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From the Spokesman-Review:

Colville Tribes sue U.S. government, seeking damages for failure to manage forests that burned in massive 2015 wildfires

The Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government on Wednesday, alleging federal agencies failed to fulfill their legally required duties before, during and after the 2015 wildfires that burned more than 240,000 acres and turned parts of the reservation into a “moonscape.”

The Colville Tribes, whose approximately 9,500 members rely heavily on timber revenue and other natural resources, are seeking compensation from the federal government after the 2015 fires destroyed roughly 20% of the commercial timber on the reservation. But Andrew Joseph, Jr., chairman of the Colville Business Council, said the damage extended far beyond the lost revenue.

…

Under federal law, the U.S. government is responsible for managing forest health and providing adequate firefighting resources on land it holds in trust on behalf of Native American tribes. The Colville Tribes’ suit alleges the government knew it needed to make forests on their reservation less susceptible to severe fire by thinning trees and conducting controlled burns, and that its failure to do so “led to tinderbox conditions in which catastrophic fire was inevitable.”

Wall St. Journal yesterday (emphasis added):

After Tamarack Fire, the U.S. Plans New Tactics to Fight West’s Flames

At the end of an otherwise unremarkable article about yet another environmental group reversing in court a federal agency’s illegal decision, and getting paid for its troubles under the Equal Access to Justice Act, is the following postscript:

In fiscal 2020, 16 federal agencies reported 15,596 separate awards under the EAJA totaling more than $101 million. The Social Security Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs accounted for the vast majority of the EAJA payments.

And the answer is: Veterans and seniors. That’s who.

Folks, forgive me for this bit of shameless self-promotion. The debut edition of my new newsletter, Natural Resources Management Today, is online. It’s free after registering, though I do ask for voluntary subscription payments.

Here’s what you’ll find in the August 2021 edition:

• The Power of Private Forests: A conversation with Tom Martin, President and CEO of the American Forest Foundation
• NRM Student Profile — Anna Pauletta: A Passion for Wildlife and Forests
• Southern Timberland Owners Face Increasing Pressures
• Wildland Stories Webinar: Rangeland Ecology
• Reflections: Ordinary Time, an essay by Marianne Patinelli-Dubay
• Bringing Tech Innovation to Wildfires: 4 Recommendations for Smarter Firefighting as Megafires Menace the US
• Esri Provides Open Access to Key Federal Geospatial Data
• NRM Science Notes: Wild Pigs, Lidar Accuracy, Grouse, Owls, and Bats
• Observations: Counties on Fire, an essay by Jim Petersen
• Climate, Weather, Fuels Drive Wildfires. What Can We Do? Focus on Adaptation and Resilience [I wrote this one]
• Mount Hood Prayer, p. 27

In the online publication, the top and bottom menu bars appear when you hover a mouse cursor over them. On the bottom menu bar, the Share button lets you post links to articles to social media or send them by email. I encourage you to share NRM Today far and wide….

Steve

Steve Wilent
Editor & Publisher
Natural Resources Management Today
Oregon home office: 503-622-3033
[email protected]
nrmtoday.com

The following interview comes rom South Dakota Public Broadcasting:

Jim Furnish grew up visiting the Black Hills National Forest with his family and later worked for the Forest Service. He rose through the ranks and served as the deputy chief of the agency from 1992-2002.

Furnish said he was saddened by findings about the Black Hills timber industry that were revealed in a February National Forest study.

“This general technical report clearly shows that the levels that they’ve been logging at are not sustainable,” he said. “In fact the technical report said if you keep logging at the level there won’t be any trees left in the Black Hills in 50 years.”

Furnish says it’s shocking that the Black Hills harvests the most trees out of all 154 National Forests, even more than the huge forests of the Pacific North West.

He said the forest is prioritizing timber over other natural resources and this will result in negative long-term effects for timber workers and fire safety.

This unsustainability violates the Multiple-Use Sustained Yield Act, Furnish said. He also said he’s found evidence of logging in areas that haven’t been approved through the National Environmental Policy Act.

Ben Wudtke is the director of the Black Hills Forest Resource Association, which represents businesses and workers in the timber industry.

“The partnership between the forest products companies and the Forest Service in the Black Hills has long been heralded by both the agency and the communities as a success in mitigating mountain pine beetle mortality, mitigating hazards for wildfires that threaten our communities and the lives of firefighters and the public alike,” Wudtke said.

He said Furnish’s vision for the forest would eliminate about 80 percent of the local industry.

The 22 minute interview with Furnish comes from a recent interview on SDPB’s weekday radio program, “In the Moment.” Listen to the full interview here.

I came across a 2017 USFS paper about mortality on Doug-fir and ponderosa pine after wildfires.

Brief excerpts:

Only 8% of Ponderosa pine and 14% of Douglas-fir died within 3 years after fire. The amount of crown volume consumed, the number of bole quadrants with dead cambium and the presence of beetles were variables that classified most accurately,
but surviving trees in our sample displayed a wide range of fire injury making the accurate classification of dead trees difficult.

Injury to trees from wildfire and prescribed fire can produce mortality that is not immediately apparent and environmental
stress before and after a fire may also contribute to tree mortality in years after a fire

An item from the American Forest Resource Council‘s July newsletter. This edition has another entry on the topic, about hazard tree litigation in California.

Hazard Tree Removal Litigated

Last month the California-based Klamath Forest Alliance filed a complaint against the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest on a project that aims to remove fire-killed trees posing a danger to roads following the 2020 Slater Fire.

The Slater Fire Safe-Reentry Project proposes to remove hazard trees affecting 146 miles of travel corridors, including the mainline road connecting Cave Junction and Happy Camp. The Forest authorized the proposed actions using a Categorical Exclusion that allows various road maintenance activities. Among other things, the plaintiffs argue that the Forest Service violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by failing to prepare an Environmental Assessment (EA) or Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).

The Rogue River-Siskiyou opted to defer consideration of any timber salvage on the Slater Fire and instead focus its planning resources on the Safe-Reentry Project. This decision has become the status quo for most National Forests impacted by severe wildfires as timber salvage, a silvicultural tool, has been deemed too risky due to threat of litigation and the associated delays that render fire-damaged timber useless to local manufacturers. To date, the four western Oregon National Forests, the Mt. Hood, Willamette, Umpqua, and Rogue River-Siskiyou, have only proposed area salvage on 750 acres of the 377,000 acres impacted by last year’s wildfires—that’s less than 0.2% of the burnt acres.

It remains to be seen if special interest groups will also challenge that 0.2%, but it’s clear that resources are being deployed to halt the removal of any fire-damaged trees posing hazards to Forest Service roads. Currently, the mere threat of litigation has resulted in the continued closure of hundreds of miles of Forest Service roads to public access. The Rogue River-Siskiyou has 146 miles of roads closed due to hazard trees related to the Slater Fire, the Mt. Hood has 257 miles of roads closed due to hazard trees related to the Riverside and Lionshead Fires, and the Willamette has 407 miles of roads closed due to hazard trees related to the Holiday Farm, Beachie, and Lionshead Fires.

In total, over 800 miles of Forest Service roads in western Oregon remain closed to public entry due to delays in removing hazard trees created by wildfire. By all reasonable accounts, the Forest Service has three options to address these hazards:

• Close these 800+ miles of road indefinitely
• Sell the hazard trees to timber purchasers for manufacturing into wood products
• Use tax dollars to pay for the hazard trees to be felled and left on site

Given the state of the Slater fire litigation, and the threat of similar lawsuits on the other Forests, option three may be the only path forward. How much money this would cost is uncertain, but the Archie Creek Salvage EA prepared by the Roseburg BLM District estimated that it would cost up to $4 million to fell and leave hazard trees along roads associated with the Archie Creek Fire. This price tag applied across the vast Forest Service road network would be significantly higher. /Andy Geissler

Interesting paper by The Nature Conservancy and a large insurance company. It’s an “analysis that shows how ecological forest management, which reduces the risk of severe wildfires in fire-adapted forests, can be combined with insurance and significantly reduce insurance costs.” Press release here. The paper, “Wildfire Resilience Insurance: Quantifying the Risk Reduction of Ecological Forestry with Insurance,” is here. This illustration is from the paper:

Emily’s comment about barred owls reminded me of something I’ve been working on more broadly: when is it OK for humans to manipulate organisms, and when isn’t it, and who decides?  It seems like it’s OK to kill one species to protect another species in the name of “retaining a species.” Perhaps it would matter (?) if the barred owl migration was “natural” or not.. but how would you tell, since colonization, climate change, introduced or not diseases, and a variety of other changes happen through time and are correlated.  I don’t think we’ll ever tease the potential causes apart.  And when each species declines, the ESA response seems to be to  “protect more habitat”, which as we see, won’t always work.

So we’re trying to stop a possibly natural process (competition among species) in order to recreate past “naturalness”, or to keep going a maximum number of species, or because it’s the law of the land. This seems like something we’ll only be able to do in a limited number of cases.  I wonder what principles will or should guide our choices?  These are certainly not scientific questions, although the choices could be informed by science, including economics.   It almost seems like the same action (say thinning trees) is considered to be “good” when its for restoration, but “bad” when it’s for protecting communities.  Killing birds is “good” when it’s about protecting endangered species, and potentially “bad” when wind turbines do it.  So if some purposes are better than others, then that’s not a science question at all. When does the end justify the means and perhaps more importantly, how does our system of governance deal with different points of view on the subject? Has their been a public comment period on the practice of killing barred owls?

Underpinning all this may be the idea of  “keeping all the species where they used to be is necessary for ecosystem (integrity? health? function?).”  But that’s not actually “natural” in any practical sense as Stephens, Millar and … (2009) say here.

Paleorecords in areas where abundant information exists can be used as a test of what has been sustained naturally overtime. When Quaternary vegetation records from the Sierra Nevada were assessed, Millar and Woolfenden (1999b) found that only a few conditions often associated with ecological sustainability concepts pertained. These included: (1) relative stability of the Sierra Nevada ecoregion, i.e., persistence of a distinct ecoregion over time, and, (2) persistence of overall species diversity at the scale of the entire Sierra Nevada ecoregion, with only one species, a spruce (Picea spp.), disappearing from the region about 500 000 years ago. Beyond these two features, however, other conditions commonly associated with ecological sustainability did not occur. At sub-regional scales within the Sierra Nevada, species diversity changed considerably at timescales of centuries to millennia. Movement of individual species meant that vegetation assemblages changed over time and/or shifted locations as species followed climate gradients individualistically (Woolfenden1996). Vegetation communities appeared sometimes to shift locations, when individual species tracked climate coincidentally, and in other cases, changed composition and dominance relations as species responded differently. Non-analog communities occurred transiently, such as the co-occurrence 20–30 thousand years ago in the southern Sierra Nevada of yucca (Yucca brevifolia) and Utah juniper (Juniperus osteosperma) with an understory of Artemesia tridentata, Purshia tridentata, and Atriplex concertifolia (Koehler andAnderson1995). Finally, historic fire regimes reconstructed from the Sierra Nevada have changed over time at multiple scales (Swetnam1993); however we recognize that the largest change in Sierra Nevada fire regimes occurred with the onset of fire suppression in the early 20th-century.These and similar records challenge interpretations of ecological sustainability that emphasize persistence of population sizes and species abundances, stability of native distribution ranges, and continuity of vegetation and wildlife community compositions. By contrast, we find that, of the diverse concepts commonly associated with ecological sustainability, only native species persistence within large ecoregional boundaries, such as the Sierra Nevada, pertains. Our goal here is not to imply that any combination of species would be acceptable in Sierra Nevada forests but that managers should not attempt to maintain all species at their present locations, as climate continue to change this will probably not be possible or desirable.

Of course, they’re not talking about a species being completely gone from everywhere. At some point, though, I think we may cross from seeking the “natural” to something sublimely unnatural.. the Disneyland equivalent of Nature.