In 1987, Ronald Reagan was president, climate change was barely discussed and Santa Fe National Forest drafted its management plan.
Forest officials now are overhauling the 34-year-old plan, with an eye on keeping it malleable for when the climate, landscape and science change in the future.
The revised plan addresses how extended drought, increased development, population growth and more diverse uses are affecting the forest. It also offers broad guidance for adapting to whatever comes in the next 10 or 15 years.
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One of the key changes from the Reagan era is how fires are handled.
Past practices have led to high tree density in some areas, leaving these woodlands susceptible to fire, especially in prolonged drought conditions, the plan says.
Fire management in the past 30 years has shifted from suppressing most natural fires to using controlled burns to reduce dense debris and vegetation that can ignite severe wildfires.
The revised plan calls for creating open areas — more gaps between trees as well as clumps of trees in fields — to prevent flames from spreading easily, Cramer said.
To achieve that, crews will increase mechanical tree thinning by 135 percent and almost triple the amount of managed burns, she said.
The plan says lack of natural fires along with livestock grazing, roads and human activities have decreased grasslands. Reduced grass cover keeps water from absorbing into the Earth, increases erosion and leaves the ground barren.
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — U.S. wildfire managers have started shifting from seasonal to full-time firefighting crews to deal with what has become a year-round wildfire season as climate change has made the American West warmer and drier. The crews also could remove brush and other hazardous fuels when not battling blazes.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management said Thursday that it’s adding 76 firefighters and support personnel to its 3,400-person firefighting workforce.
Additionally, 428 firefighters will change from part-time seasonal work to either full-time seasonal or permanent work with health and retirement benefits. Ultimately, the agency wants about 80% of its firefighters on permanently. The rest would be seasonal, many of whom are college students who return to class in the fall.
Folks, last week I sat in on an hour-long briefing on wildfire for journalists, presented by SciLine, a free service of the the American Association for the Advancement of Science for journalists and scientists. This event was called “Wildfires: Climate connections & community impacts,” and featured presentations and a Q&A session with three scientists:
Dr. Phil Higuera, a professor of fire ecology at the University of Montana, who’s going to describe how wildfires and wildfire seasons have been changing in recent years and decades and ways in which climate change and other factors are driving those changes. Second, you’re going to hear from Dr. Colleen Reid, an assistant professor in geography at the University of Colorado Boulder, who specializes in environmental health issues and is going to speak about these huge plumes of smoke that wildfires create, what’s in them and what are the health effects from breathing those pollutants. And third, you’ll hear from Dr. Crystal Kolden, assistant professor at the University of California, Merced, who will speak about the role of forest management in getting wildfire activity back in balance and will describe some of the individual- and community-level inequities that exist when it comes to the burden of risk from wildfires.
I think this was a superb briefing, and I hope the journalists in attendance have a new and better understanding of the topics discussed. The transcript and video are available here. It’s an excellent resource for we denizens of The Smokey Wire.
The American Forest Resource Council’s latest newsletter has a nice summary of the wildland fire and land-management appropriations in the recent $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill…. And lots of other interesting info, as usual:
Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework. The five-year, $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure legislation includes about $3.3 billion for “wildfire risk reduction” activities and wildland firefighters, $2.1 billion for “ecological restoration,” and several new authorities for federal forest management activities. Below is an outline of the major provisions and the allocation by department:
Wildfire Risk Reduction – $3.3 billion
$500 million for “mechanical thinning and timber harvesting in an ecologically appropriate manner” (80% USDA-USFS; 20% DOI).
$500 million for establishing wildfire “control locations” including shaded fuelbreaks when “ecologically appropriate” (50% USDA-USFS; 50% DOI).
$200 million to contract “for the removal of flammable vegetation on federal land” with an emphasis on using treatment materials for “biochar and other innovative wood products” (50% USDA-USFS; 50% DOI).
$200 million for post fire restoration activities within three years of fire containment date.
$100 million for Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Act projects (100% USDA-USFS). Also reauthorizes program for five years and prioritizes certain projects.
$600 million for increased wildland firefighter salaries (80% USDA-USFS; 20% DOI).
Most of the funded activities must be conducted consistent with Healthy Forests Restoration Act. The legislation also includes a priority for projects: signed record of decision as of date of enactment, “strategically located” to “minimize risks from wildfires”, maximize large and old growth tree retention to promote fire-resilient stands, and create no new roads and obliterate any temporary roads.
The legislation would also create a permanent Federal wildland firefighter job series within the Forest Service and Department of the Interior, convert 1,000 seasonal to full-time employees, provides for a $20,000 or 50% salary increase, and directs that firefighter positions should spend half of the year doing hazardous fuels reduction work.
The Forest Service and the Department of the Interior would be required to report accomplishments annually and develop a five-year treatment, monitoring, and maintenance plan for fuels reduction activities funded under this section.
Ecosystem Restoration – $2.1 billion
$300 million for contracts for a minimum of 10,000 acres of ecological restoration on federal lands, including $100 million for a capital fund to address contract cancellation ceiling (75% USDA-USFS; 25% DOI).
$200 million for matching payments to states and tribes for Good Neighbor Agreements (80% USDA-USFS; 20% DOI).
$400 million for loan guarantees or low-interest loans for wood using facilities “that purchase byproducts of restoration treatments.” Facilities must be near a unit of federal land identified as high or very high priority for ecological restoration and substantially decrease the cost of conducting ecological restoration projects.
$400 million to provide grants to states and tribes for ecosystem restoration on federal and non-federal lands, emphasizing cross-boundary projects.
$200 million for invasive pest detection, prevention, and eradication (50% USDA-USFS; 50% DOI).
$100 million to restore and improve recreation sites on federal land (50% USDA-USFS; 50% DOI).
$200 million for abandoned mine land restoration (50% USDA-USFS; 50% DOI).
$200 million for reforestation on both public and private lands (65% USDA-USFS; 35% DOI).
$80 million for a new “collaborative based, landscape-scale restoration program to restore water quality or fish passage on federal land.”
Additional Authorities
3,000-acre Categorical Exclusion to “establish and maintain linear fuel breaks” within up to 1,000 feet of “existing linear features, such as roads, water infrastructure, transmission and distribution lines, and pipelines of any length on federal land.” Actions must be consistent with existing forest plans and located “primarily in” WUI or water supply area. Also includes prohibition on new roads.
Codifies the Forest Service’s existing administrative Emergency Situation Determination to streamline certain emergency salvage, reforestation, and roadside hazard tree removal projects and expands to DOI agencies. Agencies are only required to analyze the proposed action and no-action alternative with no administrative objections. Directs courts not to issue injunctions unless plaintiff is likely to succeed on the merits.
Includes the REPLANT Act, which would direct the Forest Service to identity areas in need of reforestation and provide an additional $80-$90 million annually to the Reforestation Trust Fund (currently receives $30 million annually).
A question for the Smokey Wire community: What role, if any, does forest planning and management have in this “new normal” megafire era? This the issue of our professional careers. Some grist for discussion:
1. If, with the Caldor and Dixie Fires, past forest management is irrelevant when it comes to megafires,
2. And because our current wildfire suppression resources are inadequate for stopping some wildfires such as Caldor, Dixie, Camp, and other fires once they become megafires,
3. And since any effort to slow climate change, even if successful — say, if the world meets the Paris accord emissions targets — will have no appreciable positive effect on forest health and susceptibility to fire in the near- or medium-term future,
4. And because there will be no mass emigration from WUI zones,
Then what is our course of action?
My take on these 4 points:
A. We must dramatically increase the pace and scale of forest health and fuels reduction. Doing so won’t prevent wind-driven megafires, but it will help reduce the number of smaller fires and perhaps keep some from exploding into megafires.
B. Assemble a wildfire air force of sorts. Maybe we need 10 times the number of air tankers and tanker bases, maybe more. Such a force would put enough retardant between fires and communities, and water on hot spots, to prevent widespread destruction of homes, business, infrastructure — even whole towns.
C. A significant increase in active management, as in my point A above, would at least serve to reduce emissions — GHGS and smoke — from wildfires of all sizes.
D. Forest management in WUI zones is more important than ever important, as will “hardening” structures to better withstand wildfires. However, the pace and scale of management and hardening will have to be dramatically increased, including forest management much farther from current WUI zone boundaries. To do this, city/county ordinances, state building codes, insurance companies, and federal policymakes must make commensurate revisions/action.
KCRA, a Sacramento news station, reports: Evacuation orders were issued Monday for all of South Lake Tahoe after expanded evacuations the night before as the massive Caldor Fire in El Dorado County experienced a “rapid spread,” Cal Fire said.
One more thing before I go.. last week, I posted this piece on potential career folks who could be selected for BLM Director. I was also given the name of one non-fed, Dave Johnson, Director of Fisheries at the Nez Perce, as being very good at working with all kinds of people, stakeholders and government officials of all parties, on natural resource issues. He could be (possibly) the first Native American BLM Director, which could help with the Biden Administration’s goals of working better with Tribes. With all the press around different Tribes and their members’ views of Bears Ears expansion and contraction, his background as a Tribal member could help. His background is “in the west” and “on the ground” and as a fisheries biologist is likely to a strong science background- and the Biden Administration has stated and expressed through other selections, that they are interested in elevating science.
Anyway, my point isn’t to promote a specific person- in my case, this is hearsay, after all; but to leave a place for people to promote their own candidates, should they wish to do so, in the comments below.
Stand of changing yellow Aspen tree in front of dark green pine trees in mountains of Colorado on fall afternoon
I posted a few extra over the past Friday and weekend, and will be out from today until Monday the 12th of September. Please contact Steve Wilent for any TSW concerns. I’m planning to see those great federal lands that we all care so much about.
One of the shortest efforts I was involved with in my career was to work on “how NEPA applies to R&D conducted by USDA through grants.” In my case, it was genetically engineered organisms and concern about their release into the environment. The answer, I was told, was that they wouldn’t get out, so no problem, no NEPA. But that was decades ago.
I thought the Washington Post has done a good job of reporting here on the details of how gain of function experiments and other potentially dangerous experiments have been approved. Hopefully there is no firewall. What does this have to do with the federal lands/forest biz, might you say? It just seems to me if you need public involvement and environmental analysis for a 300 acre fuel reduction project, maybe you need the same kind or more for projects involving biosafety concerns?
If you need third party independent certification to make sure your wood has been sustainably produced.. maybe you should have the same (independent certification) procedures for labs, perhaps international like PEFC or FSC? And if your argument why not is that it could be dangerous if you made the information public, maybe that’s a scientific/public policy situation that shouts “watch out.” And needs greater attention and scrutiny. hat’s conceptually, and then there’s the legal question of how or if NEPA applies.
I hope you can read the whole WaPo story, as it gives a history of how gain of function research has been managed.
Lisa Monaco, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, and John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, urged all federal and nonfederal labs on Aug. 28, 2014, to conduct a “Safety Stand-Down” to “review laboratory biosafety and biosecurity best practices and protocols.”
In mid-October — citing the “recent biosafety incidents at Federal research facilities” — the Office of Science and Technology Policy and HHS jointly announced a “pause” in funding for any newly proposed gain-of-function experiments with influenza and the feared coronavirus strains MERS and SARS.
The announcement also encouraged “those currently conducting this type of work, whether federally funded or not, to voluntarily pause their research while risks and benefits are being reassessed.”
The increased federal scrutiny triggered pushback from some virologists, including coronavirus researchers Ralph S. Baric of the University of North Carolina and Mark R. Denison of Vanderbilt University.
“We argue that it is premature to include the emerging coronaviruses under these restrictions, as scientific dialogue that seriously argues the biology, pros, cons, likely risks to the public, and ethics of [gain-of-function research] have not been discussed in a serious forum,” Baric and Denison wrote to the biosecurity board on Nov. 12, 2014.
Referring more broadly to highly pathogenic flu and coronavirus strains, their letter added: “The pandemic potential of these viruses is clear, but they also are vulnerable in the early stages of an outbreak to public health intervention methods. . . . GOF [gain of function] experiments are a documented, powerful tool.”
Within weeks, NIH officials informed Baric and an undetermined number of other researchers that their work had been exempted from the pause.
I’d argue that it shouldn’t be only “scientific” dialogue; but perhaps experienced Ag and Interior people could help HHS design a “serious” public/scientific forum. We’ve had a variety of political and media exhortations to “follow the science” which sometimes can spread into giving the mantle of authority to (some, usually at the expense of others) scientists and into placing undue confidence in scientists acting selflessly in the public interest. But hey, we’re just people, no better or worse. Who don’t always behave well without oversight. I think that’s what President Eisenhower had in mind when he said:
“Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields… ,” Eisenhower warned. “Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.”
While continuing to respect discovery and scientific research, he said, “We must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Dan Sarewitz, an STS researcher, adds:
Eisenhower was concerned about a dilemma scientific and technological advances present modern society, Sarewitz said. The influence of these advances forces democratic societies to increasingly depend on a rarified elite to understand and manage the very complexity that they help to create and accelerate, he said. This is not only a problem of managing modern warfare, he said, but applies to other key technology-driven systems such as energy, agriculture and food, transportation, and communications.
And the interface between democracy and scientific expertise is the place that at least federal lands/forest people have long inhabited. In my own experience, not so much Big Science and the Science Establishment (like research on synthetic organisms.. what could go wrong?). I tried to find NEPA for NIH and HHS online but it seemed to relate to construction. Maybe there is a “when NEPA applies” paper like the FS has, for those organizations somewhere?
Here’s an interesting paper on synthetic biology and research needs for assessing environmental impacts. Perhaps we are several recursive steps (research to do research to do research) from doing the kind of environmental analysis that is needed for much of this kind of research.
This photo from August 18,2021 is from the Mt. Scott Lookout, looking east across 2020 Archie Creek Fire snags. Courtesy of Melvin Thornton, Douglas Forest Protective Association
Note: Zybach wrote this a year ago, following the Labor Day fires in Oregon.
The most deadly, destructive, and widespread catastrophic wildfires in Oregon’s history erupted on Labor Day this year, driven by strong east winds. But unless we change how our national and state forests are managed, these events will be just another chapter in this age of predictable, increasing, and ever-greater firestorms.
I spent my career studying forest fires and forest health. For example, my doctoral dissertation from the OSU College of Forestry was titled, The Great Fires: Indian burning and catastrophic forest fire patterns of the Oregon Coast Range, 1491-1951.
In a 2018 interview, just before the California Camp Fire destroyed the town of Paradise, I said: “You take away logging, grazing and maintenance, and you get firebombs.” Then someone took my quote, pasted it on a forest fire photo, and the resulting meme quickly went viral on Facebook.
This September Facebook began flagging this post as “partly false” because my quote, and related interview, doesn’t mention climate change. Evidently Facebook’s executives feel their new-found forestry judgment is better than my lifetime of scientific research and hands-on forestry experience.
The broad arc of Oregon’s fire history explains why this year’s catastrophic wildfires have converted our public forests into unprecedented firebombs. What were once green trees filled with water, have now become massive stands of pitchy, air-dried firewood.
For thousands of years ancestral Oregon Indian families kept ridgeline and riparian areas open for travel, hunting, fishing, and harvesting purposes. They cleared ground fuels by firewood gathering and seasonal fires. This created systematic firebreaks in a landscape characterized by southern balds, huckleberry fields, camas meadows, oak woodlands, and islands of mostly even-aged conifers.
Following the 1910 firestorms, the US Forest Service established a nationwide system of fire lookouts and pack trails backed up by rapid response fire suppression. This system became remarkably effective over time. From 1952 until 1987, only one forest fire in all of western Oregon was greater than 10,000 acres: the 1966 43,000-acre Oxbow Fire in Lane County.
But since 1987, Oregon has had more than 30 such fires, with several larger than 100,000 acres. The 2020 Labor Day Fires alone covered more than one million acres, destroyed over 4,000 homes, caused 40,000 emergency evacuations, killed millions of wild animals, and blanketed the state with a thick, acrid smoke that obscured the sun for days.
What changed to cause this dramatic increase in catastrophic wildfire frequency and severity?
The problems began in the 1960s, with apparently well-intentioned national efforts to create large untouchable wilderness areas and cleaner air and water on our public lands.
The single biggest turning point in how public forests are managed happened on December 22, 1969: about 50 lawyers in Washington, DC created the Environmental Law Institute, and a short distance away Congress passed the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA).
Next, the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the 1980 Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA) provided the growing environmental law industry with a way to be paid by the government for challenging nearly every attempt to log or otherwise actively manage public forests.
By the 1980s, the artificial creation of Habitat Conservation Plans (“HCPs”) and the listing of spotted owls as an Endangered Species laid the groundwork for today’s fires.
The 1994 Clinton Plan for Northwest Forests might have been the final nail in the coffin. The subsequent never-ending environmental lawsuits, new Wilderness and HCP creations, access road decommissionings, and fruitless public planning exercises have created tens of millions of acres of massive fuel build-ups and “let it burn” policies that have decimated our forests.
The predicted result has been ever larger western Oregon forest fires. More than 90% of these large- and catastrophic-scale fires have taken place in federal forestlands, which only represent 50% of Oregon’s forested areas.
Even if — like Facebook executives — you believe these fires were somehow sparked by climate change, you should be very concerned with what will happen next.
Lessons from the 1933-1951 “Six-Year Jinx” Tillamook Fires and the 1987-2018 Kalmiopsis Wilderness Fires are clear: unless removed, the dead trees resulting from these fires will fuel even greater and more severe future fires.
Forests of dead trees are far more flammable, dangerous, and unsightly than those with living trees. Dead trees dry out, and dead forests become firebombs that almost certainly will burn again and again, unless something is done.
The 2020 fire-killed trees should be mapped, sold, and harvested ASAP. Prices for Douglas fir logs are at a record high, and there is a great need for good-paying rural jobs. The initial focus should be on the dead trees east of Portland, Salem, Eugene, Ashland and the rural towns directly affected by this year’s fires.
Salvage logging must be done soon to be economical: dead trees deteriorate rapidly.
The 1962 Columbus Day windstorm downed 9 billion board feet on a Friday, and by the following Monday salvage logging on public lands had already started. But the 2002 Biscuit Fire burned a roughly equivalent amount of timber, and it took years to develop salvage logging plans and deal with court challenges.
All the delays meant salvage logging actually lost the US Forest Service money; very little needed logging was ever completed, and the 2017 Chetco Bar Fire resulted, burned hotter, and spread wider.
This year’s fires killed at least twice as much timber as the 2002 Biscuit Fire, and it greatly damaged and affected urban areas near major cities. So it will be interesting to see if we can learn from Oregon’s fire history and take the prompt, decisive actions needed to avoid the clearly predictable coming firestorms.
Following a 20 year career as a successful reforestation contractor, Dr. Zybach returned to school and obtained a Ph.D. in the study of precontact Indian burning patterns and historical catastrophic wildfires of the Oregon Coast Range. His book is available here. He is the Program Manager of nonprofit educational website Oregon Websites and Watersheds Project, Inc. since its founding in 1996: and has researched and written about wildfire mitigation and reforestation in the Pacific Northwest for more than 40 years.
