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FYI… US-wide standard, all lands. However….

“This draft includes the “base indicators” for Principle 1 through Principle 10, and associated
annexes, that will be applicable to almost all certified Organizations, but does not include the
Scale, Intensity, and Risk Indicators (i.e., SIR Indicators: family forest indicators and plantation
indicators), nor the supplementary requirements for US Forest Service lands. These additional
materials will be consulted through a separate first public consultation, and then all materials will
be combined for the second public consultation in 2021.”

Public Consultation Open for Revised FSC US National Forest Stewardship Standard

Thursday, 15 October 2020

On October 5th, FSC US opened a 75-day public consultation for the first draft of a revised FSC US National Forest Stewardship Standard.

Due in large part to the quality and rigor of our forest management standards, FSC is widely recognized as the world’s most trusted certification system. Draft 1 of the revised Standard offers further refinement of the respected existing standard for the United States, aligning it with the FSC Principles and Criteria Version 5 and the International Generic Indicators.

Our goal is to deliver a standard that is both best-in-class and achievable by streamlining the existing standard and addressing a number of priority issues, identified below. To help achieve this goal, we will need clear, actionable input from an informed and diverse set of stakeholders during this consultation.

Guided by the FSC US Board of Directors (the Standard Development Group) and a technical working group of experts, the Standard reflects the social, environmental and economic values that underpin FSC’s approach.

While much of the Draft 1 revised Standard remains consistent with the existing US Forest Management Standard, the Standard Development Group identified a set of priority issues to address in the revision process, including:

• Climate Change
• Indigenous Peoples’ Rights, Local Communities’ Rights, and Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC)
• High Conservation Value Areas, Representative Sample Areas, and the Conservation Area Network
• Forest Workers
• FSC US Regions and Regional Requirements

FSC US will be hosting a series of three webinars related to the priority issues.

Visit https://www.engage.us.fsc.org/ to register for the webinars, review the Draft 1 revised standard, read the supporting overviews about the consultation and priority issues, and access the consultation platform to comment.

The public consultation closes on December 18, 2020.

If you have questions, please email them to [email protected].

This list may help us examine our own biases and beliefs. I reckon each of us has employed one or more of these biases, whether we realized it or not…. Curry invites contributions to the list….

From a post by Judith Curry on her blog, Climate Etc., October 4, 2020.

How we fool ourselves

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person too fool.” – physicist Richard Feynman

Cognitive biases relate to self-deception that leads to incorrect conclusions based on cognitive factors, including information-processing shortcuts (heuristics) (Tversky and Kahnemann 1974). Cognitive biases can abound when reasoning and making judgments about a complex problem such as climate change.

Cognitive biases affecting belief formation that are of particular relevance to the science of climate change include:

• Confirmation bias: the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions
• Anchoring bias: the tendency to rely too heavily on one trait or piece of information, such as the mean or previous results.
• Framing bias: using an approach that is too narrow that pre-ordains the conclusion
• Overconfidence effect: unjustified, excessive belief
• Illusory correlations: false identification of relationships with rare or novel occurrences
• Ambiguity effect: the tendency to avoid options for which the probability of a favorable outcome is unknown
• Self-serving bias: a tendency for people to evaluate information in a way that is beneficial to their interests
• Belief bias: evaluating the logical strength of an argument based on belief in the truth or falsity of the conclusion
• Availability heuristic: The tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events with greater ‘availability’ in memory, which can be influenced by how recent the memories are or how unusual or emotionally charged they may be

A fallacy is logically incorrect reasoning that undermines the logical validity of the argument and leads to its assessment as unsound.  There are many different classifications of fallacies. Below are some fallacies that I’ve seen used in arguments about climate science:

• Begging the question is a fallacy occurring in deductive reasoning in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one of the premises.
• Correlation implies causation is a logical fallacy by which two events that occur together are claimed to be cause and effect.
• Fallacy of distribution occurs when an argument assumes that what is true of the members is true of the class (composition), or what is true of the class is true of its members (division).
• Hasty generalization is the logical fallacy of reaching an inductive generalization based on too little evidence.
• Statistical special pleading occurs when the interpretation of the relevant statistic is ‘massaged’ by looking for ways to reclassify or requantify data from one portion of results, but not applying the same scrutiny to other categories.
• Fallacy of the single cause occurs when it is assumed that there is one simple cause of an outcome when in reality it may have been caused by a number of only jointly sufficient causes.

The category of intentional fallacies is not about how we fool ourselves, but how we try to fool others. Examples of intentional fallacies used routinely in the public debate on climate change include:

• Diverting the argument to unrelated issues with a red herring(ignoratio elenchi)
• Ad hominem fallacy: asserting that an argument is wrong because of something discreditable/not authoritative about the person
making the argument.
• Appeal to motive: challenging a thesis by calling into question the motives of its proposer.
• Asserting that everyone agrees (argumentum ad populum, bandwagoning)
• Creating a ‘false dilemma’ (either-or fallacy) in which the situation is oversimplified
• Selectively using facts (card stacking)
• Making false or misleading comparisons (false equivalence and false analogy)
• Appeal to consequences of belief (argumentum ad consequentiam): an appeal to emotion that concludes a hypothesis or belief to be either true or false based on whether the premise leads to desirable or undesirable consequences.

The Lolo National Forest is working on the “Wildfire Adapted Missoula” project, “a risk-based strategic fuels management project. It proposes mechanized and non-mechanized fuel and vegetation treatments to reduce wildfire hazard and associated risk in strategic locations.”

Location Summary: Project surrounds the communities of Missoula, Lolo, East Missoula, Bonner, Clinton, and Turah (approx. 158,725 acres of National Forest System (NFS) lands).

Scoping documents are here.

IMHO, many areas in the west would benefit from risk-based strategic fuels management projects like this.With limited funding and staff, setting priorities is a must.

Excerpts from an article from the Missoula Current:

Compared to towns in California and Oregon, Missoula was lucky this summer not having any serious nearby wildfires. But with a warming climate, it’s not a matter of “if” but “when,” so the Lolo National Forest is proposing a large treatment project on the suburban forest to reduce wildfire risk in the Five Valleys region.

On Wednesday morning, on the upper part of the Blue Mountain Recreational Area, U.S. Forest Service silviculturist Sheryl Gunn walked along a dirt road pointing up at all the mistletoe infestations in the Douglas fir that grows thicker in the upper sections of forest.

“Where would wildfire hazard be high? It would be high in a place like this,” Gunn said. “We have this forested condition all around Missoula. This forested condition is what we saw in the Lolo Fire. When a fire gets into the crowns of this, nothing really survives. And so we see very, very, very intense fire.”

…

But not all the national forest land will be treated. That would take a lot of time and money. More importantly, it’s more effective to focus on areas of high risk. No point treating a fairly wet or previously burned area farther away from Missoula when there’s a heavily wooded spot right next to town.

This article from Audubon is well worth reading. It sheds light on questions we’re discussed at length here.

Recent ‘Megafires’ Imperil Even Fire-Loving Forest Birds

Many birds, such as owls and woodpeckers, thrive in forest habitats created after fire. But the hotter, bigger, more destructive megafires out West might be too much even for them.

An excerpt:

After the King Fire, Jones returned to his research site to see how California Spotted Owls responded to the devastation. The massive fire swept through more than 97,000 acres, which included 44 percent of the study area and 30 of the owl’s 45 known nesting sites within it. Jones tracked the owls, which had already been outfitted with GPS receivers and colored leg bands, and found that a year later the birds had abandoned the most severely burned areas where more than 75 percent of trees died. These severely burned areas represented 50 percent of the fire’s total burn area.

It’s not that California Spotted Owls avoid all severely burned areas after fire—just the largest patches. They rarely venture more than 325 feet deep into a severe burn, Jones found in follow-up research at the King Fire site. But do they recolonize smaller patches that burned severely? To find out, he also studied owls in three western national parks in the Sierra Nevada where forest managers intentionally set small fires, and let natural ones burn, to maintain healthy, historical wildfire regimes. He saw that the California Spotted Owl returned to smaller patches even if they burned intensely, while avoiding larger ones—maybe because wide expanses with fewer trees are home to less prey or offer less cover from predators, such as the Great Horned Owl. “To us, that suggests again there’s this adaptive response,” Jones says. “Owls are adapted to frequent, low-severity fires,” not intense megafires.

The article also discusses black-backed woodpeckers:

Even the Black-backed Woodpecker, long-considered a bird that thrives after intense fires, apparently has its limits. The woodpecker flocks to burned-out forests to feast on beetle larvae that infest dying and dead trees. However, Andrew Stillman, an avian ecologist at the University of Connecticut and Tingley’s student, made a surprising discovery when he attached radio transmitters to adult and juvenile birds over the course of seven years. 

As expected, adult woodpeckers primarily kept to severely burned areas. “But the juveniles were a different story,” Stillman says. “Right after leaving the nest, these young birds flew to areas with live trees remaining after fire.” He suspects they preferred these areas because the living trees provide protection from predators. This species, too, needs pyrodiversity.

“Our conventional thinking was that more severe fires might be good for certain species that thrive in burned forests,” Stillman says. “But our research shows that even fire-loving species need variation in burn severity to survive.”  

— Thanks to Nick Smith for including the link to this article in his Sept. 30 Healthy Forests, Healthy Communities email.

Just received a press release from the American Forest Foundation in support of the Rural Forests Markets Act, which would:

• Establishes the Rural Forest Market Investment Program that offers guaranteed loans up to $150 million for nonprofits and companies to help small and family foresters create and sell forest credits for storing carbon or providing other environmental benefits.
• Provides a climate solution by encouraging forestland owners to adopt voluntary land management practices that draw carbon out of the air and stores it in forests.
• Creates new revenue streams for small-scale, family foresters by making it possible to generate innovative credits they can sell in established environmental marketplaces.
• Brings investment into rural communities by reducing the financial risk to private investors who can contribute the upfront financing that makes these projects possible.

The press release:

Dear Senator Stabenow and Senator Braun,

The undersigned organizations are writing to offer our sincere thanks for your leadership in introducing S.
4451, the Rural Forests Markets Act. Together, we represent organizations with diverse backgrounds in
forest and forest products, large and small private forest owners, conservation and wildlife groups,
landowners, academics, and carbon finance experts, all proud to produce and support natural climate
solutions from our forests and forest products.

Even though our interests are diverse, the Rural Forests Markets Act benefits us all. For example, this bill
will help unlock capital investment that will allow America’s family forest owners to participate in
markets for carbon and other values. This bill will not just benefit family forest owners, but will also
support a diverse set of private forest owners seeking to participate in market opportunities that have high
up front costs but an abundance of environmental and economic benefits especially in rural areas.
Most importantly, we urge you to add the Rural Forests Markets Act to any year end package moving
through Congress to help stimulate rural economies by opening carbon and other markets, bringing
billions from the private sector and generating additional landowner income from their land.

Once again, we appreciate your dedication in ensuring investment to rural forested communities is
leveraged and access to carbon and other environmental markets are available to amplify our conservation
efforts.

Sincerely,

American Bird Conservancy
American Forest Foundation
American Forests
American Wood Council
Arkansas Forestry Association
Arkansas Tree Farm Program
Domtar
Finite Carbon
Hardwood Federation
Land Trust Alliance
Michigan State University Department of
Forestry
National Alliance of Forest Owners
National Association of State Foresters
National Wildlife Federation
Oregon Tree Farm Program
RenewWest
Small Woodland Owners Association of Maine
Society of American Foresters
The Lyme Timber Company
The Nature Conservancy
Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership
Western Landowners Alliance
Westrock

Breaking news from Friday evening: William Perry Pendley, a self-described Sage Brush Rebel who questions the very existence of federal public lands, has unlawfully overseen the management of 250 million acres of federal public lands for over 400 days, according to Chief District Judge Brian Morris of the US District Court of Montana.

Federal judge removes acting Bureau of Land Management director after finding he has served unlawfully for 424 days

Washington (CNN)—A federal judge on Friday ordered acting Bureau of Land Management Director William Perry Pendley to step aside, blocking him from exercising any more authority after finding that he has served unlawfully for more than 400 days.

Chief District Judge Brian Morris of the US District Court of Montana ruled that Pendley has served unlawfully for 424 days, in response to a lawsuit brought by Democratic Montana Gov. Steve Bullock and the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation. Morris additionally ruled Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt cannot pick another person to run the Bureau of Land Management as its acting head because that person must be appointed by the President and Senate-confirmed.

The judge gave both sides of the case 10 days to file briefs about which of Pendley’s orders must be vacated.

“Pendley has served and continues to serve unlawfully as the Acting BLM Director,” Morris wrote in his opinion. “His ascent to Acting BLM Director did not follow any of the permissible paths set forth by the U.S. Constitution or the (Federal Vacancies Reform Act). Pendley has not been nominated by the President and has not been confirmed by the Senate to serve as BLM Director.”

He added, “Secretary Bernhardt lacked the authority to appoint Pendley as an Acting BLM Director under the FVRA. Pendley unlawfully took the temporary position beyond the 210-day maximum allowed by the FVRA. Pendley unlawfully served as Acting BLM Director after the President submitted his permanent appointment to the Senate for confirmation — another violation of the FVRA. And Pendley unlawfully serves as Acting BLM Director today, under color of the Succession Memo.”

Read the full article from CNN here.

NY Times today:

The United States Forest Service, an agency of the Department of Agriculture, is scheduled on Friday to publish an environmental study concluding that lifting the roadless rule protections in the Tongass would not significantly harm the environment. That study will allow the agency to formally lift the rule in the Tongass within the next 30 days, clearing the way for the Trump administration to propose timber sales and road construction projects in the forest as soon as the end of this year.

USFS press release is here. Not much info there.

USFS documentation is here.

OPB has released most of its 7-part “Timber Wars” podcast.

The writer/director, Aaron Scott, spent a year on this impressive project, funded, in part, by an NPR grant. As in Bill Dietrich’s “The Final Forest,” the best book on this era, Scott sympathetically lets protagonists from all sides tell the story in their own words. [As one of those protagonists, Episode 3 — The owl, I’ll let my words on that subject speak for themselves.]

With the benefit of 30-year hindsight, however, Scott’s storyline sweeps more broadly than Dietrich could in 1992. Who could have anticipated that the Timber Wars would catalyze anarchist protests at the Seattle WTO? Or be the fuse that ignited science-denying, anti-government, class-based populism?

Scott’s production captures well the social paroxysms of those times and the indelible wounds they have left in a generation of northwesterners.

Interesting article in Grist: “This Oregon forest was supposed to store carbon for 100 years. Now it’s on fire.”

Claudia Herbert, a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, who is studying risks to forest carbon offsets, noticed that the Lionshead Fire — which tore through 190,000 acres of forest in Central Oregon and forced a terrifying evacuation of the nearby town of Detroit — appeared to have almost completely engulfed the largest forest dedicated to sequestering carbon dioxide in the state.

The project, owned by the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, spans 24,000 acres. Before the fires, the state of California had issued more than 2.6 million offset credits based on the carbon stored in its trees. That translates to 2.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide — or the equivalent of driving 560,000 cars around for one year.

As many of you are aware, the Lionshead fire is one of many fires to burn in Oregon this year, for a total of ~1 million acres.