The Smokey Wire Volunteer Opportunity! Finding the Forest in Legislation

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There seem to be more bills floating around in Congress about fire and forests and carbon than ever before.  Jon Haber does a terrific job on rounding up litigation; it would be wonderful if someone (or a group) would be willing to do the same for legislation.  It’s definitely more than I can keep up with.  And if it is your day job, being anonymous would be perfectly acceptable. All you would have to do is find the key provisions of interest and post them.. we can discuss the pros and cons, and add relevant info, here.

We can’t count on news stories to go to the detail we’d prefer. Different reporters are interested in different things, and generally don’t provide the comprehensive view related to our interests.. so we are left with “what other people the reporter contacted thought about the bill.” Not quite as useful as the text, IMHO.

Here’s one example from E&E news..(granted the reporter mostly works on climate.. so..) interesting choice of interviewees, Chad Hanson, Tim Ingalsbee (asserting that fuel treatments of various kinds don’t work..) and a researcher from the Midwest.

But it takes more than just keeping the big trees to get fire resilience, said Jessica McCarty, a Miami University professor who studies wildfire. Operating the logging machinery can be a fire risk, and moving such equipment through the forest leaves lasting disturbances.

“If you take out everything but the large trees, you’ve probably disturbed and/or compacted the soil. Then what’s going to grow in the understory? Probably grasses and forbs. And to be quite frank, in North America, that means you have a high likelihood of invasive species,” she said.

It would be a good thing for federal agencies to shift their timber programs toward sustainable, climate adaptive practices, McCarty added. That would mean an end to clear-cutting and better incentives for more selective logging in natural areas.

I was curious about the details of this mentioned in the article..

It also creates a new federal system for subsidizing sawmills and other wood processing facilities, along with $400 million in new financial assistance. “Close proximity” to a sawmill would become a factor for agencies to consider when funding federal land restoration.

So decided to do a search on Forest. One of the first things I ran across was about permitting critical minerals, so I got sidetracked.

(e) FEDERAL PERMITTING AND REVIEW PERFORMANCE REQUIREMENTS—To improve the quality and timeliness of Federal permitting and review processes with respect to critical mineral production on Federal land, the Secretary of the Interior, acting through the Director of the Bureau of Land Management, and the Secretary of Agriculture, acting through the Chief of the Forest Service (referred to in this section as the ‘‘Secretaries’’), to the maximum extent practicable, shall complete the Federal permitting and review processes with maximum efficiency and effectiveness, while supporting vital economic growth, by— …

and it goes on at some length about how to do that.

Interesting, but searching on “forest” through more than 2000 pages is time-consuming. Now I know that there are individuals in Forest Service Legislative Affairs who do this work, but unfortunately we don’t have access to their work the same way we have access to Litigation Weekly. It would be quite a public service if that could be done, IMHO, and good press for the FS.

Anyway, until that day The Smokey Wire could really use one or more helpers in this area. Please consider it.

Advice from Some Retirees to the Chief on Managing Fires

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The last letter was from a group of some fire scientists (SFS). I don’t know how much experience they’ve had actually managing fires.

This letter is from a group of mostly agency retirees called the National Wildfire Institute (NWI). Similarly, I don’t know the specific fire experience of the folks who signed this letter. They raise, as might be expected, a number of different points from the fire scientists.

One of their concerns is the same as the fire scientists.. that there needs to be more support among  communities for managed fire.  The NWI solution is…planning and NEPA.

Chief, it’s time to declare that all fires will be promptly and aggressively extinguished, period. This would be direction until such time as the Agency would engage the public in a robust and comprehensive planning process to subject fire policy to widespread public involvement and public understanding. Anything less would simply serve to increase already fevered resistance to Forest Service fire policies. We reaffirm our strong support for Prescribed Fire and strong compliance with the law through approved burn plans.

As many of you know, I am a fan of the concept of standing down NFMA plan revisions, and standing up formal fire planning for forests, which could develop the support that both the SFS and NWI feel is needed. But even with delineations of areas where fires can be managed, possible condition and weather-based standards and guidelines, even with notice and comment of burn plans or other potential innovations, it seems to me that wildfire use is in a special category.  WFU is opportunistic by nature, and I don’t think they can be nailed down in advance and carefully reviewed by scientists, the public and legal authorities, like, say, a hazard tree project or a grazing permit renewal or pretty much anything else that’s subject to NEPA.

Because it’s a judgment call given the ever-changing conditions. And we’d probably agree that the best folks to make those judgment calls are the experienced fire professionals certainly informed by whatever has been hammered out in a plan.  Fires may not respect area delineations or any other plan components.

We also believe these uses of wildfire to manage natural resources and profoundly change ecosystems are not wise, especially during this time of severely clogged forests (forests are more than just trees); the expanding Wildland-Urban Interface; and the impacts of severe drought. We are concerned that the practice of “managed fire” has never been subjected to NEPA, NFMA, or to the plain requirements of the substantive Acts such as Clean Air, Clean Water, the Endangered Species Act, ARPA, and others. The truth is that our wildfire use has dramatically changed land and resource management plans and there seems to be no accounting for the cumulative effects and outcomes.

What’s interesting to me about this is that I agree in concept, the nature of different ICs doing different things on different fires under different conditions seems like it would make it impossible to predict any impacts. Of course, agency employees are perfectly capable of making assumptions.. but would they be meaningful, since fire weather and conditions are specific to time and place? I suppose you could do simulations under a variety of conditions but.. how close would they be to reality?

Perhaps public engagement is more important when impacts are more or less unknown or unknowable (and perhaps so is the no-action alternative), because only being honest and building a track record will build trust. In fact, we have many social scientists who have been studying communities and their responses to prescribed fire so those scientists could be brought together and asked to weigh in- and also explore peoples’ views about managed fires.
….

We think that now is the time to engage the public and the agency to disclose the cumulative effects of our wildfire use programs, gain public understanding and acceptance, align our actions with our appropriations, and carry on together in a unified way with our partners and our people.

The 2010 Schultz Fire: A Ten-Year Full-Cost Analysis

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From the Ecological Restoration Institute at Northern Arizona University….

The Schultz Fire was ignited by an abandoned campfire on June 20, 2010, and burned 15,075 acres northeast of Flagstaff, Arizona. Following the fire, intense monsoon rains over the burned area produced heavy flooding that resulted in extensive damage to properties in neighborhoods downstream from the fire, as well as one death.

A full-cost accounting of the 2010 Schultz Fire and post-fire flooding was conducted in 2013 (Combrink et al. 2013) to capture initial damage over a three-year period. At that time, costs were estimated to be between $133 million and $147 million. This analysis builds on and revises the 2013 study to derive a ten-year full-cost accounting. This multi-year analysis is a unique contribution to the understanding of the long-term economic, ecological, and social effects of a major fire and post-fire flooding.

The original study (Combrink et al. 2013) estimated a loss in personal wealth due to reduced assessed property values in the amount of $59.4 million. The new analysis revealed the difficulty of attributing losses of property value to the fire and flooding. After analyzing assessed property values over time, we concluded that the changes in value were similar to those in the greater Flagstaff area that were not impacted by the fire and flooding. We also found that average assessed property values in the study area had rebounded 51.5% from 2010. Thus, we did not include property value changes in our updated full-cost accounting. Removing assessed property values from the amount estimated in the original study (Combrink et al. 2013) would have resulted in an estimate of full costs in 2013 dollars between $73.6 million and $87.6 million.

Costs associated with the Schultz Fire and flooding continued to accrue over ten years, although at a slower rate than during the first analysis. In the current study, the total cost of the Schultz Fire for the ten-year assessment period was conservatively estimated to be between $95.8 million and $100.7 million in 2021 dollars, including the fire response and post-fire flooding response and mitigation, but excluding all losses and gains related to assessed property values. This represents a 30%–15% increase in the respective range of costs from 2013, excluding property values.

Advice from Some Fire Scientists to the Chief on Managing the 2021 Fire Season

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I’m going to post two letters from different groups of people about some aspects of restoring fire to landscapes in a climate-challenged world.

First the fire scientists’ letter.

We are a group of fire and forest scientists who study the range of interactions of fuels, fire, climate, and management. We are writing to express concern over your new directives to stop managing fire for resource benefit and requiring regional Planning Level 2 and Regional Forester approval for prescribed burning. Certainly, we recognize the underlying rationale to address short-term risks of escaped wildfires. Even if temporary, these directives will significantly limit options for resource managers in a time when increasing the pace and scale of forest restoration and fuel reduction is of critical importance. We request that you consider modifying the order, returning decision-making about managed fire and prescribed burning to the forest and district levels.

Now, I am not sure that I’ve ever met Chief Moore, so I am not a Current FS Chief apologist.  If you read the Chief’s letter, he’s pretty clear about his rationale (there aren’t enough resources and people are sick and tired), and that it’s for this unusual year.   But what’s really interesting to me about this paragraph in the scientists’ letter is the idea that decision-making should be returned to the forest and district levels.  It’s an interesting concept that fire scientists are weighing in as to what level is the best at decision-making. It seems like you would need some kind of evidence to make that assertion.  I agree that having to have the RO involved means that people are more serious about justifying their actions to other people.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, in my experience with NEPA.  In fact, some TSW folks (as well as some federal judges) think that district and forest folks can make bad NEPA decisions.  In my experience, most of the District and Forests make the right call most of the time. That’s why the decentralized system works.  But the risk of making a mistake here, even with a low overall probability of it happening, is pretty high.  If things went wrong, and I were making the decision, I’d want to make sure my boss was aligned in advance, and had my back, about something this potentially sensitive and dangerous. It’s a way of expanding the zone of potential blame.

And the Chief’s letter is only for this year… we can imagine from the national and state budget discussions that capacity will be ramping up in the future.  It’s taken us, what, a hundred years to get here? The scientists’ letter says “even if temporary”.. really it’s important to increase pace and scale this year of Pandemic? I just don’t get the urgency of needing to do it This Year.

Then there are many paragraphs in the letter that we would all agree with, about the general concepts of reintroducing fire via PB and WFU. Since the Chief has been in this business for a while (in Region 5, as the letter points out) I’m sure that this summary isn’t news to him.

The fire scientist authors go on to the need to convince “local leaders and residents”:

 The US Forest Service and other federal land management agencies should work with their state partners to help local leaders and residents understand the objectives and benefits of managed fire and to help them understand that fire and forest professionals are making science-based decisions about fire management. The number of examples of successfully managing natural ignitions far exceed the few cases with negative outcomes. The US Forest Service needs to advertise its successes and make the linkage to the 2009 decision that allows the flexibility to manage fires in a manner that is appropriate given the conditions.

This is a bit puzzling. Fire managers use their wisdom, experience, modeling and so on to manage WFU. Is the science-basis the general idea that fires should happen at some point? Or is each decision that a fire manager makes “science-based” somehow? And if community leaders are honestly worried about the “few cases with negative outcomes” happening to them, do they have a right to worry? This to me is not the territory of fire scientists.. to tell the FS how to change peoples’ minds about risks.  That’s the territory of social scientists.  I’m not one, but I think it’s about the challenge of building trust via starting small and not screwing up,  versus imposing your (albeit “scientific”) views on communities by citing.. the fact you decided it.  At least in part.

I know, at least via social media, and respect most of the signatories of this letter. I honestly don’t get why this cautious approach, for this year, bothers them enough to write a letter. And honestly it doesn’t really seem like a science issue at all; it’s a management issue- of what do do with the resources you have and don’t have, and how to reduce unnecessary stress on firefighters.

I was reminded of these Pinchot Principles.

* A public official is there to serve the public and not to run them.
* Public support of acts affecting public rights is absolutely required.
* It is more trouble to consult the public than to ignore them, but that is what you are hired for.
* Find out in advance what the public will stand for; if it is right and they won’t stand for it, postpone action and educate them.

vs. from the letter..

Our national forest system requires science-based leadership, even when political pressure is high.

Maybe we could discuss this with one or more of the signatories to understand their position better?

Here’s a Lessons Learned on escaped prescribed fires from 2005.

NFS Litigation Weekly August 6, 2021

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Two weeklies in two weeks!

The Forest Service summaries are here:  NFS Litigation Weekly August 06 2021 FINAL

COURT DECISION

Sequoia ForestKeeper v. U.S. Forest Service (E.D. Cal.) — On July 23, the district court granted the plaintiffs’ motion for a temporary restraining order against the Plateau Roads Hazard Tree Project on the Sequoia National Forest because it inappropriately used the categorical exclusion for road maintenance, and the prior 9th Circuit EPIC case is controlling.

NEW CASES

Washington State Snowmobile Association v. U.S. Forest Service (E.D. Wash.) — On July 27, plaintiffs filed a compliant alleging the Forest Service issued a special use permit to Wenatchee Mountain Alpine Huts, LLC to develop commercial winter lodging at the top of Van Epps Pass on the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest without following appropriate NEPA procedures.  The substantive issue appears to be whether the huts would pose a risk to public health and safety from avalanches and from increased interaction between motorized and non-motorized users as a result of the increased use of the area.

Alliance for the Wild Rockies v. Moore (D. Mont.) – On July 26, the plaintiffs filed a complaint against the Greater Red Lodge Project on the Custer Gallatin National Forest.  Issues include lynx habitat mapping, effects on lynx and compliance with the HFRA definition of WUI.  The project was stopped in 2015 by a previous lawsuit.  Here is some background, and here is plaintiffs’ perspective.

 

BLOGGER’S BONUS

Court decision:  Orr v. U. S. Environmental Protection Agency (W.D. N.C.) – On July 22, the district court denied a stay pending appeal to the 4th Circuit in one of a series of cases against the French Broad Electric Membership Corporation’s planned spraying of herbicides on its right-of-way easements (apparently including national forest lands).

On July 22, the Center for Biological Diversity and Maricopa Audubon Society filed a notice of intent to sue the BLM and the Fish and Wildlife Service for failing to protect critical (riparian) habitat for seven threatened and endangered species in the Gila Box Riparian National Conservation Area in southeastern Arizona based on documented cattle grazing damage.  (The news release has a link to the NOI.)

On July 19, a coalition of ten environmental groups filed a 60-day notice of intent to sue the state of Idaho over a new law that enables the year-around trapping of wolves on private property.  They contend the expanded use of traps and snares to catch wolves also harms grizzly bears and lynx, in violation of ESA.   The recorded interview also discusses a similar NOI in Montana against legalizing the use of snares (which would apply to national forests), as described here.

 

Webinar: Using Maps for Participatory Planning

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This webinar is aimed at urban planners, but perhaps the techniques would be valuable for forest collaboratives.

This webinar focuses on how to enable a web-based approach to participatory planning and the four types of spatial analysis that you can implement for your own online events. By using digital maps to engage with constituents, you can collect crowd-sourced inputs from residents and easily generate usable insights. No GIS degree required, this online approach not only enables broader participation alongside your in-person meetings (hopefully soon!), but also yields useful data that can be quickly analyzed to uncover feedback that planners need.

I. Woody Restoration Residuals- ENGOs in Agreement : Background and Sierra Letter

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I mentioned that I was working on a project to find areas of agreement between environmental groups of various kinds (ENGOs) and others on a variety of topics related to restoration, fuels management and wildfires. I looked at the Climate Smart Agriculture and Forestry public comment letters that USDA requested earlier this year.

Previously we’ve discussed the question of “fuel treatment vs. restoration” because sometimes they are lumped (in reality, and in discussion and writing) and sometimes they are split; and there are enough disagreements around this set of questions (IMHO) without different definitions clouding the picture.  And some ENGO’s are against fuel treatments (“excuse for logging”) but not restoration.  I also agree with Susan Jane Brown who gave some examples in this comment of what we can accomplish without being in agreement:

And I personally think that we can disagree about it and still move forward with treatments on the land: many collaboratives do this regularly. For example, there may not be agreement on anthropogenic climate change, but there is agreement that losing structures in a wildfire is an undesirable outcome and that community preparedness and landscape RESILIENCE are things we can take steps to accomplish.

So for now, I’ll just be on the lookout to see how each group defines “restoration.” To cut to the chase, I found that a surprising number of ENGOs support commercial use of restoration residuals, which I’ll cite in this and later posts. But there is a main underlying political question.. who decides what counts as restoration? We can imagine an international FSC-like certification system, a USDA organic labelling kind of thing, something at the state level, all the way to what a local collaborative agrees on.  Each choice invests different actors, at different spatial levels, with power to wield the lever of what’s in and what’s out, with associated concerns of diversity, equity and inclusion.

But let’s start with the Statement on Removal and Use of Forest Biomass, which is actually not from the Climate Smart Letters at all.  It was signed by the ENGO’s in the image at the top of the post.  The whole statement is well thought out and comprehensive IMHO and worth a read. Below are a few excerpts.

Statement on Removal and Use of Forest Biomass
● Bioenergy facilities utilizing forest biomass waste include a range of different technologies and energy production scales, ranging from small scale bioenergy for heat (e.g., thermal-only installations), to cogenerating community scale biomass (1-5MW), to medium scale facilities (5-20MW), to larger scale facilities (> 20MW) co-located with wood processing and other light industrial facilities that can make use of waste heat and generated energy.
● The removal of forest biomass for bioenergy purposes should follow the guidelines below to ensure environmental standards are being met:
o The demand for power generation or value-added wood products at any facility should never drive removal of biomass from the forest.
o Biomass facilities should be sized according to the availability of fuel in the surrounding landscape and an ecologically appropriate removal rate, in      accordance  with restoration plans. To mitigate trucking and transportation costs and greenhouse gas emissions, it is desirable that supply areas be in relatively close proximity to the facility.
o The availability of fuel should be determined by landscape-level ecological restoration plans that provide for the ecological integrity and biodiversity of the target landscape.
o Any biomass facility should utilize woody biomass at an annual rate and for a period of time that is ecologically appropriate for the surrounding forested landscape. In order to attract private investment and encourage public private partnerships, supply agreements should be guaranteed across all lands and among all land restoration partners for a minimum of 10-20 years. These two conditions should be harmonized when developing commercial uses for forest
biomass.

● Our groups are dedicated to ensuring clean air and clean water for all. With this goal central to our organizations, we believe that siting biomass facilities in California Clean Air Act non-compliant air basins should be avoided to reduce pollution burdens on disadvantaged communities, unless those facilities can be shown to reduce emissions from other sources of burning. Facilities should generally be located in air quality basins in compliance with federal and state standards and should incorporate emissions control technologies to ensure they remain within state, federal, or tribal standards. This precludes the siting and building of additional biomass facilities in noncompliant air basins, like the Central Valley, unless a net reduction in emissions can be achieved.

…
I also liked how they touched upon marketing and keeping productions within forested communities where possible or practicable..

● Marketing and branding approaches for restoration byproducts such as energy, pellets, bio briquettes, biochar, fire resistant building materials, etc., that include triple bottom
line impact statements and reinvest a portion of proceeds for charitable purposes aligning with long term restoration and maintenance of fire resilient landscapes is an additional value-added economic stacking tool that will help to reduce the taxpayer burden in the long run.

● Facilities and uses should be sited either within or as close as possible or practicable to forested communities to capture economic and social benefits in the communities of origin of the biomass materials. Previously used mill sites may be ideal in many locations and can leverage federal funding for clean-up.

The landscape level planning idea still makes me wonder.. would it be possible to do one giant NEPA document, perhaps at the 4FRI scale?

Which parts do you agree and disagree with?

Practice of Science Friday: The hitchhiker’s guide to co-production- Six ways to link knowledge and action for sustainability

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Fig 1 from the Nature paper. Note that FAC-Net is one of the case studies (#20)

 

It’s always interesting to take our US-western federal lands-collaborative governance experience and relate it to other countries. I like that the authors wrote a user-friendly intro to their study.  There’s a bit of academic-ese to wade through but the diversity of approaches and the categories give much to think about.

How can humanity address the vast sustainability challenges that we face? Today there is no shortage of ideas and recommendations. Yet, what do they actually do for society? In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a supercomputer is famously tasked with calculating the answer to the ultimate question of life, the Universe, and everything. After 7.5 million years, it answers “42”. An answer of little use to anyone when the original question remains a mystery.

This metaphor is apt for the state of many academic disciplines: research churns out advice, yet often with poor connection to the world beyond academia, where progress is at best incremental. One response to this is “co-production” – processes that connect researchers and diverse societal actors to grow critical insights in ways that promise to spur direct action. Instead of a single lead researcher (or computer), co-production entails collaborative work to navigate often contrasting views regarding what questions matter, and how their exploration can generate societal change.

Co-production is widely applied to address sustainability challenges, and action is urgently needed. Yet, questions remain around the many proliferating concepts and methods that make up co-production. In response, our initial answer was also 42 – in this case, 42 scholar practitioners deeply engaged in co-production. Together, we mapped out commonalities and differences across 32 initiatives that designed to connect diverse sectors and sustainably develop ecosystems at local to global scales in six continents. We asked ourselves: How do our approaches differ? Why? What are the implications?

In our new study, “Six modes of co-production for sustainability”, we share our collective insights via a heuristic tool designed to support diverse change agents – researchers, policy makers, activists, community leaders, and CEOs – to reflect on how they attempt to link diverse knowledge and action. The six modes we identify vary in their purpose for using co-production – to solve predefined problems, or to reframe problems; understanding of power – focusing on changing people’s behaviour, or more systemic issues; approach to politics – empowering marginalized actors, or influencing powerful actors to yield power; and pathways to impact – by primarily producing scientific knowledge, or through more integrated forms of knowing, relating and doing. These differences influence the kinds of outcomes that are possible, as well as the critical risks they pose. Here we offer a brief tour of six such initiatives.

Vilsack: we have tried to do this job on the cheap

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Thanks for Bill Gabbert at Wildfire Today for this article. An excerpt:

On August 4 Governor Gavin Newsom, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, and new U.S. Forest Service Chief Randy Moore met at the burn scar of the 2020 August Complex of fires in Northern California to discuss state and federal collaboration on ​wildfire response and fuels management across the West.

During a press availability, Secretary Vilsack uttered words we don’t hear from Chiefs of the Forest Service, or certainly from Secretaries of Agriculture:

We are prepared to do a better job [of forest management] if we have the resources to be able to do this… Candidly, I think it’s fair to say over the generations and decades, we have tried to do this job on the cheap. We have tried to get by, a little here, a little there, with a little forest management here, a little fire suppression over here, but the reality is this has caught up to us.

We have to significantly beef up our capacity. We have to have more boots on the ground… And we have to make sure our firefighters are better compensated. Governor, that will happen.

We need to do a better job, and more, forest management to reduce the risk of catastrophic fire.

Post-Wildfire Hazard Trees

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This Statesman-Journal article (Salem, OR), “Forest Service moves to remove ‘hazard trees’ along fire-burned roads in Santiam, McKenzie canyons,” has a slideshow with 58 images from the burned areas. Gives you an idea of the hazards along trails and roads.

This photo is not from the article, but from Freres Lumber’s blog. Shows how a fire can weaken roots and undermine trees, so that they easily fall over.