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Nick Smith has a link in today’s newsletter to this article in Singletracks magazine.

About 35 miles from the mountain bike mecca of Bend, Oregon lies Prineville, population 10,429 (2020). Surrounded by Ochoco National Forest (ONF), it is a small town in a rural county in the west that—like so many others—is experiencing change. When the group Ochoco Trails proposed a broad suite of ideas for new trails, improvements to existing trails, horse camps, staging areas and the like over a diverse landscape within the ONF in 2018, they and their many partner organizations had good reason to be encouraged. There was horse stuff for the horse people, bike stuff for the bike people, all with a relatively light footprint on the land and wildlife habitat. What’s not to love? 

We recently discussed Carole King’s congressional testimony. Now she’s written for The Hill. Excerpts:

The U.S. Forest Service has been facilitating taxpayer-subsidized commercial logging for decades under multiple presidents from both parties. Subsidies incentivize companies to log on public rather than private land. And an operator of heavy equipment is motivated to “harvest” (a euphemism for turning a living tree into a log) the biggest, most profitable trees as quickly as possible.

Another euphemism is “thinning.” In many areas out west, feller bunchers clearcut a forest by sawing down and stripping nearly all the trees, leaving “slash” — the unprofitable branches, needles, and leaves — to dry out. That’s not thinning.

Misinformation disseminated under the guise of euphemisms such as “thinning,” “treatment,” “fuel reduction,” “management,” and “restoration” by the timber industry and by government officials has convinced much of the public that commercial logging is necessary to control wildfires.

But peer-reviewed studies by independent scientists show that removal of trees from a forest causes fire to burn hotter and faster — and that the most effective way to protect communities is to harden homes. 

Bill Gabbert of Wildfire Today has an interesting post on a new Wildfire Risk map.  Some commenters were not too impressed based on their ground-truthing.  Wouldn’t it be wise to “ground-truth before touting the accuracy of maps” rather than putting them out and telling everyone they’re correct? Is that way crazy? So Wildfire Today did some testing and so did the commenters. The results were generally not good.

It seems like modelers are driving way beyond their headlights… and acting if their models are somehow.. real.. Here’s what it says.. “Past events, current risks, and future projections based on peer-reviewed research from the world’s leading flood, fire, and climate modelers.”

Who is working at First Street Foundation? Not one of the usual fire suspects. Check them out. Their model looks very impressive and incorporates many variables .. check those out here.

Here’s their argument for why they exist:

What makes First Street Foundation unique

• Custom built models to calculate property-level climate risk statistics
• Transparent, peer-reviewed methodology that’s proven against real environmental events
• Validated by millions of users every day who continuously improve the data and science
• Easy-to-understand experience that’s trusted by industry leaders
• Building details and structure characteristics are used to customize information for your specific property

Institutional real estate investors and insurers have long had access to environmental risk data from for-profit oligopolies who use non-transparent methodologies that do not advance science and which limit access to risk information for the country. Because of this, the majority of Americans have relied on sources such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the United States Forest Service, and other public agencies to understand their risk. However, these agencies are not tasked with defining risk for individual properties, do not consider how environmental changes impact that risk in the near-term future, and are often unable to incorporate the latest science due to the bureaucratic and regulatory restrictions within which they operate, leaving millions of households and property owners unaware of their true risk.

There has long been an urgent need for accurate, property-level, publicly available environmental risk information in the United States based on open source, peer reviewed science. In a mission to fill that need, First Street Foundation has built a team of leading modelers, researchers, and data scientists to develop the first comprehensive, publicly available risk models in the United States. Beginning with flood and now wildfire, First Street works to correct the asymmetry of information in the market, empowering Americans to protect their most valuable asset–their home while working with industry and government entities to inform them of their risk.

It’s great that they’re not a “for-profit oligopoly” but who funds them and what are their interests? I can’t really tell based on this.. because 990 reading is not in my skill set.

My house for example, was always at risk of wildfire. Because we live in a dry climate and things.. dry out. That’s probably why my insurance company has contracted with a private structure protection outfit.   When fires start (mostly due to human ignition) the key variables are 1) wind, 2)  fuel (houses, grass grazed or not, trees?)   3) how fast suppression folks get there, 3) if it’s too windy for air suppression resources, 4) how much grazing reduced fuels, 5) wind (did I mention that?). So wind is a big deal.

What about wind and climate change?  That appears to be a can of worms, partially because it seems like researchers are interested in questions like “will changes in wind speed affect energy from wind turbines?” And also because.. it doesn’t seem like they know.  I did find a paper from 2019..by Jeong and Sushama.. “Projected Changes to Mean and Extreme Surface Wind Speeds for North America Based on Regional Climate Model Simulations.”

The IPCC [27], however, reported that projected changes to extreme wind speeds based on GCMs are more uncertain than those to mean wind speeds because of relatively fewer studies on extreme wind speeds and the difficulties in simulating these events with GCMs.

And yet, the folks at First Street Foundation tell me..that my house will go from .07 to .22 in 30 years.  But they haven’t actually modelled, nor can they, the most critical factors. As they say..

Risk Factor™️ is most powerful when used in conjunction with the FEMA flood maps, WildFire.org, and other available state and local risk resources. Risk Factor should be viewed as complementary to the federally adopted risk maps for a community, which need to be used for building and permitting purposes. Risk Factor™️ allows individuals to easily view risk information at the property level, and provides useful information on potential actions to mitigate risk. More information on each community’s risk maps and mitigation plans, however, can be best obtained by contacting the community’s floodplain manager or local fire department.

The question is does is add any value to federally adopted risk maps?  What does the map tell you about your house, and does it make sense?

From an article in Timber Harvesting magazine….

U.S. Forest Service reported it sold 2.87 billion BF of timber sales (compared to the agency target of 4 billion BF) in fiscal 2021, a decrease from 3.2 billion BF in FY 2020, according to the agency’s Fiscal Year 2023 Budget Justification document. The sold volume was valued at $197 million.

The decrease in sales was primarily due to limited staff capacity and no-bid sales, according to the agency, adding that the COVID-19 pandemic limited the mobility of timber crews, and field work continued to be difficult to accomplish due to the large fire activity across the Western U.S. Many employees that usually work to prepare timber sales were assigned to wildfire suppression and support. Recovery efforts after large fires, including stabilization work and hazard tree removal, necessitated the involvement of the staff who would typically work on preparing and administering timber sales, the agency stated.

This chart from a recent fact sheet by the Consortium for Research on Renewable Industrial Materials (CORRIM) illustrates the challenge of managing national forests: Timber mortality is increasing and net growth decreasing.

Well, the CORE Act reminded me of Jim Stiles’ pieces about amenitization or “gentrification in the name of amenities” of rural communities. One of the primary, earliest, and most extreme examples are ski communities. And then this story from the Colorado Sun showed up today about affordable housing in the Vail Valley and bighorn sheep which illustrates the situation:

The largest resort operator in North America is going to war with its namesake town.

The Vail town council late Tuesday voted to condemn a parcel where Vail Resorts plans to spend $17 million to build affordable housing for 165 workers. Dozens of Vail Resorts executives, employees and managers crammed into the council’s chambers Tuesday night as the council heard passionate support for both housing and wildlife. Ultimately the council voted 4-3 to approve a resolution that gives the town the ability to seize ownership of the 23-acre parcel and prevent any development as a way to protect a bighorn herd that winters in the south-facing aspen groves along Interstate 70.

“I’m disappointed you’ve been backed into a corner and have to consider this resolution tonight,” said Terry Meyers, the executive director of the Rocky Mountain Bighorn Society. “Please make the decision to protect the bighorn sheep herd and move forward to find other options for affordable housing in the Vail Valley. The sheep have to have this. They can’t go anywhere else.”

“What public is being referenced? It’s not the workers,” Bruno said. “We are in a housing crisis that is affecting not only our guest experiences but the very make-up of our community. If we are really thinking about the welfare and safety of our neighbors, we would want to make sure they have homes.”

Chris Romer, the head of the 920-business Vail Valley Partnership, focused on the role of government, saying eminent domain and government seizure of private property is an “extreme action.”

“The idea of what is mine is mine and what is yours is mine is bad government policy,” Romer said.

Frances Hartogh, a Vail resident and volunteer wilderness ranger for the Eagle Summit Wilderness Alliance, said she has seen the detrimental impacts of crowds, dogs and climate on the valley’s wildlife.

“It’s time to stop violating wildlife in the name of our sport,” Hartogh said.

Robyn Smith, a resident and business owner in West Vail, presented a map she assembled from town data showing 17 short-term rental homes, two luxury homes under construction, two trailheads, the town’s public works building and Vail Mountain School among more than 100 buildings in the bighorn herd’s winter range on the south-facing slopes in East Vail.

Smith said condemning the affordable housing project while allowing all the other activity in the winter habitat “is a textbook example of redlining.”

“The consequences of this action are clearly discriminatory,” said Smith, adding that state wildlife officials are in charge of protecting bighorn “but you are uniquely responsible for us.”

Vail Resorts also brought a map showing more than 100 homes in the habitat, many of the homes awash in red dots indicating the homes owned by people who have spoken publicly against the affordable housing project near their neighborhood.

Many residents urged Vail Resorts to direct employee housing to its Ever Vail parcel in the valley. The company years ago proposed a new chairlift and luxury village on the land adjacent to the ski area. John Dawsey, the vice president of hospitality for Vail Resorts, said Ever Vail is three to five years away from approval.

“And we need this housing now,” Dawsey said. “One gets us housing now and one will get us housing in the future and we need both.

 

Bill Gabbert of Wildfire Today had an excellent idea of having a post (he calls it the “staging area”) specifically about stories or other topics that hadn’t been covered. We kind of have that with the tab “other topics of interest” but I think this approach is more encouraging to people. What went on this week that we didn’t post about that you would like to discuss?

Way back when TSW (or then, NCFP) was started, while I was still working for the Forest Service, I wrote this post “talking across the concrete-abstract divide”. I used for examples of abstract thinking Charles Wilkinson and Martin Nie, both law profs(even thought Wilkinson was on the “Committee of Scientists” for NFMA, which I never really understood).  You can still see the 1997 report here. See, as a concrete thinker, I would have thought it should have been called the “Committee of Almost Entirely Scientists” or the “Committee of People We Think Are Really Smart and Knowledgeable.” I tend to seek clarity, comprehensibility, and words that mean what they say in plain English, at each step along the policy path.

I’ve mentioned before that our Regional Forester, Rick Cables, plus a noted, experienced, and thoughtful forest planner (currently working so not to be named) and I had a bit of a project in which we would go to visit law school profs and students and talk about policy issues, in order to develop more joint understanding.  This was where I first really interacted with individuals across the divide. I found those discussions to be of such richness that I thought “it’s too bad we can’t let students across the country hear this!” So Martin Nie and I started NCFP to talk about planning as the 2012 Rule was developed.

Listening to the webinar from the UC Boulder Law School last week, as well as our discussion this week of what the Park Service mission statement means, reminded me a bit of that post.  Here’s an excerpt (remember, this was written in 2010 discussing what would be in the 2012 Rule):

Second, the idea of ecological sustainability being pre-eminent never appealed to me. Strictly pragmatically, I thought we can’t always make the most protective decisions (like fencing all the people out of the Angeles National Forest if they have too many environmental impacts). But talking to Professor Wilkinson, he meant it in a visionary, right-brained way, as a goal which people could figure out through collaborative efforts and reinvent their interpretation through time and with learning. My original thought was “ecological sustainability” was an analytical idea, and the problem was that you could do all kinds of analyses of everything and never prove something was sustainable.

Something like forest planning, and planning rules involve people from a wide array of backgrounds with different meanings for the same words. That is why it is so important to have conversations with others across different views, including the concrete/abstract divide.

So I’ve thought about this for some time. Certainly abstractions may be linked with privilege, as who will determine how the abstractions are interpreted when they finally reach the dirt level of real forest practices, for example? I’ve also thought that perhaps the dichotomy had other dimensions as well. Perhaps some flavor of classism, for example. I ran across this piece recently, which I thought opened up a different way of thinking about it. The post is written by someone named N.S. Lyons (apparently a pen name for someone in DC) and you have to look through some of the political stuff to find the juicy parts.

To simplify, let’s first identify and categorize two classes of people in society, who we could say tend to navigate and interact with the world in fundamentally different ways.

The first is a class that has been a part of human civilization for a really long time. These are the people who work primarily in the real, physical world. Maybe they work directly with their hands, like a carpenter, or a mechanic, or a farmer. Or maybe they are only a step away: they own or manage a business where they organize and direct employees who work with their hands, and buy or sell or move things around in the real world. Like a transport logistics company, maybe. This class necessarily works in a physical location, or they own or operate physical assets that are central to their trade.

The second class is different. It is, relatively speaking, a new civilizational innovation (at least in numbering more than a handful of people). This group is the “thinking classes” Lasch was writing about above. They don’t interact much with the physical world directly; they are handlers of knowledge. They work with information, which might be digital or analog, numerical or narrative. But in all cases it exists at a level of abstraction from the real world. Manipulation and distribution of this information can influence the real world, but only through informational chains that pass directives to agents that can themselves act in the physical world – a bit like a software program that sends commands to a robot arm on an assembly line. To facilitate this, they build and manage abstract institutions and systems of organizational communication as a means of control. Individuals in this class usually occupy middle links in these informational chains, in which neither the inputs nor outputs of their role has any direct relationship with or impact on the physical world. They are informational middlemen. This class can therefore do their job almost entirely from a laptop, by email or a virtual Zoom meeting, and has recently realized they don’t even need to be sitting in an office cubicle while they do it.

For our purposes here, let’s call these two classes the Physicals and the Virtuals, respectively.

When considering the causes and character of the current protest, and the response to it, I would say the divide between Physicals and Virtuals is by far the most relevant frame of analysis available. In fact I’d say this is among the most significant divides in all of Western politics today.

And this excerpt reminds me of the current fad of calling “information you disagree with” “misinformation”; even a bit of the current hubbub around Twitter:

But have a little sympathy for them: they do this not just because it is cynically convenient (though it is), but because this is literally the only way they know how to navigate and influence the world. The post-modern fish swims in a narrative sea, and their first reaction is always to try to control it (through what the CCP calls “discourse power”) because at heart they well and truly believe in the idea of the “social construction of reality,” as Lasch pointed out in the quote at top. If there is no fixed, objective truth, only power, then the mind’s will rules the world. Facts can be reframed as needed to create the story that best produces the correct results for Progress (this is why you will find journalists are now professionally obsessed with “storytelling” rather than reporting facts).

If you read the comments, you’ll find that many agree that the concept is useful, but they also says that people don’t fit as neatly into one or the other as the author describes. They’re pretty civil, though, so it’s an interesting discussion.

But what strikes me about this is that many folks in the natural resource professions have the skills and experience to understand both worlds. Which is difficult, but also important and necessary for the betterment of our society. After all, rural and urban, Virtuals and Physicals, red and blue, lawyers and fire crews, academics and practitioners, all of us..need to live together more or less harmoniously.

The subject line is the headline of a Missoula Current article. 144,000 acres. Thanks to Nick Smith for the link. An excerpt:

The U.S. Forest Service this week announced it was beginning scoping efforts on the proposed Bitterroot Front Project affecting forestlands from northwest of Florence south to Conner and Trapper Creek.

Since scoping is the first step in the public process, the documents consist of a series of maps showing areas where a group of agencies want the focus on timber, prescribed burns or other activities. The agencies include the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, Ravalli County, Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, and other federal agencies.

If the project sounds familiar, that’s because Bitterroot National Forest supervisor Matt Anderson held a series of “pre-scoping” meetings in 2019 to give the public more of a heads-up on the project. It led to some confusion as to what the public was to do, but Anderson told the Bitterroot Star in 2019 he just wanted to describe the “desired future condition that we want and then look at the various ways we can achieve it.”

The Forest Service describes the project as it does many others: a “fuels reduction, vegetation management, and forest health improvement project” that will provide timber projects and related jobs. Calling it “a landscape-scale proposal,” the Forest Service proposes a “Shared Stewardship Approach” to encourage vegetation treatments across ownership boundaries. Private landowners along the forest boundary will be invited to participate in the project through Bitter Root Resource Conservation and Development and Good Neighbor Authority.  

Many stalwarts of federal lands scholarship will be there (I don’t like to be pedantic, but strictly speaking “America’s public lands” would include state and county lands as well; I always wonder why people use “public” when they mean “federal”). And I’ve always enjoyed contrasting scholarly histories with my own experiences.  Fellow dinosaurs may enjoy that as well.

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It will be interesting to see how they talk about these efforts (from Center for Western Priorities today)

The Biden administration says it’s on track to nearly double the capacity of renewable energy projects on public land by the end of 2023. The projection came in a new report to Congress that shows rapid progress towards an additional 10 gigawatts of renewable capacity by the end of next year, and 25 gigawatts of wind, solar, and geothermal energy on public lands by 2025.

Just this week, the Bureau of Land Management issued its first competitive lease for solar energy, leasing nearly 5,000 acres for a 600-megawatt solar array in Utah’s Escalante Desert. When the project is fully developed, it’s expected to create 200 construction jobs and 15 ongoing operations positions while powering 170,000 homes.

Interior’s report to Congress says it has over 50 renewable projects in early review stages right now. The agency is also working to update land use plans across 11 Western states that are part of the Westside Energy Corridor, identifying 3 million acres of public land suitable for transmission lines while also “providing enhanced conservation of public lands.”

I couldn’t find acreages impacted by the proposed buildout (other than the 3 mill suitable for transmission lines). Lots of gigawatt estimates, though.

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Here’s a link to register.. or if you can get to Boulder you can probably register to go in person.

Our Common Ground: A History of America’s Public Lands
Book Release Event
John Leshy, Author
Emeritus Harry D. Sunderland and Distinguished Professor of Law
University of California, Hastings College of Law

Thursday, April 21
5:00 p.m.
Wolf Law Building, Wittemyer Courtroom
Livestream option available

Attendee Information (Parking/Zoom/Logistics)

Zoom Webinar Link: https://cu.law/CommonGround

The event will include an overview of the book by the author and Professor Emeritus John Leshy, followed by a panel discussion of the topics covered.

Registration

Panel Moderator

Professor Mark Squillace, University of Colorado Raphael J. Moses Professor of Law

Panelists

Eric Dude, U.S. Department of the Interior, Attorney/Advisory (2019 Colorado Law Wyss Scholar)

Alison Flint, The Wilderness Society, Senior Legal Director

Maria Handley, The Wilderness Society, Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships & Organizing

Professor Patty Limerick, University of Colorado Center of the American West

Johnsie Wilkinson, Colorado Law rising 3L (2021 Colorado Law Wyss Scholar)

Our Common Ground: A History of America’s Public Lands

The little-known story of how the U.S. government came to hold nearly one-third of the nation’s land and manage it primarily for recreation, education and conservation.

America’s public lands include more than 600 million acres of forests, plains, mountains, wetlands, deserts, and shorelines. In this book, John Leshy, a leading expert in public lands policy, discusses the key political decisions that led to this, beginning at the very founding of the nation. He traces the emergence of a bipartisan political consensus in favor of the national government holding these vast land areas primarily for recreation, education, and conservation of biodiversity and cultural resources. That consensus remains strong and continues to shape American identity. Such a success story of the political system is a bright spot in an era of cynicism about government. This book is essential reading for anyone who cares about public lands, and it is particularly timely as the world grapples with the challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss.

Presented by the Colorado Law Wyss Scholar is U.S. Lands Conservation, the Colorado Environmental Law Journal, and the Getches-Wilkinson Center.

Our Common Ground is free and open to the public, but registration is required to attend and/or receive the livestream link.

During registration, please indicate your intent to join in person or remotely.

In consideration of continued Covid mitigation measures at Colorado Law, there will not be a reception following the event. We hope to resume these networking opportunities later in the year.