the harvesting, threats to grizzly bears and lynx, threats to water quality, and so on. What I’d like to know is this: If these two groups were the land managers, what would they do? Nothing. An objection letter states that “We recommend that the “No Action Alternative” be selected.” The groups describe significant environmental problems that already exist — sediment in streams from roads, low-quality wildlife habitat, etc. Have the groups proposed an alternative management plan, other than “no action”?

It’s been a slow fire season for the U.S. Forest Service, which still has $0.5 billion remaining in its suppression account. With 80% of acres burned year-to-date in Alaska, where most fires are not actively worked, the Forest Service has had fewer chances to spend money than in most recent years. Only 350,000 of the nation’s 6.3 million burned acres have been located on national forests. So when things do start popping, the FS has lots of budgetary incentive to throw everything it has into the fight.

California homeowners are the beneficiaries of this profligate spending. Here are some of the services the FS is providing to those who have chosen to live deep in the woods.

Private swimming pool

Customized sprinkler system

Aluminum foil wrap

These photos are from the on-going Shasta-Trinity NF’s South Complex fire.

Meanwhile, the Forest Service bemoans the lack of dollars to manage its natural resources while Congress is scrambling to write another blank check for firefighting. Weird.

The job of enforcing environmental laws rests primarily with the government. But, as regular readers know well, sometimes the government doesn’t do its job. That’s why Congress included “citizen suit” remedies in several key laws, such as the Endangered Species and Clean Water Acts. These provisions deputize citizens to enforce the law when the responsible government agency is behaving irresponsibly. Sixty days before bringing a citizen suit, the citizen has to tell the government, in writing, the how, what, when and where the law is being broken.

Yesterday, a Ninth Circuit panel lampooned the Forest Service’s defense that environmentalists hadn’t given the Forest Service sufficient written notice of its alleged lawbreaking associated with approving suction dredge mining in coho habitat. The Forest Service argued that it knew full well the details of its infractions, that environmentalists could have bolstered their written notice by asking the Forest Service for that information (e.g., through the Freedom of Information Act), and, as a result, environmentalists had not given sufficient notice to the Forest Service of its law-breaking.

Here’s the court’s scathing response: The Forest Service contends that KS Wild should have sought information from the Forest Service, either based on Forest Service public information regulations or on the Freedom of Information Act, and that KS Wild should then have provided that information, obtained from the Forest Service, to the Forest Service. The Forest Service writes in its brief, “Information about the Forest Service’s response to notices of intent to operate is readily available from the Forest Service itself.” If the relevant information is as readily available to KS Wild as the Forest Service claims it is, that same information is just as readily available to the Forest Service. And it is available to the Forest Service directly, without first having to provide it to KS Wild which would, in turn, then provide it back to the Forest Service, the original source of the information.

While I’ve been away, the Denver Post has run a number of interesting original articles (kudos to them!) and I am very ..slowly..trying to catch up. This one is not about the Forest Service, but does talk about tensions rising over different uses, a familiar theme.

Here is the link (hint:turn your volume all the way down before you go to this link) and below is an excerpt.

Detractors come out

“Corporate events,” he wrote, “have no place in the park and are incongruous with the park’s mission of resource protection, the appreciation of nature and the respect of the experience of others in the park.”

The post spurred more than 800 comments from detractors.

Bissell’s response was in stark contrast to that of Yosemite National Park managers, who saw opportunity when Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson finished their record-setting climb of the Dawn Wall on El Capitan in January .

When the rock-climbing legends returned to the valley below El Capitan, a park-service-provided lectern stood ready before a phalanx of news cameras eager to catch the pair’s thoughts after their 19-day ascent.

“Forging a connection”

“So much of what we are doing is forging a connection between the parks and visitors so people understand why parks are here and people appreciate the environment we try to create,” Yosemite assistant superintendent Scott Gediman said.

The two parks’ reactions to internationally acknowledged athletic feats reveal divergent approaches to stewardship of public lands and highlight the increasing struggle for cash-strapped land managers dealing with inspiring, yet unpredictable, athleticism inside the country’s preserved wildlands.

“Most people are not going to do those things, but the value is that they are inspiring,” said Christian Beckwith, whose annual SHIFT Festival in Jackson, Wyo., gathers outdoor leaders to consider conservation alongside adventure and culture. “You might not be able to run the Appalachian Trail in 46 days. But you still might be able to go out for a run this evening and dig a little deeper because you are so fired up. The challenge is balancing that inspiration with the impact and long-term sustainability of our natural resources.”

When regulations for public lands were first etched into law decades ago, the rule-writers never suspected GoPro-strapped athletes would be leaping from quiet peaks with wingsuits or exploring remote backcountry on lightweight personal rafts.

I recently received a copy of a book, “The Ecological Importance of Mixed-Severity Fires: Nature’s Phoenix,” edited by Dominick DellaSala and Chad Hanson. In the August edition of The Forestry Source, I write that the book is “advocacy first and science second.” You can get a sense of this in a NY Times op-ed by DellaSala and Hanson from last week, “More Logging Won’t Stop Wildfires,” in which they write:

“In the case of the Rim Fire, our research found that protected forest areas with no history of logging burned least intensely. There was a similar pattern in other large fires in recent years. Logging removes the mature, thick-barked, fire-resistant trees. The small trees planted in their place and the debris left behind by loggers act as kindling; in effect, the logged areas become combustible tree plantations that are poor wildlife habitat.”

I know Larry H. and others will have something to say about this.

Contrast the DellaSala/Hanson view with objective science in “Fuel and Vegetation Trends after Wildfire in Treated versus Untreated Forests, Forest Science, August 2015. The abstract:

“Increasing size and severity of wildfires have led to increased interest in managing forests for resiliency to future disturbances. Comparing and contrasting treated versus untreated stands through multiple growing seasons postfire provide an opportunity to understand processes driving responses and can guide management decisions regarding resiliency. In treated and untreated forests, we compared fire effects 2–10 growing seasons following fire on 3 different fires in New Mexico and Arizona. We estimated understory cover, standing crop, fuel loading, and basal area in (1) lop, pile, burn; (2) lop and scatter; (3) harvest and burn; and (4) untreated control stands. Untreated sites had persistent bare soil exposure and less litter cover up to 10 growing seasons after fire. However, there were few differences in standing crop among years and treatments. Falling rampikes contributed to greater coarse woody debris on untreated sites versus treated sites 6 –10 years postfire. However, there were few differences in fine fuel loading among treatments. Proactive management using the full range of silvicultural tools can reduce fire severity and create desired stand conditions, depending on management objectives.”

I highlighted the last sentence for emphasis.

Here are a couple items of interest from Ron Roizen..the links are in his post linked here. (Note, I tried to share it, but only WordPress-hosted blogs came up..) Thanks, Ron

Rep. Ken Ivory “What the BLM does NOT want you to Know!

Here is a link to a YouTube video of Rep. Ivory explaining the origins of federal land ownership in the American West. Linda Yergler was kind enough to forward this item to us.
Forest management: Real, collaborative models should be nurtured

Here’s a link to a Montana publication’s editorial advocating real collaborative efforts (over superficial ones, say?).

More Logging Won’t Stop Wildfires

And, finally, a link to a NEW YORK TIMES op-ed arguing, in effect, that reducing the fuel in a forest does not reduce the burn when it burns. Nick Smith’s invaluable daily was the source of this link.