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You can read the entire opinion piece from Frank Carroll, co-owner of “Professional” Forest Management out of South Dakota right here.

I find it shocking that the Rapid City Journal would published such a piece. Also, somewhat shocking is the fact that Frank Carroll was the official public affairs officer for the Black Hills National Forest and worked for the U.S. Forest Service for 31 years.

Here’s a snip featuring Frank Carroll’s own words:

“Most of the wood we will use to rebuild after the hurricanes will come from outside of the United States. Why? Because the Alliance Wild Rockies’ Gary MacFarlane and henchman Michael Garrity think the Earth will somehow plummet into the abyss if a few loggers cut a few trees to feed a few sawmills so people can use the dead wood before it rots. And they’re not alone. A whole enviro-terrorist industry is backing them, bringing reasonable use of dead timber to a complete halt in the most devastated areas.

Native Ecosystems Council’s Sara Jane Johnson; Friends of the Swan’s Arlene Montgomery; Swan View Coalition’s Keith Hammer; Wild Earth Guardians’ John Horning; Rocky Mountain Wild’s Tehri Parker; Defenders of Wildlife’s Jamie Rappaport Clark and a host of other bomb-throwers have joined these suits. If you know these people, call them. If not, call anyway. Tell them to just stop it.”

On Sunday, the Missoulian published on their homepage and Facebook page – and then about 4 hours later, deleted – this in-depth story about public lands logging, fuel reduction and wildfires.

The editor claims it was a ‘mistake’ that it was published and that the article isn’t finished and needs editing. The complete version of the article the Missoulian published on Sunday is cached here.

The editor has told interested and curious members of the community that the article may re-run this coming weekend, or next weekend, or eventually. – mk

In the wake of one of the worst fire seasons in Montana history, Montana lawmakers in Washington, D.C., and many others have called for more logging and thinning in forests as a way to “fireproof” the state and create more jobs at timber mills.

But several wildfire experts say the simplistic notion that fuel reduction will somehow stop wildfires or reduce their severity is deeply flawed. And at worst, it could waste taxpayer dollars.

That’s because, according to years of research, fire managers would need a crystal ball that tells them when and where to thin forests, and even then drought and heat are still going to drive fires. One fire expert likens it to playing the lottery, because the odds of a fire starting in an area that’s been managed are so low.

Logging and thinning every one of the hundreds of millions of acres of the vast Western forests every 10 years or so would be the only way to rig that lottery, and that would be nearly impossible, expensive for taxpayers and quite likely a natural disaster.

“We can’t let politicians make promises for us that we can’t deliver on,” said Andrew Larson, an associate professor of forest ecology at the University of Montana.

***

Despite significant increases in areas burned since 1970 due to rising temperatures, wildfires only burn about 1 percent of Western U.S. forests even in the worst years. As the climate gets warmer and drier they will continue to burn not only near communities, but also in remote, high-elevation, inaccessible terrain.

A recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Montana found that only about 7 percent of fuel-reduction treatment areas in the entire United States were subsequently hit by wildfires since 1999. This past summer, fires burned more than 1 million acres of Montana’s 94 million acres of land, but they were scattered around the state in both low-elevation wildland-urban interfaces and deep in the high-elevation backcountry.

That means there are very few opportunities for fires to actually burn in places that have been thinned or even could have been thinned in the last 10 years before they regrow.

So why not just thin more and increase the chances of hitting that lottery? It could work if it’s done strategically in the wildland-urban interface, according to many experts. But the fires like the 160,000-acre Rice Ridge fire near Seeley Lake that choked western Montana with smoke this summer burned large amounts of areas in wilderness areas.

If someone had the magical ability to predict, within the past decade, that a major fire was going to strike that particular portion of the 240,000-acre Scapegoat Wilderness, then thinning and logging theoretically could have helped. But it doesn’t work that way, and fires are sparked in random places by lightning and humans, and they are pushed by erratic winds and weather.

***

According to Tania Schoennagel, a forest landscape ecologist and fire researcher at the University of Colorado, a warming climate in the western United States means that fires are here to stay and fire managers would be better served using taxpayer dollars if they focused their efforts on fuel treatments around homes and infrastructure.

“Thinning can help protect the things we value where people live in the wildland-urban interface, but it will not make wildfires and large-acreage burns go away,” she said. “Thinning, no matter how much we increase the rate of it, will not be able to outpace the influence of warming on wildfire area burned.”

Schoennagel, who specializes in the implications of forest management policy, said the argument that more logging and thinning would reduce or prevent catastrophic wildfires is “hard to break apart” because it seems so sound without looking deep into the scientific research that’s been done on the subject.

“Did they know last year that those areas were going to burn this year?” she asked of the fires that burned in Montana this year. “It’s always easy, especially ex post facto, looking back to say, ‘Darn it, if only we had thinned or logged, we would be psyched.’ But it’s little bit of a crapshoot probability game whether the treatment you put in is going to encounter wildfire in the 10 to 15 years it remains effective in reducing fire severity. Simply because forests in the West are so vast, the chance of burning in a place we’ve pre-treated is so low. It’s not a very effective lever. We don’t know where fires are going to happen.”

On May 17, Schoennagel testified in front of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Federal Lands hearing that was titled “Seeking Better Management of America’s Overgrown, Fire-Prone National Forests.”

She said that most forests in the West are not overgrown due to past suppression, and forest management tools like thinning and prescribed burns can’t outpace the rise in wildfires.

“However, if strategically placed, such management can reduce fire severity, help firefighters protect communities and hopefully reduce the cost and risk of suppression,” she said.

Schoennagel and a team of other fire and forest experts recently published a research paper called “Adapt to more wildfire in western North American forests as climate changes.”

In it, they argue that the current approaches to fighting and attempting to prevent wildfires through suppression and fuels management are inadequate.

The team contends that fuels reduction “cannot alter regional wildfire trends” and that new approaches are needed. Those include targeting fuels reduction to increase adaptation by some ecosystems and residential communities to more frequent fire, actively managing more wild and prescribed fires with a range of severity, and giving incentives and planning for residential development to withstand inevitable fire.

Schoennagel told the subcommittee that a wide range of scientific studies has found that since the 1970s, temperatures have risen by an average of 2 degrees Fahrenheit, snowpack is melting one to four weeks earlier than historically normal, and fire seasons are almost three months longer. In the 1970s, there were 20 large fires per year and now there are more than 100 large fires every year.

“Further warming is expected, 2-4 degrees Fahrenheit in the next few decades, which will spark ever more wildfires, perhaps beyond the ability of many Western communities to cope,” she testified.

“The area burned is tightly correlated with warming in the West, no matter how much thinning we do,” she told the Missoulian. “Thinning can reduce fire severity if that thinned area burns, and help us fight some fires, but it’s not going to stop the increase in area burned in the West. Fires simply burn when it’s hot and dry, and it’s getting hotter and drier on average.”

***

Back in September, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke directed all land managers at all levels under the Department’s supervision to “adopt more aggressive practices, using the full authority of the Department, to prevent and combat the spread of catastrophic wildfires through robust fuels reduction and pre-suppression techniques.”

Sen. Steve Daines and Rep. Greg Gianforte, both Montana Republicans, have called for more forest management in recent months. Both have also assailed what they call “environmental extremists” that they say stall logging projects with lawsuits.

“Here’s one of the problems we have in Montana,” Daines said during a recent teleconference in which he took calls while on a video screen broadcast on a Facebook live feed. “We have radical environmentalists who are blocking projects to remove dead trees even in some cases, lodgepoles that died from insect infestation. We have radical environmentalists that do not represent the vast majority of Montanans who believe in a common sense balanced, approach. They stop these projects.”

Larson, the fire ecologist at UM, doesn’t want to take sides, but he is pushing back on the notion that “environmental extremists” are the bogeymen causing wildfires.

“I don’t think there is a scientific basis to blame environmentalists who have litigated and held up individual projects,” he said. “We can’t prevent fires. It’s not an attainable goal. Environmentalists are acting entirely within the law. They’re not doing anything illegal or unethical, and they’re using the same mechanisms available to all the rest of us to participate in public land management.

“So where does responsibility lie there? If we take away the ability for those environmental groups to participate, we also would be removing our own ability as private citizens, as engaged participants in public land management. It cuts both ways.”

Larson said he realizes that smoky air is a terrible burden for people in the summer, but he also agrees that aggressive thinning and logging wouldn’t help.

“The smoke issue in a year like this is intractable, but we’re not going to stop it,” he said. “Imagine a scenario where we had aggressively restored forests all over western Montana so that those forests were resilient to fire. In a year like this, once a fire is ignited, the spread is so rapid it’s going to burn into mountain forests where there is no ecological or economic rationale to have ever done logging in those forests. Even if you had treated those, we would still be breathing smoke. The scale of area so greatly exceeds what we could ever treat, so we’re still going to have those smoke problems.”

Larson said he understands that people are looking for a scapegoat.

“It’s a difficult thing to hear,” he said of the scientific conclusion that preventing wildfires is impossible. “The natural tendency is to blame somebody. But fire is overwhelmingly driven by summer drought. About 80 percent of the year-to-year variation of fire frequency and size is explained just by summer climate. There is also an overwhelming amount of evidence that humans are causing these global climate impacts.”

Daines, on a tour of the Lolo Peak fire earlier this summer, said the “climate has always been changing.”

“Go back to 1910,” he said. “We had the Big Burn, 3 million acres. In 1930s we had the Dust Bowl. My ancestors living up on the Hi-Line had to leave our state to go to Canada. The climate has always been changing. We go through warmer cycles, cooler cycles, droughts, etc., extra precipitation. We are in a warm cycle right now. We are in drought conditions here in Montana and consequently we’re having a severe fire season.”

Larson agreed that 1910 was an “epic” drought year.

“It’s absolutely true that there is variability in the climate and drought is worse in certain years,” he said. “That doesn’t somehow negate the fact that humans are causing the climate to warm.”

Larson also said that fires are an essential part of the ecosystem. For example, although most people associate wildfires with a short-term loss in the water quality of nearby streams because loose soil erodes into the waterway, it provides long-term benefits.

“Over the long term you can only have healthy stream habitat with periodic delivery of large wood and sediment into aquatic network,” he said. “There are short-term negative consequences to waterways after a fire, with turbidity and fine sediments, but it’s better over the bigger, longer-term picture.”

Larson also said that many species, such as the black-backed woodpecker, have evolved to live in burned areas. He also said fires play an important role in cycling organic matter into forests.

***

Schoennagel is trying to convince more people that dry, low-elevation forests are where thinning is both most ecologically appropriate and where fires tend to burn more frequently. She said that’s where fire managers should focus their efforts, especially around the wildland-urban interface near communities. Research has shown that humans start the majority of wildfires, so thinning there is also probably more likely to encounter fire than in the backcountry.

High-elevation forests tend to burn very infrequently because they are cooler and wetter on average, she added, so the chance of a thinned area to burn there is much lower and these forests burn at high severity naturally, so there is no ecological need to reduce severity there.

“Combined, strategically thinning dry low-elevation forests and near the wildland-urban interface is a win-win,” she said. “It reduces fire severity where it’s needed ecologically, and helps protect people and homes. But importantly, such treatments would have a better chance of encountering a fire.”

***

Kevin Barnett, a research associate in the Department of Economics at the University of Montana, collaborated with a team of researchers to quantify the frequency and extent of fire and fuel treatment interactions on federal lands across the U.S.

“The Hazardous Fuels Reduction Program received a lot of financial investment and resources over the past 15 years,” he explained. “We treat quite a lot of landscapes each year. And less than 10 percent of that had even burned by a subsequent fire. So that raises more broad general questions over the efficacy of fuel treatments to change regional fire patterns.”

Since 2006 when the Forest Service allocated about $290 million per year for the hazardous fuels reduction, there has been a steady rise in the discretionary funding allocated to that program. Barnett said in fiscal year 2017 the Forest Service spent roughly $375 million on the program.

“It boils down to: Not a whole lot of the treated area we’ve put in has been impacted by fire,” he said. “It raises questions about the cost-effectiveness of fuel treatments.”

This paper, in the July 2017 edition of the Journal of Forestry, may help us in our discussions of fuel-treatment effectiveness.

“An Evaluation of the Forest Service Hazardous Fuels Treatment Program—Are We Treating Enough to Promote Resiliency or Reduce Hazard?”

The USFS offers this intro:

In the wrong place at the wrong time, wildfires cause damage to ecosystems and threaten homes, communities, and cultural resources. To manage the impact of future wildfire and help restore its natural role in forest ecosystems, land managers often use fuel treatments such as thinning, mowing, and prescribed burning. How well do these treatments work? Ecologist Nicole Vaillant studies fire behavior and fuel treatments, including how effective they are over time. Her work is important in helping land managers assess wildfire risk and compare different fuel treatment strategies. She recently led a study that addresses the question: Are we treating enough of the landscape to compensate for decades of fire suppression?

Vaillant and her coauthor, Elizabeth Reinhardt, evaluated the extent of fuel treatments and wildfire on all lands administered by the Forest Service from 2008 to 2012. They compared these areas with historical wildfire rates and severities; they found that each year only about 45 percent of the area that would have burned historically experienced either characteristic wildfire or fuel treatment. This indicates a “disturbance deficit.” The good news is that 73 percent of the acres burned by wildfire during this period experienced characteristic fire (wildfire at an appropriate severity level for that ecosystem). However, Vaillant’s study also found that the forest type in the highest wildfire hazard class had the lowest percentage of area treated and also the highest proportion of uncharacteristically high-severity wildfire. This suggests that locating more treatments in areas with the highest hazard could improve program effectiveness. This is the first study to intersect the actual footprint of fuel treatments and wildfire with mean fire-return interval and wildfire hazard on a national scale.

Douglas County, in southwestern Oregon, is so broke it had to close all its public libraries earlier this year.

However, according to an investigation in the Oregonian, Douglas County Commissioners “have awarded Communities for Healthy Forests a total of $490,000 in federal money over the last two years, $250,000 of it to make videos. Only one has been released.”

After originally reading the story, I went to Guidestar and looked up the most recent 990 tax report for Communities for Healthy Forests. Turns out, according to their 2015 990 report to the IRS, Communities for Healthy Forests paid their executive director, Javier Goirigolzarri, $77,258 in 2015 for a 30 hour work week. That comes to almost $50 an hour.

Below is the opening few paragraphs of the Oregonian story. Click here to read the entire thing.

The six-minute video opens to ominous music and burning trees. After the flames are out, a narrator says, forests suffer from devastating neglect, turning into a “vast sea of dead, charred trees” that aren’t reforested because of a maze of confusing, contradictory environmental regulations.

The music brightens as the answer appears: Salvage logging. The video concludes by urging viewers to call their elected officials “and tell them these federal lands… are too valuable to simply walk away.”

The clip credits a tiny nonprofit called Communities for Healthy Forests and went online in early September, a day before Oregon Republican Rep. Greg Walden introduced a bill to harvest trees burned this summer in the Columbia River Gorge. Timber companies support the plan.

It’s become routine for cryptically named interest groups to push changes in federal policy that industry wants. The surprising twist this time: Federal money paid for it.

Douglas County, a local government so broke it closed all its public libraries earlier this year, funded Communities for Healthy Forests to create the video. And it did so with federal safety net money meant to ease rural Oregon’s dependence on timber revenue.

Commissioners have awarded Communities for Healthy Forests a total of $490,000 in federal money over the last two years, $250,000 of it to make videos. Only one has been released.

The Douglas County commission’s spending raises questions about a federal program called Secure Rural Schools, which has suffered from a lack of oversight since it was co-authored in 2000 by Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat.

I’ve been a contributor on this blog for a long time, and if there are two people and/or organizations that some folks on this blog love to hate more then the rest it’s the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Dr. Chad Hanson.

So, how cool is it that AWR’s director Mike Garrity and Dr. Hanson, research ecologist with the John Muir Project, have this opinion piece in today’s Washington Post?!?

The American West is burning, Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) tells us in his recent Post op-ed. He and officials in the Trump administration have described Western forest fires as catastrophes, promoting congressional action ostensibly to save our National Forests from fire by allowing widespread commercial logging on public lands. This, they claim, will reduce forest density and the fuel for wildfires.

But this position is out of step with current science and is based on several myths promoted by commercial interests.

The first myth is the notion that fire destroys our forests and that we currently have an unnatural excess of fire. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is a broad consensus among scientists that we have considerably less fire of all intensities in our Western U.S. forests compared with natural, historical levels, when lightning-caused fires burned without humans trying to put them out.

There is an equally strong consensus among scientists that fire is essential to maintain ecologically healthy forests and native biodiversity. This includes large fires and patches of intense fire, which create an abundance of biologically essential standing dead trees (known as snags) and naturally stimulate regeneration of vigorous new stands of forest. These areas of “snag forest habitat” are ecological treasures, not catastrophes, and many native wildlife species, such as the rare black-backed woodpecker, depend on this habitat to survive.

Fire or drought kills trees, which attracts native beetle species that depend on dead or dying trees. Woodpeckers eat the larvae of the beetles and then create nest cavities in the dead trees, because snags are softer than live trees. The male woodpecker creates two or three nest cavities each year, and the female picks the one she likes the best, which creates homes for dozens of other forest wildlife species that need cavities to survive but cannot create their own, such as bluebirds, chickadees, chipmunks, flying squirrels and many others.

More than 260 scientists wrote to Congress in 2015 opposing legislative proposals that would weaken environmental laws and increase logging on National Forests under the guise of curbing wildfires, noting that snag forests are “quite simply some of the best wildlife habitat in forests.”

That brings us to myth No. 2: that eliminating or weakening environmental laws — and increasing logging — will somehow curb or halt forest fires. In 2016, in the largest analysis ever on this question, scientists found that forests with the fewest environmental protections and the most logging had the highest — not the lowest — levels of fire intensity. Logging removes relatively noncombustible tree trunks and leaves behind flammable “slash debris,” consisting of kindling-like branches and treetops.

This is closely related to myth No. 3: that dead trees, usually removed during logging projects, increase fire intensity in our forests. A comprehensive study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences thoroughly debunked this notion by showing that outbreaks of pine beetles, which can create patches of snag forest habitat, didn’t lead to more intense fires in the area. A more recent study found that forests with high levels of snags actually burn less intensely. This is because flames spread primarily through pine needles and small twigs, which fall to the ground and soon decay into soil shortly after trees die.

Finally, myth No. 4: that we can stop weather-driven forest fires. We can no more suppress forest fires during extreme fire weather than we can stand on a ridgetop and fight the wind. It is hubris and folly to even try. Fires slow and stop when the weather changes. It makes far more sense to focus our resources on protecting rural homes and other structures from fire by creating “defensible space” of about 100 feet between houses and forests. This allows fire to serve its essential ecological role while keeping it away from our communities.

Lawmakers in Congress are promoting legislation based on the mythology of catastrophic wildfires that would largely eliminate environmental analysis and public participation for logging projects in our National Forests. This would include removing all or most trees in both mature forests and in ecologically vital post-wildfire habitats — all of which is cynically packaged as “fuel reduction” measures.

The logging industry’s political allies have fully embraced the deceptive “catastrophic wildfire” narrative to promote this giveaway of our National Forests to timber corporations. But this narrative is a scientifically bankrupt smoke screen for rampant commercial logging on our public lands. The American people should not fall for it.

Chad Hanson is a research ecologist with the John Muir Project and is co-editor and co-author of “The Ecological Importance of Mixed-Severity Fires: Nature’s Phoenix.” Mike Garrity is executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies.

This is a must read! Public lands, wildlife management and Forest Service censorship, oh my!

Dr. Martin Nie is not only the director of the distinguished Bolle Center for People and Forests at the University of Montana…but Dr. Nie was one of the founders of this blog. The Missoulian article also includes quotes from current blog contributor Jon Haber. – mk

Forest Service tried to quash paper debunking Montana wildlife authority
By Rob Chaney, Missoulian | Full article here

The U.S. Forest Service has disavowed a legal analysis it commissioned that showed federal land managers have given state wildlife departments more authority than they really possess.

In June, the agency asked the University of Montana to remove the draft report five days after “Fish and Wildlife Management on Federal Lands: Debunking State Supremacy” appeared on the Bolle Center for People and Forest’s website.

Three weeks later, it terminated a two-year contract with the center and its director, Martin Nie, citing the “provocative title” as a reason.

“This is some of the most tedious, boring work I’ve ever done,” Nie told a group of UM students Wednesday. “That’s what’s amazing — how much controversy this has generated.”

The beehive Nie and his colleagues whacked concerns who owns and controls wildlife in the nation: state fish and game departments or federal land managers.

In 126 pages of Supreme Court citings, legislative history and case studies, the Bolle team argued that “the U.S. Constitution grants the federal government vast authority to manage its lands and wildlife resources … even when states object.”

“The myth that ‘the states manage wildlife and federal land agencies only manage wildlife habitat’ is not only wrong from a legal standpoint but it leads to fragmented approaches to wildlife conservation, unproductive battles over agency turf, and an abdication of federal responsibility over wildlife,” the report stated. It found that claim “especially dubious when states assert ownership as a basis to challenge federal authority over wildlife on federal lands.”

One case study Nie looked at took place just over the Montana border last winter. An Idaho Department of Fish and Game helicopter team trapped and radio-collared two wolves in the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness while ostensibly conducting an elk study. The action violated several requirements of the federal Wilderness Act as well as a federal court warning against such activities. In June, a federal judge ordered Idaho to destroy all the elk and wolf data gathered from the study and chastised the Forest Service for allowing the project to go forward.

“Congress has no interest in usurping the role of states in managing hunting and fishing,” Nie said. “But the federal government can’t say it doesn’t manage public land just because they don’t want to manage the take of big-game animals. What’s baffling to us was we reminded them they have the power, and they don’t seem to want to hear it.”

Forest Service officials at the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Fort Collins, Colorado, and in Washington, D.C., did not respond to requests for comment on this story Friday. A spokesperson said they may be able to discuss the issues next week.

Nie stressed the report didn’t call for a federal claw-back of authority over wildlife. Rather, it suggested a more constructive “co-trusteeship” that balances state management goals with federal obligations to conserve all kinds of fish and wildlife in the public trust.

Take it down

Nie’s team posted a draft version of the study on June 2 on the Bolle Center’s website for feedback and criticism before sending it for publication in Environmental Law, a law review at Lewis & Clark Law School dedicated to environmental issues.

Five days later, Rocky Mountain Research Station Director John Phipps contacted Franke College of Forestry and Conservation Dean Tom DeLuca and asked him to take down the report. Nie said Phipps told him, “I hope that the consequences of this decision will not be as serious as I fear they will be.”

DeLuca declined to remove the report.

“To be told you have to take that down or face consequences — that sure seems like censorship to me,” DeLuca said. “No other Forest Service research project we have has encountered something like this, and we have a very close relationship with the Forest Service. I don’t know Phipps personally, but we’ve always had a very positive relationship. When he says ‘consequences,’ I don’t know how to interpret that. Does he mean for the college or for Martin?”

Lucy France at UM’s Office of Legal Counsel said the university has and intends to continue its positive working relationship with the Forest Service. But it also considers Nie a well-respected faculty member and scholar, and supports the academic freedom of all its faculty.

“The university supports, and to the extent it can be helpful, will continue to help facilitate continuing dialogue between Dr. Nie and the U.S. Forest Service,” France said. “The university position is that neither it nor Dr. Nie did anything to violate the terms of the joint venture agreement.”

DeLuca said UM and the Forest Service have deeply interwoven research ties, with more than $2 million a year in joint venture agreements and related funding supporting student and faculty activity.

On June 26, Phipps sent a letter to UM stating that the Forest Service was terminating Nie’s contract. Phipps stated the contract required all work to be produced in collaboration with the agency, and “to date, the Forest Service has not collaborated on the content of any final or draft reports or other publications produced(.)”

Nie found this confusing. He had been invited to formally brief Forest Service leadership in Washington, D.C., twice in 2015 and 2016 while the research was in progress (for the first time in his career).

He added that the contract laid out what the Forest Service was supposed to do on its end: “I fail to understand the rationale of terminating an agreement based on a perceived failure of the USFS, not by me and my research team,” he wrote to Phipps.

Phipps followed up on July 27 with a clarification letter. He wrote the agency wasn’t accusing Nie of failing to carry out the obligations of the contract: “Rather at the time the decision was made to terminate the agreement, the Forest Service simply had not seen the results of any research or content of any draft or final work product.” Phipps added the agency “looks forward to working with Dr. Nie” and UM on future projects.

That further confounded matters. “On what basis would you ask that the article be taken offline if the agency had not yet seen it?” Nie asked.

On August 30, Forest Service Deputy Chief for Research and Development Carlos Rodriguez-Franco wrote Nie another response.

“The concerns which led to the termination … arose when a draft article, with a provocative title challenging state legal authorities, was placed on a public website without prior substantive comment from the Forest Service,” Rodriguez-Franco wrote.

“(I)t became apparent that the work being conducted by the University was entering the realm of legal services — including interpreting the Constitution, laws and court cases as they pertain to the administration of Forest Service programs — rather than scientific research.”

The Forest Service, he explained, was required by law to get its legal advice from the federal Office of General Counsel.

But the contract itself never asked for scientific research. It requested “an authoritative review of the policy-legal issues related to wildlife management on federal lands … to explain the more relevant public land laws, regulations, case law, agreements and plans relevant to fish and wildlife management on federal lands and wilderness(.)”

The contract came from the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute, a Forest Service-funded center that Nie can see from his office on the fourth floor of UM’s Clapp Science Center. Center Director Susan Fox wrote Phipps a letter supporting Nie and protesting the contract termination.

“Blue-ribbon panels are used when it is important that they are independent from political influence or agency authority,” Nie quoted from Fox’s letter to Phipps. “Blue-ribbon panels are often appointed by government to report on a matter of controversy.”

What’s the controversy?

Nie described the final version of the report as “four parts Nyquil and one part Red Bull.” It charts the legal reasoning from dozens of federal court cases confirming that federal law trumps state law where wildlife is concerned. It also chronicles the history of states carving out exceptions to that federal authority, or challenging federal oversight when it conflicts with state plans.

For example, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2016 attempted to protect grizzly bears and wolves on national wildlife refuges from hunting practices promoted by Alaska’s state predator control policy to boost elk, moose and caribou populations. Congress this year used the Congressional Review Act to nullify the FWS regulations, although it didn’t take away the agency’s obligation to protect predators on its lands.

The underpinning for public land management is something called the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. Nie’s work poked that historic philosophy of big-game hunting.

The North American Model dates back to the 1860s, when habitat loss to settlement and commercial hunting of wildlife for sale drove much of the continent’s deer and elk off the landscape. Hunting advocates, including Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell, helped lead a movement to professionalize wildlife management and preserve habitat.

As noted in the Missoula-headquartered Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation’s website, the model has two core principles. “That our fish and wildlife belong to all Americans, and that they need to be managed in a way that their populations will be sustained forever.”

Montana’s five-week, general big-game hunting season stands testament to the success of the idea. The state enjoys one of the longest and most liberal opportunities to kill deer, elk, black bears, fish and antelope anywhere in the continental U.S. Its Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks gets almost all its funding directly from hunters and anglers through the sale of licenses and permits to hunt and fish.

The problem, according to the study, is that approach assumes the point of public wildlife is to serve the needs of the community that hunts it. That perspective excludes or demotes the needs of non-game animals, people who watch but don’t hunt, ecosystems that depend on a balance of predators and prey, and places that don’t support popular game animals.

“When we got into all those cases, we were surprised to see the states constantly citing this (North American) model,” Nie said. “They’ve been making these arguments for a century. But the constitutional issues have been resolved for a long time.”

Nevertheless, the presumption got woven into federal policy without proper support. For example, federal Bureau of Land Management policy 43 CFR Part 24 states in part: “BLM lands … explicitly recognized and reaffirmed the primary authority and responsibility of the States for management of fish and resident wildlife on such lands.” In fact, Nie argued, underlying federal law does not grant such state primacy.

Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Director Martha Williams said that tension is a constant factor in land management.

“In these political times, looking at wildlife management and public lands is timely and, frankly, tricky,” Williams said. “I firmly believe in public trust wildlife. It’s a responsibility that states, especially Montana, need to take seriously. I think the authors are asking for more understanding of the need for collaboration between the states and federal government on wildlife.”

Giving states ownership of public wildlife also pushes the federal government out of the land-management arena. DeLuca said that may be a clue to why the report generated such a swift shut-down.

“It’s more than just the title,” DeLuca said. “It’s the content of the work and the definitive conclusion that there’s no primacy of states over wildlife. That pushes against the supposed agenda to shift responsibility for federal land management down to the states.”

The report documents efforts by organizations like the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies to cement state primacy into federal law. It noted that AFWA has been attempting that “through legally questionable policy channels and nontransparent agreements between federal agencies and (AFWA).” Montana FWP is a member of AFWA.

The ideas also show up in bills like the Sportsmen’s Heritage and Recreational Enhancement Act, which passed out of the House Natural Resources Committee on Sept. 13. The bill blocks federal restrictions on lead ammunition and fishing tackle and gives states expanded approval of federal fishing restrictions, among other things. Its final section, “Respect for State Wildlife Management Authority,” states: “Nothing in this act shall be construed as interfering with, diminishing, or conflicting with the authority, jurisdiction or responsibility of any State to exercise primary management, control or regulation of fish and wildlife under State law, on land or water within the State, including on Federal land administered by the Bureau of Land Management or the Forest Service.”

“Some of us were aware of the SHARE Act, but we chose not to include that in the scope of paper,” report co-author Jon Haber said. “It wasn’t targeted at the SHARE Act or other legislation. This is information that could be used anywhere. That’s all it was intended to be.”

Haber is a retired Forest Service planning specialist. He was joined in the project by Christopher Barnes, recently retired wilderness specialist from BLM’s Carhart Center, and Kenneth Pitt, a retired attorney from the USDA Office of General Counsel. On the academic side, Nie brought in law professor Sandra Zellmer and former University of Alaska associate professor Julie Joly.

Nie opted to keep the dispute quiet over the summer, hoping to get an explanation of the Forest Service’s reaction and perhaps an apology. At one point, it appeared the agency was going to provide a formal review through its Office of General Counsel. That fizzled after several weeks of anticipation. It wasn’t until students asked about the project at the start of the fall semester that he decided to air the dispute publicly.

At Wednesday’s gathering, UM environmental sociologist Jill Belsky played devil’s advocate and asked about the decision to keep the “debunking” title. If the goal was to promote better state and federal cooperation, getting silenced by a federal agency wasn’t the intended outcome.

Nie said the team considered changing the title. But once they got the order to take the paper offline, they dug in.

“This is what we do,” Nie said. “These are myths, and they need to be debunked. If they can’t get past a title, there’s no hope the agencies will ever change.”

New Forest Service Chief Tony Tooke announced today that the Forest Service is unrolling “bold moves we will make throughout the agency to help our employees improve our ability to do more work on the ground, deliver more results and live up to our responsibility for sound land stewardship.” The new planning and analysis tactics will be announced next week at a Phoenix workshop attended by over 200 Forest Service leaders. These “innovations [will] demonstrate ways to significantly reduce costs and the time it takes for us to do this work, while delivering safe, high quality outcomes—with meaningful results that honor our stewardship responsibilities.”

The Forest Service’s Phoenix workshop comes at a time when some members of Congress believe that changes in environmental laws are needed. It appears Chief Tooke and his leadership team believe that the Forest Service already has the tools needed to get the job done.

Here is the complete text of Chief Tooke’s all-employees email:’

From: FS-Office of the Chief
Sent: Thursday, September 21, 2017 5:03 AM
To: FS-All FS
Subject: ***MESSAGE FROM THE CHIEF***Employees Invited to Participate via Live Stream in National Workshop on Environmental Analysis and Decision-making

Next week more than 200 leaders from around the country will convene in Phoenix, AZ, for a national workshop aimed at initiating Forest Service-wide reform of our environmental analysis and decision-making processes.

We invite you to join us via live streaming for the opening and closing sessions of the Environmental Analysis and Decision Making workshop, which brings together professionals from every level of the organization. It will result in bold moves we will make throughout the agency to help our employees improve our ability to do more work on the ground, deliver more results and live up to our responsibility for sound land stewardship.

The Workshop takes place Monday-Thursday, September 26-28. You can join 8 a.m.-noon Pacific Time Tuesday, September 26, for the opening session and 2:15-4:15 p.m. Pacific Time Thursday, September 28, for the closing session. (See instructions below)

The National Leadership Council and I will participate in portions of the session. Participants will draw on more than 30 years of experience of completing environmental analyses and making sound decisions. This includes learning from innovative efforts taking place in various units of these agency. These innovations demonstrate ways to significantly reduce costs and the time it takes for us to do this work, while delivering safe, high quality outcomes—with meaningful results that honor our stewardship responsibilities. Now is the time to apply these innovations nation-wide.

This gathering serves as a critical next step toward a collective shift for the Forest Service. The timing is right: A confluence of factors—including a back log of needed mission critical work, a need for increased employee capacity, land conditions calling for extensive forest restoration, and increased expectations for the agency to deliver services—have come together to create an urgency for change. To be successful, we will need support and commitment from all employees. I am asking you to participate in this change that will advance our commitment to citizens we serve and lands we steward.

I am personally committed to keeping this effort moving forward; I am working right alongside you to get it done. We look forward to your workshop participation—in person or live stream–and thank you for the commitment to our work ahead to improve results to sustain healthy, resilient and productive forests.

Live Steam Broadcasts:

Opening Session: 8 a.m-12 Noon, Pacific Time, Tuesday September 26
Closing Session: 2:15-4:15 pm. Pacific Thursday, September 28.

To connect to the live stream, please click on the link below:

http://fsweb.wo.fs.fed.us/nfs/live.html

Helpful advice:
· Because of bandwidth limitations, every unit should attend from a central location if at all possible.

· Confirm your system has the most recent version of Adobe Flash player appropriate for your computer.

Chief Tony Tooke

The Columbia River Gorge’s Eagle Creek Fire will be history as about 5 inches of rain are forecast to fall within the next several days. Tongue-in-cheek, we can calculate the ecosystem service value of rain by analyzing the avoided cost of an alternative delivery vehicle — the Global Supertanker.

Five inches of rain delivered across the Eagle Creek Fire’s 48,387 acres is 6.6 billion gallons. The Supertanker can dump about 20,000 gallons per sortie, and, if a sufficient airfield is nearby, can perform about seven sorties per day at a daily rate of $250,000 (note that these calculations are for dumping water, not retardant, which would add a couple of bucks per gallon to the cost). It would take the Supertanker about 47,000 days to dump the equivalent of 5 inches of rain at a cost of $10 billion and change.

Ahh, blissful, beautiful, cheap free rain!

Last night Montana Senator Steve Daines, who hasn’t hosted an in-person town hall meeting in over 1,000 days hosted a ‘teletownhall’ to blame ‘radical environmentalists’ for wildfires.

Montana Public Radio News Director Eric Whitney sat in the studio and listened to Senator Daines’ phone call with University of Montana Forest Ecologist Dr. Andrew Larson.

You can listen to the interview here, and the transcript is below. Suffice to say, Dr. Larson took Senator Steve Daines to the woodshed and dumped cold water on his incendiary and childish “radical environmentalist” rhetoric.

P.S. For at least the past twenty years us ‘radical’ ‘fringe’ and ‘extremist’ environmentalists have been basically delivering the same message and points that Dr. Larson does in this excellent, in-depth Montana Public Radio interview. – mk

Last night Senator Steve Daines held what he calls a “tele-townhall,” one of the periodic conference calls he invites Montanans to join, in which he takes a few questions from callers. This one was also live streamed on his Facebook page. The topic was forest management and wildfires.

Senator Daines said Montanans are angry about the fires and smoke they’ve been enduring this summer, and placed the blame for the fires on, “Radical environmentalists, who are blocking projects to remove dead trees, even in some cases, trees, lodgepoles, that died from insect infestation,” Daines said. “We have radical environmental groups that do not represent the vast majority of Montanans, who believe in a balanced, common sense approach. They stop these projects.”

As he’s done before, Daines offered the Stonewall project outside Lincoln as an example of a logging project proposed by the U.S. Forest Service that could have reduced fire danger, had it not been stopped by a lawsuit. The Alliance for the Wild Rockies sued to stop the Stonewall, which was proposed for an area now being partially consumed by the 18,000-acre Park Creek Fire.

“The environmentalists are not responsible for that fire burning, and had the Stonewall project advanced, it’s very likely that the site would be burning today,” says Andrew Larson. He’s not an environmental activist. He’s an associate professor of forest ecology in the forestry college at the University of Montana.

“As an ecologist, as someone — I’m trained as a forester — I would expect and hope that that forest, that hypothetical treated forest, would burn. Because that’s what it needs to function, to be a healthy forest ecosystem. Montana forests are only going to function when they have fire in them. That’s a healthy forest,” Larson said.

I listened to Senator Daines’ conference call with Larson, who said he detected a change in the senator’s comments about wildfires. Daines has been saying that more logging would prevent forest fires. Last night he said more logging and forest management won’t entirely eliminate fire from the landscape, but will reduce risks from and severity of wildfires.

“I really was pleased to hear him say that. That’s, I think, a really important incorporation of some forest ecology, fire ecology knowledge into the types of things he’s saying,” Larson said.

“However, the entire conversation tonight on the tele-townhall mingled them, sometimes explicitly. More often there was the implication that, if we do more logging, more vegetation management, more thinning, we won’t have as many acres burned, and we won’t be breathing as much smoke; and that’s just absolutely not true,” Larson said.

“What we might be able to achieve with a more active vegetation management program are areas that don’t burn with as high a severity, we also might have safer working environments for fire managers.”

Larson acknowledged that it may seem counterintuitive that not removing vegetation from forests will have no impact the number of acres that burn in a given year, or the amount of smoke, but, “The total biomass that’s consumed might be less, but the only time you do not have enough fuel to carry a fire is going to be in the first year or two after a fire has burned,” he said.

“Even after you go and thin a forest, when it’s dry like it is now, it’s still going to carry a fire, it’s still going to generate smoke. So, in terms of day to day life, the experience we have during the fire season, we need to not get our hopes up,” Larson says. “You can anticipate more smoke. Even if we were to double, triple, increase the amount of area logged or thinned by a factor of ten or 20, we’re still going have smoke, we’re not going to stop the fires. We may change how they burn, and that’s an important outcome, it’s something that a lot of my research is directed at. But we need to make sure people don’t get their hopes up and expect something that the forestry profession, that managers in the Forest Service, the Department of Interior, can’t deliver on.”

A woman identified as Patricia from Ft. Benton, was one of the eight callers who were able to speak to Senator Daines last night. She asked about trees killed by pine beetles.

“And I was troubled, because I couldn’t understand why those trees were remaining, because they are a fire hazard, they are dead trees, so there is no reason for them to remain.”

Daines agreed, and said only, “radical environmentalists” would try to stop efforts to remove dead trees from Montana forests.

“That’s an attitude that I’m always kind of disappointed to encounter,” Larson said, “because a healthy forest has dead trees and dead wood. The snags — standing dead trees — and dead logs are some of the most important habitat features for biodiversity. You can’t have an intact, healthy wildlife community without dead wood in your forest.”

One of the lines Senator Daines often uses when talking about public lands management is, “a managed forest is a healthy forest.”

“One of the problems is, ‘healthy’ doesn’t have a scientific definition,” Larson said, “so, when we come at it from a technical perspective, it can mean whatever we want it to mean. Some of the most intensively managed forests in the world are in Northern Europe, and they are in a biodiversity crisis, because they have mismanaged their dead wood. They never let their trees get old, they never let ’em die. They cut ’em down and take them to the mill, and there is a horrible deficit of dead wood in those forests. And as a consequence, they’re compromised, they’re not functioning, they’re not providing the habitat for all the native biodiversity, the native wildlife species.

I asked Professor Larson what he thinks is important for Montanans who listened to Senator Daines’ conference call to keep in mind.

“My main points are, climate and weather drive fire. Healthy forests have to have dead trees in them. That’s not saying that we can’t cut some of the dead trees down. But you can’t have a functional forest without dead trees, they’re incredibly important for habitat,” Larson said.

“And the forestry profession, we need to be careful to not promise things that we can’t deliver,” he said. “And we’re never going to stop fire. We can help society live with fire, but that’s going to be a big team effort. We have to change our expectations. We need to expect that fire to come at some point, and not be surprised. We need to be planning for it — individual land owners, home owners — because that’s the environment we live in.”

This piece, “The Science of Fighting Wildfires Gets a Satellite Boost” from Megan Molteni in Wired is certainly worth a read.

While the news media in Montana seems entirely intent on just letting Montana’s politicians – especially from the GOP – engaged in childish name calling like calling Montana citizens who are environmentalists ‘extremists’ ‘fringe’ or ‘radicals’ (thereby inciting hatred, and maybe even potential violence against environmentalists in Montana)….

Numerous national media outlets (here and here, for example) seem to have no problem picking up the phone and contacting actual, real-life Montana scientists and researchers who actually do things like study wildfires. Crazy, right?

This part of the Wired article caught my eye (emphasis added):

Here’s the straightforward logic of Zinke’s scapegoating: Environmentalists block the Forest Service from lowering the fuel load on the land, land catches on fire, and now it’s harder to put out. Thanks, tree-huggers.

But fire scientists say it’s more complicated than that. Many question the ecological (and economic) value of thinning forests out, for three big reasons. One, the evidence for its efficacy is both scant and at times contradictory. Two, probabilistic risk assessments show that the thinning doesn’t really help much because the likelihood of a fire starting close enough to interact with thinned areas is negligibly small. And three, in the worst weather conditions — dry, hot, and most importantly, windy — no amount of thinning or selective logging is going to make much difference.

[Geez, where have we heard these points before… – mk]

A case in point: that Park Creek fire burning outside of Lincoln. It started on a remote slope that wasn’t slated for any prescribed burns or dead tree removals. But such treatments wouldn’t have made much difference anyway, according to Carl Seielstad, a fire ecologist at the National Center for Landscape Fire Analysis at the University of Montana, because the closest road is more than mile away, at the bottom of a slope.

If you know anything about fire behavior, you know it moves much faster uphill. And in this case there wasn’t much in that direction, except more trees. “Without any roads in this area there was nothing for firefighters to anchor to,” says Seielstad, pointing at a 3D rendering of the fire’s path he’s pulled up on his computer. “It’s fair to say that regardless of treatment, this area would probably have been impossible to contain.”

Well, as careful readers of this blog will recall, Montana’s Republican politicians including Secretary Ryan Zinke, Senator Steve Daines, Rep Greg “Gonna Body Slam Ya” Gianforte and even Sec of Ag Sonny Perdue all pointed to the Park Creek Fire in an effort to blame ‘fringe’ ‘radical’ ‘extremists’ environmentalists for wildfires throughout Montana. And of course the Montana timber industry had to jump on that blame the environmentalists bandwagon too.

Over the past 22 years, as I went from a seasonal wildland firefighter to a year-round forest and public lands activist, I’ve come to realize that one of the first things torched during wildfire season is the truth.

Hopefully more national news outlets continue to reach out to actual scientists and researchers in Montana to get their side of the story. Maybe someday soon more media outlets in Montana will be able to locate the wildfire scientists, researchers and experts literally living right under their noses, or maybe even right next door.