Excellent post by Judith Curry on her Climate, Etc. blog.

The objective of scientific research is to find out what is really true, not just verify our biases. If a community of scientists has a diversity of perspectives and different biases, then the checks and balances in the scientific process including peer review will eventually counter the biases of individuals. Sometimes this is true—but often this does not happen quickly or smoothly. Not only can poor data and wrong ideas survive, but good ideas can be suppressed.

However, when biases caused by motivated reasoning and career pressures become entrenched in the institutions that support science – the professional societies, scientific journals, universities and funding agencies – then that subfield of science may be led astray for decades.

From The Atlantic:

Received this intro via email today….

By David Treuer

The national parks—sometimes called “America’s best idea”—were intended to be natural cathedrals, places of worship where visitors could seek spiritual refuge. But the story of their creation is far darker and bloodier than their serene vistas might suggest. The parks were founded on land that once belonged to Native Americans like me, and many were created only after we were forcibly removed by invading armies, or by treaties signed under duress.

Reparations for the losses that Native Americans have endured for centuries must take the shape of land. In my cover story for The Atlantic, I argue that the national parks should be returned to America’s original peoples—that all 85 million acres of federally protected land should be entrusted to a consortium of tribes.

Doing so would be a noble act. Despite America’s many sins, it still has the chance to make amends. Placing the national parks under collective Native control could be part of this reconciliation process, one that would benefit us all. This transfer isn’t just an opportunity for Native people to return to their ancestral lands. It is an opportunity for America to live up to its highest ideals—of dignity, honor, compassion—and to become a more perfect union.

The following guest column was written by Leia Barnett, Greater Gila Campaigner for WildEarth Guardians. – mk

The Greater Gila region is an exceptional landscape. It is exceptional for its biodiversity, which is greater than that of Yellowstone. It is exceptional for its cultural significance, as it is the traditional homelands for 18 different federally recognized tribes. It is exceptional for its cultural history, which dates back to over 10,000 years ago. It is exceptional for its size and scale, at over 10 million acres, five different ecoregions, four different designated wilderness areas, and three separate mountain ranges. And it is exceptional for the place that it holds in the hearts and minds of many New Mexicans, as a place to backpack deep into the Black Range Mountains, a place to fish in our state’s last free flowing river, to star gaze under unparalleled dark skies, to experience the elk hunt of a lifetime. There is no other landscape in the West that is both an ecological and cultural nexus cherished by so many.

And the Greater Gila is under threat. The megadrought that continues to bear down upon the Southwest threatens the health of the rivers and the vulnerable plant, animal, and human communities that rely upon them. The continued livestock grazing of these distressed ecosystems perpetuates their increasing fragility. A Tucson-based company just proposed a new copper and gold mining operation in the Burro Mountains.The Holloman Air Force Base recently proposed expanding jet training over the Greater Gila, although this has stalled. For now. A private entity just received their preliminary approval for a water storage pump facility on the lower San Francisco River. And the persecuted population of Mexican Gray wolves continues to aspire to recover, but instead teeter on the brink due to agency mismanagement and a lack of meaningful carnivore coexistence legislation.

Each of these threats is representative of larger national issues that continue to jeopardize the health of our communities, the robustness of the ecosystems we rely upon, and the resilience of our planet. The F-16s that buzz the tops of the ponderosa pines and shake the hatchling chickadees from their nests high atop Hillsboro Peak are an expression of the increased militarization of the borderlands, a tradition that has shaped our national narrative since Woodrow Wilson first signed into law sweeping constraints on immigration. The United States Government’s often xenophobic border wall agenda has for too long come at the expense of human health and safety, ecosystem resilience, and equitable and just policies for all affected communities.

The General Mining Act of 1872 continues to expose our public lands to the rapacious agendas  of extractive industry. The laws established in this act remained mostly untouched and heavily in favor of mining companies until former Senator Udall and current Representative Grijalva made some modifications to them in 2019. But multinational mining companies still literally get away with murder. Anyone who’s seen the scar of the Chino Mine outside Silver City knows there is nothing eco-friendly about an open pit mine. The barren red and yellow canyon of that cavernous scar has become a lifeless landscape all to itself. Not to mention the environmental effects that will be felt in those surrounding communities for centuries to come.

Additionally, we know that Indigenous communities are fighting hard to protect their sacred lands from this misguided, monomaniacal enterprise. The San Carlos Apache and their representative non-profit Apache Stronghold have been fiercely fighting to save their sacred lands of Chi’chil Bildagoteel, also known as Oak Flat, from the profit-mongering objectives of the multinational mining corporation Resolution Copper. The Apache were forcibly and violently removed from the Greater Gila landscape as recently as the end of the 19th century. The displacing effects of these unfettered, unregulated industries reverberate across the landscape of the American southwest.

And if we’re on the topic of resource exploitation, water should most certainly be included in the conversation. The Greater Gila houses the watersheds of several important rivers, including the San Francisco, the Gila, and the Mimbres. All three make up a portion of the Colorado River Basin, an already imperiled, over-used, and mismanaged hydrological system. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) recently issued a preliminary permit for a pump storage facility for a site near Lake Powell, similar to the one proposed for the San Francisco River. The ill-conceived nature of this project cannot be overstated. “Unsustainable use of the Colorado River has already taken this life source to its knees,” said Jen Pelz, the Wild Rivers Program Director at WildEarth Guardians. “If we intend to sustain this living river for future generations, we cannot ask the river to bear this heavy burden any longer. It is time to look elsewhere to wind, solar and other forms of power storage.”

The threats to the Greater Gila include threats to the rivers and threats to the wildlife that rely upon them. For over two decades, the critically imperiled Mexican gray wolf, or lobo, has fought its way back from extinction and the current wild population hovers just over 180. Ongoing acute conflict with livestock grazing on public lands continues to jeopardize the future of the species. The prioritization of beef production over biodiversity protection is part of an old west mandate that still permeates the culture of the agencies and leaves them hamstrung when bold, meaningful action is needed.

All of the things that make the Greater Gila special: the wildlife, the water, the quiet, the dark skies, the long running human relationships to the land, they’re all under threat. The Greater Gila is underprotected and the federal agencies entrusted with the management of these revered lands continue to prioritize profit over people, extractive industry over biological integrity, and rapacious corporate agendas over ecological resilience. We must change the mandate of administrative bodies like the forest service from “multiple use” to “sustaining for all”. It’s long overdue that our national forests be managed under the Department of the Interior rather than the Department of Agriculture.

There must be systemic land-management reformation if we are to save wild landscapes like the Greater Gila. We must start thinking at a scope and scale that appropriately reflect the gravity of the threats that continue to menace and endanger life as we know it. We need big, protected landscapes that revitalize and invigorate communities, that allow for a thriving, rather than a barely surviving. The time is now. Let’s protect the Greater Gila.

Born and raised in the foothills and arroyos of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, Leia Barnett is thrilled to bring her love and deep reverence for the high desert country of the Southwest to the Greater Gila campaign. Leia graduated summa cum laude from the University of New Mexico’s cultural anthropology program, where she focused on the ways the more-than-human world can be reimagined through anthropological theory and practice. When she’s not endeavoring to understand the complexities of a successful conservation campaign, Leia can be found mountain-side or river-side, praising the feathered and four-legged ones, and planning her next epic snack.

In the paper I posted Friday, Squillace says:

Land use planning cannot succeed unless public land agencies are committed to monitoring the impacts that various activities and events have on land resources, and to adapting the management of those resources to meet the goals and objectives laid out in their plans over time. A robust, transparent, and meaningful monitoring and evaluation program is especially important at the landscape and unit planning levels, since it is at these levels where the broad impacts of planning policies are likely to be best understood. Moreover, experience with adaptive management suggests that it works best at larger scales where there is far more flexibility to adapt to new information. Adaptation might also prove necessary at the activity- and project-planning levels, but appropriate conditions can (and should) be baked into activity- and project-level decisions as necessary to ensure that that the evolving goals and objectives in
the higher level plans are not compromised.

First, “planning cannot succeed without monitoring and adaptation.” First, let’s talk about what success might look like. To me, it’s beyond meeting NFMA requirements. Let’s start with the pieces of NFMA planning.. desired conditions and objectives, standards and guidelines, and land allocations. Success in each of these “plan components” might look different. Land allocation seems to be basically a political call e.g. Wilderness, so is success delineating RW’s to satisfy some and not others? I’d say it’s doing a meaningful deal at the local level that everyone can live with. But there are others, including elected officials that think “more is better.” What is success?

Law profs like Mark tend to be very careful with language. So he says “monitoring the impacts that various activities and events have on land resources, and adapting management to meet the goals and objectives laid out in plans over time.” Also he says “ensure that that the evolving goals and objectives..”. But I’m not sure that plan goals and objectives actually can evolve based on the difficulty of doing plan revisions. Yes, you could amend a plan to change the goals and objectives, but … I don’t think I’ve seen that done. Perhaps one of you has. It seems to me that there are Forest Plans on the shelf or on the computer, and there is the adapting to post-fire, different budget priorities, new recreationists, etc. that goes on every day. Forests do adapt, but not necessarily through formal monitoring in an LMP.

So monitoring DC’s may be difficult, based on how general they are, objectives could be fairly straightforward to measure, but where would you measure “impacts of various activities and events”? I’d think mostly at the project level, because you would design the next project in light of those observations. And if you measure something like wildlife across a broad area, generally biologists aren’t sure what exactly are causing increases or declines (weather? disease? hunters? and so on). That’s why people design research experiments to tease out impacts, e.g. mountain bike impacts and so on.

For those of you who remember Chief Jack Ward Thomas and his and subsequent efforts on monitoring, these discussions will not seem new. Federal agencies “should” monitor their impacts but what, and how, at what scale, and who decides? Here we are with twenty five more years under our belts and we don’t seem any closer to resolving the question. Then there were the “Adaptive Management” areas of the NW Forest Plan, as well as that monitoring plan. I wonder how well that has worked; whether anything found at that scale changed project-level decisions.

It almost seems to me that people are and have been adaptively managing, but it’s the degree of formality/transparency that’s the real underlying issue.

Excerpt from a Greenwire article today:

Chief Justice John Roberts this week openly urged opponents of sprawling national monuments to continue their legal fight, suggesting the Supreme Court may be eager to take a fresh look at precedent it first set a century ago.

The Supreme Court declined on Monday to weigh in on whether President Obama exceeded his authority under the Antiquities Act when he created a marine national monument in the Atlantic Ocean (Greenwire, March 22).

But in a four-page statement, Roberts questioned how presidents have implemented the law and suggested other cases that might be better suited to Supreme Court intervention.

In his statement, Roberts wondered whether presidents have abused the 1906 law by ignoring a provision requiring that monuments be “limited to the smallest area compatible with the care and management of the objects to be protected.”

“Somewhere along the line, however, this restriction has ceased to pose any meaningful restraint,” Roberts wrote. “A statute permitting the President in his sole discretion to designate as monuments ‘land-marks,’ ‘structures,’ AND ‘objects’ — along with the smallest area of land compatible with their management — has been transformed into a power without any discernible limit to set aside vast and amorphous expanses of terrain above and below the sea.”

A look at fuels treatments in the Greater Santa Fe Fireshed, by Earth Economics.

This conservative analysis found that the proposed fuel treatments are estimated to generate between $1.44–$1.67 in benefits for every dollar invested in treatment. The majority of these benefits directly accrue to the Santa Fe community, through avoided air quality impacts, recreational losses, damages to structures, and source water impacts. The remaining benefits accrue to public agencies at the state and national level or to the global community (in the case of avoided carbon emissions).

The authors examination of avoided costs is interesting. For example:

$5 million – $14 million in avoided fire suppression costs
$2 million – $4 million in avoided fire restoration costs
$5.1 million – $11.4 million in voided economic losses of recreation

Also:

Carbon stocks are reduced through treatment, however a reduction in carbon losses due to wildfire is projected to generate a net reduction in carbon losses over the long term. For this analysis, we used the carbon model developed by Krofcheck, et al. This carbon model used a 50-year analysis period, rather than the 10-year study period used in this study. This decision was intentional, because using a 10-year study period would likely produce a negative value owing to the near term biomass reductions through thinning and prescribed burning. A 50-year time period is more appropriate for analysis, because it demonstrates the long-term goal of carbon storage. Krofcheck, et al. found that treatments would result in a net carbon emissions reduction of 150,000–330,000 metric tons of carbon. This reduction is valued using EPA’s social cost of carbon ($42 per ton).

I’m heading out for Spring Break tomorrow for a week. I’ll be checking email if something comes up.

I thought I’d share a sample of interesting stories that I’ve come across that don’t lend themselves necessarily to discussion, but seem interesting.

Fifty Years of Wildland Fire Science in Canada.

Fifty Years of Fire Science in Canada. Shout out to Bill Gabbert of Wildland Fire Today fpr this link and highlighting some of the findings.

A group of nine land managers and researchers in Canada have put together a compendium highlighting the country’s accomplishments in wildland fire science over the last 50 years. Information in the 296 pages plus more than 300 references covers five key developments and contributions:

The creation of the Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System;
The relationships between wildland fire and weather, climate, and climate change;
Fire ecology;
Operational decision support; and,
Wildland fire management.
There is also a case study about the evolution of wildland fire management in Banff National Park.

Wildife

Ferrets Cloned

Interesting things about BFF’s.. population was down to less than 18 apparently. Remember when folks thought less than 30 would cause extinction? Apparently (some) mammals do OK with surprisingly little genetic diversity, which is good news for those who work with endangered mammal species.
Pronghorns, deer and fences
https://www.wyofile.com/new-study-reframes-fence-impacts-on-deer-pronghorn/

Social Science Around Prescribed Fire

Katie McGrath Novak’s work is here. She may do a Smoke Wire post on her thesis which looked at what happens to attitudes after a prescribed fire escapes.

What Can 501c3’s Do?

The Nature Conservancy sent me an email that sounded like asking folks to lobby Congress. I wondered where the line was in terms of tax-exempt status for 501c3’s. Colleagues at TNC (thank you!) sent me the link to this document which shows what they can and can’t do. Holy Smoke! It only took me a couple of pages to learn that I wasn’t as curious as I had thought. Maybe others would like to know about this. I’m assuming staff of 501c3’s already know this.

That’s it for now! See you all in a week.

Last August we discussed and debated this piece of investigative journalism from Oregon Public Broadcasting titled “What Happened When a Public Institute Became a De Facto Lobbying Arm of the Timber Industry.”

Today, Oregon Public Broadcasting published another piece of investigative journalism titled “A timber lobbyist called our investigation ‘completely bogus.’ We have the receipts to show it’s not.”

Greenwire had this story on Feb. 26: “Annual wildfires hurt forests’ carbon retention — study.” The study ($), “Decadal changes in fire frequencies shift tree communities and functional traits, is here.

This is what some of us on Smokey Wire and elsewhere have been saying for years.

Excerpt:

Repeated, intense wildfires have damaged forests’ ability to grow fire resistant and store carbon, causing scientists to rethink how to deploy tree-planting efforts after natural disasters.

After 50 years, regions with the most extreme annual fires suffered from a 63% smaller wooded area with almost three-quarters of the individual trees than in regions that never burned, according to the study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Even in regions with tree species that are well-equipped to withstand frequent burnings, fires over the past couple of decades have often decimated fire-resistant adult trees, while younger saplings haven’t been able to reach maturity.

“After a fire, a small tree has to regrow the biomass that it lost during the fire, which takes time,” said Adam Pellegrini, a co-author of the study and professor at the University of Cambridge. “The more frequent a fire is, the lower probability that the trees can grow fast enough to become resistant.”