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Here’s a link. Some excerpts.

he Senate on Tuesday passed the most sweeping conservation legislation in a decade, protecting millions of acres of land and hundreds of miles of wild rivers across the country and establishing four new national monuments honoring heroes from Civil War soldiers to a civil rights icon.

The 662-page measure, which passed 92 to 8, represented an old-fashioned approach to dealmaking that has largely disappeared on Capitol Hill. Senators from across the ideological spectrum celebrated home-state gains and congratulated each other for bridging the partisan divide.

“It touches every state, features the input of a wide coalition of our colleagues, and has earned the support of a broad, diverse coalition of many advocates for public lands, economic development, and conservation,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, (R-Ky).

Perhaps the most significant change the legislation would make is permanently authorizing a federal program that funnels offshore drilling revenue to conserve everything from major national parks and wildlife preserves to local baseball diamonds and basketball courts. Authorization for the popular program, the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), lapsed months ago due to the partial government shutdown and other disputes. Liberals like the fact that the money allows agencies to set aside land for wildlife habitat. Conservatives like the fact that taxpayers don’t have to foot the bill for it.

Congress is now set to reauthorize the fund in perpetuity, though it will not make its spending mandatory. Congressional funding for the program has “fluctuated widely” since its inception in 1965, according to a 2018 Congressional Research Service report. Less than half of the $40 billion that has piled up in the fund during its five decades of existence has been spent by Congress on conservation efforts.

And Utahns supporting wilderness..

As outlined his opposition in the Deseret News a day after Utah’s junior senator, Mitt Romney (R), defended the package in the same paper. “We can conserve wildlife, protect historic sites, maintain access and preserve Utah’s public lands in a way that reflects the priorities of rural Utahns,” Romney wrote. “This is the future our public lands need and deserve.”

In an interview, Heinrich noted that Republican and Democratic supporters of the bill stuck together to defeat hostile amendments such as Lee’s, which could have unraveled the deal.

“That’s something you used to see all the time,” he said. “That’s been much more rare in recent years.”

The package designates several other protected areas in Utah, including the 850-acre Jurassic National Monument and the much more vast San Rafael Swell Recreation Area. Scott Groene, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance executive director, said the wilderness designations will keep motorized vehicle use at bay in Desolation and Labyrinth Canyons, part of the dramatic red rock landscape that defines the state.

“Spectacular canyons will remain quiet places,” Groene said.

Maybe Congress working together based on mutual interests (and listening to the voices of those affected), and major bipartisan lifting to get a bill out the door, will become more frequent. One can only hope.

The following press release is from Swan View Coalition, Friends of the Wild Swan and Earthjustice. A copy of the Notice of Intent is here. – mk

Conservationists Challenge Abandonment of Grizzly Bear and Bull Trout Protections In Flathead National Forest

New Plan for Flathead National Forest Could Fragment Wild Habitat for Grizzlies and Discards Longstanding Wildlife Habitat Standards

Kalispell, MT – Two Montana conservation groups have notified the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that a newly revised management plan violates the Endangered Species Act by abandoning longstanding protections for key grizzly bear and bull trout habitat in the Flathead National Forest.

The 2018 Flathead Forest Plan purports to maintain habitat conditions that existed in 2011. However, the plan actually abandons key measures that have protected grizzly bear and bull trout habitat on the Forest for more than two decades, allowing new roadbuilding and wildlife disturbances in formerly secure habitat. Swan View Coalition and Friends of the Wild Swan have notified both agencies that they will file a lawsuit challenging the 2018 Plan’s abandonment of wildlife protections if the agencies do not correct their legal violations within 60 days.

“By abandoning the cap on new roads and eliminating the provisions to remove roads, this new plan harms bull trout and native aquatic life,” said Arlene Montgomery of Friends of the Wild Swan. “When road culverts inevitably fail they dump sediment into streams that will clog spawning beds. The Flathead doesn’t have the budget to maintain its existing road system, so they should be reducing the miles of road on the Forest instead of degrading habitat for wildlife and fish.”

“The Flathead is abandoning road removal, the true habitat restoration it says is helping recover grizzly bears and bull trout,” said Swan View Coalition Chair Keith Hammer. “It is replacing that with road building and logging and trying to call that restoration. We don’t buy it and the science doesn’t support it.”

NEW ROADBUILDING THREATENS HARM TO GRIZZLY BEARS AND BULL TROUT

The Flathead National Forest encompasses 2.4 million acres of public land in northwest Montana, including large areas of public land adjacent to Glacier National Park. The Flathead therefore provides key habitat for the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem population of grizzly bears, whose range extends from the Park southward down the spine of the Northern Rockies, as well as a significant stronghold for the region’s threatened bull trout.

Seminal grizzly bear research in the 1990s demonstrated that the presence of roads in grizzly bear habitat, and the motorized and non-motorized intrusion those roads allow, harm bears’ survival. Researchers found that even roads closed to the public can displace bears from otherwise secure habitat because bears learn to avoid such roads and the roads also facilitate motorized trespass and other human access. Roads also threaten harm to bull trout, because roads and the culverts that come with them can send sediment into the streams where bull trout live.

Recognizing these threats, the Flathead National Forest in 1995 adopted a Forest Plan provision called Amendment 19, which limited the number of roads the Forest Service could maintain in the Flathead. To meet this standard, the Forest Service was required to decommission some existing roads, as well as any new roads it built, through revegetation, culvert removal, and other measures intended to ensure the roads no longer function as either a road or a trail.

NEW PLAN PAVES THE WAY FOR MORE ROAD CONSTRUCTION IN THE BACKCOUNTRY

The new 2018 Forest Plan abandons this approach in favor of a requirement that the Forest Service claims will maintain the habitat security that existed in 2011. This new management direction is less protective of grizzly bears and trout, because in many parts of the Flathead, the Forest Service never achieved the standards and goals set by the 1995 plan and the new plan excuses that failure. The change further ignores broad public support for Amendment 19: fully 98% of public comments the Forest Service received during its planning effort supported retaining Amendment 19’s road decommissioning program.

Also, the new plan does not actually commit to maintaining 2011 conditions. That is because it allows new road construction beyond 2011 levels so long as the Forest Service administratively closes the new roads by placing an inadequate barrier—even just a fallen tree—across the entrance. Such new roads would not be counted against total road limits in the Forest, even though such minimal barriers enable continued ATV and dirt bike use in grizzly habitat.

“This new plan is a stealth attempt to allow harmful new roads in key grizzly bear habitat, just as the Fish and Wildlife Service is talking about removing the Northern Continental Divide’s grizzly bears from the endangered species list,” said Josh Purtle, an attorney in Earthjustice’s Northern Rockies office.
Under the lax new plan, the Forest Service has already planned extensive new roadbuilding in the Flathead Forest. A new project proposed in the Swan Valley would build 60 miles of new roads and retain them on the road system indefinitely. By contrast, the Forest Service built only 3.2 miles of new roads in grizzly bear habitat over 14 years under the former, stronger plan.

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The photo above was taken by a volunteer for the volunteer-run Friends of the Bitterroot, a grassroots organization based in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana with a mission “to preserve the wildlands and wildlife and to protect the forests and watersheds of our region as we work for a sustainable relationship with the environment.”

According to FOB, the photo was taken within the Three Saddle Vegetation Management project on the Bitterroot National Forest.

Back in 2013, the Bitterroot National Forest’s planning staff officer, Jerry Krueger, described the project as “It’s sort of a soup to nuts sort of project.”

Well, “nuts” is right.

According to FOB, as part of the timber sale, first this area logged.

Then strong winds blew down many of the remaining trees.

Then the area was salvage logged.

Then the area was burned.

Then herbicides were sprayed on the area.

Presto! The U.S. Forest Service created a “Healthy Forest!”

In my opinion, this is some really intelligent media coverage on the topic of wildfires, climate change and climate and fire adaptation.

Listen here as Eric Whitney, news director of Montana Public Radio, interviews journalist Andrew Revkin. Below is the teaser from Montana Public Radio’s website.

There’s been a change in the response to global climate change. Journalist Andrew Revkin, who’s been writing about the issue since the 1980s for outlets including the New York Times highlights the new response in a recent story for National Geographic.

I had a chance to talk with him about his story, in which he mentions a program supported by Bozeman-based Headwaters Economics, in partnership with the US Forest Service. It’s called “Community Planning Assistance for Wildfire.”

Andrew Revkin is the Strategic Adviser for Environmental and Science Journalism at the National Geographic Society and has written on global warming for 30 years. He is the author of three books about climate, most recently Weather: An Illustrated History, from Cloud Atlases to Climate Change. He covered the environment for years at the New York Times.

Press release from Oregon State today:

2-4-19

NW Forest Plan 25 years later: Wildfire losses up, bird populations down

By Steve Lundeberg, 541-737-4039, [email protected]

Sources: Matt Betts, 541-737-3841, [email protected]; Ben Phalan, [email protected]

This story is available online: http://bit.ly/2G97xKn.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Twenty-five years into a 100-year federal strategy to protect older forests in the Pacific Northwest, forest losses to wildfire are up and declines in bird populations have not been reversed, new research shows.

The findings, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, underscore the importance of continuing to prioritize the safeguarding of older forests, the scientists say – forests characterized by a complex structure that includes multiple canopy layers, large trees, downed wood and snags.

The researchers stress it’s vital to remember that upon its adoption in 1994, the Northwest Forest Plan was conceived as a century-long plan, and was not expected to show significant positive impacts on biodiversity for 50 years.

“Trees in the northwestern United States are some of the longest-lived and largest in the world,” said Matt Betts of Oregon State University. “Douglas-fir can live to be more than 800 years old and grow to be more than 100 meters tall, so it shouldn’t be surprising that it is hard to ‘restore’ this forest type, and that any plan to do so will take a long time.

“The plan has been one of the most impressive forest conservation strategies in the world, and there is no doubt that it has had a strong positive impact on the conservation of old-growth forests, but our results show that even with these strong conservation measures, bird species living in this system still aren’t doing too well.”

The NWFP, a series of federal policies put in place at the behest of then President Bill Clinton, encompasses 10 million hectares of land, including national forests, national parks, wilderness areas and Bureau of Land Management parcels, in Oregon, Washington and California.

Betts and OSU research associate Ben Phalan led a collaboration that used region-wide bird surveys, forest data and land ownership maps to gauge the plan’s effect on biodiversity so far. Birds are a key indicator of biodiversity.

The researchers examined population trends for 24 widespread bird species for which the Pacific Northwest holds important populations – some associated with older forests, some with diverse early-seral ecosystems, and some with both.

While there have been other detailed studies of threatened species such as spotted owls and marbled murrelets, this study focused on what populations of more-common birds can tell us about wider forest biodiversity.

Populations of bird species associated with older forests – such as the varied thrush, golden-crowned kinglet, Pacific-slope flycatcher and Townsend’s warbler – are continuing to struggle on both federal and private industrial land, the findings show.

On private industrial land, that’s likely due to ongoing timber harvesting, while on federal land it’s due, at least in part, to the recent uptick in fires in the Northwest, in part because of drought.

“All forests in the region evolved with fires to some degree, but now, at a time when old-growth forests are so depleted, stand-replacing fires have become an important cause of declines in bird populations in older forests,” said Betts, professor of landscape ecology and the IWFL Professor of Forest Biodiversity Research in OSU’s College of Forestry. “Evidence suggests that some of the increase in fires is climate related.”

Another important finding, notes Phalan, now based at the Institute of Biology at the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador, Brazil, is that the area of young, complex preforest vegetation – known as “diverse early-seral ecosystems” – isn’t declining as much as the researchers expected, and had increased in some regions.

“Again, that seems to be because new fires are creating quite a bit of early seral,” Phalan said. “There are proposals that more of this vegetation type be promoted via forest management, but our results show that birds in older forests are more likely to be in decline than those in early-seral ecosystems, so we need to be very careful not to reduce our options for recovery of older forests – especially dense, moist forests.”

Diverse early-seral ecosystems support many broadleaf species, shrubs and herbs as well as young conifers, and are important habitats for some bird species. Bird species associated with these habitats that are showing ongoing declines include the rufous hummingbird, willow flycatcher and orange-crowned warbler. For most of these species, however, in contrast to birds of older forests, the declines have not gotten worse.

Betts said that before launching into efforts to create these diverse early-seral ecosystems, more information is needed regarding how much of it there might have been historically in different areas, and how sensitive the associated species are to reduced habitat.

Phalan emphasizes the findings show that efforts to maintain and restore old-growth forests are working, but that it’s harder to prevent stand-replacing fires than to manage logging.

“It was anticipated in the plan that species declines might take decades to arrest,” he said. “It was surprising, though, to learn that species associated with older forests continued to decline much faster than those in early seral. We argue that, because forest regeneration is an inherently slow process, and because fires are going to become more frequent in most forest types, forest plans should continue to emphasize conservation of old-growth habitats.”

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Last week on this blog, a post focused on comments members of the public left on the Sierra Club’s Facebook page regarding the issue of logging and management of the Giant Sequoia National Monument. The basic ‘gist’ of the post was that the Sierra Club wasn’t being truthful in their advertising. If you look at the comments to the post (which listed 30+ comments that were on the Sierra Club’s FB page) from Jon Haber, I do believe that Jon provided some pretty good evidence and legal history documenting past threats and also explaining how future threats are certainly not out of the question.

So, let’s take a look at the official Twitter account of the U.S. Forest Service. Today, they posted this collage of photos above with the text “Active management is key to helping reduce wildfire severity and forest resilience. In 2018, the USDA Forest Service improved conditions on 3.5 million acres of forestland.”

Does anyone spot any evidence what-so-ever in any of the four photos of anything that comes even remotely close to indicating that any of these areas saw any “active management” in 2018, or even within the past decade?

When I look at the four photos, what I see are some fairly pristine areas, which appear to look much more like a Wilderness area, or a roadless area, or an unlogged native forest than anything that comes close to resembling “active management” to “reduce wildfire severity.”

In fact, the forest-type presented in each of the four photographs all appear to be more like a mid- to upper-elevation mixed conifer or spruce-fir forest type. Ironically, if a wildfire would start burning in the forest-types and ecosystems presented in each of these four photos, the wildfire would naturally and normally very likely burn at mid- to high-severity – the very type of fire that some politicians catastrophic.

It goes without saying that I think it’s pretty darn dishonest for the U.S. Forest Service to be officially using these four photos to promote “active management” (which often times means logging and “thinning”). The other thing I found sort of interesting is the claim that in just 2018 the U.S. Forest Service accomplished 3.5 million acres of some type activity that supposedly will “reduce fire severity and increase resilience.” That accomplishment in just one year on nearly 5,500 square miles of U.S. Forest Service land is a far-cry from the rhetoric we hear from many right-leaning politicians, who claim the USFS can’t do anything because of “environmental terrorist groups” and “environmental extremists.”

P.S. Here are a couple of photographs showing actually U.S. Forest Service projects, which had a stated goal of reducing fire severity and increasing resilience. Guess these photos just would not have been as pretty to use in the Forest Service’s PR efforts.

Interactive map of fires in California: worth a look.

According to this piece by Billings, Montana-based Associated Press writer Matthew Brown:

As the Trump administration rolls back environmental and safety rules for the energy sector, government projections show billions of dollars in savings reaped by companies will come at a steep cost: more premature deaths and illnesses from air pollution, a jump in climate-warming emissions and more severe derailments of trains carrying explosive fuels.

The Associated Press analyzed 11 major rules targeted for repeal or relaxation under Trump, using the administration’s own estimates to tally how its actions would boost businesses and harm society.

Just check out this list of regulation for the oil, gas and coal industry. Many of these regulations impact resource extraction on America’s federal public lands, one way or another.

According to the Associated Press: Under President Donald Trump, federal agencies have moved to roll back regulations for companies that extract, transport and burn oil, gas and coal. Government analyses show companies will save billions of dollars in compliance costs, but the trade-off often will be adverse impacts to public health and the environment.

See the full list here.

The AP identified up to $11.6 billion in potential future savings for companies that extract, burn and transport fossil fuels. Industry windfalls of billions of dollars more could come from a freeze in vehicle efficiency standards that will yield an estimated 79 billion-gallon (300 million-liter) increase in fuel consumption.

On the opposite side of the government’s ledger, buried in thousands of pages of analyses, are the “social costs” of rolling back the regulations. Among them:

— Up to 1,400 additional premature deaths annually due to the pending repeal of a rule to cut coal plant pollution.

— An increase in greenhouse gas emissions by about 1 billion tons (907 million metric tons) from vehicles produced over the next decade — a figure equivalent to annual emissions of almost 200 million vehicles.

— Increased risk of water contamination from a drilling technique known as “fracking.”

— Fewer safety checks to prevent offshore oil spills.

But, hey, “Make America Great Again,” right?