How one Oregon town put politics aside to save itself from fire

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This article about Ashland, Oregon, “How one Oregon town put politics aside to save itself from fire,” was first published back in September in Grist, but was republished today by InvestigateWest. Excellent piece.

“After another year of meetings and paperwork, the Forest Service approved the Ashland Watershed Protection Project. Environmentalists who had once thought that the notion of cutting down trees to reduce wildfire damage was simply a Trojan horse for loggers had engaged deeply with the evidence suggesting that human intervention could make the watershed resilient to fire. They had devised a plan of action they believed in. The doubters who had claimed that the environmentalists were obstructionists who would never agree to any real management watched in amazement as workers began cutting down trees.”

I attended one SAF tour of part of the Ashland Watershed Protection Project maybe 20 years ago. Lots of work has been done since then, but there’s a long way to go.

Let’s Co-Design and Co-Produce a NEPA Study! I. The Back and Forth of NEPA Papers in Journal of Forestry

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If you spend as much time online, reading news, etc. as I do to find juicy (relatively) tidbits for The Smokey Wire, you’ll notice many people talking past each other. I think part of that is just because there are few containers (I think that’s what they call them nowadays) that foster dialogue. I think we’ve got a terrific example to explore with the Fleischman et al. NEPA paper back and forth in the Journal of Forestry.

Anonymous posted this yesterday as a comment.

A said: “much boils down to talking past one another, (who said who said what about the relative formality of a hypothesis), ultimately disappointing in that regard.”

Anonymous found this new paper.. remember this journal article? and this response (r1) to the article (also Matthew published another response post here?)  Well this is the response to the response (r2).  The paper is attached here.NEPA article R2 and can be found online here.

FWIW, in this case, I don’t think it’s about the data, but about the claims in the first paper. If the original reviewers had pointed out that some of the claims were far beyond the data, then I think the second paper wouldn’t have been written. Here’s what Anonymous said:

“our paper tested no hypotheses” but it implied several that the other authors attempted to systematically test which they clearly stated, with the upshot being that the conclusions made needed formal hypothesis testing to match the strength of the claim

“our paper made no causal claims” but it clearly speculated about causes and the necessity for revising regulations, so is it not appropriate for someone to test those claims more formally?

Will be interesting to see a response to the response to the response. Really seems like the response to the response is to claim “not applicable!” whereas the intent of the original response was to question not the study as a whole but specifically the final conclusions drawn from it as resting more conclusions on the data than it can support

final note – it seems that the “response to the response” shifts the ground a little bit by claiming much more modest conclusions for the original study than that study itself made. the original article did indeed provide valuable trend data and kick off the conversation about what works and what doesn’t in an interesting direction, but it also claimed to reach conclusions about the role of CEs vs. EAs vs. EISs, conclusions about what to make of the relative abundance of litigation, and even further claims about the merits of policy change. the response to the response doesn’t really touch on these more ambitious claims. you can couch that as speculation all you like, but it doesn’t make the claim off limits for further evaluation.

general question on examples cited ; is it in any way historically demonstrable that NEPA-mandated public involvement led to the change of the 10am policy or allowable cut measures – inclined to think not, unless you collapse wildly divergent histories into something which NEPA can take credit for, somehow, and ignore NFMA)

Here’s the last paragraph of R2:

Ultimately, public comment periods, scientific analysis, and land management activities are tools the agency uses to achieve its goals of managing land in the public interest. Much like a fuels treatment, NEPA has costs as well as benefits, and a deeper understanding of what those costs are and how they can be minimized relative to their benefits would help the agency use the NEPA process more effectively. Although neither our analysis nor Morgan et al.’s directly addresses this big question, both of our analyses point to high levels of variability within the agency in terms of how NEPA is carried out. We suggest, as we did in our original article, that studying this variability may help the agency understand what works well, and what doesn’t, in the NEPA process.

Let’s compare this with what the original article said:

There has been much public debate on how the US Forest Service (USFS) can better fulfill its National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) obligations, including currently proposed rule-making by the agency and the Council on Environmental Quality; however, this debate has not been informed by systematic data on the agency’s NEPA processes. In contrast to recently publicized concerns about indeterminable delays caused by NEPA, our research finds that the vast majority of NEPA projects are processed quickly using existing legal authorities (i.e., Categorical Exclusions and Environmental Assessments) and that the USFS processes environmental impact statements faster than any other agency with a significant NEPA workload. However, wide variations between management units within the agency suggest that lessons could be learned through more careful study of how individual units manage their NEPA workload more or less successfully, as well as through exchanges among managers to communicate best practices. Of much greater concern is the dramatic decline in the number of NEPA analyses conducted by the agency, a decline that has continued through three presidential administrations and is not clearly related to any change in NEPA policy. This may suggest that USFS no longer has the resources to conduct routine land-management activities.

But then there’s alo the title to the original article: “US Forest Service Implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act: Fast, Variable, Rarely Litigated, and Declining.” Which seems like something of a stretch. But that’s fairly normal in today’s world.

Here are my claims to knowledge- I was the WO NEPA Assistant Director for both Process Predicament, and for the initiation of the PALS database. Practitioners have always known that some project NEPA takes longer than others; and that some of the variation is due to intrinsic tendencies of the unit (or that specific ID team), some due to the nature of the project (and the perceived need for bullet-proofing), some due to what the unit considers appropriate ways of dealing with a variety of public concerns, some due to changes of personnel, and some due to the perceived urgency of the project and its relationship to other possibly more urgent projects. All these things are known variables, and have been described at the EADM workshops by stakeholders, if nowhere else. Then there’s internal strategizing about size and content of NEPA- Queen Mary vs. flotilla of small boats, and so on.

I don’t think the PALs database can tell us about those.. you need qualitative research (aka interviews) to explore those further. As Fred Norbury, the former EMC director used to say, “we treat NEPA as a cobbler shop run by each unit, when it would be more efficient as a NIKE factory.” However, as you may recall, efforts to centralize ran into obstacles in FS culture. My point being that I think we could get much further if we (1) pooled our academic and practitioner knowledge, (2) reviewed existing sources of information, and 3) jointly determined what questions are interesting and could be addressed best by which available analytic tools. Otherwise known as co-design and co-production of knowledge. I think we should try it for this example, with the ultimate goal of applying for a grant from NSF or NIFA, perhaps combining scientists from both studies as well as practitioners. Anyway, we’ll start tomorrow with “What are the questions we could jointly study?” “what benefits might accrue from obtaining the answers?”

How many Forest Service employees does it take to screw in a light bulb?

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Maybe we’re too Serious here on Smokey Wire. Please forgive my non-original? attempt — meaning no disrespect at all to anyone — to lighten things up….

Q: How many Forest Service employees does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Scroll down for the answer….

Please post anything better…. — Steve

 

Scroll down…

 

Scroll down more….

 

Just a bit more….

 

A. One to screw in the light bulb and at least a dozen to write the EIS.

Get Thee Behind Me, NIMBY! Challenges of ENGO’s Dealing With Energy Development Projects

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I thought this opinion piece would be worthy of discussion, because federal lands in the West turn out to be key to current renewable energy build-outs.

But first I’d like to back up and give a framework which I think is important to consider, especially since these are likely to be major issues in the future.  Take a community composed of various ethnic groups, economic classes and so on, with surrounding landscapes.  Someone want to develop something there (mines, solar and wind, geothermal, powerlines, oil and gas, dams, grizzly or wolf reintroduction) for the good of the broader population.  Not to get all political science-y here but who decides what is the good of the broader population? Who decides who gets to sacrifice (however felt by locals) their own views, agriculture, land, to what end? What if some in the community benefit and others get only the downsides?   How does social justice enter into the equation?

And finally, should Tribes not only have a voice, but have the ultimate say, based on their original ownership of the land and the injustice of treaties? I’m thinking here on federal lands for pragmatic reasons.   With all these complexities, when Coastals start talking about NIMBYism when it comes to development of rural lands, I like to replace NIMBY in my mind with “local concerns.” As one of my fellow planning commissioners in El Paso County said.. “it’s got to go somewhere.” But does it? At the most extreme, using political force to do something locals don’t want has colonialist overtones.

Check out this Noah Smith op-ed in Bloomberg Opinion .. tagline

State and national leaders need to move more forcefully to override local protestors who are blocking new solar and wind developments under the guise of land conservation.

And for readers interested in partisan political stuff, the fellow who wrote this op-ed, Wally Nowinski, is  the former democratic ads director for House and Senate Dem candidates, according to the blurb.  As for me, I am quite sympathetic to the environmental groups.  They want to be the “good guys” but without the traditional “bad guys” (forest products, oil and gas) the way forward is not so clear.  They could be for nuclear to reduce the environmental footprint, but members probably don’t want that either.  I don’t see any bad guys here, just people who want different things.  Side note: in the comments it was pointed out that NRDC really hadn’t done what the author said.

Conservation is not the same thing as climate action.

Conservation is a conservative impulse, but right now, the climate threat calls for sweeping changes to our physical environment. Our best shot at mitigating the impact of climate change is to electrify every process in our economy as quickly as possible: We need to preserve clean energy infrastructure like hydro and legacy nuclear power plants. We need to build a ton of new wind and solar fast. And we need to find and harvest the raw materials needed for batteries.

All of these projects pose tradeoffs: They’re important from a climate standpoint, but bad from a conservation standpoint. To state the obvious: If you build a solar farm in the desert, it is no longer a natural desert habitat, it’s a solar farm. Meanwhile, wind farms do kill some birds. Hydro dams (though we aren’t likely to build more since we’ve already used the best sites), do disrupt fish, and nuclear plants still scare people.

So it’s not actually surprising that conservation groups like the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society and the NRDC regularly oppose specific clean energy projects, even while they acknowledge the importance of a rapid energy transition.

The tradeoffs are a hard problem for organizations to wrestle with, particularly when many of our biggest environmental groups were founded specifically with a goal of conservation. The Audubon Society was created to protect birds and the Sierra Club was founded by mountaineers. The Natural Resources Defense Council, meanwhile, grew out of opposition to a hydro-electric project on the Hudson River. Until very recently, their agendas were focused on protecting what already existed–not embracing rapid change.

For its part, the national Sierra Club leadership seems to be trying to put more emphasis on supporting clean energy projects than it did in the past. Its platform calls for 100% clean energy now, and the organization’s national magazine even published a story about the threat NIMBYs pose to renewable energy. But when you have an organization that has fought for conservation for over 100 years, and whose entire playbook and tool kit is designed to stop or at least delay change, embracing clean energy development can be hard.

Many conservation groups have a structure that makes them chaotic, and vulnerable to NIMBYs. 

One of the reasons the Sierra Club was so successful at advancing its agenda in the late 20th century is that it was organized as a chapter-based membership organization. Local chapters popped up across the country where the most passionate members could organize around local issues, lobby local politicians, and talk to the press, all with the credibility of the Sierra Club name behind them. The Audubon Society, and more recently the Sunrise Movement, followed a similar model.

This structure enabled the groups to take on many more fights than they otherwise would have, and helped broaden their influence within state and local governments across the country. Wherever you went, there was likely a Sierra Club chapter ready to weigh in on local development projects.

Now, that structure means that the groups’ power can be high-jacked to protect members’ backyards. For example, last year, the Sierra Club of Iowa came out swinging against a solar project. The weight of its message was increased by the imprimatur of the national brand—normie voters don’t know the difference—even though the national organization has said it’s pro-solar development.

The Sierra Club used to be for natural gas as a transitional fuel.. but local groups didn’t like development near them. So in that case, it was The Right Thing to be against natural gas due to the influence of locals.. or was it “high-jacked to protect members’ backyards” in that case as well?
…..

It’s not just organizations with a historic conservation mission that can be taken over by NIMBY interests either. Earlier this week the Amherst Chapter of the Sunrise Movement, a group whose tagline is “We are the climate revolution,” joined area NIMBYs in advocating for a moratorium on all large solar projects in the city.

Where do we go from here?

Big environmental groups have very powerful brands, particularly in blue states. Unfortunately, I think we should expect the trend of these organizations opposing clean energy projects to continue, at least in the short term. Because of their brand power, that opposition will carry a lot of weight, and it will likely be weaponized by conservatives and others to say “even environmentalists oppose this project.”

The solution will involve rethinking what it means to be “environmentalist.” The term is usually understood to encompass a wide range of different causes–from climate activism, to habitat conservation, to recycling and plastic straw bans. But it’s worth remembering that not everything coded as “green” helps fight climate change, and much of it is actively counterproductive.

The good news is there are some signs of an internal backlash within environmental groups. In 2019, a cadre of activists concerned about climate change took over the Ann Arbor, Michigan Sierra Club in a contentious election. In the Bay Area, different local Sierra Club chapters are fighting with each other about whether or not to support a big solar project. And while many chapters continue to be almost cartoonishly NIMBY on housing issues, the national Sierra Club changed its tune on housing construction and now supports infill development.

The most basic thing we can do now is simply to recognize we are not in an era where all environmental goals are aligned. Conservation and climate action are often directly at odds. And if we’re going to successfully prevent global calamity wrought by extreme weather and rapid warming, we’re going to have to displace many more tortoises.

In reality, developing a scheme of decarbonizing on paper is easy, and building it out is difficult. We always knew that.

Wildfire response to changing daily temperature extremes in California’s Sierra Nevada

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Here’s an open-access paper in which the authors find that:

Solely considering changes in summer daily temperatures from climate model projections, we estimate that by the 2040s, fire number will increase by 51 ± 32%, and burned area will increase by 59 ± 33%. These trends highlight the threat posed to fire management by hotter and drier summers.

Other factors are at play, too, of course. But if this doesn’t make the case for fuels reduction and other work that will make forests and communities more resilient, what will?

The Sciences That Matter in Forest Policy: Will Fire Science Be the New Winner?

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Last fall I was filling out a form and realized that I joined the Society of American Foresters in 1974.. which means it’s only two years to fifty.  There are many others in the TSW community from the same and earlier time periods.  It seems to me that taking the long view (at a foot a year, seedlings I planted are now fifty feet tall) might lead to seeing trends that are otherwise not obvious.

To that end, I’d like to talk about The Sciences That Matter in Policy and How They Think About Things.  When I took forest policy as an undergrad at Berkeley, forest policy seemed to be mostly in the hands of the field of economics. 

At the time, I thought forest policy was the most boring thing imaginable (the 1872 Mining Law? really?), but here I am.

Later it was determined that the ESA was a good policy tool by environmental groups, as depicted in George Hoberg’s work. So wildlife sciences became key, as for example, Chief Thomas, the Gang of Four, and so on. Yes, there are qualities of science silverback-hood* that are larger than original discipline, but I’m talking about general trends.

Then somewhere along the lines, folks (I think veg ecologists) came up with the course/fine filter approach.  Which wasn’t exactly science itself, but seemingly a common-sensical idea by scientists.  If you get have the veg as in the past, you should have the species as in the past.  So if you manage that way (course filter) you’ll have fewer endangered species that require protection beyond that. Somehow that transitioned to HRV..as I said during the 2001 Planning Rule discussion.. a full employment program for vegetation ecologists.

As geneticist, I’ve never been a fan of HRV..just pragmatically, it’s too difficult to figure out how things would have been if Europeans hadn’t killed off Native Americans. Or possibly enshrining some post-Native American past as the way things ought to be.  In evolutionary biology, change through time in response to changing conditions IS the natural process.

And I think that’s to some degree behind the concept of “restoration”; if that abstraction is taken with it’s usual English meaning.  And so it has been. But sometimes “restoration” means “resilience” .. and sometimes it’s a clear concept as in the practices of watershed restoration.

But prioritizing PODs is a completely different kettle of scientific and practitioner fish.  The goal is not to restore, or even make forests climate-resilient. The goal of PODS is to help suppression people manage wildfires. It’s pretty clear who the experts are. Fire suppression folks.

If we choose to manage PODs, they will be on the basis of 1) what practicing fire suppression folks think they need including concerns of fish, wildlife, watershed, recreation and so on, with some degree of help from 2) fire modelers who include climate considerations. 

So we could be changing from vegetation ecologists being the key policy-relevant science, to fire science being the key policy-relevant science. But being a fire scientist is different from having on-the-ground fire experience. In my experience, this is a wider practitioner to academic gap than in silviculture or wildlife or watershed. So in this case, practitioner, Indigenous, and local knowledge will also be brought into the mix in specific places.

The Forest Service tried to do that with Strategic Fireshed Assessments in California as described in this post. And Don Yasuda’s presentation about “why it didn’t happen”.

Note, I’m just talking location and management of PODs here, not other efforts to promote resilience of forests to fires, for which vegetation ecology, fire science, watersheds and wildlife sciences, and climate science would also be involved. I think it might be hard for some to pass the torch of power gracefully, both with regard to different science disciplines, and perhaps most difficult, to admit that suppression practitioners and Indigenous folks have a key role to play. It’s possible, that for these projects, that the research/academic “science” card will no longer be trump.

* science silverback-hood.. I’ll define as “being a person who gets asked for their opinions in policies beyond the relatively narrow confines of their own discipline.” I call it silverback-hood because in my experience it’s been mostly males, at least in forest policy.
 

A Cautionary Tale – Too Much Sawmill Capacity, Too Little Trees

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Everyone wants a solution to the wildfire dilemma across the west. A very common answer is we need more logging. So many sawmills have closed and gone away and now the chickens have come home to roost, they say. There is certainly some element of truth there but what happens when you have the opposite problem? When you have too much sawmill capacity and demand for volume exceeds timber sustainability? How does a situation like this come about and does it even exist?

I am Dave Mertz and I was the Natural Resource Staff Officer on the Black Hills National Forest (BHNF) from 2011 to 2017 when I retired. I provided oversight and management of the Forest’s timber program. One thing that I regret from that time is that I wish I had gotten out of the office more and out on the Forest. I should have had better knowledge of what was really going on out there. Fortunately, since I retired, I have been able to spend quality time on the Forest and learn a whole lot more about the situation we are in. It’s a somewhat complicated story and I am going to try and tell it here.

Prior to 2000, the BHNF was sitting fat, dumb and happy.  There were plenty of trees, you could argue too many trees.  There was certainly lots of sawmill capacity.  The 1997 Forest Plan had set an Allowable Sale Quantity (ASQ) of 202,000 ccf.  This was an achievable goal and would be met or exceeded many times over the next 20 years.  Then the mountain pine beetle (MPB) came to the Forest with a vengeance.  Along with that, a series of large fires including the Jasper Fire in 2000.  This is the largest fire on the Forest at over 80,000 acres. 

The MPB epidemic continued until 2016.  In the meantime, the Forest carried out an aggressive thinning program to mitigate the epidemic.  The timber industry was happy, they were seeing years where the timber volume sold exceeded the ASQ, sometimes significantly.  There was a problem though, the good times would eventually end.  The Forest Silviculturist began warning as far back as 2012 that there would be a future problem with timber sustainability.  The MPB had killed over 200,000 acres of trees and wildfire another 200,000 acres on a 1.2 million acre Forest.  Meanwhile, the timber industry was modernizing their mills and making them more efficient.  They needed fewer employees and could run more volume through their mills even faster.  If they ever believed that there would be a future problem with timber volume, they certainly didn’t act like it and never admitted it publicly.

Finally, by 2016, when the MPB epidemic ended, the Forest took a drawn-out approach to addressing the timber sustainability problem.  They would work with Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) to intensify their survey by doubling the plots.  They did this in response to the timber industry’s insistence that the data was not good enough to make a reduction in the annual volume sold.  They insisted that in spite of the beetle epidemic and wildfires, the timber volume sold could continue on as before.  Of course, they had some assistance from SD and WY politicians putting pressure on the Forest Service (FS).  Not that the Regional Office and Washington Office took much convincing.  They had no interest in reducing the volume sold.  It would go against the narrative that the FS wasn’t cutting enough.  Oh no, they weren’t sticking their necks out for the BHNF!  The Forest was often in the lead or top 2-3 of annual timber volume sold for the Agency.  They needed that volume!

Once the FIA gathered the additional data, which took three years, the Forest worked with FS Research to analyze the data and develop a scientific recommendation for long-term sustained yield.  A General Technical Report (GTR) was produced in April of 2021 that recommended an annual volume of 72,000 CCF to 90,000 CCF would be sustainable.  The day before the GTR was released, it was announced that one of the local sawmills would be closed.  The FS was blamed for the closure because timber sold in the current and previous fiscal years was below ASQ.

Six months later, the Forest came out with a tentative three-year plan to reduce timber volume sold to 80,000 CCF by FY 2024.  With much negotiation, alignment was reached with the Regional Office and Washington Office to make this tentative plan possible.  Meanwhile, significant pushback from the timber industry and politicians continues. 

It should be said that the BHNF is one of the most managed Forests in the National Forest System.  Much of the Forest’s suitable timber base has been thinned, either through logging or the MPB.  What do you do to keep the timber volume sold levels up when much of the Forest has already been thinned?  Well, in 2016 a Forest-wide project was developed to conduct overstory removal (OR) on 183,000 acres.  Never mind that many of these acres were not ready for OR due to insufficient regeneration or that they were still putting on significant growth resulting from the recent thinning.  This was really the Forest’s only option to keep high timber volumes flowing. 

A major justification from timber industry to keep sale volumes high is that the Forest needs to be thinned to save it from wildfires.  As stated earlier, much of the Forest has already been thinned.  Also, even though the Forest has been heavily logged for decades, this had minimal impact on the MPB epidemic (until they started thinning down to 40 basal area) and very little, if any impact on mitigating catastrophic wildfires. 

I took a look at the Jasper Fire from 2000 using Google Earth to see how much logging had occurred in the fire’s footprint prior to the fire.  I was able to go back to 1986 and look year by year to see what logging had occurred there.  Much of fire area had been thinned prior to the fire.  This thinning did little to mitigate the fire’s impact.  Granted, the fire occurred in late August in very dry, windy conditions, resulting in extreme fire behavior.  Extreme conditions, however, have been present for all of the large fires in the Black Hills, that is why they get big.  Thinning alone, without prescribed burning, has not proven to be effective in the Black Hills for mitigating catastrophic wildfire.  Very little prescribed burning takes place on the Forest for a variety of reasons.  The Forest uses wildfire mitigation to justify most of its timber projects.  They should be up front about its effectiveness.    

Attached is a link for a video that I produced which shows what occurred in the Jasper Fire. 

Jasper Fire before and after – YouTube

Not having enough sawmill capacity is a problem but what happens if you have too much?  All it takes is one large wildfire and a Forest can be in that position, when you have an industry that is highly dependent on FS timber.  The FS has not proven itself to be very adept at handling this kind of situation.  It has shown that overcutting can continue for years in spite of significant evidence that it is unsustainable.

Here are a couple of interviews that I have done with South Dakota Public Broadcasting regarding this topic.

Dave Mertz: The forest simply cannot sustain current logging levels | SDPB

Anatomy of a cut: We look at the Bull Springs Timber Sale in the Black Hills National Forest | SDPB


Missoulian: Fire strategy stuck with old tactics, experts warn

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Today, Rob Chaney with the Missoulian newspaper has an in-depth article featuring the expert opinions of Dr. Jack Cohen, a retired U.S. Forest Service fire scientist, and Missoula County Commissioner Dave Strohmaier regarding the “new” U.S. Forest Service strategy, “Confronting the Wildfire Crisis.”

Readers of this blog will likely recognize Dr. Jack Cohen as the world’s leading expert on protecting homes and communities from wildfire. Maybe you’ve even watched his video—produced by the experts at the National Fire Protection Association—called “Your Home Can Survive a Wildlife.” The U.S. Forest Service’s website even includes this featured page about Dr. Cohen and his life’s work.

Fewer readers may know about the previous career of Missoula County Commission Dave Strohmaier, who worked for 18 years with the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service, including working for 15 years as a wildland firefighter. In fact, Strohmaier is also the author of Drift Smoke: Loss and Renewal in a Land of Fire.

Below is the Missoulian article featuring the expert opinions of Dr. Jack Cohen and Missoulian County Commissioner David Strohmaier. I must point out that many of the views expressed here by Dr. Cohen and Commissioner Strohmaier have been repeatedly expressed by nearly every single environmental organization that works on public lands issues related to wildfires and logging.

Fire strategy stuck with old tactics, experts warn
By Rob Chaney, Missoulian (January 20, 2022)

Although it uses the words “paradigm shift” 13 times, the U.S. Forest Service’s new wildfire crisis strategy appears stuck on old tactics, according to area fire experts.

“I saw no new strategy but rather a potential increase in the same fire control strategy of ‘fuel treatment’ to enhance fire control,” retired Forest Service fire scientist Jack Cohen said after reviewing the documents released on Tuesday.

On Tuesday, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced plans to spend upward of $50 billion to fight catastrophic wildfire. The strategy focuses on “firesheds” — forest landscapes of about 250,000 acres that are likely to burn and have lots of homes and infrastructure at risk.

Those firesheds would get intensive work to return 35-45% of their acreage to fire-adapted conditions through hazardous fuels removal, logging and prescribed fires.

The plan identifies five firesheds in Montana, including four along the Idaho border in the Lolo, Bitterroot and Nez-Perce/Clearwater national forests, and one in the Flathead National Forest surrounding Kalispell.

The strategy calls for treating up to 20 million acres of national forest lands and up to 30 million acres of other federal, tribal, state and private lands over the next 10 years. Nationwide, the strategy will create 300,000 to 575,000 jobs, protect property values, and stimulate local economies.

That represents a tempo of work four times greater than current activity in the West, the report claims.

It should also bring down the Forest Service’s annual firefighting costs, which averaged $1.9 billion a year between 2016 and 2020. 

The report notes that wildfires in 2020, 2017 and 2015 burned a total of more than 10 million acres. The National Interagency Fire Center has stopped labeling fires larger than 100,000 acres as exceptional events, because they have become so common.

Missoula is home to the Forest Service’s Fire Sciences Lab as well as an extensive community of academic and professional forestry and fire experts. It started developing a Community Wildfire Protection Plan in 2005, and updated it in 2018.

“The use of tired, old, ill-defined language such as ‘hazardous fuels’ does little to describe what the fuels (i.e., wildland vegetation) is hazardous to,” said Missoula County Commissioner Dave Strohmaier, who helped revise the latest version of the plan. “We seem to have learned nothing from recent fires that have resulted in community destruction, such as Denton, Montana. This was a grass fire, and there were no forests to thin or otherwise eliminate the risk of crown fire from.”

The West Wind fire on Nov. 30 destroyed 25 homes and six commercial buildings in Denton, including the town’s granary. The Marshall fire on Dec. 30 burned almost 1,100 houses with an estimated $513 million in total damage. It was primarily a grass fire pushed by 110 mph winds.

And despite 11 of the report’s 23 photo illustrations depicting burned houses or fire-threatened neighborhoods, Strohmaier couldn’t find the words “home ignition zone” anywhere in the document.

“Community destruction is (a home ignition zone), not a fire control problem,” Strohmaier said. Throwing more money at treatments that won’t get the expected outcomes “does no one any good and sets up false expectations as to what will truly reduce the risk of community destruction and improve ecological and community resilience.”

Cohen found no evidence that the writers considered best available science, which shows that wildland-urban disasters are mainly a factor of how houses catch fire, not forest management, he said.

He cited extensive research explaining how community wildfire destruction (incidents where more than 100 homes get destroyed) happens when fires overrun the fuel breaks and forest treatments intended to control them. But it’s not the “big flames of high intensity wildfires (that) cause total home destruction,” but rather “lofted burning embers (firebrands) on the home and low intensity surface fire spreading to contact the home” that did the damage, often hours after the main fire had subsided or moved elsewhere.

At the same time, Cohen noted that the fireshed approach appears headed in two contradictory directions. On one hand, it acknowledges the need for large-scale burning to improve forest health and ecology. But it doesn’t acknowledge the Forest Service’s “inherent management aversion to fires burning at landscape scales that cannot be under tight control.”

“The press release and full document are just more of the same management that enables continuation of the wildfire problem,” Cohen concluded.

The Wildfire Today blog reviewed the strategy with an eye for its funding. It noted that the Forest Service called for an additional $2 billion a year to get ahead of its hazardous fuels backlog.

“The growth of the climate crisis, which has contributed to the ‘wildfire crisis,’ appears to be exceeding the estimates of scientists,” Wildfire Today moderator Bill Gabbert wrote on Tuesday. “Changes are occurring even more quickly than previously expected. So low-balling the funding for protecting our homeland will mean we will fall even further behind in treating fuels and attempting to keep fires from wiping out more communities.”

California Nine-Forest Hazard Tree Plan: Currently in Prep

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I couldn’t find a photo of a cleared California highway or forest road.. this is from Colorado.

Region 5 is working on a  hazard tree decision for certain burned areas on certain (9 total) Forests with wildfires.  It sounds like they are looking toward doing one EA per zone. This seems like an interesting experiment to see what can be standardized and what is best done at the zone or forest level.

Here’s a link to the documents. From scoping letter.

I am writing to inform you of the opportunity to provide input on the R5 Post Disturbance Hazardous Tree Management Project in the Forest Service Pacific Southwest Region (Region 5). Due to the time-sensitive nature of the proposed hazard tree removal, I am requesting your input on the proposed action briefly described below within the next 21 days, by November 15, 2021, to ensure your comments are fully considered during this public scoping opportunity.


The record wildfire years in 2020 and 2021 in California have resulted in fire-killed or damaged trees that pose threats to public health, safety, and property. The R5 Post Disturbance Hazardous Tree Management project includes hazard tree felling and removal, as well as removal of downed woody fuels resulting from hazard trees (slash), to reduce public safety hazards along portions of roads, trails, and near facilities (campgrounds, trail heads, Forest Service offices). We have identified a need to expedite analysis and decision making related to this project, which includes activities that are not novel, and for which the effects are generally well-known.


Hazard tree felling, removal, and slash removal is proposed in specific project areas within the following national forests: Inyo, Klamath, Lassen, Mendocino, Modoc, Plumas, Sequoia, Shasta-Trinity, Sierra, and Six Rivers within the North, Central, and Southern Sierra sub-regional zones.


To initiate the scoping process for this project, a more detailed description of the proposed action has been developed to provide the public and other stakeholders an opportunity to review and comment on the proposal. A copy of the proposed action and associated maps can be found on the project website (https://www.fs.usda.gov/project/?project=60950).

Based on the nature of activities being proposed, we intend to document the National Environmental Policy Act environmental analysis for these activities within separate environmental assessments for each of the three zones. The environmental assessments will be made available for public review during an upcoming 30-day comment period per 36 CFR 218.22 (anticipated January 2022). Ultimately, the Forest Supervisors will decide whether to implement the proposed actions on each Forest, implement an alternative action that meets the purpose and need, or take no action.

What’s interesting to me about this article about it from California Wild, compared to our Williamette discussion, is this idea..

In the past, wildfire-damaged hazard trees in undeveloped areas and along backcountry roads and trails are removed annually before the start of the summer recreation season. This reduces the hazard of trees falling on recreational visitors. And it also allows for the conservative retention of trees damaged but not necessarily killed or condemned to die by the fire. But the Forest Service no longer has the funding or staff to remove fallen or soon-to-fall trees on an annual basis and over the hundreds of thousands of acres that have burned in the last few years. Roughly 120,000 miles of trail, or about 75% of the National Forest trail system, already require some level of maintenance or repair. The massive hazard tree removal program proposed by the agency may lead to significant trail repair in some areas, but at the expense of the wilderness and recreational experience.

This is the “do it as they fall, but they can’t afford to” argument.

CalWild’s comments did not opposes hazard tree removal along roads, although this too has its drawbacks. Wide swaths of forest along some of the most scenic highways and roads in Northwest California and in the Sierra Nevada are proposed for clearing. Eliminating hazard tree removal taking place in sensitive wild places like roadless areas will help expedite the process. In addition, our comments requested that project not be expedited in a manner that bypasses the crucial public review, comment, and alternatives development process provided by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

California Wild also thinks that “swaths” or “denuding” along trials impairs “outstanding recreation values”. That might be in the eye of the beholder, especially in a burned over area.

They also say:

The Forest Service may seek an “Emergency Situation Determination” (ESD) from the Chief of the Forest Service to expedite the proposed project. This would enable the agency to sell hazard trees for their commercial value before they begin to rot, but it bypasses the pre-decisional objection process, which allows the public and other affected agencies to object to project actions and negotiate positive changes.

I’m kind of sympathetic to this.. the more detailed a project proposal is, the less need there is for two bites at the apple (comments and objections). It does draw attention to the objection “negotiation” process.  I’ve only heard stories about these and would be interested in peoples’ experiences.  For a different thread, though…

Some roads may be useful for clearing a corridor due to their location for potential strategic fire breaks…(plus for roads with faster speeds, it seems like it would help reduce vehicle/wildlife collisions.)

In fact, CalTrans has a plan about the former for state highways.

Overview

State highways extend through every county and range of elevation in California.  Over 5,000 centerline miles of state highways are built in a rural setting of natural landscapes, including forestland, chaparral and grassland winding through mountains and along coastlines.  Historically, active forest management of forests was discouraged in California, but this has resulted in unhealthy, overly dense timber and vegetation which increases wildfire vulnerability and decreases forest health. Drought has triggered widespread accelerated forest mortality.

Defensible space, in the context of fire control, is a natural or landscaped area around a structure that has been maintained to reduce fire danger. Through the Division of Maintenance, Caltrans prepared a Wildfire Vulnerability Analysis (2020-2030) which identifies the highway corridors that are a priority for fuels reduction to create defensible space.  Fuels reduction projects with local, state and federal partners would reduce wildfire vulnerability to life, property and ecosystem services.

Defensible space can also mitigate the probability of wildfire ignitions originating from vehicles and travelers, reduce direct impacts to state highway assets when wildfires do occur, and maximize traffic flow for all modes of transportation during normal and emergency operations.

So roads as defensible space are a thing also, at least in California.  Another reasons to focus on getting PODs delineated ASAP, IMHO.

New Chief of Staff at NRE Hire “Key” to Implementing Wildfire Strategy: Former Lobbyist for UFW and Earthjustice

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Thanks to E&E news and reporter Marc Heller for this one..

The Agriculture Department today announced four senior staff appointments, including for positions handling conservation and environmental policies.

Andrea Delgado will be chief of staff for natural resources and environment, an area that primarily covers the Forest Service. Delgado comes from the United Farm Workers Foundation, where she was director of government affairs.

Delgado has a bachelor’s degree in international relations from the State University of New York at Geneseo.

In her new role, Delgado will play a key part in implementing a 10-year wildfire strategy the Biden administration released yesterday, with its mix of forest management and measures to protect property in fire-prone areas.

What is her background, one might ask? Well, she worked for the United Farm Workers Foundation most recently, and before that, Earthjustice. She was one of the Hill’s Top Lobbyists of 2018 working for Earthjustice. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to place her somewhere working with agriculture?

But maybe she heard about wildfires around the Earthjustice watercooler… so what does that organization think about wildfires?

In 2018, President Abigail Dillen released this statement:

“The only ‘radicals’ here are Trump administration officials who are exploiting a climate tragedy to try to benefit their friends in the timber industry. There’s no question that climate change is driving these catastrophic wildfires and the deadly air quality that goes along with them.

But what does the 10 year plan say about the timber industry? They’re listed under “Creating Conditions for Success.”

FOREST PRODUCTS. The wood products industry has been and will remain an important partner for helping achieve restoration outcomes and reduce wildfire risk. New and innovative uses
of wood, such as cross-laminated timber, can not only support restoration and risk reduction outcomes but also sequester large quantities of carbon.

Would it be too great a leap to assume that Ms. Delgado’s previous employment did not necessarily set her up with the skills to be successful with some of the envisioned partnerships?

Is it good to have experience in a field before you become a “key part” of leading a difficult effort?

Honestly, I’m having a little trouble believing it. As we’ve talked about previously with the choice of BLM Director at Interior, there are plenty of experienced, knowledgeable and diverse fish in the sea. USDA so far had a good track record on selections.

Say it ain’t so, Secretary Vilsack!