Oh boy, the Trump administration apologists and U.S. Forest Service fans are going to have a tough time spinning this one, I think. If you are one of the seven current Forest Service Regional Foresters who sees your current position advertised as vacant on USAJobs.gov how would that make you feel?  Why some people think we should continue to ignore everything the Trump administration is doing to dismantle and undermine key public institutions like the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service and U.S. Postal Service is a real mystery to me.

Perdue pressures forest managers on Trump agenda
Marc Heller and Scott Streater, E&E News reportersPublished: Thursday, August 13, 2020

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue has asked regional foresters to step up efforts to implement his “vision” for forestland management at the same time the Forest Service is posting a call for applications for their jobs.

Two regional forester positions — in the Intermountain region and the Southwest — are actually vacant due to retirements, the Forest Service told E&E News. But all nine are currently advertised as vacant on USAJobs.gov.

The other seven are being advertised through Aug. 27 in an effort to “be prepared with a pool of candidates for consideration if other critical leadership positions become vacant in the near future,” the service said. The posting on USAJobs.gov — posted a week ago today — remains open to applicants for up to a year, following Office of Personnel Management guidelines, the Forest Service said.

Officials advertised the vacancies four days before Perdue sent each of the nine regional foresters a memorandum prodding them to do more to pursue the administration’s “vision,” which includes increased forest thinning, more timber production, more grazing of livestock and shorter environmental reviews on land the Forest Service oversees.

An agency spokesperson said the memo and the job postings aren’t related, but it prompted some worries in the ranks that the secretary was getting ready to clean house.

Perdue’s memo also comes as the Forest Service falls short of timber harvesting goals, despite directives from the Trump administration and some members of Congress to increase sales from national forests.

In the memo, Perdue reminded the foresters of his June directive in which the secretary outlined those goals (E&E News PM, June 12).

Perdue — bypassing Forest Service Chief Vicki Christiansen — asked the regional foresters to answer a series of questions about how they intend to meet the goals and added, “I want to hear from you directly on how you are progressing in implementing the vision.”

The regional foresters have until Aug. 31 to reply.

“The advertisement is in anticipation of normal agency attrition and has no connection to the Secretary’s memo,” the Forest Service told E&E News.

But current and former Forest Service officials said the concurrent timing led to speculation that jobs might be on the line and that a pool of potential candidates would be in place if regional foresters’ answers don’t satisfy the secretary.

One senior Forest Service official who spoke to E&E News on the condition of anonymity called the memo “very brutal,” though Perdue took a congenial tone and thanked the regional managers for their efforts to date.

A letter from the secretary of Agriculture to regional forest managers is unusual, former Forest Service officials said.

But Perdue has expressed a personal interest in many of the related issues, and President Trump has taken up forest policy in speeches and in an executive order.

Among the top questions Perdue said he wants answered:

“What actions have you taken in your region” since June “to implement the direction laid out in the memo?”
“What future actions will you be taking to implement the vision and direction” outlined in the June directive? “Specifically, I want to hear your timeline and key milestones for implementation.”
“What more can be done by the Forest Service, the Department or our external partners to support implementation of the memo?”
Regional foresters are not political appointees but senior executive level employees who can be moved into new positions at the administration’s discretion. All “SES” employees sign a statement acknowledging that.

A shuffle of senior executive positions wouldn’t be unprecedented with a potential change of administration coming in January, former Forest Service employees said.

A Forest Service spokesperson said the agency has used a similar approach in the past for leadership positions such as forest supervisors, though people who work with the Forest Service said they’ve rarely seen regional forester positions posted publicly. Regional foresters are paid between $175,501 and $186,500 a year, according to the job posting.

Regional foresters are a key piece of the Department of Agriculture’s management of the national forest system’s 193 million acres of wildlands. They bring the administration’s forest policies to the field and are a point of contact for state and local officials. They also hire and fire the foresters for each national forest.

Some oversee as many as a dozen national forests at once, making decisions that affect forest ecology across vast areas — and they develop working relationships with state forestry departments.

“I’ve always considered it to be a really important position,” said Laura McCarthy, New Mexico state forester. New Mexico is in Region 3, home to one of the job vacancies.

In that region, McCarthy said, the regional forester has managed negotiations with environmentalists suing to protect the Mexican spotted owl, for instance. “We’ve been kind of a region in crisis.”

Missing the targets
The vision Perdue laid out in June has run into the realities of tough international market conditions for wood products, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic. The Forest Service is on track to miss its timber targets as a result, according to industry and agency sources.

Through the first three-quarters of fiscal 2020, the Forest Service has sold 1.194 billion board feet of timber, less than in any of the four previous years, the agency reported.

In the Pacific Northwest region, the agency has attained just 58% of its timber target with two months to go in the fiscal year, said Dan Shively, the region’s natural resources director, in an Aug. 3 memo to forest supervisors.

“It’s clear that all of you are working extra hard this year under our COVID-19 challenges delivering not only the timber program but also a broad portfolio of integrated restoration activities and other work that remains critically important to our partner agencies, NGOs, communities, and the public we serve,” Shively said. A recent upturn in market conditions could help, he said.

Perdue, who told lawmakers two years ago that he wants USDA to be “the most customer-focused department in the entire federal government,” reiterated that priority in his memo, saying the department’s “customers” want a Forest Service that’s accessible, responsive and solutions-oriented.

He inquired what each regional forester is doing “to ensure a culture of customer service extends through every level of your operation.”

He also asked them to identify “the key stakeholders in your region,” and to answer, “what are you doing to improve your staff’s, your region’s and your personal relationships with them?”

Timber companies, state forestry officials and some conservationists cheer Perdue’s emphasis on more intensive forest management, which they say could prevent catastrophic wildfires and protect watersheds, among other benefits.

Environmental groups oppose those moves.

The secretary’s memo looks like “pure intimidation,” said Randi Spivak, public lands director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “Any regional forester who doesn’t dramatically increase logging or curry favor with the livestock industry better polish up their resume.”

New Jersey forester Bob Williams passed me a link to this essay by Daniel Botkin and Lisa Micheli. 

An excerpt:

Now in California, and other parts of the USA, in the wake of catastrophic wildfire, there is an increased openness to the need to actively manage forest resources. One example is the fire mitigation work spear-headed by the Pepperwood Foundation in Sonoma County. Pepperwood had been actively reducing fuels on-site at its 3200-acre research reserve via forest thinning, including removing Douglas Fir trees that invade oak woodlands in the absence of fire, to achieve both ecological benefits and fuels reductions. Their grassland management also actively reduced fires hazards and enhanced ecological function via conservation grazing and prescribed fire, similar to methods advanced by Williams and others decades ago.

Pepperwood has the distinction of being one of the rare sites twice-burned in recent wildfire seasons, including the 2017 Tubbs Fire which burned the entire property and the 2019 Kincade Fire, which thanks to CAL FIRE and first responders, impacted only 60% of the property. In 2017, Pepperwood’s prescribed burn treatment area was the only the only portion of the preserve NOT burned by the uncontrollable Tubbs Fire. In 2019, first responders found that land management on the reserve seemed to help slow the Kincade Fire and thus allow CAL FIRE to secure the fire perimeter, preventing it from spreading into nearby Wildfire Urban Interface communities.

Here’s more on Pepperwood.

We’ve discussed Botkin’s work here in the past. Sharon had a Virtual Book Club series of posts on Botkins The Moon in the Nautilus Shell, such as here and here.

Like the many folks in the forest protection community have been saying for decades “we should question assumptions about wildfires.” That’s the title of a guest column by Dr. Jack Cohen and Missoula County Commissioner Dave Strohmaier in the print edition of today’s Missoulian.

The title of the on-line version is different, and pasted below “Community destruction during extreme wildfires is a home ignition problem.” Many people in the forest protection community have also been saying that for decades.

Dr. Jack Cohen is the most knowledgable on the planet when it comes to protecting homes and communities from wildfires. Dr. Cohen’s bio in the Missoulian reads: “Jack Cohen, PhD, retired from U.S. Forest Service Research after 40 years as a research physical scientist where he conducted experimental and theoretical wildland fire research. In addition, he developed operational fire models for management applications and served operationally as a fire behavior analyst.”

Meanwhile, “Dave Strohmaier is Missoula County Commissioner. He previously worked for both the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service in fire management, and has published two books (here and here) on the subject of wildfire in the West.” Strohmaier is not only one of my Missoula County Commissioners, he’s also my former Missoula City Councilperson and my former state legislator. I’ve chatted with both Dave and Jack about wildfires and home protection over the years.

Question: Where would our country, the U.S. Forest Service, and communities be in terms of being better prepared for wildfire if we would’ve listened to—and implemented—the recommendations of Dr. Cohen, Strohmaier and numerous forest protection groups over the past two decades instead of letting some politicians and some in the timber industry use the wildfires as an excuse for more logging and roadbuilding with less oversight and less public participation?

Community destruction during extreme wildfires is a home ignition problem
By Dr. Jack Cohen and Dave Strohmaier

The following guest blog post is written by Duane Keown, a Professor Emeritus of Science Education at the University of Wyoming. The main topic is the U.S. Forest Service’s Landscape Analysis Vegetation, or LaVA, project on the Medicine Bow National Forest in southern Wyoming; however, Keown also digs into NEPA and recreation issues. Conservation groups say the LaVA is one of the largest logging and road-building projects in Wyoming’s history. The project would allow timber cutting on up to 320,000 acres over the next 15 years, including as much as 95,000 acres of clearcutting, as well as 80,000 acres of logging in designated roadless areas. It would bulldoze 600 miles of new, temporary roads that can remain on the ground for eight years or more, harming streams and degrading the watershed. – mk

Fifty years ago, on June 22, 1969, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire. The river was one of the most polluted in the U.S. Journalists filled glasses with pitch-black river water. The Santa Barbara, California oil spill occurred in January and February1969 in Southern California. It smeared beaches for 12 miles and had a significant impact on marine life in the channel, killing an estimated 3,500 sea birds, as well as marine animals such as dolphins, elephant seals, and sea lions. Nearly 100,000 gallons of crude oil from a well pipeline owned by Union Oil lined the Santa Barbara Bay. It was the environmental shot heard around the world, the largest oil spill ever in the U.S. at the time. Public citizens had little authority over large private and governmental projects dangerous to the environment. Industry or governmental agencies called the shots for large forest logging operations, locations for oil pipelines, oil wells, large environmental disruptions. Washington state senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson caused that to change. He led Congress to sign the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The Senate voted unanimously to approve the bill on July 10, 1969. The House approved its version of the bill on September 23, 1969, by a vote of 372-15. President Richard Nixon signed the bill into law on January 1, 1970. It is Environmental Impact Statements (EISs) and associated laws that are the tools of NEPA enforcement.

In its 50 years of existence some industries and governmental agencies have begun to do their best to skirt the peoples’ NEPA. In carrying out the Landscape Vegetation Analysis Project (LaVA), the largest commercial logging operation ever in Wyoming, officials of the Medicine Bow National Forest (MBNF) have evaded the NEPA at each of its stages for public involvement.

In the first stage of all EISs, the agency is to introduce the project to the public with a Scoping Meeting and document. The public and interested groups, by the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR §1501.7 Scoping) are to be notified, including wildlife organizations and environmental conservation groups. None of these groups in Wyoming were notified, like the Wyoming Outdoor Council and the Wyoming Wildlife Federation. And by CFR 40, page 102, the main public media outlets, in this case the Boomerang, was to be notified in good time before the meeting. The public was not notified by the Boomerang of the August 8, 2017 Scoping Meeting. But in the next public stage of the NEPA process, the Draft Environmental Impact Statement document the following June, it stated on page 22 of that document that on August 1 of 2017 the Boomerang notified the public. The MBNF Superintendent and the Coordinator of the LaVA knew well this was a cover up for their scoping errors. There are 36,000 residents of Albany County and fewer than 15 attended the Scoping Meeting. The public was not notified of this largest operation ever planned on the Medicine Bow National Forest.

With LaVA, six hundred miles of road for logging are contemplated, 95,000 acres (148 square miles) of clear-cutting are planned and the commercial logging of the forest in the first six years — a 15-year project — is to increase 800 % annually above the present commercial logging. The harvest is not of the 10 year old dead trees, but live trees. Nearly one third of the forest (260,000 acres) is up for commercial harvesting. And 380,000 acres is eligible for so called “treatment”. What a misnomer. The project is not about forest health, as most forest ecologists will tell you, but a veiled logging project straight out of Washington D.C,

According to the CFR, public meetings are to be held concerning the Final Environmental Impact Statement. At these three meetings, true public involvement was not allowed. They were LaVA sales meetings. My wife and I attended nearly all the NEPA meetings. There was no public discussion and we were not allowed in the meetings to set up our small table of scientific and legal information that countered LaVA planned actions. (A major study by the Colorado State School of Forestry and the University of Idaho concludes that because of climate change, burned Rocky Mountain forests are not regenerating, naturally or by forest crew’s plantings.) At the third meeting at the Cheyenne Public Utilities (CPU) building, a public owned building, we were not allowed by the manager in charge of the building to even put our small table outside the front door or on the CPU property. CPU is a LaVA Cooperator with MBNF. The manager had no idea what NEPA was about, its purpose, or our First Amendment rights.

By far the greatest use of the Medicine Bow is recreation. It already has the greatest density of roads of any Wyoming National Forest and also the greatest density of recreationists of all Wyoming National Forests. There are an equal number of green license plates from Colorado as Wyoming plates since the forest adjoins Colorado’s five million residents on the Eastern Slope. The Snowy Range has become Wyoming’s equivalent of the Rocky Mountain National Park. The LaVA plan will degrade this spectacular recreation site and tourist draw that means so much to Albany and Carbon counties of Wyoming. And I must add, guests from all over America. And that is not even to speak of the economic value of this National Forest to the two counties.

On August 1, last week, my wife and I recorded by numbers of vehicles and their states’ licenses, people recreating at all sites along Highway 130, the Snowy Range Road. We started at the east entrance and recorded the numbers of vehicles and their states at all of the turnouts, campgrounds and trailheads. Going west we included the Silver Lake Campground on the western slope and stopped there. Here is our count. Thirty-five states were represented: Wyoming 202 cars, Colorado 209, Nebraska 22, Texas 8, Iowa 8, Kentucky 3, Kansas 4, Utah 3, North Carolina 2, Alabama 3, Montana 4, California 4, Pennsylvania 2, Illinois 4, Missouri 3, Michigan 1, Wisconsin 10, Washington 1, Louisiana 1, Vermont 1, Oklahoma 2, Minnesota 1, Oregon 1, Arkansas 1, Florida 1, New Jersey 1 New Mexico 2, Idaho 1, Ohio 1, Tennessee 1, Mississippi 1, Virginia 3, and South Dakota 1. There were 12 cars for which we were not able to get their license. The total of cars counted August 1, 2020 was 518. The numbers increase yearly. Most parking lots were full and overflowing.

At the Libby Lake parking lot, cars were lined for a half mile from the lot at the trailheads. The Snowy Range Road where we counted vehicles in the plan is designated recreation area but it the primary road to many of the LaVA logging areas and their 600 miles of roads, with the resulting truck traffic. At this time the public awaits the MBNF Supervisor, Russell Bacon, to make the Record of Decision about continuance of the LaVA.

The Supervisor gave me this answer last May when I asked him for expenses to date on LaVA : “Use the Freedom of Information Act process for the entirety of your request” he said. What transparency! But based on the agency’s own numbers, over a 15-year period, the project will cost $255 million, a quarter of a billion dollars. According to the Modified Final EIS of May 2020, the cost for the 600 miles of temporary roads — never temporary for off road vehicles — is estimated to be three million dollars. What a price for decimating our national treasure.

Here’s a press release that should be of interest to readers of this blog.

For Release: August 6, 2020

Conservationists to Federal Agencies: Restore Protections for Imperiled Wildlife in the Flathead National Forest

Flathead Forest Plan favors resource extraction over grizzly bears, Canada lynx, wolverine, and bull trout

MISSOULA, MT—Four conservation groups have filed their opening salvos in a lawsuit to require the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to restore proven safeguards for the protection and recovery of imperiled grizzly bears, Canada lynx, wolverine, and bull trout on the Flathead National Forest in northwest Montana.

WildEarth Guardians, Western Watersheds Project, Swan View Coalition, and Friends of the Wild Swan charge that the recently revised Forest Plan for the Flathead National Forest violates the Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Policy Act by favoring destructive activities such as logging, grazing, road building, and motorized use over protection and restoration of these species and their habitats.

“The Flathead National Forest plays an essential role in the long-term recovery of grizzly bears and other imperiled species,” explained Adam Rissien, ReWilding Advocate for WildEarth Guardians. “In its recent decision overturning the de-listing of the Yellowstone grizzly bear population, the Ninth Circuit recognized the importance of inter-population connectivity and genetic exchange to ensure the grizzly bear’s long-term health and recovery. The Flathead’s revised Forest Plan fails to ensure this connectivity and thus threatens grizzly bear recovery as well as other species such as threatened bull trout and lynx.”

The revised Forest Plan is critical because it will govern all future activities on the 2.4 million-acre Flathead National Forest for the next 15 years or more. As part of the “Crown of the Continent,” the Flathead is a haven of rugged mountain peaks, rich, thick forests, and cool, clean mountain streams, with some of the last remaining intact wilderness and free-flowing rivers on the continent. Outside of protected wilderness, however, this national forest suffers from a long history of unsustainable logging, an excessive road system, and motorized use, including ATVs and snowmobiles, that harm and harass wildlife, fragment fish and wildlife habitat, and degrade sensitive riparian areas and water quality.

“The agencies’ conclusions that the revised Forest Plan will not jeopardize grizzly bears and other imperiled species are contrary to science and will undoubtedly put endangered species at risk of extinction,” said Jocelyn Leroux, Washington and Montana Director for Western Watersheds Project. “Rather than provide for robust and diverse ecosystems, the Plan prioritizes destructive special interests.”

The Flathead National Forest’s Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex, along with neighboring Glacier National Park, are the core of the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem (NCDE) grizzly bear recovery area, which contains the largest grizzly population in the lower 48 states. The top grizzly bear scientists emphasize the importance of linkage areas that connect the NCDE to other isolated recovery areas such as the Bitterroot range to the Southwest, the Greater Yellowstone to the South, and the Cabinet-Yaak-Selkirk to the West. Notably, these same linkage areas are important for other imperiled species such as lynx, and contain important bull trout habitat. The lawsuit’s main thrust is the impacts that the revised Forest Plan’s authorization of increased road building and motorized use will have on these key migration corridors.

“The old Forest Plan had strict limits on how many logging roads and culverts could exist in grizzly bear and bull trout habitat and a program for removing a lot of them,” said Swan View Coalition Chair Keith Hammer. “The revised Forest Plan has no limits and the Flathead National Forest is now busy building more roads with more culverts. It’s a disaster in the making.”

“The Flathead is a stronghold for bull trout whose strict habitat requirements of cold, clean water with little fine sediment make them an excellent indicator of water quality,” said Arlene Montgomery, Program Director for Friends of the Wild Swan. “The previous Forest Plan required culverts be removed before roads are closed because they can clog up and wash out the roadbed dumping tons of sediment into streams. The revised Plan eliminated this important standard and will lead to degraded habitat for native fish. This is unacceptable.”

The conservation groups are represented by attorneys with WildEarth Guardians, the Western Environmental Law Center, and Earthjustice.

LINKS:
Brief in support of motion for summary judgement
Joint motion for summary judgement

SPOILER ALERT: The answer is clearcut.

Make sure to check out this latest piece of solid investigative journalism by Rob Davis of the Oregonian and Tony Schick, a reporter for Oregon Public Radio. Rob Davis is an investigative reporter covering the environment for The Oregonian/OregonLive. Meanwhile, Tony Schick is a reporter for OPB. He’s been covering the environment in his home state of Oregon for the past seven years.

This article covers so many issues we’ve discussed and debated here at The Smokey Wire over the past decade or so. I have to admit that It will be fun to watch the usual suspects and predictable timber industry apologists dance their way around this one. I’d encourage readers of The Smokey Wire to read the actual investigative piece for themselves and then compare what’s in the piece with the predicable comments that are sure to follow in the comment section below. Will people attack the reporters? Will people attack the people interviewed in the article? Will people gloss over the findings from the investigation? Will people offer any evidence or proof to refute the findings of this investigation? I guess we are about to find out.

UPDATE: Just saw this Action Alert from Oregon Wild, titled “Defund the Oregon Forest Resources Institute.” The FB post had this text with it: “Undermining science, threatening a journalism project, and coordinating logging lobby days with industry are just a few of the incidents uncovered in a new investigation of the Oregon Forest Resources Institute. It’s time to defund them.”

What Happened When a Public Institute Became a De Facto Lobbying Arm of the Timber Industry

Internal emails show a tax-funded agency created to educate people about forestry has acted as a public-relations agency and lobbying arm for Oregon’s timber industry, in some cases skirting legal constraints that forbid it from doing so.

by Rob Davis, The Oregonian/OregonLive, and Tony Schick, OPB, August 4, 2020

As Oregon Gov. Kate Brown crafted a bill in 2018 to enact sweeping limits on greenhouse gas emissions, leaders at an obscure state agency worked behind the scenes to discredit research they feared would persuade her to target one of the state’s most powerful industries.

The research, published that March, calculated for the first time how much carbon was lost to the atmosphere as a result of cutting trees in Oregon. It concluded that logging, once thought to have no negative effect on global warming, was among the state’s biggest climate polluters.

Researchers led by Oregon State University forest ecologist Beverly Law found that the state could dramatically shrink its carbon footprint if trees on private land were cut less frequently, a recommendation that pushed against the approach of Wall Street real estate trusts and investment funds that cut trees at a younger age to maximize profits.

The findings alarmed forest industry leaders in Oregon, who quickly assembled scientists and lobbyists to challenge the study and its authors. Among the groups leading the fight was the Oregon Forest Resources Institute, a quasi-governmental state agency funded with tax dollars that is, by law, restricted from influencing or attempting to influence policy.

Leaders at the institute worked behind the scenes for months to persuade lawmakers and the dean of Oregon State’s College of Forestry that the research was flawed, informing timber lobbyists of their efforts along the way, according to an investigation by The Oregonian/OregonLive, OPB and ProPublica.

The institute needs to “develop a swift, fairly immediate, response so that this study doesn’t drive all of the initial narrative and so that it doesn’t drive early attempts at the state level to develop carbon policy based on what appears to me to be faulty science,” Timm Locke, the agency’s forest products director at the time, wrote in a May 2018 email with the subject line “Bev Law carbon BS.” “One reason I feel this way is that the Governor’s office is noticing.”

Then, Locke, a public employee, offered to help a timber lobbyist draft a counterargument “those of us in the industry can use.”

The email is one of thousands obtained as part of an investigation by The Oregonian/OregonLive, OPB and ProPublica, which found that the Oregon Forest Resources Institute, created in the early 1990s to educate residents about forestry, has acted as a public-relations agency and lobbying arm for the timber industry, in some cases skirting legal constraints that forbid it from doing so.

Oregon’s biggest forest owners have eliminated thousands of jobs, shrinking their contribution to the state’s economy while receiving an estimated $3 billion in tax cuts since 1991, a June story that is part of the yearlong investigation by OPB, The Oregonian/OregonLive and ProPublica revealed. The timber industry has maintained outsized influence in the state, thwarting attempts to restrict logging with the help of a decades long public opinion campaign. And through the institute, the timber industry executed that campaign from behind the veneer of the state government.

The tax-funded institute spends $1 million annually on advertising that for years promoted Oregon’s logging laws as strong, even as many became weaker than in neighboring states, a review by the news organizations found. It worked to undercut university research, challenging the validity of studies and the credibility of professors. Its executive directors sat through private industry deliberations about dark money attack ads that opposed Brown’s 2018 reelection. And, in 2019, its board discussed rushing a report in an attempt to stop ballot measures that targeted logging, the news organizations found.

Erin Isselmann, the institute’s executive director since July 2018, defended the agency. Isselmann said she has operated “under the highest ethical standards.” After the news organizations obtained the emails, Isselmann told board members she had solicited an opinion from the Oregon Department of Justice about the institute’s legal constraints. She declined to make it public, citing attorney-client privilege.

Locke said in an interview that the line between lobbying and educating at the institute was unclear. He said his pushback against Law’s study wasn’t an attempt to sway Brown’s carbon policy, “so much as to ensure that the policy was based on sound information.”

Charles Boyle, a spokesman for the governor, called the news organizations’ findings “deeply troubling.” He said they merited “at the very least an investigation by the Oregon Government Ethics Commission or the secretary of state’s office, and perhaps an audit to bring more facts to light.”

“It is clear that they have openly disregarded the idea that OFRI is a public entity that should serve the interests of Oregonians,” Boyle said.

The institute, created by state lawmakers in 1991, was granted the ability to support the timber industry by educating the public about forests and wood products, and by helping private landowners manage their forests in ways that protect the environment.

But the law bars the institute from attempting to influence the actions of any other state agency, which could make the pushback against the Oregon State University study a violation, said William Funk, an emeritus law professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland.

“Even if lawful, it’s just wrong,” Funk said. “The academy should rule itself. It should not be strong-armed by industry in league with a government agency.”

After the carbon study was released, Paul Barnum, who served as the institute’s executive director at the time, told representatives of a national trade group, the American Wood Council, that he would work with state lobbyists to respond, calling the research “of grave concern to all of us in Oregon.”

“These are folks who likely believe that the planet would be better off without humans,” Barnum wrote in a May 2018 email.

Barnum offered to use the institute’s press release distribution service to circulate an analysis written by a former U.S. Forest Service employee who ran an online publication partly funded by timber industry groups. The analysis claimed the study underestimated emissions from wildfires and didn’t account for increased logging in other states or countries if Oregon cut fewer trees.

He also sent the analysis to a Republican state representative who was a supporter of the timber industry and later became vice chairman of the legislative committee negotiating the governor’s climate bill. In his email, Barnum said the analysis refuted the Oregon State University research, which had undergone peer review from fellow scientists. He later emailed the dean of Law’s college, objecting to a scheduled public radio appearance of hers.

“That’s not the way science works,” Law said in an interview. “It’s attacking academic freedom.”

Barnum, who retired as executive director in 2018 but continued working under contract through June, said it was not wrong for him to question the Oregon State University study or any other academic research. But he acknowledged making inappropriate comments, including some that questioned the researchers’ motives.

“My comments demeaned me, and more importantly, the organization I professed to represent,” Barnum said. “I regret my words and offer sincere apologies to those I discredited.”

“Too Sophisticated to Be Fooled by Propaganda”

Reeling from protests and lawsuits over cutting trees that were hundreds of years old, the state’s largest timber lobbying group in 1991 asked for help selling the benefits of forestry to Oregonians.

A year earlier, federal protections for the northern spotted owl had suddenly put millions of acres of Oregon’s national forests off-limits to logging.

With national news showing images of vast stretches of ancient forests that had been clear-cut, a practice in which thousands of trees are leveled at once, representatives of Oregon’s biggest timber companies attended a hearing in the state Capitol. They urged lawmakers to create an agency that would provide credible public education based on documented facts and reliable science.

The proposed agency would not rely “on wishful myths and clever slogans,” said John Hampton, then president of the Oregon Forest & Industries Council, an association representing the state’s biggest timber owners and manufacturers.

“There are those who have asked, why should the state sanction a propaganda machine for the forest industries?” Hampton told lawmakers in 1991. “The answer is, the people of Oregon are too sophisticated to be fooled by propaganda and, frankly, people like me who will pay for this program would not stand for it.”

That year, the state’s Legislature approved the creation of the Oregon Forest Resources Institute.

As lawmakers raised taxes on logging to fund the institute, they cut millions of dollars in taxes that timber owners paid to fund schools and county governments. They also gave control of the institute’s tax rate to its board.

Today, with an annual budget of about $4 million, the institute creates television, radio and digital advertising campaigns, educational materials for classrooms, reports, workshops and illustrated manuals. It describes itself as “a centralized gateway of shared ideas and collaborative dialogue.”

The line between the timber industry’s lobbying work and the institute’s actions has often been blurred.

Many of the companies represented on the institute’s board are also members of the Oregon Forest & Industries Council, the industry’s primary lobbying group, according to the trade association’s website and tax filings.

Lawmakers gave timber companies control of the institute with nine of the 11 voting board seats. The other two voting positions are a small forest landowner and a representative for timber workers. The board also has one public member who cannot vote and is prohibited from belonging to an environmental advocacy group. The position has been vacant for all but a month since the January 2019 resignation of Chris Edwards, a former state senator who became a lobbyist for the timber industry.

Emails show institute employees routinely participated in the industry council’s public affairs and legislative strategy meetings. At one, Barnum and Isselmann got a sneak peek at political attack ads against Brown from Priority Oregon, a business group that opposed her reelection in 2018. Acknowledging in an interview that it was inappropriate, Barnum said they should have left.

Public employees at the institute helped timber industry groups plan a lobbying day at the state capitol, then asked the lobbyists not to include the institute’s name as a sponsor on the agenda, suggesting that they did not want the institute listed as a group that advocates with legislators.

They also coordinated a demonstration of aerial pesticide spraying and invited elected officials, singling out for special attention a lawmaker who’d tried to tighten spraying rules.

A spokeswoman for the timber industry council didn’t respond to specific questions about its relationship with the institute. Instead, she sent a statement praising the institute for 30 years of providing “valuable, foundational public understanding of one of our state’s greatest resources and cornerstone industries.”

The institute operates in near anonymity. Its own surveys show that few who see its advertisements remember who’s behind them.

In 2018, a potential recruit to lead the institute asked whether its board was open to new approaches. Barnum responded in an email, cautioning that there were limits to how much change would be tolerated.

Large industrial landowners provide roughly 75% to 80% of the institute’s funding, Barnum told the recruit.

“You can’t get too far ahead of those who pay the majority of the tax,” Barnum wrote, “at least not if you want to stay employed.”

“That’s Not the Way Science Works”

Hours before Beverly Law was scheduled to be interviewed on a Southern Oregon public radio station to discuss her research in June 2018, the dean of the Oregon State College of Forestry, Anthony Davis, received an email from Barnum suggesting her study was built on faulty assumptions.

“I understand academic freedom,” he told Davis in an email. But given criticisms from industry scientists and a timber-backed publication, “this seems like policy advocacy based on a heavily flawed study.”

In an interview, Barnum said the institute got involved because “historically, we have not felt it our role to be silent when we believe research to be biased, nonobjective or opaque.” He demurred when asked to identify mistakes in the report.

He said he was not trying to keep Law from appearing on Jefferson Public Radio. “I just was drawing it to his attention,” he said.

The suggestion that the study was flawed was nothing less than an attempt to stifle research, said William Schlesinger, the former dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. Schlesinger led the study’s peer review as an editor for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which published the work.

“That’s one of the most stringent journals in the world,” Schlesinger said. The fact the scientists “were able to put together an analysis that survived the scrutiny of peer review speaks strongly to how solid that work is.”

Barnum continued criticizing Law’s research, sending a draft of a letter from the institute’s board to Davis on July 6, 2018, requesting that he quickly commission a separate review because “unfortunately, media and policymakers are already using the Law et. al. study to promote anti-logging agendas.”

Davis responded later that day to tell Barnum it would be inappropriate for him to comment on a draft letter.

“I was confident in the findings of the researchers and of the process used to publish the paper, which follows the process used by scientists all around the country and the world,” Davis said in an interview.

Barnum eventually withdrew the letter. Not because it upset the academics at Oregon State, but because the Oregon Forest & Industries Council’s executive director, Kristina McNitt, was displeased, telling Barnum she was “shocked” he forwarded the draft to the university without her group’s approval.

In another case, the institute spent multiple years discussing a response to a forthcoming study with potentially negative effects on industry, even as Barnum privately acknowledged the validity of the research.

Mark Needham, a professor in Oregon State’s forestry school, began planning a survey in 2017 to gauge public perceptions of herbicide spraying in private forests. Timber companies apply herbicides from helicopters to kill vegetation that sprouts in the bare earth of clear-cuts and competes for water and sunlight with newly planted tree seedlings.

Needham’s survey included questions about whether residents trusted private timber companies to provide truthful information about the issue and whether they would vote for or against aerial spraying if asked at the ballot.

Internal research by the timber industry has shown Oregonians are worried about the practice, which has become increasingly common as the state’s forests have been logged more frequently.

“The research project sounds legit, but also fairly dangerous,” Barnum wrote in a July 19, 2017, email. “We already know what the public perception about chemical use is, so to have something in the public domain, especially from the College of Forestry, that confirms it, would not be a good thing in my estimation.”

The survey was eventually distributed to more than 5,000 Oregon households in April 2019. Two months later, after a timber company alerted the institute about the survey progress, Isselmann emailed Davis, the forestry school’s dean, challenging the validity of the questions.

In a separate email to a timber executive, Isselmann said most peer-reviewed journals wouldn’t accept survey results unless they were high enough quality, but that “none of this will stop the researchers from promoting their work with the media and in OSU publications. I think we need to be prepared for this outcome and start now to educate policy makers and other influencers about the reliability and validity of survey research.”

She suggested in the email that the institute could prepare for the results by spending $60,000 on its own study.

“I don’t think my actions indicate that I was attacking science, and I think my actions reflect that I wanted to learn more about the survey and how its results would be used,” Isselmann said in an interview. The institute has not conducted its own survey, she said, and has no plans to.

Needham said that his survey responses are still being analyzed, and that Isselmann was incorrect to suggest the questions might be invalid.

“I live and die by the university’s tenets of academic freedom and the external scientific peer-review process,” Needham said. “It’ll be rigorous peer review, conducted by respected scientific journals in our field, that will judge the methods and results of our study.”

When professors at the University of Oregon produced a video critical of logging during a research project, the institute tried to kill the work. Barnum helped lead the pushback in May 2017.

As part of a study on how new 360-degree virtual reality videos affected viewer behavior, students and professors created a video for an environmental group that urged people to join the fight to update Oregon’s logging laws. Strategic communications professor Donna Davis, who studies virtual reality, wanted to know whether an immersive video would make viewers more likely to participate in a cause.

Objecting to the involvement of journalism professor Wes Pope in the video’s creation, Barnum joined a contingent of industry lawyers and lobbyists who alerted timber executives on the university’s board of trustees about the research, then met with school officials and threatened to pull timber donor funding if the university didn’t “extricate” itself from the project.

Barnum said the institute got involved because he saw it as an advocacy project using the university to disseminate negative information about forest practices.

Pope said the university allowed him and his colleagues to continue their work. But the professors, who lacked tenure, let it die. In part, Pope said they said they were worried about angering the timber industry.

“If anybody’s doing anything that possibly threatens or questions logging practices in the state of Oregon, they’re going to swoop in and crush that message really quickly and really thoroughly,” said Pope, now tenured.

Muddying the Waters

In 2013, residents in the tiny coastal town of Rockaway Beach received alerts about cancer-causing contamination in their drinking water after timber companies logged most of the hills around the creek that supplies the town.

The same year, state health officials released a study about the communities around Triangle Lake in Oregon’s Coast Range, the dominant timber-producing region, which found low levels of toxic herbicides in the drinking water, air and in residents’ urine. The state said it was possible timber spraying was the source. Residents in the area called for statewide restrictions on spraying within 2 miles of schools and homes, a request that reached then-Gov. John Kitzhaber’s office, though he didn’t grant it.

Pete Sikora, CEO of Giustina Resources, a large timber company operating in the same county, emailed Barnum to urge him to pay attention to the issue.

“I think drinking water is going to be our biggest public perception issue,” Sikora told Barnum. “As you know public perception often leads to public policy.”

Tens of thousands of residents in towns throughout Oregon’s heavily logged coastal mountains draw their drinking water from industrial forests. Industrial clear-cutting can reduce both the quality and quantity of drinking water, according to state regulators and recent research from Oregon State University.

For years, the institute has helped timber executives who worried about the threat that new drinking water protections would pose to their ability to log. The message that Oregon’s forests produced clean water was a central theme.

Two months after Sikora’s email, a commercial was released featuring two loggers, a father and son, standing creekside in a forest and pouring a glass of crystal clear water.

“This is Oregon water,” says the father, a third-generation logger.

“Oregon has strong laws that help protect our watersheds,” he says. “And besides, it’s the right thing to do.”

“You’ve got to have clean water,” his son says.

The commercial is part of the institute’s advertising campaign, which over the years has grown to be its single largest expenditure at $1 million annually. The campaign has reached Oregonians more than 300 million times since 2013, according to institute documents, with a key message: Oregonians live in a state with strong logging laws.

The commercials don’t acknowledge significant problems caused by industrial logging. The federal government withholds more than $1 million from Oregon each year because its laws don’t do enough to protect coastal rivers from logging pollution. Federal regulators have also faulted Oregon’s logging laws for pushing coastal salmon populations toward extinction.

“There’s only so many messages you can get into in a 30-second commercial,” Isselmann said. “We use the medium of television advertising to educate the public generally, and we direct them to our website and all of our materials if they would like to take a deeper dive and learn more information.”

Records show the institute’s employees have avoided publishing information on the website that could make Oregon’s laws look inadequate.

In 2016, a new employee, Inka Bajandas, faced resistance when she suggested writing a blog post comparing Oregon’s logging laws with California and Washington. Bajandas, the institute’s public outreach manager, told other institute leaders she wanted to address concerns that forest protection laws in Oregon were weaker than in other West Coast states.

“I’m also just genuinely curious about this,” she wrote.

Locke, who no longer works for the institute, told Bajandas that he believed the comparison was a bad idea.

“Certain elements (some that enviros think are most important)” of Oregon’s logging laws, he said, “are not quite as strong” as in Washington or California.

If his understanding was correct, Locke said, “then comparing the three could be a slippery slope. It’s not really about having the absolutely most stringent laws there are.”

Barnum, the institute’s director at the time, responded that Locke was “right on” with his response.

“We do not want to promote a regulatory ‘arms race’ among the three western states, which is where the enviros would like to take us,” Barnum wrote.

Asked about the exchange, Bajandas said the emails speak for themselves but don’t reflect the institute’s current management. Under Isselmann’s leadership, the institute has removed the phrase “strong laws” from advertisements, instead saying that forests are managed responsibly and protect drinking water.

“Because I don’t think a law is something that you can quantify,” Isselmann said. “It’s a fact. You either have a law or you don’t have a law.”

As lawmakers and environmental groups continued to press the issue of water protections, the institute spent $120,000 for Oregon State researchers to study the connections between logging and drinking water contamination.

In November 2019, with a ballot box fight looming over Oregon’s logging practices, the institute’s board discussed whether to speed up the release of the study.

Frustrated by years of legislative inaction, environmental advocates had proposed ballot measures to increase protections for communities that drew their drinking water from forests.

Oregon State’s report, which the institute initially hoped to time for the 2019 Legislature, was a year overdue.

Citing the ballot measures, Casey Roscoe, a board member and executive with Seneca Jones Timber Co., one of Oregon’s biggest logging companies, suggested accelerating the research during a public meeting, on a conference call that happened with nearly no one else outside the organization listening.

“I get if it’s not ready for prime time, but will people be able to access it in order to use that science in conversations and so forth?” Roscoe asked.

“Sometimes, you can stop things before they start,” Roscoe told board members.

Roscoe, whose company gave more than $100,000 to the industry campaign against the measures, said in an interview that she wanted both sides to have the best information available.

Timber companies and environmental advocates ultimately struck an agreement in February to negotiate new logging rules, eliminating the urgency for a report that could help contest ballot measures.

In June, the institute released a draft of the Oregon State study along with its own summary of the scientists’ work. The institute hired Barnum to write the 24-page summary, which downplays some of the more critical aspects of the 321-page study.

The science review says Oregon’s forest practices laws are insufficient to protect some aspects of water quality. It highlights survey results in which dozens of municipal drinking water providers in Oregon said logging was their biggest concern.

It concludes with a list of recommendations, including changes to the state’s logging laws, mandatory reporting of chemical use in forests, increased pesticide sampling and more tree buffers along small streams to prevent chemicals from getting into the water.

The institute’s summary, however, focuses on how forests provide higher-quality water than cities or farms.

It makes no mention of deficiencies in Oregon’s logging laws and says they “help safeguard drinking water sources.”

It doesn’t list any of the scientists’ recommendations. Instead, it ends by saying: “As Oregonians in 2020, this is where we find ourselves: with high-quality water, significantly improved forest practices and the ability to continue improving. And that, I believe, is worth a toast, not only to our forests that supply the raw water, but to those who keep the water safe – from trees to tap.”

“Why Wouldn’t You Want to Know What the Science Is Saying?”

A year after the Oregon State University carbon study was published, the climate bill that had worried the institute came before the state Legislature.

It was 2019, and Democrats had gained a supermajority in both chambers, promising to make Oregon the second state in the nation behind California with a cap on carbon emissions by targeting pollution from fuel consumption and manufacturing. Republicans said they’d do everything they could to stop the bill.

Law, the lead researcher, said she heard state senators citing not her study, but the talking points undermining it that the institute had circulated months before.

“That’s unfortunate because honestly, really, why wouldn’t you want to know what the science is saying?” Law said.

The industry had been concerned that Law’s study would prompt the governor to target logging in the climate bill. But she and lawmakers not only excluded logging, they added an amendment to ensure the measure would avoid any reductions in logging.

The bill died after 11 Senate Republicans walked out of the capitol and went into hiding, denying Democrats the quorum they needed for passage.

The institute was absent during the carbon debate. Its leaders were defending their budget from a longtime Democratic lawmaker, state Rep. Paul Holvey, who said the institute’s advertisements were a disturbing use of money that could be better spent fighting wildfires. His bill died after the timber industry opposed defunding the institute. Rather than shrinking by 60% as Holvey had proposed, the institute’s budget grew after its board approved an increase in logging taxes that spring.

Oregon State’s forestry college also wanted an increase to fund new research. But the lawmakers kept the college’s funding flat after the timber industry opposed the increase.

By the time the Legislature adjourned, the institute had begun its own research report to study carbon in Oregon’s forests.

To write it, the institute recruited the same consultant that industry lobbyists used to refute Law’s study.

Is anyone conducting similar studies in western forests?

Press release from Harvard U.: — My <<comments>> embedded….

In a warming world, New England’s trees are storing more carbon

Unprecedented 25-year study traced forest carbon through air, trees, soil, and water

Climate change has increased the productivity of forests, according to a new study that synthesizes hundreds of thousands of carbon observations collected over the last quarter century at the Harvard Forest Long-Term Ecological Research site, one of the most intensively studied forests in the world.

The study, published today in Ecological Monographs, reveals that the rate at which carbon is captured from the atmosphere at Harvard Forest nearly doubled between 1992 and 2015. The scientists attribute much of the increase in storage capacity to the growth of 100-year-old oak trees, still vigorously rebounding from colonial-era land clearing, intensive timber harvest, and the 1938 Hurricane – and bolstered more recently by increasing temperatures and a longer growing season due to climate change. Trees have also been growing faster due to regional increases in precipitation and atmospheric carbon dioxide, while decreases in atmospheric pollutants such as ozone, sulfur, and nitrogen have reduced forest stress.

“It is remarkable that changes in climate and atmospheric chemistry within our own lifetimes have accelerated the rate at which forest are capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,” says Adrien Finzi, Professor of Biology at Boston University and a co-lead author of the study.

The volume of data brought together for the analysis – by two dozen scientists from 11 institutions – is unprecedented, as is the consistency of the results. Carbon measurements taken in air, soil, water, and trees are notoriously difficult to reconcile, in part because of the different timescales on which the processes operate. But when viewed together, a nearly complete carbon budget – one of the holy grails of ecology – emerges, documenting the flow of carbon through the forest in a complex, multi-decadal circuit.

“Our data show that the growth of trees is the engine that drives carbon storage in this forest ecosystem,” says Audrey Barker Plotkin, Senior Ecologist at Harvard Forest and a co-lead author of the study. “Soils contain a lot of the forest’s carbon – about half of the total – but that storage hasn’t changed much in the past quarter-century.”

The trees show no signs of slowing their growth, even as they come into their second century of life. But the scientists note that what we see today may not be the forest’s future. “It’s entirely possible that other forest development processes like tree age may dampen or reverse the pattern we’ve observed,” says Finzi. <<Yes, and the influences of management or the lack of management — less fire, more-crowded stands, etc.>>

The study revealed other seeds of vulnerability resulting from climate change and human activity, such as the spread of invasive insects.

At Harvard Forest, hemlock-dominated forests were accumulating carbon at similar rates to hardwood forests until the arrival of the hemlock woolly adelgid, an invasive insect, in the early 2000s. In 2014, as more trees began to die, the hemlock forest switched from a carbon “sink,” which stores carbon, to a carbon “source,” which releases more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than it captures. <<similar to bark beetle infestations in the west?>>

The research team also points to extreme storms, suburbanization, and the recent relaxation of federal air and water quality standards as pressures that could reverse the gains forests have made.

“Witnessing in real time the rapid decline of our beloved hemlock forest makes the threat of future losses very real,” says Barker Plotkin. “It’s important to recognize the vital service forests are providing now, and to safeguard those into the future.”

###

Received this USF&WS press release, but I have yet to find the final EIS it mentions. This page at Regulations.gov has some supporting docs, but I don’t see the full EIS. Anyone have a link to it?

July 30, 2020

Contact(s):

Meghan Snow, [email protected], 916-414-6671

Here’s a press release from the groups involved. Here’s some more general information from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

According to USFWS: “The most significant risk factors for Sonoran desert tortoises are: 1) altered plant communities, primarily due to the invasion of nonnative grasses; 2) altered fire regimes, also related to the changes in plant communities; 3) habitat conversion of native vegetation to developed landscapes; 4) habitat fragmentation by the construction of permanent linear structures like highways and canals; 5) human-tortoise interactions such as handling, collecting, and killing individual tortoises intentionally or unintentionally (especially by vehicle strikes); and 6) climate change as it relates to increases in the frequency, scope, and duration of drought.”

Seems to me that livestock grazing on federal public lands administered by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management in Arizona play a significant role in numbers 1 and 2.

TUCSON––Conservationists have brokered an agreement with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (the Service) to go back and reconsider its 2015 decision not to protect the Sonoran Desert tortoise under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

The agreement—approved by a federal court today in Tucson, Arizona—was reached after WildEarth Guardians and Western Watersheds Project challenged the Service’s 2015 decision not to list, which they alleged was arbitrary, in conflict with the ESA, and not in accordance with the best science.

“The Fish and Wildlife Service should be applauded for doing the right thing here,” said Matthew Bishop, an attorney with the Western Environmental Law Center representing the groups. “The 2015 decision merely assumed tortoises were doing fine in the absence of any population data. This was not legally or biologically defensible.”

As per the agreement, the Service must now go back and take a new look at the imperiled animal’s status in Arizona. As part of this new evaluation, the Service will also request additional information from the public and biologists, and then issue a new decision in 18 months. During this time, the Sonoran Desert tortoise’s “candidate species” status will be restored, thereby elevating its protection while a new decision is pending.

“In the midst of an extinction crisis, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has a responsibility to step up and protect our country’s biodiversity,” said Taylor Jones, endangered species advocate for WildEarth Guardians. “It is more important than ever for the Service to protect habitats and species based on the best available science.”

The habitat of Sonoran Desert tortoise is threatened by invasive species, livestock grazing, increase fire risk, housing developments, off-road vehicles, habitat fragmentation, and increased predation facilitated by human activities. Residential development of tortoise habitat has created artificial barriers to the species’ movement and its natural genetic mixing. Continuous overgrazing in the desert has depleted the vegetation on which the species depends. Cattle are also known to trample and crush tortoises in their burrows.

“Desert tortoise are known for moving slowly, but without full federal protections, they have been racing toward extinction,” said Cyndi Tuell, Arizona and New Mexico director with Western Watersheds Project. “The agency will now have to reconsider its decision based on the best scientific data available rather than caving to political pressure and economic interests in Arizona.”

The Arizona Game and Fish Department hasn’t funded any monitoring studies of the species since 2015 and, as of 2019, the Arizona State Land Department has prohibited any scientific studies on state trust lands. The current population of the tortoise is therefore largely unknown, but it is likely on the same downward trend detected in 2015 due to accelerating climate stressors and increasing residential and commercial development.

The Service now has 18 months to make a new determination about the status of the species and will be accepting public comment and additional information on any proposed decisions.