Uncategorized

ESA Revision Proposal

by

Report released today by a group of House Republicans for updating the Endangered Species Act:

Endangered Species Act Working Group

From the report:

This Report summarizes the findings of the Working Group and answers key questions related to those findings. The Report acknowledges the continued need for the ESA, but recommends constructive changes in the following categories:

* Ensuring Greater Transparency and Prioritization of ESA with a Focus on Species Recovery and De-Listing
* Reducing ESA Litigation and Encouraging Settlement Reform
* Empowering States, Tribes, Local Governments and Private Landowners on ESA Decisions Affecting Them and Their Property
* Requiring More Transparency and Accountability of ESA Data and Science

Timber Changes Reflect Inequality: Wood products companies have busted labor unions and pay less in taxes, all to the benefit of the 1%

by

The following opinion piece is from Ernie Niemi, president of Natural Resource Economics Inc. based in Eugene, Oregon.

From leaders as diverse as Barack Obama and Newt Gingrich, we’re hearing a desire to rein in the nation’s extreme inequality — inequality in incomes, wealth and political power. It’s about time. The forces underlying inequality have harmed Oregon’s workers, families and communities for several decades, and they undermine our children’s economic future.

Today’s economic inequality is staggering. The top 1 percent — 1.6 million families with incomes more than $394,000 in 2012 — currently captures about 20 percent of the nation’s total income. In contrast, from the end of World War II until 1980, that group collected only about 10 percent of total income.

In recent decades, as the nation’s total income has grown, the top 1 percent has captured an increasing share of the aggregate growth: more than two-thirds since 1993, and 95 percent of all increased income since 2009.

Inequality in Oregon shows similar characteristics. Between 1990 and 2012, the median income (half have more, half have less) of year-round workers remained essentially unchanged, at about $35,000 in 2012 dollars. Not so the richest Oregonians. Over the same period, the top 1 percent saw their incomes increase by about 40 percent, to almost $240,000.

The growth in inequality likely stems from several factors, but two stand out: the decline in labor unions and reductions in taxes. The changes in Oregon’s timber industry illustrates the importance of those trends.

Before the mid-1980s, most timber workers belonged to strong unions and the industry employed about 70,000 to 80,000 workers. Then the industry busted the unions and began cutting labor costs. It did so largely by eliminating jobs, so that it now employs only about 25,000 workers statewide.

Contrary to common belief, most of the job losses have not resulted from environmental restrictions that reduced logging on federal lands. In the 1990s, when most logging reductions occurred, for example, the Forest Service estimates that those restrictions caused only about one-third of the industry’s job losses.

Most job losses stem, instead, from management’s efforts to get rid of workers, replace workers with technology, and avoid hiring workers by shipping logs overseas.

Management also has reduced wages for the industry’s remaining workers. Before the unions were busted, the industry’s average wage was about 40 percent higher than the statewide average for all workers. Now, it has fallen to near or slightly below the statewide average.

If unions had remained in place and kept timber-industry wages 40 percent above the current statewide average, wages in the industry would be about $17,000 more per worker. Do the math.

Statewide, 25,000 loggers and mill workers lose about $425 million in wages per year. For the 3,300 wood-products timber-industry workers in Lane County, the loss is about $56 million per year.

Where does all that money go? Nobody knows for sure. It seems safe to say, though, that much of the money that otherwise would be going to middle class workers now goes, instead, to upper-income owners and managers of timber companies.

The shift has real, negative economic impacts on Oregon’s workers, families and communities. It also negatively affects our children’s future: The greater the degree of income inequality in our society, the greater the consequences if they become stuck on rungs of the economic ladder where incomes remain stagnant or decline.

The timber industry has accentuated these negative effects by obtaining tax reductions. In the early 1990s, the industry paid a severance tax of about $50 million per year on the volume of timber harvested in Western Oregon, with the proceeds going to support various types of public services. In 1993, though, it used the spotted owl’s impacts on federal logging and other arguments to persuade the state Legislature to begin phasing out this tax.

That arrangement contrasts with timber harvest taxes that timber companies — often the same companies that are doing business in Oregon — pay in Washington and California.

In Washington, for example, the industry pays a timber harvest tax dedicated to county governments. If Oregon had a similar tax, it would have provided Lane and other counties in Western Oregon with about $40 million in 2011. That amount would have filled much of the funding gap that has caused counties to lay off workers in their transportation, public safety, health and other departments.

The timber industry’s experience is not unique. The crippling of labor unions in other industries and changes in taxes at all levels of government have shifted income away from workers and middle-class families and to the very rich.

The extreme inequality we see today is not an unavoidable result of natural forces, however. It results, instead, from political decisions our parents and we made in the past.

We can reverse the effects of these decisions. We must do so if we are to arrest the growth in inequality that increasingly is producing an economy, a political system and a society of the people and by the people, but for the rich.

Ernie Niemi is president of Natural Resource Economics Inc. in Eugene.

Research survey does not support logging as beetle outbreak remedy

by

sixOne of the nation’s leading mountain pine beetle experts is Dr. Diana Six, professor of Forest Entomology/Pathology at the University of Montana’s College of Forestry and Conservation.  As the Bozeman Chronicle reported yesterday, “On Friday, in the online journal Forests, University of Montana pine-beetle biologist Diana Six and two University of California-Berkeley policy experts published a review of the scientific evidence to date on whether forest manipulation is effective at preventing pine-beetle outbreaks. The answer is generally ‘No.’”

You can download the full PDF of the study here.  Meanwhile, the full abstract follows below:

ABSTRACT:  While the use of timber harvests is generally accepted as an effective approach to controlling bark beetles during outbreaks, in reality there has been a dearth of monitoring to assess outcomes, and failures are often not reported.  Additionally, few studies have focused on how these treatments affect forest structure and function over the long term, or our forests’ ability to adapt to climate change.  Despite this, there is a widespread belief in the policy arena that timber harvesting is an effective and necessary tool to address beetle infestations.  That belief has led to numerous proposals for, and enactment of, significant changes in federal environmental laws to encourage more timber harvests for beetle control. In this review, we use mountain pine beetle as an exemplar to critically evaluate the state of science behind the use of timber harvest treatments for bark beetle suppression during outbreaks. It is our hope that this review will stimulate research to fill important gaps and to help guide the development of policy and management firmly based in science, and thus, more likely to aid in forest conservation, reduce financial waste, and bolster public trust in public agency decision-making and practice.

Here’s a large chunk of Laura Lundquist’s article, “Research survey does not support logging as beetle outbreak remedy” from yesterday’s Bozeman Chronicle:

Logging trees in a forest can serve certain purposes, but preventing pine-beetle damage doesn’t seem to be one of them, and policy makers should stop making such claims, according to a University of Montana researcher…..Yet politicians and agency policy makers increasingly push logging projects with the claim that they will help stop the spread of pine beetles.

During the past decade, a handful of bills were introduced each year that promise bark beetle control. That number rocketed to 13 in 2013 and included bills such as Rep. Doc Hastings’, R-Wash., Restoring Healthy Forests for Healthy Communities Act.  Meanwhile, the U.S. Forest Service has a number of projects intended to ward off beetle attacks such as one in the Bass Creek area of the Bitterroot National Forest.

“We wrote this paper because we’re seeing less of an interest for policy makers to include science in policy. We don’t really have the time to write things like this but someone has to do it,” Six said. “There’s this big push to do ‘something’ and people take for granted that there’s science behind these claims. Often there is not.”

Six poured through the scientific literature for any and all studies dealing with the control of pine beetles, from direct controls, such as traps, insecticides or wholesale salvage that gets rid of infected trees, to indirect controls, such as thinning, that seek to improve the health of remaining trees to improve their odds of holding off beetle attacks.

Six points out that the problem with both types of controls is they don’t address the underlying conditions of a beetle outbreak, which is tree stress due to drought and ultimately, climate change.

“People tend to think that it’s the forest’s fault, because the trees are too thick,” Six said. “In an outbreak situation, the trees are doing worse while the beetles are doing better because of the underlying conditions.”

Direct controls are expensive and deal only with a particular section of forest, so their effect appears to be limited.

It’s actually hard to nail down the effect of various controls, Six wrote, because there has been little monitoring of forests after controls were used, in spite of the fact that the U.S. and Canadian governments have spent millions to counter recent beetle outbreaks.

In one the few large studies conducted that compared treated areas to untreated areas in Canada, results seem to show that traps and tree removal limited infestation only when beetle populations were small.

When beetle populations increase, such as during an outbreak, no treatment made any difference.

Studies showed that direct efforts to keep beetle populations down must be extensive, long-term and work only at the beginning of infestation.

Six wrote that the mechanism of thinning is not well understood as far as how it improves tree health. Many studies that record success were done right after thinning occurred and could have more to do with changes in local climate than tree health.

Six said that thinning operations that don’t diminish beetle kills are often not reported, leaving a gap in the information that could further inform scientists.

No long-term studies have looked at the effect of thinning during outbreaks.

Six noted that researchers struggle to accurately assess beetle density, which is not surprising when dealing with a flying insect the size of a grain of rice. So often, efforts to keep beetle populations low may already be too late because the population is larger than what people assumed.

During winter cold snaps, many hope that the temperatures dip low enough to kill the beetles hunkered down under the pine bark. Scientists know that temperatures need to go below minus 30 degrees and stay that low for several days to do the trick.

Six said even extended cold is no guarantee.

“Even when there’s a cold snap, there will always be some that survive. That’s what happened in the Big Hole a few years ago. Ninety percent were killed, but now they’re back,” Six said.

The paper concludes that weakening environmental laws to combat beetle outbreaks is unjustified given the high financial cost of continual treatment, the negative impacts such treatment can have on other values of the forest, and the possibility that trying to control beetles now could hurt forests as they try to survive climate change in the future.

Democratic Sen. Jon Tester’s spokeswoman, Andrea Helling, said Tester’s Forest Jobs and Recreation Act evolved out of concern over beetle outbreaks but does not argue that the mandated logging would control beetle populations.

“That said, dead trees in the urban interface are a significant fire hazard to forested communities and harvesting some of the dead trees would reduce some of the risk,” Helling wrote in an email.

———————–

NOTE: Here’s the opening paragraph of Sen Tester’s website devoted to his mandated logging bill, the Forest Jobs and Recreation Act:

“Montana’s forest communities face a crisis. Our local sawmills are on the brink and families are out of work while our forests turn red from an unprecedented outbreak of pine beetles, waiting for the next big wildfire. It’s a crisis that demands action now.  That’s why I wrote the Forest Jobs and Recreation Act.”

It’s also worth pointing out that during the first two Senate Committee hearings on the Forest Jobs and Recreation Act, Senator Tester opened the hearing sitting right next to huge blown up pictures showing bark beetle outbreaks. But, hey, Sen Tester “does not argue that the mandated logging would control beetle populations” right?

Postscript to “Anatomy of a Timber Sale Appeal”

by

missionaccomplished

Faithful readers may recall an earlier post describing FSEEE’s first timber sale appeal in years.

We prevailed. The Forest Service reviewing officer recommended the sale be reversed because of “a lack of information regarding reforestation techniques and methods.” The appeal deciding officer, aka the Bighorn forest supervisor, agreed and reversed his district ranger’s decision “in whole.”

I welcome the reader’s suggestions on “where to from here?” What constructive next steps might FSEEE take, preferably in collaboration with Bighorn staff, to ensure this doesn’t happen again?

Wyden O&C Bill: Well, That Didn’t Take Very Long

by

 Jerry Franklin is the widely acknowledged “Guru of Old-growth.” Norm Johnson is an eminent forest economist and political strategist. Both are career university professors. Neither one has much background in forest management, reforestation, forest history or fire history as evidenced by their lack of experience in these areas and by their public writings and statements in regards to these topics. Yet, Senator Ron Wyden has based his current proposal before Congress on the requirement that nearly 1/2 of the 2.6 million acres of forested BLM Lands in western Oregon would be managed under their prescription for “ecological forestry” and the remainder would be “preserved” in permanently designated Wilderness and other passively managed reserves.

A major shortcoming of this arrangement has been discussed on this blog before, and most succinctly in Sharon’s October 13 post from last year: https://forestpolicypub.com/2013/10/13/quid-pro-quo-without-the-quo-be-wary-of-trading-wilderness-for-management-acresg/

The crux of Sharon’s and her coauthors concerns was that there would be no problem setting aside more than a million acres of new Wilderness, but that the areas slated for active management would be subjected to lawsuits by the environmental community and be tied up in courtrooms. This concern was illustrated in my post from early last month:

https://forestpolicypub.com/2014/01/11/opb-franklin-johnson-ecological-forestry-includes-tree-sitters/

Both industry and environmentalists are strongly opposed to this proposal, yet Wyden keeps slogging along, wasting everyone’s time and money as if this is a reasonable (or even possible) solution to the problems besetting federal forest management in Oregon since the passage of the Clinton Plan for Northwest Forests more than 20 years ago. He has scheduled a hearing for February 6 to discuss his proposal in greater detail.

The Wyden Plan is DOA, and everyone seems to know that except the Senator. Further proof is provided by this post in yesterday’s Public Land News (Vol. 39, No. 3):

As Wyden readies O&C bill, enviros sue BLM timber pilot

Shortly after Senate Energy Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) announced a hearing for February 6 on his legislation to boost timber sales on O&C lands environmentalists showed him how hard his job will be.

They filed a lawsuit January 22 against a BLM sale that would serve as a prototype for the kinds of sales Wyden envisions on one million acres of O&C lands, i.e. limited environmental review.

The lawsuit argues that BLM must conduct far broader environmental reviews than it did for a White Castle Variable Retention Harvest Timber Sale in BLM’s Roseburg District.  And the lawsuit from Oregon Wild and Cascadia Wildlands asks the court to order BLM to prepare an expensive and time-consuming EIS to replace an environmental assessment (EA).

BLM in the sale approved a timber harvest practice called “variable retention regeneration harvest.”  But to Oregon Wild that constitutes a clearcut.  “No matter what you call it, a clearcut is still a clearcut,” said Sean Stevens, executive director of Oregon Wild.  “Clearcutting century-old forests that offer habitat for threatened wildlife on public lands in Oregon is not only immoral, in this case it’s illegal.”

On Nov. 26, 2013, Wyden published a draft O&C lands bill that would set aside about one million acres of O&C forest primarily for timber sales and about the same amount of land for conservation.  He would have BLM both manage the timber sale lands and the conservation lands.

The Wyden bill sort of parallels a House-passed bill (HR 1526) that would also emphasize timber sales on one million acres of O&C lands and protect another million acres.  But the House would have a trust appointed by the Oregon governor manage the timber lands and would transfer the conservation lands to the Forest Service.

On announcing the February 6 sale Wyden said he intends to go all out. “No bill or issue in Congress is more important to me than passing the O&C Lands Act into law and creating a long-term solution for rural Oregon,” he said.

Wyden says timber sales under his legislation (like BLM’s White Castle prototype) would follow the recommendations of two eminent forestry scholars, Drs. Norm Johnson and Jerry Franklin.  They say their strategy would stop well short of clearcutting to leave the foundation for regeneration of harvested timber tracts.

In joint testimony to the Senate Energy Committee on June 25, 2013, Johnson (a professor at Oregon State University) and Franklin (a professor at the University of Washington), said, “Functional early seral habitat potentially can be created using regeneration harvest prescriptions that retain biological legacies and use less intensive approaches to re-establishment of closed forest canopies.  Such approaches would produce more modest timber yields than the intensive management described above but could provide significant ecological benefits.”

Under direction from the Secretary of Interior BLM set up the White Castle sale as one of three pilot projects using the principles enunciated by Franklin and Johnson.  The Roseburg Demonstration Project anticipated that several timber sales would extend over 438 acres, with 285 acres subjected to the Franklin and Johnson principles.

In their lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court Eugene Division the environmentalists invoked the Franklin and Johnson management scheme in asking for an injunction against the timber sales.

“Failing to thoroughly consider and objectively evaluate an adequate range of alternatives, including an alternative that would: meet timber objectives by thinning in dense young stands, meet early-seral objectives by embedding ‘gaps’ within thinning prescriptions, and be consistent with the management recommendations of Drs. Johnson and Franklin,” the lawsuit says.  “BLM further failed this duty by contriving an overly narrow ‘purpose and need’ for the project that predetermined the outcome and excluded consideration of alternative approaches.”

The House-passed O&C bill would also have BLM follow the Franklin and Johnson proposals.

And that did not go over well with the Obama administration, even though administration ally and Democrat Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) is the chief sponsor of the O&C provision in HR 1526.  Said the Office of Management and Budget of exemptions from environmental reviews in the bill in a Sept. 18, 2013, statement, “This would undermine appropriate management and stewardship of these lands, which belong to all Americans, would compromises habitat for threatened and endangered species, and would create legal uncertainty over management of these lands as well as increase litigation risk.”

The House bill also goes beyond the BLM-managed O&C lands to propose a Forest Service-wide timber program that would: direct each national forest to designate one or more forest reserves and, within 30 days of designation, determine annual timber volume requirements for the reserves; direct each forest to reach an annual timber sale volume from each reserve beginning in fiscal year 2014; limit an environmental assessment to a review only of a proposed project in a reserve, limit the assessment to less than 100 pages and require completion of the assessment within 180 days; and exempt from an environmental assessment projects that, among other things, “cover an area of 10,000 acres or less.”

“Our Languishing Public Lands”

by

This essay is worth reading and discussing:

“Our Languishing Public Lands: The Economic and Environmental Benefits of Decentralization,” By Robert H. Nelson  |  Posted: Wed. February 1, 2012. Also published in Policy Review.

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=3244

I did not find a discussion on this 2012 article elsewhere on this blog. Apologies if I missed it.

Nelson devotes much attention to economics:

“Not surprisingly, the Forest Service’s decision to abandon its historic economic objectives under multiple use management has led to corresponding declines in economic benefits achieved, as shown by the Forest Service’s own calculations. The 2001 Forest Service financial analysis described above also detailed the trends during the 1990s in the economic “present net value” (pnv) derived from all national forest outputs. As the Forest Service reported, the “all resources pnv” for the whole national forest system—covering all the forms of use—fell from more than one billion dollars in total values realized in 1991 to about $300 million in 1998. Most of this sharp economic decline was due to the precipitous drop in timber program pnv, but the abandonment of former timber sale activities did not yield any new gains in the pnv of recreation or other uses to balance things out. Ecosystem goals, however vaguely defined, increasingly were the ends in themselves—and the (lesser) economic outcome was a mere byproduct of the more important new ecological objectives.”

 

 

A Modest Proposal: Why Not Canadianize Our National Forests?

by

Canadian timber

Jonathan Swift, it will be recalled, suggested, in his book titled A Modest Proposal, that the poor should sell their children to the rich, the latter making use of the little tots as food.  In a somewhat similar vein, if not quite so outlandishly, I’d like to ask this blog’s subscribers to comment on a simple proposal for the reform of the beleaguered U.S. national forest system:

Why not turn over U.S. national forests to Canadian management?

After all, over 90 percent of Canada’s vast forest lands – almost a billion acres in all — is owned by federal, provincial, or territorial governments.  Canadians, moreover, would seem to embrace a strong environmental consciousness.  And yet Canada manages to make good use of its forests for timber production and other economic uses.  According to a recent estimate, for example, the net value of Canada’s forest products exports – to the U.S., to Europe, and to China and Japan — amount to about $17 billion per year.  Somehow, in other words, the Canadians have managed to combine their environmental sensibility with a productive economic life for their forests.

So why then not simply turn over our national forests to Canadian management?  We would get a substantial portion of the revenues of course – after all, they’d remain our forests.  And, presumably, the Canadian rendering of environmental values would preserve the life and health of our forests.

So, what’s wrong with this modest proposal?

Thanks!

Ron

Farm Bill Rider Amends Clean Water Act in Giveaway to Timber Industry

by

What follows is a press release from WildEarth Guardians:

Seattle, WA (January 28, 2014) – The House and Senate agreed today to reduce oversight for our Nation’s clean water. Under the guise of protecting the timber industry, Congress included a rider in the compromise Farm Bill that significantly weakens the Clean Water Act by exempting certain silvicultural activities from permitting under the Act’s National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System. The Clean Water Act has been incredibly successful in cleaning up polluted water in the United States. As a victim of its own success, it is now under regular attack in Congress by democrats and republicans alike. This controversial amendment was unlikely to succeed had Congress used normal legislative channels for making this change. Instead, they attached this unnecessary legislation as a rider to the Farm Bill, short-circuiting the regular legislative process.

“Congress has decided to protect the timber industry instead of protecting America’s drinking water. This new provision allows the timber industry to continue to pollute our nation’s drinking water with sediment,” said Bethanie Walder, Public Lands Director for WildEarth Guardians.

The Forest Service estimates that well over 50% of the American public lives in communities that rely on public and private forest lands for their drinking water supplies. Numerous studies have identified forest roads as the principal source of accelerated erosion in forests throughout the western United States. With so much of the Nation’s drinking water impacted or potentially impacted by sediment pollution from logging roads, the Clean Water Act provides an important regulatory backstop.

“This fundamental change to the Clean Water Act undermines our Nation’s clean water and was unnecessary. It will tie the EPA’s hands. Now, even where logging roads are causing significant water quality problems, citizens and the EPA will not be able to ensure that landowners address those impacts,” said Paul Kampmeier, Staff Attorney at the Washington Forest Law Center.

Oregon Senator Ron Wyden and Congressman Kurt Schrader were key spokespeople promoting the rider. Oregon has 70,000 miles of roads on Forest Service lands; Washington has 22,000 miles. Together the two states account for nearly 25% of the entire Forest Service road system. A recent study from the Forest Service found that 78% of all Forest Service watersheds in Washington and Oregon are being negatively affected by roads. “We are extremely disappointed that some members of the Oregon delegation not only supported but championed this effort to diminish Clean Water Act protections. With so many Oregonians dependent on forests for our drinking water, and so many roads bleeding sediment into our streams, our delegation should be putting the people’s need for clean water above corporate profits,” said Chris Winter, Co-Executive Director of the Crag Law Center.

“This rider is a giveaway to the timber industry that threatens our drinking water and fisheries. But reducing regulation of logging roads under the Clean Water Act doesn’t change the fact that logging roads remain a primary cause of sediment pollution,” added Bethanie Walder.

The Farm Bill has not been finalized by Congress yet, but votes in the House and Senate are expected imminently now that the compromise has been finalized and introduced. Assuming the bill passes, this rider to amend the Clean Water Act will become law.

Farm Bill Would Permanently Extend Stewardship Contracting

by

Here’s a section of an E&E News article today that deals with federal forestry, including permanent reauthorization of stewardship contracting.

http://www.eenews.net/eedaily/stories/1059993543

The draft also would bar the EPA from requiring permits for non-point runoff due to silvicultural activities.

Forestry

The bill would also provide big wins for forest health advocates by permanently extending stewardship contracting and expanding good-neighbor authority on roughly 193 million acres of national forests. It would also allow the Forest Service to designate “landscape-scale” treatment areas and use expedited permitting authority to protect the areas from insects or disease.

Permanent extension of stewardship contracting has been a top priority for the Obama administration and lawmakers of both parties, as well as conservation groups and logging companies. It allows lands agencies to sell 10-year timber contracts and use the revenue to fund forest health projects such as road improvements, stream restoration, hazardous fuel removal or recreation improvements. While it is used for roughly one-fourth of Forest Service timber harvests, the contracting authority is set to expire in September.

The farm bill’s good-neighbor provision is very similar to S. 327, which passed the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last year. It would expand the federal government’s authority to partner with state foresters on restoration projects, including bark beetle treatments, across state-federal boundaries. Currently, that authority only exists in Colorado and Utah.

The farm bill would also allow agencies to expand their use of streamlined permitting under the Healthy Forests Restoration Act to projects that reduce a landscape’s susceptibility to insect infestations or disease. Old-growth trees must be retained under this authority, “as appropriate to the forest type.”

Projects up to 3,000 acres in size could be permitted under a categorical exclusion as long as they follow several restrictions, including: They maximize retention of old growth, consider best available science, are developed through a collaborative process, do not result in new permanent roads, comply with forest plans and do not affect wilderness or wilderness study areas.

“The farm bill provides a broad array of new legal tools to allow the Forest Service to do their job,” said Bill Imbergamo, executive director of the Federal Forest Resource Coalition, which represents loggers that contract with national forests. “It has provisions that provide for streamlined analysis, give stewardship contracts the same liability limitations found in normal timber sales and provisions that will make it easier to manage the national forests.”

But Imbergamo said the bill fails to provide the comprehensive overhaul of the Forest Service’s timber program that industry was hoping for, including reforms to the National Environmental Policy Act and Endangered Species Act.

Hastings Focuses on the ESA in 2014: Time for a Reevaluation?

by

No comments from me — this article is well written and presents the current — and long-term — problems and solutions clearly and succinctly. Kudos to Kate Prengaman.

Rep. Hastings calls for reforms to Endangered Species Act

A male spotted owl glowers at visitors to his nesting area in the Wenatchee National Forest near Cliffdell, Wash. in June, 2002. The spotted owl, which was listed in 1990 as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. The has since become a lightning rod in the debate over the ESA. (GORDON KING/Yakima Herald-Republic file)

Phone: 509-577-7674
Follow me on:

By Kate Prengaman / Yakima Herald-Republic
[email protected]

YAKIMA, Wash. — From spotted owls to salmon, the Pacific Northwest has been ground zero for the impacts — good and bad — of the Endangered Species Act for 40 years.

That’s the view of U.S. Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Pasco, who heads the House Committee on Natural Resources, which is considering significant changes to the landmark 1973 legislation.

“Very generally, those of us in the Northwest have been hit by impacts of the Endangered Species Act more than anybody,” Hastings said. “The economy that is based here is natural-resource based, with water, and with the timber industry, so whenever you have laws that impact natural resources, they are going to impact the economy.”

Hastings believes the law takes too much of an economic toll, leaves too much room for litigation by environmental groups and lacks an emphasis on getting species recovered and off the list. He called legislation to reform the act a priority for the year.

Proponents of the Endangered Species Act, ESA for short, say that it’s working well and that calls for reform are actually a move to weaken protections.

There are lots of proposed reforms floating around, including one sponsored by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., which would make adding a species to the list subject to state and congressional approval, automatic delisting after five years, and require the government to pay landowners who property lost value because of the ESA enforcement.

Hastings declined to comment directly on Paul’s proposal, saying that the group of representatives who are looking into reforms is still working on identifying the specific weaknesses in the law and the best potential solutions. He did say that limiting “closed-door settlements” with environmental groups was a priority.

Hastings’ push for reforms is supported by many industry organizations, including the Washington Farm Bureau. The public policy director for the bureau, Tom Davis, said that reducing lawsuits from environmental groups and requiring sound science would help landowners gain trust in the ESA process.

The ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., said in a statement to the Yakima Herald-Republic that he doubts the proposed reforms will succeed.

“There’s the potential for balanced, reasonable compromises to modernize the Endangered Species Act based on the best available science, but unfortunately this majority does not seem interested in such an approach,” DeFazio said. “Instead, we will likely spend time debating legislation that will be cast as ‘common sense’ reforms, but will actually gut the law, and as a result will go nowhere in the Senate.”

Spotted owl, shuttered sawmills

Talking about the economic consequences of the law, Hastings invokes an example familiar to many Washington — the northern spotted owl. When the iconic bird was listed as threatened in 1991, controversial protections of old growth forest were made to protect its critical habitat, reducing the forest available for logging.

Many in the timber industry blame those protections for putting loggers out of work and closing mills along the eastern Cascades.

However, other factors were also at play. Much of the most profitable acres of old-growth had already been cut at that point, and many of the secondary stands had not grown enough to log.

Noah Greenwald, endangered species director for the Center for Biological Diversity, disagrees with the argument that listed species are always bad news economically.

“Take the Northwest Forest Plan, which protected the last 10 percent of old-growth forest — that halted some economic activity, but the economies of Oregon and Washington have continued to grow,” Greenwald said.

Protecting endangered species, Greenwald said, actually means protecting their environments, which is important because people depend on clean water and healthy habitat just like other species.

Bridget Moran, who works for U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) in Washington state, said that the agency works with foresters to figure out how timber harvest and spotted owl protections can coexist.

“We work with the national forests in Washington to help them get the harvest out and more often than not, we know how to work through owl issues,” Moran said.

The ESA works, she said, because the law gives the federal agencies a flexible set of tools to solve conservation problems working with landowners.

Do we need to limit lawsuits?

The national Center for Biological Diversity is one of the environmental groups Hastings likes to blame for turning the ESA into “a process where litigation becomes more paramount than saving species.”

The Natural Resource Committee said 570 ESA-related lawsuits from 2009 to 2012 cost the federal government more than $21 million in attorney fees, including $4.6 million in the Northwest.

Hastings says time and money could be better spent working on recovery efforts.

However, the fees paid to plaintiffs in those cases do not come out of the $175 million annual budget the federal Fish and Wildlife Service has for endangered species work; it comes from a separate fund tapped for all government lawsuits.

Greenwald disputes Hastings’ contention that environmental groups sue to get listings made for “political purposes” and financial gain. They sue to force the agencies to make decisions in a timely manner, he said, not to dictate the outcome.

Last summer, Dan Ashe, the director of the USFWS, told the House Natural Resources Committee that the number of species at risk is increasing, but limited funding and a backlog of species proposed for the list means his agency can miss its own deadlines.

“Any deadline settlement we enter into commits us only to undertake a process already required by the ESA by a certain date,” Ashe said in his testimony.

He added that these lawsuits don’t give away his agency’s authority to make decisions based on the best available science.

Ashe also said a recent nationwide settlement that included hundreds of species at once was in the best interest of the public and the agency, because it allowed the agency to set priorities and achievable deadlines, while also reducing the number of lawsuits it had to deal with.

Greenwald said the right of citizens to sue for enforcement of the ESA is critical to protecting the environment.

“Hastings makes it seem like a process problem, but really, he objects to species being protected,” Greenwald said.

One listing Hastings opposed recently was that of a rare plant found in the Hanford Reach. He calls it a “poster child” for problems with the current ESA. The White Bluffs bladderpod, a perennial plant with clusters of small yellow blooms, was listed as threatened in December, despite opposition from local farmers and the Franklin County Natural Resources Advisory Committee. They hired an independent scientist to analyze the plant’s DNA to see if it really was a unique sub-species.

“The law has to be better defined as to what good science is,” Hastings said. “DNA evidence showed that it’s the same as other bladderpods. … Why was the DNA evidence ignored? In criminal law it’s conclusive.”

Federal records show that the USFWS sent that DNA study to five other scientists for review, and they all said the study lacked sufficient data to conclude that the bladderpod was not unique.

Moran said she saw the bladderpod decision as a success story because of how the agency worked with local landowners to determine the plant’s key habitat.

The only critical habitat that was designated for the bladderpod is about 2,000 acres of federal land in the Hanford Reach National Monument.

Although 300 acres of privately owned farmland was considered for habitat protection but eventually not included, area farmers still worry that the plant’s listing could cause them problems. Excess irrigation water from adjacent farms can cause landslides on the bluffs where the bladderpod grows and the USFWS could potentially limit farming in a buffer zone to protect the habitat, although there are no proposals to do so at this time.

Kent McMullen, chairman of Franklin County’s resources committee said he was “very disappointed” in the agency’s decision because of the potential impact on the area’s farmers.

“I think the USFWS is walking a tightrope trying to avoid litigation from the Center for Biological Diversity and from private landowners,” McMullen said.

He supports reforms to the ESA that would prevent agencies from wasting money on species like the bladderpod, which in his opinion don’t really justify protection, and reduce costs to landowners. However, he said he’s not optimistic that such reforms will gain traction under the Obama administration.

Salmon, steelhead success stories

When Hastings talks about endangered species success stories, he also cites a local example — salmon and steelhead restoration.

The numbers of returning salmon are improving throughout the Columbia River system, Hastings said, and he believes the specific recovery plans, written in collaboration with locals, are key to that success.

One of the 14 ESA-listed fish that travel the Columbia, the fall chinook that swim up the Snake River to spawn have grown from a run of about 800 fish in 1992 when they were listed as threatened, to 56,000 in 2013.

Stuart Ellis, a biologist with the Columbia River Inter Tribal Fish Commission, said that the Snake River chinook are one of the region’s best recoveries, thanks to the efforts of the Nez Perce tribe.

Ellis said that through ESA protections, declines have halted for all the threatened and endangered fish in the Columbia, but recovery is a complicated process and not all the species are doing as well as the Snake River chinook.

In the Yakima River, the only two listed species are steelhead and bull trout.

Alex Conley, one of the people responsible for the recovery plan process for mid-Columbia steelhead, agreed with Hastings about the value of thinking locally about how to help species.

“The cooperative approach for recovery planning for salmon and steelhead in Washington has been bringing scientists together to talk about recovery targets,” said Conley, director of the Yakima Basin Fish and Wildlife Recovery Board. “It gives you something to measure your progress again.”

Conley, who works with two different agencies for the basin’s two listed fish, because ocean-going fish fall under a different jurisdiction, said the level of local cooperation from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration led to a plan that has a lot of support and that people are excited about doing the work necessary to get the steelhead recovered and taken off the endangered species list.

If or when that happens, Hastings and Greenwald will both celebrate. But what the Endangered Species Act will look like by then remains up for debate.