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Interior outlines tribal co-management steps for agencies

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From E&E News (subscription) today:

Interior outlines tribal co-management steps for agencies

The guidance comes out a day before a hearing on Capitol Hill on legislation that would bolster Native American tribes’ input into the use of public lands.
Excerpt:

The Interior Department today unveiled new public lands guidance to expand and support co-management of federal lands, waters and wildlife with Native American tribes.

The Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service each individually released new policy memorandums with specific measures to facilitate and support agreements with tribes to collaborate in the co-stewardship of federal lands and waters.

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The BLM instruction memorandum mandates the bureau’s 12 state directors, within six months, will “create state-specific plans for outreach to identify co-stewardship opportunities, including identifying potential Tribal partners and sources of Indigenous Knowledge.”

And it directs the bureau to “identify opportunities for co-stewardship as part of Tribal consultation and engagement during land use planning and implementation decisions.”

Book: A Continent Transformed by Wildfire

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Here’s a review of a book that may be of interest to forest planners and other denizens of TSW, even if it has a focus on Canada: A Continent Transformed by Wildfire, Then and Now. Subtitle: ‘Dark Days at Noon’ author Ed Struzik on fire deniers, ‘pyro’ storms, a boreal forest ‘born to burn’ and more.

Excerpt:

You write a lot about Indigenous burning and how agencies like the national parks services on both sides of the border evicted Indigenous people from parks and protected areas — the topic of tomorrow’s Tyee excerpt from your book.

Indigenous fires reduced the amount of fuel on the ground for future fires to burn. With the end of this light burning and the strategy of full suppression that followed in and around 1910, we stacked up the woodpile, so to speak, to feed fire. Kicking Indigenous people out of national parks and protected areas because they burned lightly to regenerate grass for bison and young aspen for ungulates — there were other reasons — was unconscionable.

How do we get fire back on the landscape in a way that is beneficial rather than destructive?

We have to do more of the light burning that Indigenous people practiced. We also have to thin the forests that surround many communities in Canada. I would go as far as to suggest that cities such as Edmonton with urban forests that have not seen fire in more than a century, consider the idea before out-of-control fires come to them.

 

Do Fire-Killed Trees Fall in the Forest?

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Well, of course. I was thinking about our discussions of post-fire hazard tree cutting as I was looking at the maps and photos of the Cedar Creek Fire in the central Oregon Cascades, which blew up on Friday and over the weekend to 18K acres. It ran north along the west side of Waldo Lake, a vert popular recreation area. North of the lake is the area burned by the 1996 Charlton Fire, which burned 10,000 acres on the north shore, mostly in the Waldo Lake Wilderness (the Pacific Crest Trail runs though it). The Cedar Creek Fire burned well into the older fire scar. This image from Google Earth Pro — 2016 imagery — shows a portion of the newly re-burned area in the wilderness, near a small lake. The image is interesting because it shows how little timber has returned — no restoration was done, since it’s a wilderness area. It also shows many downed trees (as well as the shadows of those still standing). Many of those downed trees probably stood for years, but of course over time they weakened and fell. This scene is typical of the Charlton Fire burn area. Dead trees do fall, which is one reason to cut them before they fall onto roads, power lines, and so on.

Counteracting wildfire misinformation

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“Counteracting wildfire misinformation,” a paper by 13 authors in Frontiers in Ecology and Environment (open access), is worth a look. The authors do not mention Chad Hanson by name, but this seems to fit, IMHO: “Some scientists use their credentials to advocate for specific policy outcomes that they support personally, which may or may not be driven by robust frameworks of evidence.”

One of the supporting documents is an excellent resource: WebTable 1. “Prebunking prominent examples of wildfire misinformation related to in western North American forests.” For example:

Misinformation: Fuels reduction is a Trojan horse for commercial logging.

Description: Pre-fire fuels reduction is motivated by timber outputs, not fire hazard reduction; the result is serious harm to the land from practices similar to commodity-driven logging.

Consequence of misinformation: Distrust in land management agencies. [As well as collaborative groups and other stakeholders who support fuels reduction.]

Information from more robust knowledge frameworks: Mechanical fuels reduction focuses on retaining medium and large-sized fire-tolerant trees, to foster their survival of the next fire. Fuels reduction treatments restructure and remove woody material and fuel ladders that built up during fire exclusion, and are often of limited economic value. In other cases, removal of medium-, or large-sized fire-intolerant trees that recruited during fire exclusion is essential to improve fire-tolerant tree survival. The catchphrase “fuels reduction logging” deceptively conflates two very different types of forest management.

Key evidence: Agee and Skinner 2005; Schwilk et al. 2009; Stephens et al. 2009, 2020, 2021; Collins et al. 2014; Prichard et al. 2021; Hessburg et al. 2022.

 

 

 

 

What Is [a Poached] Old-Growth Tree Actually Worth?

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The subtitle of this Undark article is “In setting fines for timber poaching, experts are looking at different ways to calculate the financial value of trees.” It’s by Lyndsie Bourgon, author of Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America’s Woods.

Excerpts:

At last estimate, the Forest Service reported that 1 in 10 trees logged on their land is poached. The financial impact can be hard to pin down, but some sources estimate poaching amounts to up to $100 million per year, contributing to a broader $1 billion annual valuation of all timber poaching in the United States.

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In British Columbia, natural resource officers who patrol provincial forest lands have started to argue for steeper penalties that take ecological value, wildlife corridors, recreational use, and aesthetic beauty into consideration. It’s in those issues that the gravity of poaching is most felt, one officer told me, not simply the loss of a marketable resource.

Across the border, in Washington, similar arguments have been made in large timber poaching cases. In a 2012 case of tree theft, a man pled guilty to poaching bigleaf maple, Western red cedar trees, and Douglas fir, at least one of which was 300 years old, from Olympic National Forest. The market value of the wood was estimated to be between $59,510 and $118,660. But when it came time for sentencing and restitution, federal attorneys argued that the ecological value of timber should also contribute to the overall fine.

The prosecution used something called an “ecological valuation” — a method factors in considerations like the tree’s value as habitat for endangered birds, as well as a single old-growth’s influence on forest health. “Because the Forest Service is charged with stewarding the forests for the public benefit (and not simply with marketing timber), consideration of ecological factors is necessary,” the restitution memo said. Notably, it also stated: “Courts have recognized that a restitution order should reflect the value of stolen property from the victim’s perspective. Market value does not adequately reflect this value.”

A Judicial Threat to Conservation

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This essay from the PERC website is interesting. Emphasis added….

A Judicial Threat to Conservation

The recent nullification of environmental regulations by a federal court sets a dangerous precedent.

How aggressive should courts be in reversing environmental regulations?

That question has renewed significance in the wake of this summer’s U.S. Supreme Court decision using a controversial theory to declare unlawful the Obama Administration’s signature climate regulation, the Clean Power Plan. If you are concerned about the Supreme Court’s decision, you should also be worried about a little-noticed development in the lower courts that poses significant short-term and long-term threats to conservation.

Last month, a federal district court in California voided three Endangered Species Act regulations issued by the Trump Administration. Although environmental advocates typically celebrate decisions against former President Donald J. Trump as a win for conservation, in this case that would be a mistake. The implications of the district court’s decision are alarming.

One ominous concern is the basis of the court’s decision. The court did not consider the details of these regulations nor determine that they were unlawful. Instead, the court asserted it has wide discretion to void regulations issued under a former president whenever a new administration with different priorities has expressed interest in revisiting them. This decision, and recent decisions like it, set a dangerous precedent.

The court’s slash-and-burn approach to nullifying federal regulations directly harms wildlife. The three voided regulations covered a lot of ground. When the rules were issued, the Environmental Policy Innovation Center, an organization committed to environmental conservation, reported that the rules contained 33 discrete changes, more of which could benefit conservation than would undermine it. Yet the court erased all these changes, including the beneficial ones, with little or no explanation.

Read the full article from The Regulatory Review.

Modeling the risk reduction benefit of forest management

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Folks, this USFS paper may be of interest: “Modeling the risk reduction benefit of forest management using a case study in the Lake Tahoe Basin.”

Authors: Evans, Samuel G.; Holland, Tim G.; Long, Jonathan W.; Maxwell, Charles; Scheller, Robert M.; Patrick, Evan; Potts, Matthew D.

Date: 2022

Source Ecology and Society. 27(2):18

Abstract: Across the United States, wildfire severity and frequency are increasing, placing many properties at risk of harm or destruction. We quantify and compare how different forest management strategies designed to increase forest resilience and health reduce the number of properties at risk from wildfire, focusing on the Lake Tahoe Basin of California and Nevada. We combine landscape change simulations (including climate change, wildfire, and management effects) with scenarios of current and plausible fuel treatment activities and parcel-scale fire risk analysis. Results suggest that more aggressive fuel treatment activities that treat more area on the landscape, whether through mechanical and hand thinning or prescribed fire, dramatically lower the fire probability in the region and lead to a corresponding lower risk of property loss. We estimate that relative to recent practices of focusing management in the wildland–urban interface, more active forest management can reduce property loss risk by 45%–76%, or approximately 2600–4900 properties. The majority of this risk reduction is for single family residences, which constitute most structures in the region. Further, we find that the highest risk reduction is obtained through strategies that treat a substantially greater area than is currently treated in the region and allows for selective wildfires to burn for resource objectives outside of the wildland–urban interface. These results highlight the importance of more active forest management as an effective tool in reducing the wildfire risk to capital assets in the region.

WA Post: California’s giant sequoias are burning up. Will logging save them?

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Fairly good article overall, except (in my view) its gives far too much space to Chad Hanson’s views, albeit with a note about other scientists’ criticism of them. The title ought to have been “Will logging and prescribed fire save them?” The article is apparently not behind the Post’s paywall….

Excerpt:

The scale of what some foresters and researchers are calling for in places such as the Sierra Nevada amounts to a wholesale re-engineering of the forest. They say the land management policy that prevailed during much of the 20th century — of putting out most wildfires — has led to overgrown forests. During the past two decades, as climate change has intensified, drought in the West has killed many of those trees, leaving downed logs and dead snags — the “fuels” that firefighters say create hotter and more destructive wildfires.

Before colonists settled the West, forest fires caused by lightning, and set routinely by Native Americans, helped thin out forests. Back then, it was typical to have about 50 trees per hectare in the Sierra Nevada and southern Cascades, whereas now some forests have 300 to 400 trees per hectare, according to Alexis Bernal, a researcher with the University of California, Berkeley who studies giant sequoias.

What Stalled the U.S. Forest Service from Fuel Treatments Around Grizzly Flats? Capradio Article

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This is a really interesting story.. thanks to Michael Wara on Twitter!  It goes into the nuts and bolts of why a project on the Eldorado didn’t get done on time to help a community.  A conversation followed in which the question was asked whether fuels funding is targeted to the communities that need it most or have more people/political clout or matching funds due to people/political clout.  This was a topic of discussion in Colorado even back when I was working.. partnerships are good and to be fostered, but to what extent is there also an environmental justice component and how should that be addressed? For example, the State of Colorado requires less of a match for state wildfire mitigation grants in areas that it has mapped as lower income.

Anyway, really good and lengthy article, lots of interviews with FS folks, no paywall so you can read the whole thing. There’s several pieces about “what slowed the project down that could have helped.”

  • The Forest Service originally committed to finishing the Trestle Project by 2020 — a year before the Caldor Fire would later ignite. Due to a complex web of regulatory delays, logistical challenges and resource shortages, the agency pushed back the completion date to as late as 2032 — three decades after its initial warning to Grizzly Flats.

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Nelson helped devise the Trestle Project as a big step toward his goal. It would create a miles-wide fuel reduction buffer east and south of Grizzly Flats.

When the Forest Service finally announced the project in 2013, the agency sent a letter to residents describing 16,000 acres of planned work. (A miscalculation led to the document overstating the work by nearly 1,000 acres. The actual number was just over 15,000.) It laid out an expeditious — and optimistic — timeline. The analysis was supposed to take about a year, with the forest management work scheduled to wrap up by 2020.

Almost immediately the project encountered an onslaught of hurdles and delays.

“It’s sad to think about what could have been,” said Michael Wara, a climate policy expert at Stanford University who recently toured Grizzly Flats. “[If] all this work was done by 2020, Grizzly Flats might still be there.”

‘We Don’t Have That Kind Of Time Any Longer’

One of the most aggressive objections to the Trestle Project came from Chad Hanson, co-founder of the John Muir Project, a nonprofit that aims to protect biodiversity in national forests and fiercely opposes tree removal. One of Hanson’s primary concerns was the spotted owl, which is designated as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act.

In a written objection to the Forest Service in 2015, Hanson argued the Trestle Project would “pose a serious and unacceptable threat to owl populations on the Eldorado National Forest.”

Elsewhere, Hanson has argued that commercial tree removal could exacerbate wildfire intensity. Leading fire scientists have publicly pushed back against a number of Hanson’s claims; one expert even called his positions “self-serving garbage.”

The project’s 296-page environmental impact statement devoted dozens of pages to analyzing potential impacts on the spotted owl. The report also invited public comment that demanded thoroughly researched responses from the Forest Service. The agency developed alternative maps, taking into account spotted owls and sensitive species of frog and trout.

The Forest Service also put out other reports, including one that identified a likely ignition point very close to where the Caldor Fire would later start.

As the Forest Service spun out reams of paperwork, Almer reminded the agency that Grizzly Flats remained woefully exposed to wildfires that were growing more severe every year.

“The most aggressive treatment of the [Trestle Project’s] fire fuels is critical to preventing the ‘loss of our community,’” wrote Almer in a 2015 public comment about the project on behalf of the Grizzly Flats Fire Safe Council. “Everything that can be done, must be done.”

He followed up this plea with a 2017 letter addressed to Randy Moore, who at the time led the agency’s Pacific Southwest Region.

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Over the next four years, the Forest Service completed only a fraction of the Trestle Project.

It called for fuel reduction across more than 15,000 acres of land around Grizzly Flats, but completed work on just over 2,000 of those acres.

A cell phone tower disguised as a tree holds some of the only green “foliage” near the center of Grizzly Flats, California, Thursday, August 4, 2022.Andrew Nixon / CapRadio

Prescribed fire, considered crucial by fire scientists, was nowhere to be found. The project called for more than 10,000 acres of intentional low-intensity fire, but the agency only completed 136 acres of “pile burns,” the process of collecting and burning logs and vegetation that is widely considered much less impactful.

The agency instead prioritized commercial tree thinning, which generates revenue that offsets costs.

Generally, commercial thinning and other treatments designed to reduce fuel loads are a necessary precursor to prescribed fires, according to Rogers.

“Largely, we’re not going to be able to put fire on the ground before that work is completed,” he said.

But Trestle Project reports and Forest Service data show the vast majority of the planned prescribed fire was intended as the first treatment.

Wildfire researchers and former Forest Service officials say it’s disappointing the agency would focus on commercial thinning over other forms of treatment.

“The evidence that commercial thinning really reduces risk is not that good,” said Wara, the Stanford climate policy expert. “If you thin and then burn in an area, then you get dramatic risk reduction.”

Meanwhile, areas adjacent to the community that the Forest Service identified as “first priority” were left untouched and overgrown. One stands out: The highly overgrown — and highly combustible — southern border, which would have dovetailed with the buffer zone that Mark Almer and the Grizzly Flats Fire Safe Council worked on for over a decade.

“The part that didn’t get treated was the part we should have been most worried about,” said Hugh Safford, who spent two decades as the Forest Service’s senior ecologist in California before retiring in late 2021.

The steep, dense and dry south-facing terrain made it one of the more complicated parts of the project, but also the most essential, Safford noted.

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And the piece also looks at why it’s easier to complete commercial thinning (plannable) over prescribed fire (risky and not so much plannable)

 

Forest Service employees call them “Goldilocks days” — the brief window when weather, moisture levels, personnel demands and air quality all line up so prescribed burns can be done safely. Those days are becoming increasingly rare as hotter temperatures, severe drought and erratic weather patterns become facts of everyday life.

Rogers, the current Placerville district ranger, said his unit had a prescribed burn planned for spring of 2021, months before the Caldor Fire ignited.

“We had to cancel because conditions just weren’t quite right,” he said. “The historic drought conditions really cannot be overstated.” ….

Then there’s the staffing problem. Setting and managing a prescribed fire requires a lot of personnel. Longer and more extreme fire seasons mean crews ping-pong from district to district and fire to fire, often remaining on the frontlines for weeks at a time with no break. That prevents them from managing prescribed burns and tackling other vegetation reduction projects in their home districts.

Here’s the part about Lake Tahoe:

That doesn’t mean all projects struggle to secure funding. From 2008 to 2019, a partnership of private organizations and government agencies, including the Forest Service, pulled together $150 million and tackled 57,000 acres of fuel reduction around Lake Tahoe, not far from Grizzly Flats.

What if we don’t want to protect our homes?

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We have discussed the role of home sites and homeowners in reducing wildfire risk.  In doing so I think we have made an implicit assumption that homeowners care about reducing wildfire risk.  Here is some evidence that protecting their homes from fires is less important to some people than protecting them from the government.

Oregon has adopted new legislation following the barrage of fire storms across Oregon in September 2020 that burned more than 1 million acres and destroyed 4,000 homes, many of them in rural areas.  It assigned tax lots one of five wildfire risk levels, and updated and refined the state’s “wildland-urban interface” map.  Starting next year, property owners on tax lots designated “high” or “extreme” risk that also fall within the updated wildland-urban interface must comply with minimum defensible space requirements.

“(The new map) generated so much pushback from angry homeowners that officials abruptly retracted it, saying they had not done enough local outreach before publicizing the ambitious project.

The rapid reversal, announced late Thursday, capped weeks of mounting frustration in mostly rural areas as the map emerged as a new flashpoint for conservatives who call it government overreach and “climate change evangelism.”

Fierce opposition bubbled up at community meetings prior to the state’s step back. Residents and some local officials worried it would lead to insurance rate increases or coverage loss, while others bridled at new mandates for defensible space and rules for future construction that flow from the map’s designations.

One information session in the conservative southwest corner of the state was canceled after someone threatened violence.”

There can certainly be legitimate concerns about factual errors, but this is being overshadowed by this new norm for how to respond to anything the government does that tells people what to do (especially if it’s because of climate change).  And just like Covid, if you leave it up to individual “personal responsibility,” some people’s lack of that will affect other people’s lives.  Achieving societal agreement on fuel reduction may be another casualty of this ongoing breakdown of social order.