The investigative reporters at the Oregonian continue to uncover some very questionable actions by politicians who want to dramatically increase industrial logging on U.S. Forest Service lands. Previous on this blog, we highlighted the fact that Douglas County spent nearly 1/2 million dollars of Secure Rural Schools money on on a pro-timber industry video and animal trapping. Below are some clips from the latest piece by Rob Davis, which was published this week:

They bought first-class and premium airfare. One paid to travel with his dog. They’ve eaten at banquet award dinners. One expensed a $200 meal at a lounge. They’ve attended governing and timber industry conferences around the country, staying in Jackson Hole, Sunriver, Skamania Lodge and Sun Valley.

These are examples of how Douglas County commissioners spent $43,000 in federal money meant to help their struggling county over the past five years. The trips were underwritten by the Secure Rural Schools program, which pays jurisdictions like Douglas County that suffered financially after endangered species listings curtailed federal logging.

The money was supposed to be spent on firefighting, wildfire planning and search and rescue efforts. Instead it was spent on behalf of leaders in a county so broke that it shut down all its libraries in 2017. Much of their federally funded travel was to lobby Congress against restrictions on federal logging.

Douglas County charged The Oregonian/OregonLive $2,000 for the records that reveal these questionable expenditures. The newsroom paid the fee. The county delivered the documents and said the request was closed, then demanded another $700 after a reporter asked questions about the spending detailed in them.

Commissioners said their expenditures were proper and that the U.S. Forest Service, which disburses the federal money, audits the spending.

The Forest Service does not perform such audits, its officials have previously said.

One commissioner, Chris Boice, traveled for two nights in November 2016 to a remote outpost in Arizona to talk about forest management policy with Doyel Shamley, a natural resources consultant who’s also a far-right conspiracy theorist. A 2014 profile of Shamley in Mother Jones described him as believing “UFO sightings are a false-flag operation by the Illuminati to accumulate more power.”….

Hundreds of pages of records obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive show Douglas County’s commissioners have used the federal money to pay for expenses that have nothing to do with firefighting or wildfire planning….The national Secure Rural Schools program has given $3 billion to Oregon counties since Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, co-authored legislation creating it in 2000.

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE.

Here’s a story published this week by E&E News, written by Marc Heller and Heather Richards.

Last August, an environmental group following a Trump administration proposal to open national forests and grasslands in Texas to oil and gas drilling noticed something odd in the Federal Register: two versions of the same notice for an environmental impact statement, appearing one day apart.

The first notice, posted Aug. 26, contained references to climate change and greenhouse gases. The second didn’t. Then the first one vanished online.

Now the group — the Center for Biological Diversity — knows why. A deputy in the Forest Service’s Washington headquarters ordered field staff in Texas to remove the references and republish the notice, an internal memo obtained by the center shows.

“The Deputy who is reviewing the NOI requested every reference to ‘climate’ and ‘greenhouse gasses’ be removed. We did,” said Robert Potts, the Forest Service’s natural resources and planning team leader in Lufkin, Texas, in a July 25 email to Forest Service and Agriculture Department officials.

In addition, Potts said, the director of the Forest Service’s Office of Sustainability and Climate Change, Cynthia West, “seemed surprised (and not surprised) about the request to remove references to climate and greenhouse gasses.”

He added, “All of her interactions with the Department have been very supportive of the work in her office (in spite of what the main stream media reports about the ‘Administration.’)”

The Forest Service lands being considered lie in eastern and northern Texas and concern two famous natural gas-bearing formations, the Haynesville Shale that extends into Louisiana and the Barnett Shale, where hydraulic fracturing was first successfully unleashed in the 1990s.

The Obama administration closed the areas to future oil and gas leasing in 2016 due to concerns about fracking raised by environmental and health groups. At the time, gas prices had already entered a prolonged depressed price environment following the fracking boom that created an oversupply of natural gas in the United States.

The analysis proposed by the Trump administration would supplement the last oil and gas consideration of these areas, completed in the mid-1990s, according to the published notice of intent.

The Forest Service estimated in a reasonably foreseeable development scenario that new leasing on forests and grasslands would result in 1,500 new wells, produce 69 million barrels of oil and 4.2 trillion cubic feet of gas, and create than more than 30 billion gallons of wastewater over the next 20 years. [emphasis added]

By removing references to climate change, the Center for Biological Diversity said, the Forest Service censored its own staff and showed a willingness to interfere with scientists’ environmental reviews. The organization obtained the email and other documents through the Freedom of Information Act, after the dual notices piqued staff members’ curiosity, the CBD said.

“The bigger concern here is the issue of meddling and censorship,” said Taylor McKinnon, senior public lands campaigner with the Center for Biological Diversity. “If it happens at this stage, it could certainly happen later in the EIS process. So we are concerned about the future of this EIS.”

The Forest Service, in a statement, said Potts’ email mischaracterized the request from a Forest Service deputy director who had reviewed the initial Federal Register notice.

“The request was editorial in nature and does not reflect any policy on use of terminology or any policy regarding emissions associated with oil and gas development or climate,” the Forest Service said.

The intent behind removing the references, the agency said, “was to clarify that the EIS takes a broad view of multiple environmental considerations surrounding the decision to be informed by the EIS.”

“Any changes in terminology made between draft and final notices were made for clarity and do not affect the integrity of the analysis or the ability to determine whether action will impact the environment,” the Forest Service said, adding that “numerous other editorial changes not related to greenhouse gasses or climate were also made between the draft and final notices for clarity and brevity.”

Although two were posted, only the second notice was considered to be published as an official document, the Forest Service said. A notice of intent for an environmental review isn’t a policy-setting document, the agency said.

Climate change is a hot-button issue at the Forest Service, where researchers say it’s contributing to increased risk of wildfires in the West. The agency has maintained references to climate change work on its website, some inherited from the Obama administration.

“To foster climate-informed, sustainable land management across the country, the Forest Service has a long history of engaging in climate change research,” the agency says on its website. “Forest Service scientists conducting research on forest and stream environments on our Experimental Forests and Ranges have recorded environmental changes in many different ecosystems across the nation. This long-term research, some of which has continued for decades, is rare and crucial for understanding how ecosystems respond to climate change.”

The agency adds, “Today, the Forest Service is working to ensure that our National Forests and Grasslands are prepared for upcoming changes in climate through adaptation (reducing vulnerability to climate change effects) and mitigation (decreasing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere).”

Although the Agriculture Department has faced criticism, too, for de-emphasizing climate change, the agency has a “climate solutions” webpage that acknowledges “real threats to U.S. agricultural production, forest resources, and rural economies.”

“These threats have significant implications,” the site says, “not just for farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners, but for all Americans.”

Here is a lengthy and interesting piece in the LA Times :

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection did not respond to repeated interview requests for this story. But the widespread shut-offs underscore the huge — and often overlooked — role that human-related ignitions play in California wildfire.

It doesn’t matter how dry the vegetation, how fierce the winds or how high the temperature; if there is no ignition, there is no wildfire.

Outside of the Sierra Nevada and the state’s northernmost tier, there is little lightning, nature’s ignition source.

That means that, in much of California, more than 90% of the wildfires are started by people or their equipment. In coastal counties from Sonoma to San Diego, almost all the starts are human related.

In 2018, the worst wildfire year in the state’s record, 1.8 million acres burned in California. Lightning torched only 117,107 acres, according to federal statistics.

Of the known causes of the state’s 20 most destructive wildfires, all are human-related. Half were started by power line or electrical problems, including the two most devastating, the Camp fire, which incinerated 18,804 buildings, and the 2017 Tubbs fire, which killed 22 people and destroyed 5,636 structures.

Other causes of the top destructive blazes include sparks from driving a trailer on the rim of a flat tire (the 2018 Carr fire in Shasta County); a hunter’s small signal fires (the 2003 Cedar fire in San Diego County); and arson (the 2003 Old fire in San Bernardino County).

Human starts aren’t just a California problem. Researchers who analyzed two decades of U.S. records found that, from 1992 to 2012, human activity was responsible for 84% of the wildfires and 44% of the area burned nationally.

The scientists also concluded that people have dramatically expanded the fire season — extending it by far more than a warming climate — because they start fires virtually year-round.

“We’ve forgotten the importance of human ignitions in the mix of this,” said Jennifer Balch, lead author of the 2017 paper, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“I’m not saying that climate change is not important,” added Balch, who directs the Earth Lab at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

“I’m saying we have a confluence of climate change setting the stage for warmer and drier conditions — and people are providing the ignitions for those large blazes,” she explained. “The convergence and timing is really unfortunate.”

The one hopeful aspect, she said, is that “we can actually do something about it.”

Clearly something is going on,” said Keeley, who offered two possible explanations: The state’s power distribution infrastructure is aging, and the electrical grid has expanded as development pushes farther into wildlands.

Widespread power shutdowns have not been in play long enough to ascertain if they are effective, he said.

Still, Keeley said the 2019 fire season challenges the notion that the horrific wildfire toll of recent years is the “new normal” wrought by climate change.

“People have to recognize there is a lot of serendipity. It has to be the match-up of a number of things” to create catastrophic fires, he added.

One critical match-up is timing.

It is not the number of ignitions that drives wildfire destruction. There were 8,315 fires in California in 2019 — a couple of hundred more than in the devastating 2018 season, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

It is the conditions under which ignitions occur that matter the most. If it’s a red flag day with single-digit humidity and howling Santa Ana or Diablo winds, chances are greater that a few sparks can quickly explode into a freeway-hopping conflagration that sets entire communities ablaze.

A press release from the Center for Biological Diversity.

Lawsuit Challenges Trump Administration’s Failure to Protect Endangered Species From Livestock on Arizona, New Mexico Waterways

SILVER CITY, N.M.— The Center for Biological Diversity sued the Trump administration today for failing to prevent livestock from damaging southwestern rivers and streams.

The waterways are home to numerous endangered and threatened species: southwestern willow flycatchers, yellow-billed cuckoos, Gila chub, loach minnow and spikedace fish, Chiricahua leopard frogs, and narrow-headed and northern Mexican garter snakes.

Today’s lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Tucson, says the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are violating the Endangered Species Act by allowing cows to trample rivers and streams on more than 30 grazing allotments in the upper Gila River watershed on Arizona’s Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest and the Gila National Forest in New Mexico.

Recent surveys by the Center found severe cattle damage on all major waterways in both national forests, resulting in widespread degradation of streamside forest habitat and water quality, and imperiling several rare species.

“It shouldn’t take a lawsuit to keep livestock from trampling these fragile southwestern rivers, but the Forest Service has turned a blind eye,” said Brian Segee, an attorney at the Center. “We found cows, manure and flattened streambanks along nearly every mile of the waterways we surveyed. We hope this case will get cattle off these streams and renew the agency’s commitment to protecting endangered wildlife and our spectacular public lands.”

The rivers covered by the suit include the Gila, San Francisco, Tularosa and Blue rivers. In a historic 1998 legal settlement with the Center, the Forest Service agreed to prohibit domestic livestock grazing from hundreds of miles of southwestern streamside habitats while it conducted a long-overdue consultation with the Fish and Wildlife Service on the impacts of grazing on threatened and endangered species.

That effort and subsequent consultations have repeatedly confirmed that livestock grazing in arid southwestern landscapes destroys riparian habitat and imperils native fish, birds and other animals dependent on that habitat.

Poorly managed livestock grazing, persistent drought, dewatering, global warming and invasive species have taken an increasing toll on southwestern rivers. This has resulted in the recent federal protection of several additional threatened or endangered species that depend on southwestern riparian areas, including two species of garter snake, the cuckoo and the leopard frog.

These impacts, as well as the looming threat of a major diversion project, led American Rivers to name the Gila the nation’s most endangered river in 2019.

Here’s a press release from Western Watersheds Project about the Forest Service’s plans to eliminate a Black-Footed Ferret Recovery management area of over 50,000 acres on Wyoming’s Thunder Basin National Grassland via a Forest Plan amendment.

Yesterday, Jon Haber shared this account of the Coconino National Forest in Arizona amending a Forest Plan, which was just revised in 2018, to facilitate construction of a powerline.

That got me wondering: Can folks think of many examples where the U.S. Forest Service has amended a Forest Plan to strengthen protections for wildlife, clean water, old-growth forests, soils or biodiversity? If so, please do share these examples. Regardless, my gut feeling is that the number of times the Forest Service has amended a Forest Plan to weaken protections for wildlife, clean water, old-growth forests, soils or biodiversity would far outnumber them.

Here’s that Western Watersheds Project press release:

LARAMIE, Wyo. – Western Watersheds Project submitted formal comments today excoriating a Forest Service proposal to eliminate a Black-Footed Ferret Recovery management area of over 50,000 acres on Wyoming’s Thunder Basin National Grassland. The Forest Service’s plan amendment increases the poisoning and shooting of native prairie dogs, upon which ferrets depend for their survival, an action driven by livestock lobby concerns that prairie dogs compete for vegetation with privately-owned cattle on these public lands.

“The Thunder Basin is one of the rare large expanses of public land where black-footed ferrets could be reintroduced on the High Plains,” said Erik Molvar, a wildlife biologist and Executive Director with Western Watersheds Project. “The Forest Service has an obligation to recover both prairie dogs and black-footed ferrets to their natural and healthy populations here, irrespective of livestock industry profits.”

The black-tailed prairie dog is designated as a Sensitive Species by the Forest Service. Ecologically, it is considered a “keystone species” holding grasslands ecosystems together, and it is critical to the survival of many other rare species of wildlife, from burrowing owls to swift foxes to mountain plovers. According to the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, black-tailed prairie dogs are down to one-one-hundredth of one percent of their original occupied habitat in Wyoming.

The original Grasslands Plan, completed in 2002, limited prairie dog poisoning to areas immediately adjacent to homes and cemeteries, and protected prairie dogs from sport shooting in the Black-footed Ferret Recovery zone. Thunder Basin ranchers, dissatisfied with the limitations governing prairie dog killing on public lands, pressed for weaker protections and more loopholes, and succeeded in dominating a collaborative process that wound up expanding prairie dog poisoning to Forest Service lands along private land boundaries. The new plan amendment expands poisoning and recreational shooting further still.

“Ranchers shouldn’t be able to rent public lands for private livestock grazing if they can’t coexist with the native wildlife, prairie dogs included,” said Molvar. “The idea that a federal agency wants to authorize the poisoning native wildlife in order to keep them off neighboring private lands – where they are also native – effectively imprisons wildlife on public lands and blocks them from repopulating their original habitats elsewhere.”

The Thunder Basin National Grassland encompasses lands that are the traditional lands of the Cheyenne, Crow, and Lakota peoples.

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The Washington Post has an article on this: “Trump proposes change to environmental rules to speed up highway projects, pipelines and more.” The proposal is here.

The proposed rules would narrow the scope of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires federal agencies to assess the impact of a major project before a spade of dirt is turned and to include the public in the process.
…
The proposed regulations would redefine what constitutes a “major federal action” to exclude privately financed projects that have minimal government funding or involvement.

That interpretation of the law would make it much easier to build most pipelines, which have become controversial as activists have sought to block projects that make it easier to extract, transport or burn fossil fuels linked to climate change.
…
Other aspects of the proposal would set deadlines and page limits for environmental reviews, so that, with rare exceptions, agencies would have to finish their most exhaustive reviews within two years.

An NPR podcast:

How Tribal Experts Are Shaping the Federal Government’s Wildfire Strategy

But going forward, one solution supported by indigenous communities in Australia and here in the United States involves setting fires intentionally. 

Today, scientists and the United States Forest Service largely agree with tribal members that intentionally burning sections of forests is an important way to protect against wildfires. But many tribal experts say that the scale of these prescribed fires still need to be dramatically increased going forward.

Also, this site has lots of info on fire ecology and management in Australia:

Largely as a result of European misunderstanding and fear of fire, fire suppression rapidly became the dominant paradigm in fire management; in most areas there was a large shift away from traditional burning practices.

In northern Australia, the disruption of traditional burning practices means that many areas (e.g. the Top End) are now prone to extensive wildfires that sweep through the country late in the dry season.

Sound familiar?

“Previous estimates argued that about 27 percent of manmade net carbon emissions were from deforestation whereas the new research estimates that the correct number is just 7 percent.”

Press release from scientists at Yale and Ohio State is below….

The study is open access.

A Oregon State study described in an OSU blog post in November:

Pacific Northwest timber harvesting doesn’t affect mineral soil carbon, research shows

Conventional timber harvesting has no effect on carbon levels in the mineral soils of the western Pacific Northwest for at least 3 1/2 years after harvest, according to recently-published research by Oregon State University and Weyerhaeuser Company.

The study is important because soils contain a large percentage of the total carbon in forests – generally about half of it – and understanding soil carbon response to clear-cuts and other forest management practices is vital in determining carbon balance in any given stand as well as the overall landscape.

Stable carbon levels in the ground means less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. An important greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide’s concentration in the atmosphere has risen 30 percent since the start of the Industrial Age.

Historic in its scope, this collaborative and long-term effort between Jeff Hatten of the OSU College of Forestry and Scott Holub of Weyerhaeuser monitored nine managed Douglas-fir forest stands in Oregon and Washington, before and after conventional timber harvest and replanting, and involved more than 50,000 soil samples from 2700 sample points, thus far.  Continued monitoring of soil carbon with additional rounds of sampling is planned at these sites for decades to come.

“Our original hypothesis that timber harvesting would decrease soil carbon in the short term was disproven,” said Hatten, a soils researcher in the college’s Department of Forest Engineering, Resources and Management. “And I think it’s fair to say this has been the most extensive sampling ever conducted to determine if harvesting has an impact on soil carbon.”

“The no-result was remarkable,” he said. “Even where you have the highest soil temperatures and the highest soil moistures – the strongest environment for decomposition that releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – harvesting doesn’t seem to have an impact in the areas we studied. And the results likely extend to similar areas, probably totaling many millions of hectares in the Northwest.”

Across all the sites combined, after harvest, the scientists found negligible change (+2%) in mineral soil carbon content and a 184 percent hike in forest floor carbon, the result of harvest residue.

Modern harvest methods are designed to cause minimal soil disturbance, and the stable soil carbon would seem to reflect that, the researchers said.

“Concern about rising atmospheric carbon dioxideconcentrations has heightened interest in the role that forests play in carbon sequestration, storage and cycling,” Hatten said. “Living trees sequester and store carbon, but less recognition has been given to soils’ role. We have plans to resample these sites in coming years and decades to look at the longer-term impacts.”

Citation:

Holub, S.M. and Hatten, J.A. 2019. Soil Carbon Storage in Douglas-Fir Forests of Western Oregon and Washington Before and After Modern Timber Harvesting Practices. Soil Science Society of America Journal 83(1):S175-S186.

Abstract available here: https://dl.sciencesocieties.org/publications/sssaj/abstracts/83/s1/S175

Well, they say that “timing is everything” and based on what has just taken place in the past 24 hours they might be right.

Today, a federal judge today overturned the Trump administration’s renewal of the Hammond Ranches’ livestock-grazing permit finding that then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s decision to renew the permit “was arbitrary and capricious, an abuse of discretion, not rationally connected to the facts before the agency, inconsistent with the governing statutes and regulations, and an unexplained change in agency practice and procedure.” Gee, imagine that!

You may recall that the BLM had revoked the Hammonds Ranches’ grazing privileges in 2014 after Dwight and Steven Hammond were convicted of arson on federal lands in 2012. In January 2019, on his last day in office, Zinke abruptly overruled the BLM and renewed the permit.

If that doesn’t ring a bell about the Hammonds, you may remember that the Hammond’s were also the “inspiration” for the 41 day-long armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016 by Cliven and Ammon Bundy, who are also still illegally grazing their cows on our public lands and who still owe the American taxpayers over $1 million in unpaid pubic lands grazing fees.

And since “timing is everything” an explosive investigation was just released accusing Washington State GOP House Rep Matt Shea with engaging in “domestic terrorism” for his role in playing the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge

According to numerous media accounts:

State Rep. Matt Shea planned and participated in domestic terrorism against the United States before and during the armed takeover at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, an investigation commissioned by the Washington state House found.

The 108-page report found that beginning in November 2015, Shea, working with militia leader Ammon Bundy, helped “in the planning and preparation” of the Malheur takeover, a six-week conflict in which dozens of armed protesters occupied the refuge in rural Eastern Oregon. The standoff ended after one protester was shot and killed and dozens were arrested.

“Representative Shea, as a leader in the Patriot Movement, planned, engaged in and promoted a total of three armed conflicts of political violence against the United States Government in three states outside the state of Washington over a three-year period,” according to the report released Thursday. “In one conflict Representative Shea led covert strategic pre-planning in advance of the conflict.”

Ironically, you may recall that last year when he was Trump’s Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke blamed wildfires in California on “environmental terrorists groups.” Perhaps Zinke was thinking of Rep Matt Shea and Dwight and Steven Hammond when he made that comment.

Anyway, what interesting timing. Below is the press release from the conservation groups who held Zinke and the Trump Administration accountable.

Court Rejects Trump Administration Renewal of Oregon Ranchers’ Grazing Permit

PORTLAND, Ore.— A federal judge today overturned the Trump administration’s renewal of the Hammond Ranches’ livestock-grazing permit. The ruling throws out the ranchers’ permit on four allotments in eastern Oregon until the Bureau of Land Management does a proper environmental analysis.

Because of Hammond Ranches’ pattern of violating federal rules and the terms of its permit that disqualified it from renewal, U.S. District Judge Michael H. Simon found that then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s decision to renew the permit “was arbitrary and capricious, an abuse of discretion, not rationally connected to the facts before the agency, inconsistent with the governing statutes and regulations, and an unexplained change in agency practice and procedure.”

Today’s ruling suspends future grazing on these allotments until the BLM can comply with federal law and regulations and engage the public in any new decision to allow grazing to resume.

“When ranchers break the law and abuse public lands, they should lose their grazing permit every time,” said Erik Molvar, executive director of Western Watersheds Project. “Restoring grazing leases to ranchers who violate the terms and conditions of their leases encourages the livestock industry to continue abusing public lands and degrading habitat for native fish and wildlife, and fans the flames of extremism, the likes of which resulted in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge debacle.”

The BLM revoked the Hammonds Ranches’ grazing privileges in 2014 after Dwight and Steven Hammond were convicted of arson on federal lands in 2012. In January 2019, on his last day in office, Zinke abruptly overruled the BLM and renewed the permit.

The BLM grazing regulations require that permittees have a “satisfactory record of performance.” Judge Simon concluded that the Hammonds were disqualified not just because of the arson convictions, but also due to their conduct surrounding other fires they were accused of setting and that Zinke ignored this in his decision. The Hammonds also were accused of making death threats against federal officials, according to news reports.

“This ruling confirms that federal grazing permits are a privilege, not a right,” said Randi Spivak, public lands director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The BLM is charged with protecting wildlife on public lands, not facilitating political favors. Thankfully the judge understands that fragile populations of birds, fish and other animals will be harmed if livestock run rampant in this beautiful place.”

The allotments lie on Steens Mountain, a special, congressionally protected landscape that’s critically important for greater sage grouse. But the birds’ population there has declined by 50% in just the past decade. Grazing has hastened that decline by trampling the birds’ habitat, damaging wet areas they depend on for food, and eating grasses that the sage grouse rely on to hide from predators.

“This decision will finally force the BLM to honestly disclose the serious environmental harm grazing causes and, with comment from the public, put restrictions to protect sage-grouse and other native species into any new permit,” said Judi Brawer, Wild Places program director with WildEarth Guardians.

Western Watersheds Project, the Center for Biological Diversity and WildEarth Guardians filed the lawsuit in May to challenge renewal of the Hammonds’ grazing permits. In July the judge ruled that livestock grazing could not be justified as a way to reduce wildfire risk and that grazing at permitted levels was likely to cause harm to sage grouse and rare redband trout. The judge granted a partial injunction that reduced or blocked livestock grazing on two of the four grazing allotments.