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As a card-carrying woman, I got a chuckle out of this from the Center for Western Priorities..  There are actually plenty of women out there… who wouldn’t have had these nomination difficulties. Basically everyone knows that.  Or maybe the Committee would like to see more people of color? And of course, being a former career person, it’s hard for me to imagine that lacking one link in the political chain of command will put “the commitments in the IRA at risk.” From my contacts, it appears that Daniel-Davis is actually doing the job as acting.. and therefore all the same work is getting done.

But perhaps being acting and signing decisions is a problem (as per Pendley and the court case).

A federal judge has ruled that a controversial Trump official who has overseen a vast weakening of public lands protections cannot continue in his position since he has not been approved by the Senate.

Call me crazy, but maybe a better solution would be to nominate a candidate that the Senate will confirm? Pretty much everyone could come up with a list, including people of color. I continue to wonder what all this is really about. It seems hard to argue on the one hand, that the Biden Admin’s goals won’t be met without this one position… and it’s so important.. it’s not worth our time to find one of the many that the Committee could support. It seems like a bit of a rerun of the Tracy Stone-Manning nomination. But I don’t think for a minute it has to do with gender.

The U.S. Senate seems to be singling out and obstructing qualified women nominated to leadership positions in the U.S. Department of the Interior, writes Center for Western Priorities Executive Director Jennifer Rokala. The Senate committee tasked with advancing these nominations to the full chamber, chaired by Senator Joe Manchin, has taken nearly a full month longer on average to vote on female nominees than male nominees.

From Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to Bureau of Land Management Director Tracy Stone-Manning to Laura Daniel-Davis—who was nominated to be Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Land and Minerals Management in 2021—women nominated for leadership positions in the Interior Department have faced intense scrutiny and undue delays by male members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee throughout their confirmation processes. Daniel-Davis, who is still not confirmed, was asked to appear twice before the committee over the past year and a half—a highly unusual occurrence. 

The Interior Department is the steward of our public lands, water, wildlife, and natural resources. It is also a leader in promoting our country’s clean energy future, as the agency charged with permitting large-scale onshore clean energy and offshore wind development. The position of Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Land and Minerals Management oversees almost all of this development, making it a central role in realizing Biden’s ambitious climate and clean-energy goals. 

Over 100 women who have worked with Daniel-Davis throughout her career are calling on Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to bring her nomination up for a vote in the Senate before the end of the year, when her nomination is set to expire. Schumer has so far prioritized the confirmation of judicial nominees.

“It is not an exaggeration to suggest that leaving this position vacant puts the commitments agreed to in the IRA at risk, not to mention the president’s clean energy and climate goals,” the letter states.

For those of you not following this..

The assistant secretary for land and minerals management oversees four bureaus within Interior: the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement.

And BOEM seems to be doing pretty well without an assistant secretary..example.. Or maybe an assistant secretary would help with.. hiring more BLM folks? See today’s other post.

From the Univ. of Washington’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. Link to the research is in the article.

SEFS-led study shows how California’s largest wildfires have complex effects on forests – and present an opportunity for forest management

From the research paper:

Exceptionally large fires (i.e., the top 1% by size) were responsible for 58% and 42% of the cumulative area burned at high and low-moderate severities, respectively, across the study period. With their larger patch sizes, our results suggest that exceptionally large fires coarsen the landscape pattern of California’s forests, reducing their fine-scale heterogeneity which supports much of their biodiversity as well as wildfire and climate resilience. Thus far, most modern post-fire management has focused on restoring forest cover and minimizing ecotype conversion in large, high-severity patches. These large fires, however, have also provided extensive areas of low-moderate severity burns where managers could leverage the wildfire’s initial “treatment” with follow-up fuel reduction treatments to help restore finer-scale forest heterogeneity and fire resilience.

Summary and links here.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (“Ninth Circuit”) addressed in a November 25th Memorandum a judicial challenge to the United States Bureau of Land Management (“BLM”) North Landscape Project (“North Project”)in the State of Oregon. See Kalamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, et al., v. Bureau of Land Management, 2022 WL 17222416.

The judicial challenge alleged National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”) and Endangered Species Act (“ESA”) violations.

The North Project is described as BLM’s site-specific management approach for conducting annual timber sales in the Klamath Falls Resource Area in accordance with the 2016 Southwestern Oregon Resource Management Plan and Oregon & California Revested Lands Act.

Received this press release this morning….

Forest Service News Release
Contact: Catherine Caruso

[email protected]

Forest Service Recruiting for New
Federal Advisory Committee

Call for help to modernize Northwest Forest Plan

PORTLAND, Ore., Dec. 5, 2022 — Nominations are being accepted through mid January for members to a Federal Advisory Committee for national forests in the Northwest Forest Plan area of Northern California, Oregon, and Washington.

The Committee will provide input on modernizing landscape management to promote sustainability, climate change adaptation, and wildfire resilience while addressing the increased demands on Northwest Forest Plan lands.

The 20-member committee will meet about four times annually for a two-year term. They will represent the diversity across the three states covered by the plan and include experts in the science community, organizations with an interest in these forests, plus government, tribal and public groups.

The Committee will offer advice on these topics, plus additional requests from the Secretary of Agriculture or the Chief of the Forest Service:

• • Planning options to complement the Wildfire Crisis Strategy, to assist the Forest Service in proactive wildfire risk reduction and obstacles in vegetation management.
  • Ways to address dynamic ecosystems with adaptive management, monitoring, and future uncertainty.
  • Integrating indigenous traditional ecological knowledge, perspectives, and values into federal forest planning and management.
  • Feedback on how to protect and promote conservation of mature, old-growth forest while ensuring national forests are resilient to high-severity wildfire, insects, disease, and other disturbances worsened by the climate crisis.
  • Preliminary recommendations in line with Forest Service NWFP planning timelines.

Review instructions on the Federal Register Notice. Submit packets by Jan. 17, 2023 – including cover letter, resume, references and form AD-755 – to [email protected]. Put “FACA Nomination” in the subject line. If mailing, send to: Regional Forester Glenn Casamassa, c/o NWFP FACA Team, 1220 SW 3rd Avenue, Portland, OR 97204.

For more information, visit the Forest Service’s Northwest Forest Plan page or the committee page.

For questions, contact Mark Brown at (971) 712-4369, Nick Goldstein at (503) 347-1765, or email [email protected]. Individuals using devices for the deaf may call (800) 877-8339, 5 a.m. – 5 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, Monday through Friday.

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USDA is an equal opportunity provider, employer and lender.

The visual legacy of the Bitterroot’s terracing in Robbins Gulch can still be seen by satellite (click on image for full-size).

Tomorrow the U.S. Supreme Court hears oral argument in a property rights dispute between the Forest Service, which owns an easement through plaintiffs’ private property. Although the legal issue (how should courts treat the Quiet Title Act’s statute-of-limitations?) is arcane, it is the historic nature of the easement that intrigues me.

In 1962, the predecessor property owners conveyed to the United States a 60-foot road easement that plaintiffs assert is “for timber harvest” purposes only. In 2006, the Forest Service allegedly expanded the easement to include general public access by posting a sign to that effect, leading to trespassing on plaintiffs’ private property, “theft of their personal property, people shooting at their houses, people hunting both on and off the easement, and people traveling at dangerous speeds on and around Robbins Gulch Road.”

However, it is the Forest Service’s timber harvest accessed by the Robbins Gulch Road that has the more storied history. This was one of the places where the Forest Service terraced hillsides to encourage regeneration following clearcut logging. This controversial practice helped catalyze passage of the National Forest Management Act, the echoes of which continue to reverberate.

PR from the The U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities….

Here’s a twist. “A group that gathered to protest a planned project for the Upper Cheat River Project Area Monday at the Monongahela National Forest Headquarters on Sycamore Street were met by a group of counter-protesters.”

USFS press release (thanks to Nick SMith for the link). Click on “INITIAL LANDSCAPE INVESTMENTS” to get to the map. Scroll down for data.

Biden-Harris Administration Launches Interactive Map Showcasing Wildfire Reduction Projects

New map shows the impact of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law on Forest Service, partner efforts to reduce hazardous fuels in western states

WASHINGTON, Nov. 15, 2022 – The Biden-Harris Administration is announcing today that the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service has launched a new interactive map showing the progress the agency and its partners have made in addressing the wildfire crisis in eight western states as part of the Forest Service’s 10-year wildfire crisis strategy. This easy-to-use “story map” gives users the opportunity to see the impact of the historic investments from President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law across 10 initial landscapes (PDF, 9 MB) in Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona.

Thoughtful essay. Excerpt: “[Sen.] Wyden’s support of pre-fire management is certainly a step in the right direction. But without equal attention given to post-fire management, Oregon’s legacy of beautiful, forest landscapes will evolve into forestland deserts covered by brush and dead, gray-ghost trees.”