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In September, 2007, the lightning-ignited Moonlight Fire burned 65,000 acres in and around California’s Plumas National Forest. In keeping with the ecology of these forests, the fire burned a mosaic of high-intensity mixed with unburned trees. The Forest Service estimated 549 million board feet were scorched.

In making its salvage logging decision, the Forest Service evaluated 4 alternatives, ranging from a low of 14 mmbf to a high of 120 mmbf. All alternatives appraised negatively. That is, the Forest Service predicted a timber purchaser would lose $600,000 logging the 14 mmbf alternative and almost $12 million if a purchaser bought and logged the 120 mmbf sale.

In July, 2009, the Forest Service decided to move forward with the 120 mmbf sale, citing the jobs and wages that would be generated in the local economy.

Fast forward to the present. Now the purchaser, Pew Forest Products, is pleading his case to the Forest Service and Plumas county supervisors that he will go bankrupt if forced to carry out the timber sale contract he purchased.

Question for readers: What part of “you’ll lose $12 million if you log this timber” do people not understand?

My wish for you all is the peace, love and joy of this Season.

This quote from Dr. King seems particularly apt as we head into an election year..

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

–Martin Luther King, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam”, 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

I’ll be back Monday.

Other interesting things are in the conference report, however, more later..

From Rob Chaney of the Missoulian

U.S. Sen. Jon Tester’s Forest Jobs and Recreation Act was not included in a House version of the 2012 omnibus bill to fund the federal government that was released Thursday morning, setting off a round of finger-pointing between his office and that of Rep. Denny Rehberg.

“Congressman Rehberg is now personally responsible for killing guaranteed Montana jobs,” Tester spokesman Aaron Murphy said Thursday. “That fact that Dennis Rehberg actively worked against a popular, bipartisan, made-in-Montana jobs bill simply because Jon’s name is on it shows his true colors: Congressman Rehberg is not looking out for Montana; he is only interested in his own political career.”

Rehberg spokesman Jed Link countered that Tester’s bill lacked support among his own Senate colleagues. While Tester was able to attach his bill to the original Senate version of the Interior Department budget, the conference committee didn’t include it in the combined version.

“Senator Tester’s wilderness bill simply isn’t good for Montana and that’s why Denny worked to keep it out of the Interior appropriations bill,” Link said. “New wilderness areas are guaranteed in the Tester bill but new jobs are not. In the long run, this bill will mean less public access to our lands and fewer jobs. And that’s just not a fair deal for Montanans.”

Republican Rehberg is challenging Democrat Tester for the Senate seat in next year’s election.

Republican members of the conference committee had signed off on the nine-department, 1,209-page budget bill earlier this week. But Democrats withheld their signatures in a complicated bargaining maneuver aimed at blocking some Republican riders in the last-minute legislation rush.

That included opposition to the linkage of Keystone XL petroleum pipeline approval to an extension of a payroll tax cut authored by Rehberg. President Barack Obama had postponed the pipeline decision until after the election, citing concerns about its potential impact on a major Midwest aquifer. And he threatened to veto the tax bill if Republicans tried to fast-track the pipeline permit in the same legislation.

Late on Wednesday night, House Republicans released the conference budget deal without the Democrats’ signatures, although it contains the deals worked out by both sides. That version of the Interior budget left out both Tester’s Forest Jobs and Recreation Act and a proposed new national park in Rhode Island, as well as 117 policy riders proposed by House Republicans, according to Tester’s office.

“Some fixes need still to be made, but that certainly dims prospects for the Tester language to be included,” said Alan Rowsome, conservation funding director for The Wilderness Society, who’s been monitoring the budget process from Washington, D.C. “It likely would not be in this scenario, unless there’s a real reopening of the bill.”

The Forest Jobs and Recreation Act would have designated about 1 million acres of new wilderness and national recreation areas. It would also impose a timber treatment mandate on three national forests in Montana.

The bill was supported by a coalition of conservation groups, sawmill owners, environmentalists and timber industry representatives. It drew opposition from environmentalists opposed to mandated logging, as well as off-road vehicle, ranching and mining organizations.

The Interior budget does include some new policy measures. They include a move supported by both Rehberg and Tester to give a greater accounting of money paid through the Equal Access to Justice Act, which pays the legal fees of people who successfully sue the government. The bill also has a provision blocking the federal Bureau of Land Management from designating any new wilderness areas, increases funding for oil and gas production, and rejects new fees for onshore oil and gas producers.

It would add $1 million to a wolf/livestock loss demonstration program and $2 million for wolf monitoring in Montana and Idaho. It removes a requirement to separate domestic sheep from wild bighorn sheep herds. And it restores $14 million for payments in lieu of taxes from national wildlife refuges to county governments.

In the U.S. Forest Service arena, the proposed budget provides a full $40 million for the Cooperative Forest Landscape Restoration Project that includes Montana logging projects, $52.6 million for the Land and Water Conservation Fund that pays for conservation easements on wildlife habitat, and $45 million for removal of legacy roads and trails.

Murphy said a slim possibility remained that further negotiations could resurrect the Montana bill’s chances in December. The bill also remains on the docket of Senate business for the coming year.

“I’m not saying it’s likely, but it’s not final yet,” Murphy said.

For three years I’ve been wondering whether anyone in USDA pays attention to what the Forest Service does or says. Left to its own devices, the Forest Service is capable of much mischief. Here’s today’s example, from the “National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy“:

Wildland fire management actions are guided by a suite of laws, implemented through regulations and adopted as agency policy after public review and comment. Regulations and
policies, however, are often more limiting than the authorizing legislation itself, and sometimes may impede the accomplishment of management objectives and timelines. While legislation
such as the Healthy Forest Restoration Act (HFRA) has been beneficial to active management of public lands, other legislation has been used to promote agendas and philosophies that are not necessarily in harmony with the legislation’s original intent. This is especially true of the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA), which was meant to provide a means for underprivileged people to bring legal action against the federal government. Similarly, the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) are sometimes utilized by special interest groups to achieve objectives not considered by Congress when the bills were enacted. In addition to barriers presented by existing regulations and policies, the articulation of new or revised policies and changes in agency terminology and/or goals create challenges related to communication and implementation. It is important to seek out opportunities to streamline and coordinate procedures and to pursue broader use of authorities across jurisdictions to achieve common goals. Legislative barriers that are impeding project implementation must be examined and reformed to create incentives for resolving conflict through collaboration rather than litigation.

So, there we have it. The Forest Service now supports legislatively amending the Equal Access to Justice Act, the Endangered Species, and the National Environmental Policy Act.

Is the Forest Service speaking for the Obama Administration? Does USDA know or care that its flagship agency has called upon Congress to amend three bedrock laws?

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) has filed a scientific integrity complaint with the Department of Interior. DOI issued rules for maintaining scientific integrity back in January of this year.

I wonder how the Forest Service would fare if it proposed to do in depth assessments of ecological conditions on national forests without considering the effects of grazing?

http://www.peer.org/news/news_id.php?row_id=1537
For Immediate Release: November 30, 2011
Contact: Kirsten Stade (202) 265-7337

GRAZING PUNTED FROM FEDERAL STUDY OF LAND CHANGES IN WEST — Scientists Told to Not Consider Grazing Due to Fear of Lawsuits and Data Gaps

Washington, DC — The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is carrying out an ambitious plan to map ecological trends throughout the Western U.S. but has directed scientists to exclude livestock grazing as a possible factor in changing landscapes, according to a scientific integrity complaint filed today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The complaint describes how one of the biggest scientific studies ever undertaken by BLM was fatally skewed from its inception by political pressure.

Funded with up to $40 million of stimulus funds, BLM is conducting Rapid Ecoregional Assessments in each of the six main regions (such as the Colorado Plateau and the Northern Great Plains) covering the vast sagebrush West. A key task was choosing the “change agents” (such as fire or invasive species) which would be studied. Yet when the scientific teams were assembled at an August 2010 workshop, BLM managers informed them that grazing would not be studied due to anxiety from “stakeholders,” fear of litigation and, most perplexing of all, lack of available data on grazing impacts.

Exclusion of grazing was met with protests from the scientists. Livestock grazing is permitted on two-thirds of all BLM lands, with 21,000 grazing allotments covering 157 million acres across the West. As one participating scientist said, as quoted in workshop minutes:

“We will be laughed out of the room if we don’t use grazing. If you have the other range of disturbances, you have to include grazing.”

In the face of this reaction, BLM initially deferred a decision but ultimately opted to –

Remove livestock grazing from all Ecoregional assessments, citing insufficient data. As a result, the assessments do not consider massive grazing impacts even though trivial disturbance factors such as rock hounding are included; and
Limit consideration of grazing-related information only when combined in an undifferentiated lump with other native and introduced ungulates (such as deer, elk, wild horses and feral donkeys).

“This is one of the screwiest things I have ever heard of. BLM is taking the peculiar position that it can no longer distinguish the landscape imprint of antelope from that of herds of cattle,” remarked PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, noting BLM has far more data on grazing than it does on other change agents, such as climate change or urban sprawl, that it chose to follow. “Grazing is one of the few ‘change agents’ within the agency’s mandate to manage, suggesting that BLM only wants analysis on what it cannot control.”

Earlier this year, the Interior Department, parent agency for BLM, adopted its first scientific integrity policies prohibiting political interference with, or manipulation of, scientific work. The PEER complaint charges that BLM officials improperly compromised the utility and validity of the Ecoregional assessments for reasons that lacked any technical merit and urges that responsible officials be disciplined.

“This is like the Weather Service saying it will no longer track storms because it lacks perfect information,” added Ruch, pointing out that an extensive formalized Land Health Assessment database, including range-wide assessments of livestock grazing across the sagebrush biome, has existed since at least 2008. “If grazing can be locked so blithely into a scientific broom closet, it speaks volumes about science-based decisionmaking in the Obama administration.”

Debate over the creation of a new national park in Northern Maine rages on. Well, maybe not exactly rages, but there’s no lack of discussion and opinions. An opinion piece in the Maine Sunday Telegram suggests that a new national forest might make more sense. The White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire and western Maine is cited as an example of balancing preservation with multiple use. However, some Mainers oppose any additional Federal control and Burt’s Bees magnate Roxanne Quimby , at least for now, is willing to donate land only if it is for a new National Park. Residents in the Millinocket area are split. Some see a park as a way to inject vitality into a sagging economy. Others see Federal land ownership as a threat to the region’s two paper mills (just recently reopened) and as potentially undermining the long tradition of commercial logging and public recreation on private lands. Still others would like to see a broader study of the region’s economy.

October 9
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Bell of Weld teaches high school English.

Maine Voices: Park not only way to save North Woods
Establishing a Maine Woods National Forest would achieve many goals for preservation, recreation and industry.

WELD — Conspicuously absent from current debate over the fate of Maine’s North Woods has been mention of national forest designation for some portion of 10 million acres of unorganized territory. A national forest would achieve the same ends as a national park, and is better suited to northern Maine in a number of ways.

The debate about the future of Maine’s forests has needlessly pitted environmental concerns against the interests of the people who need to make a living. Forests and parks are similar, with one major difference between them: National parks allow no timber harvesting; strict preservation is the rule. National forests allow for sustainable logging activity, managed by the U.S. Forest Service. Both feature federal ownership, and each has a recreational mission that allows for multiple uses within certain bounds. What both manage to secure is the protection of wild land, and the preservation into perpetuity of public access to it.

A long-standing and cherished tradition in Maine, our access to the woods is at present threatened as never before. An unprecedented pattern of anonymous, absentee and mercenary ownership has settled over the North Woods in recent years; none of Maine’s remaining paper companies owns any portion of the forest anymore.

CHANGING FOREST
Seven million acres have changed hands since the late 1980s — the last to divest was Mead in 2005 — and the new owners are aware that there are quicker means to a return on their investment than waiting for trees to grow. Witness Plum Creek’s massive development proposal for the Moosehead Lake region.
Development in the North Woods is the looming threat these days; vacation-home building means fragmentation of the forest, with attendant damage to its ecology, diversity and resiliency. Public access will also be lost. If one accepts the premise that something needs to be done — on a broad scale and soon — to safeguard both the integrity of the forest and the public’s access to it, then the question becomes one of how best to accomplish this.

Conservation easements, though effective in their own right, are inadequate and piecemeal. The state of Maine is in no position to purchase extensive tracts. Federal ownership remains the best way to achieve large-scale and permanent protection of Maine’s forest lands. Those with an aversion to a federal presence in the Maine woods would like even less their own permanent exclusion from it someday.

RESTORE’s protracted campaign for a 3-million-acre Maine Woods National Park stretching from Moosehead to beyond Katahdin has yet to generate enthusiasm among the people who live in the northern counties. It has succeeded only in alienating those it needs to win over, through an implicit and explicit denigration of North Woods culture — of traditional modes of vocation and of recreation. National park promotional rhetoric has been rife with elitist assumptions and insinuations, chief among them that logging is somehow morally wrong.

It is not oversimplification to observe that it is precisely this aspect of the national park campaign — waged by outsiders, for the most part — that has engendered widespread resentment rather than receptivity, and it is precisely because national forests allow logging that any mention of this option has been scrupulously avoided by mainstream environmental organizations.

It seems appropriate and just that the people who live within and adjacent to the region in question might see a federal designation that would represent a respect for their traditions, rather than a contempt for them.

The rationale for a national forest goes well beyond this consideration of social justice and regional identity, however. Silviculture — the science of carefully considered manipulation of the successional stages of a forest — can enhance the entire ecosystem and render it both more resilient and more diverse. (A forest is not necessarily better off left alone; the wildfires in Yellowstone after 100 years without tree harvesting come to mind.)

NEARBY EXAMPLE
The nearby White Mountain National Forest is a widely popular destination for millions of outdoor enthusiasts and an economic boon to the region that invigorates traditional economic sectors as well as those of modern ecotourism.

Thirty-five percent of its 800,000 acres is open to logging; extensive environmental review and public comment precede any instance of timber harvest.
Maintaining a carefully managed balance between strict preservation and multiple, responsible use, the White Mountain National Forest works quite well.

A national forest represents a good compromise — certainly not in any sense of abandoning principle, but in the democratic sense of how Americans accomplish things: by meeting on common ground. While we argue self-righteously, Wall Street does not sleep. There is no time to waste.

– Special to the Telegram

At least in the U.S., no one even comes close.

The Forest Service oversees 193 million acres with a wildland fire management budget of about $2 billion. That’s $10.36/acre.

The Department of Interior manages 500 million acres with a wildland fire budget of $856 million. That’s $1.71/acre.

By the way, DOI enjoys a 98% initial attack success rate (defined as % of fires kept smaller than 300 acres) — same as the Forest Service.

Monangahela National Forest Park

Would the public interest be better served if parts of the Monongahela National Fores were administered by the National Park Service instead of the Forest Service? As Sharon mentions in her introduction to Chris Topik’s guest post, the Nature Conservancy has acquired and protected thousands of acres with the Monongahela.

Can the Park Service do a better job of managing them?

Meanwhile in Maine, State, Federal, and local governments have objected loudly to any suggestion that the Park Service conduct a feasibility study for a new National Park in Northern Maine to be created from land to be donated by Burt’s Bee’s magnate Roaxanne Quimby.

According to the Columbus, IN Republic

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Two state parks and other lands within the Monongahela National Forest could become a national park.

The National Park Service plans to begin conducting a survey in December to determine whether historic, natural and recreational resources in the targeted area would meet criteria required by Congress for a national park.

Friends of Blackwater Canyon executive director Judy Rodd tells the Charleston Gazette (http://bit.ly/uMIztk ) that the proposed High Alleghany National Park would include federal land in the forest’s northern area, Blackwater Falls and Canaan Valley state parks.

Rodd says the proposed park also would include lands improved during the Great Depression by the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration.

The survey is scheduled to be completed by September 2012. It was requested by U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin.

___

Information from: The Charleston Gazette, http://www.wvgazette.com

I am grateful for many things, including our legacy of public lands and the many and diverse people who care about them.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Today the FDA withdrew its approval for Avastin’s use as a breast cancer treatment. The FDA’s decision was based on large-scale clinical trials that failed to show Avastin improves life expectancies or controls tumor size. The lack of any statistically significant positive benefits combined with serious side effects, such as high blood pressure and hemorrhaging, has pulled this drug from the shelves.

But, some women and physicians (some with financial connections to Avastin’s manufacturer Genentech) believe that Avastin has been effective in treating particular cases of breast cancer. One protester said that the FDA’s decision is “nothing short of a death sentence” for some women.

The problem for Avastin’s promoters is that although it is conceivable that some women might benefit from Avastin therapy — even if women, in general, do not — we do not know how to predict which women these are.

Although the FDA did not consider cost in its analysis, Avastin’s $80,000/patient/year expense also does not counsel for its unsubstantiated use.

So, how is aerial fire retardant like Avastin? The Forest Service acknowledges that no data nor studies show that fire retardant improves initial attack success or decreases average fire size. In fact, fire data for the last ten years show no correlation between firefighting effectiveness and retardant use by national forest.

Fire retardant has known serious “side effects,” like dead fish and crashed airtankers. It is expensive, too, at over $1/gallon to administer — $3,000/drop from a large airtanker.

Although it is possible that fire retardant might be effective under some circumstances, we don’t know how to distinguish those fires from every other ignition.

Just substitute “fire retardant” for Avastin in this summary:

“Many breast cancer specialists say that Avastin does appear to work very well for some patients and some advocates have said the drug should be left on the market for the sake of those patients. But Dr. Hamburg said there was no way to determine in advance who those patients are, so many women would use the drug. “The evidence does not justify broad exposure to the risks of this drug,” she wrote.