Add to this diagram – “Respiration (when overheated).”
We’ve talked about how older forests may sequester less carbon and dead forests release carbon (for example, here). New research indicates that forests also sequester less carbon and start to release carbon (while they are still alive) if the temperature gets too high. As reported here:
‘We’re in Bigger Trouble Than We Thought’
The data show a clear temperature limit, above which trees start to exhale more CO2 than they can take in through photosynthesis, said co-author Christopher Schwalm, an ecologist and earth system modeler at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. The findings mark a tipping point, of sorts, at which “the land system will act to accelerate climate change rather than slow it down,” Schwalm said.
“Seeing such a strong temperature signal globally did not surprise me,” he said. “What I was surprised by is that it would happen so soon, maybe in 15 to 25 years, and not at the end of the century.”
Other researchers commented on management implications of drought-stressed dying trees:”
It may come down to looking at options for saving valuable, individual stands of trees, and protecting genetically distinct and more resilient species. It could also be important to conserve corridors and patches of woodland to reduce the distance seeds must travel to enable forests of the future to spread or reconnect under more favorable climate conditions, he explained.
“We think a lot of these areas are going to go down, so where can we save some of it?” he asked.
There are obviously implications here for national forest planning. It seems like it should be the role of the national headquarters to review and interpret the implications of new research for forest management, and to advise national forests regarding its implications for their plans and whether they should consider making changes.
Outside had this story. What I thought was most interesting about the judge seemed to think that having permits is about environmental damage, and not so much about the taxpayers getting their share of any monetization. Andy has posted on this before here, that it has to do with the peculiar nature of Park Service regulations on filming.
In the opinion, Kollar-Kotelly noted that new technology and the evolving media landscape have changed the nature of filmmaking. The permitting system was intended to mitigate ecological impact, but an independent filmmaker shooting a climbing documentary is a much different beast than a crew shooting the next Star Wars movie.
“Now, over two decades after the passage of § 100905, any individual may easily enter a national park and shoot a high-quality video at will using nothing more than a smartphone,” she wrote. “With the expansion of mass-media outlets like YouTube, such filmmakers may expediently disseminate and monetize those videos on the internet. Yet, so long as these modern filmmakers attempt to commercially market their videos, § 100905 and its implementing regulations require a permit, without any regard for the effect that their filming might have on the preservation of national park land.”
I wonder whether the permitting system was actually designed only to charge enough to mitigate ecological impact. It seems like other kinds of permits, it’s argued that feds should charge fair value for the American taxpayer (however that is defined). As a taxpayer, it seems to me that for anyone who monetizes something from federal lands, we should get some piece of the action.
The Park Service will also no longer distinguish between different types of filming, such as commercial, noncommercial, or news-gathering projects. In the past, a major newscast wasn’t subject to obtaining a permit, nor was a production for a nonprofit, no matter the size of the crew or amount of equipment required. From now on, it’s just “filming,” and whether or not you need a permit depends solely on how much your crew will impact the park. According to the NPS, the interim guidance will “eventually be replaced with regulations addressing filming activities that are consistent with the outcome of the litigation.” For now, anyone interested in filming in a park is still encouraged to contact that park directly beforehand.
As a video producer myself, navigating the lengthy application process and red tape has frequently outweighed the benefits of shooting on public lands, and in some cases made it impossible. That’s a shame, because these lands belong to everyone and are one of this country’s greatest assets. For the Pattiz brothers, being able to easily capture the beauty and wonder of the national parks helps them accomplish their mission of sharing the parks with the greater public.
“We’re of the strong belief that greater awareness leads to more protection,” Will says. “The reason we named it More than Just Parks is that they really are more than just parks, they’re something different to everybody, and they should be a place for inclusion—these places were set aside for everyone.”
I’m not sure that greater awareness leads to more protection, after all they are Parks already. And the argument that they are “set aside for everyone” seems like a slippery slope in terms of uses.
The following guest column was written by Leia Barnett, Greater Gila Campaigner for WildEarth Guardians. – mk
The Greater Gila region is an exceptional landscape. It is exceptional for its biodiversity, which is greater than that of Yellowstone. It is exceptional for its cultural significance, as it is the traditional homelands for 18 different federally recognized tribes. It is exceptional for its cultural history, which dates back to over 10,000 years ago. It is exceptional for its size and scale, at over 10 million acres, five different ecoregions, four different designated wilderness areas, and three separate mountain ranges. And it is exceptional for the place that it holds in the hearts and minds of many New Mexicans, as a place to backpack deep into the Black Range Mountains, a place to fish in our state’s last free flowing river, to star gaze under unparalleled dark skies, to experience the elk hunt of a lifetime. There is no other landscape in the West that is both an ecological and cultural nexus cherished by so many.
And the Greater Gila is under threat. The megadrought that continues to bear down upon the Southwest threatens the health of the rivers and the vulnerable plant, animal, and human communities that rely upon them. The continued livestock grazing of these distressed ecosystems perpetuates their increasing fragility. A Tucson-based company just proposed a new copper and gold mining operation in the Burro Mountains.The Holloman Air Force Base recently proposed expanding jet training over the Greater Gila, although this has stalled. For now. A private entity just received their preliminary approval for a water storage pump facility on the lower San Francisco River. And the persecuted population of Mexican Gray wolves continues to aspire to recover, but instead teeter on the brink due to agency mismanagement and a lack of meaningful carnivore coexistence legislation.
Each of these threats is representative of larger national issues that continue to jeopardize the health of our communities, the robustness of the ecosystems we rely upon, and the resilience of our planet. The F-16s that buzz the tops of the ponderosa pines and shake the hatchling chickadees from their nests high atop Hillsboro Peak are an expression of the increased militarization of the borderlands, a tradition that has shaped our national narrative since Woodrow Wilson first signed into law sweeping constraints on immigration. The United States Government’s often xenophobic border wall agenda has for too long come at the expense of human health and safety, ecosystem resilience, and equitable and just policies for all affected communities.
The General Mining Act of 1872 continues to expose our public lands to the rapacious agendas of extractive industry. The laws established in this act remained mostly untouched and heavily in favor of mining companies until former Senator Udall and current Representative Grijalva made some modifications to them in 2019. But multinational mining companies still literally get away with murder. Anyone who’s seen the scar of the Chino Mine outside Silver City knows there is nothing eco-friendly about an open pit mine. The barren red and yellow canyon of that cavernous scar has become a lifeless landscape all to itself. Not to mention the environmental effects that will be felt in those surrounding communities for centuries to come.
Additionally, we know that Indigenous communities are fighting hard to protect their sacred lands from this misguided, monomaniacal enterprise. The San Carlos Apache and their representative non-profit Apache Stronghold have been fiercely fighting to save their sacred lands of Chi’chil Bildagoteel, also known as Oak Flat, from the profit-mongering objectives of the multinational mining corporation Resolution Copper. The Apache were forcibly and violently removed from the Greater Gila landscape as recently as the end of the 19th century. The displacing effects of these unfettered, unregulated industries reverberate across the landscape of the American southwest.
And if we’re on the topic of resource exploitation, water should most certainly be included in the conversation. The Greater Gila houses the watersheds of several important rivers, including the San Francisco, the Gila, and the Mimbres. All three make up a portion of the Colorado River Basin, an already imperiled, over-used, and mismanaged hydrological system. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) recently issued a preliminary permit for a pump storage facility for a site near Lake Powell, similar to the one proposed for the San Francisco River. The ill-conceived nature of this project cannot be overstated. “Unsustainable use of the Colorado River has already taken this life source to its knees,” said Jen Pelz, the Wild Rivers Program Director at WildEarth Guardians. “If we intend to sustain this living river for future generations, we cannot ask the river to bear this heavy burden any longer. It is time to look elsewhere to wind, solar and other forms of power storage.”
The threats to the Greater Gila include threats to the rivers and threats to the wildlife that rely upon them. For over two decades, the critically imperiled Mexican gray wolf, or lobo, has fought its way back from extinction and the current wild population hovers just over 180. Ongoing acute conflict with livestock grazing on public lands continues to jeopardize the future of the species. The prioritization of beef production over biodiversity protection is part of an old west mandate that still permeates the culture of the agencies and leaves them hamstrung when bold, meaningful action is needed.
All of the things that make the Greater Gila special: the wildlife, the water, the quiet, the dark skies, the long running human relationships to the land, they’re all under threat. The Greater Gila is underprotected and the federal agencies entrusted with the management of these revered lands continue to prioritize profit over people, extractive industry over biological integrity, and rapacious corporate agendas over ecological resilience. We must change the mandate of administrative bodies like the forest service from “multiple use” to “sustaining for all”. It’s long overdue that our national forests be managed under the Department of the Interior rather than the Department of Agriculture.
There must be systemic land-management reformation if we are to save wild landscapes like the Greater Gila. We must start thinking at a scope and scale that appropriately reflect the gravity of the threats that continue to menace and endanger life as we know it. We need big, protected landscapes that revitalize and invigorate communities, that allow for a thriving, rather than a barely surviving. The time is now. Let’s protect the Greater Gila.
Born and raised in the foothills and arroyos of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, Leia Barnett is thrilled to bring her love and deep reverence for the high desert country of the Southwest to the Greater Gila campaign. Leia graduated summa cum laude from the University of New Mexico’s cultural anthropology program, where she focused on the ways the more-than-human world can be reimagined through anthropological theory and practice. When she’s not endeavoring to understand the complexities of a successful conservation campaign, Leia can be found mountain-side or river-side, praising the feathered and four-legged ones, and planning her next epic snack.
Slide from presentation on BLM leasingThis webinar is worth a watch for anyone interested in the topic. Here’s the agenda. Folks at Interior couched this as being presentations by “experts”; I would call them interests, myself. The recording is available here.
* Excellent explanation of the BLM leasing process by Nada Culver. Culver, according to this E&E news story, may also be up for the permanent BLM Director post (Senate-confirmed). Culver is an environmental attorney, formerly working for National Audubon.
* We heard from Indigenous interests first. Sharp (National Congress of American Indians) and Borromeo (Alaska Federation of Natives) both focused on the importance of all forms of energy production to their communities, region and the country. As Borromeo said (not an absolutely exact quote) “we don’t inhabit an either/or space about energy production and refuse to be caught between industry and environmental groups.” Sharp is at 49:31 and Borromeo is around 1 hour. Both Sharp and Borromeo represented Native organizations. According to their websites:
As a member-based representative Congress, NCAI is governed by voting members who determine NCAI’s consensus positions expressed in resolutions, which are developed in committees and sub-committees and then voted on at national conventions. NCAI members also elect the organization’s Executive Committee – the NCAI President, 1st Vice President, Recording Secretary, and Treasurer. These are elected by the entire membership.
The Alaska Federation of Natives (AFN) is the largest statewide Native organization in Alaska. Its membership includes 168 federally recognized tribes, 166 village corporations, 8 regional corporations, and 12 regional nonprofit and tribal consortiums that contract and compact to run federal and state programs. AFN is governed by a 38-member board, which is elected by its membership at the annual convention held each October.
One speaker (Mario Atencio) on the panel represented a Dine’ environmental group (Dine’ CARE). The website’s tagline is “Citizens against ruining our environment.”
*The discussion of offshore leasing. I thought Frank Macchiarola of API did a great job of explaining the pros of offshore. He naturally mentioned that receipts are used to fund popular programs such as LWCF. Dr. David Yoskowitz, of Corpus Christi, talked about the success of a broad-based coalition the “Gulf of Mexico Alliance”.. it would be interesting to learn more about their collaboration.
* 2/3 of the Indigenous presentations, and the two labor presentation were very similar in concern for working people in the US. As long as we’re using it here, why not produce it here? All acknowledged we need to transition to new energy sources, but were wary of dumping existing jobs for those which only exist in the talking points of political folk.
If you only have a small amount of time (each presentation is five minutes), I’d listen to the Indigenous and the Labor presentations, because those voices are less heard in many news stories.
* There was a panel of “equity experts” – three folks from NGO’s concerned about equity, the Hispanic Access Foundation, NAACP Climate Justice Program and the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice. These NGO’s are interesting because they spoke as if they were representing the interests of ethnic/racial groups, without having a mechanism for representation.
For example, the Hispanic Access Foundation’s conservation program says
Hispanic Access Foundation’s conservation program seeks to elevate diverse Latino voices and leaders to support Latino communities to advocate for the environmental issues that directly affect their daily lives.
It’s interesting that the Hispanic Access Foundation has been funded by the Hewlett Foundation. I wasn’t surprised as the speaker made some claims about how Hispanics feel about issues based on the Colorado College poll, also funded by Hewlett as part of a larger initiative. More on this aspect in a later post. What I’d like to draw attention to here is the question of equity.. is it something to be judged based on how members of disadvantaged groups feel? How do you find that out? Do you need to be an “equity expert” to weigh in and how do those experts arrive at their conclusions? How does diversity and inclusion in the oil and gas industry fit into equity.. or does it? Where is the overlap between social justice and environmental justice or do we need separate social and environmental equity panels?
For example, we can look at figures like these (note, the Permian is not on federal land).
In 2019, Permian companies employed more than 12,560 women and 48 percent of all oil and gas jobs were held by Hispanic or Latino workers, according to the report.
and wonder, would their views more allied with the Hispanic Access Foundation, or the views of the union reps?
Speaking of the union reps, in the Q&A one of them said that the wind industry paid about half (less than a living wage) of what the oil and gas industry pays, and suggested that any wind turbines on federal land be required to pay better. I didn’t catch all of it, but I had never heard that before.
Bottom line for this public forum- if you’re for Indigenous and unions (as the Biden Admin is), you have plenty of political cover to stand up to folks like NRDC (whose rep gave what sounded like a political speech, not really what I heard the Interior folks ask for). Check out some of the presentations (they are each five minutes, so are mostly very focused) and let us know what you think.
Chris has includes many items of interest in this update, including about Alaska, Oak Flats, GAOA projects, legislation, and (for those of us who have been concerned) that the Admin is not going for a Wilderness only view of what is included in 30 x 30, even though some groups want this.
For those of you who watched the Department of Interior Public Forum on their Oil and Gas Leasing Review last week, you might wonder whether USDA and Interior (plus Commerce for NMFS) and even more Departments (!)…. could work jointly on improving consultation processes rather than having separate efforts…oh well.
We’ll go back to more on the Squillace paper next week, but based on comments, it appears that not many people (this week, at least) are interested in BLM and Forest planning.
I’ve been spending time during this season of Lent online with a group of spiritually-oriented folks. In our online discussions, it was common to say things like “we have destroyed the planet” and one spiritual leader whom I respect greatly said “we are like a metastatic cancer.” There wasn’t really an opportunity for me to say “that’s Malthus!” or “that’s Edward Abbey!”. People just tossed that off as if it were a fact, that everyone must know, and agrees with. I attribute this, and especially the certainty around it, as being influenced by news sources. It’s particularly prominent in the environmental/forest world, but occurs everywhere. I recommend reading this entire piece, by Emma Varvaloucas, and here are some excerpts.
Is it possible to stay informed and engaged without destroying our faith in humanity every morning?
Yes. The key is learning how to read the news with an understanding of both its structure and your own brain’s, a critical (but not distrustful) eye, and an equanimous, long-term perspective. We’ve gathered these ideas into a five-step approach for how to keep reading the news—without losing your mind.
Remember the Long Game: In Case of a Crisis, Zoom Out
The word crisis gets a lot of exercise in the news. During one week in June 2019, news outlets reported on the following crises: child-care, college dropouts, immigration, the climate, opioids, Sudan, homelessness, cops’ mental health, rural healthcare, retail landlords in the UK, lead, farming, money laundering, guacamole, sex abuse, the automotive industry, Iran, Moldova, India’s GDP, Pakistan, Venezuela, Israeli bacon, Trump’s reelection prospects, Boeing’s 737 MAX, the world economy, pastoral courage, and Canadian national unity.
That is a lot of crises to keep track of. And, with no disrespect to the importance of Canadian patriotism or avocados, they cannot all possibly be a crisis.
In 2018 the Los Angeles Times and others reported on “an epidemic of nicotine addiction among kids” because of the rising numbers of teens who had tried vaping, or electronic cigarettes. CDC figures attest that between 2011 and 2018, there was a 1.5% increase in high schoolers who reported that they used e-cigarettes in the past 30 days and a .6% increase in middle schoolers.
Meanwhile, during this nicotine “epidemic,” cigarette, cigar, and smokeless tobacco use all went down during the same period for high schoolers, with a 7.7%, 4%, and 2% drop, respectively. (Hookah use stayed the same.) And lest you still think that today’s kids have just switched from Marlboro to Juul, take a look at these long-term numbers from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. This is the percent of students by grade who smoke cigarettes, including traditional cigarettes, e-cigarettes, cigars, pipes, and hookah, daily from 1976 to 2018. Since the seventies, and consistently from the late nineties on, youth tobacco use has been plunging:
So are we in the midst of a nicotine epidemic, or simply a changing landscape in the midst of a long-term success story? The point is not that we shouldn’t be concerned by teenagers vaping—we should, especially if new companies are specifically targeting young people and nonsmokers. There is a reason why this story appeared in the news, and tobacco use hasn’t dropped so dramatically because action wasn’t taken.
But as always in the case of a crisis, take a moment before you panic, and try zooming out. No one has the time to research the wider long-term narrative of every news story they read. You can, though, keep in mind that there often is one.
Hopefully we can contribute to the “wider long-term narrative” of some forest-related news stories.
Land use planning cannot succeed unless public land agencies are committed to monitoring the impacts that various activities and events have on land resources, and to adapting the management of those resources to meet the goals and objectives laid out in their plans over time. A robust, transparent, and meaningful monitoring and evaluation program is especially important at the landscape and unit planning levels, since it is at these levels where the broad impacts of planning policies are likely to be best understood. Moreover, experience with adaptive management suggests that it works best at larger scales where there is far more flexibility to adapt to new information. Adaptation might also prove necessary at the activity- and project-planning levels, but appropriate conditions can (and should) be baked into activity- and project-level decisions as necessary to ensure that that the evolving goals and objectives in
the higher level plans are not compromised.
First, “planning cannot succeed without monitoring and adaptation.” First, let’s talk about what success might look like. To me, it’s beyond meeting NFMA requirements. Let’s start with the pieces of NFMA planning.. desired conditions and objectives, standards and guidelines, and land allocations. Success in each of these “plan components” might look different. Land allocation seems to be basically a political call e.g. Wilderness, so is success delineating RW’s to satisfy some and not others? I’d say it’s doing a meaningful deal at the local level that everyone can live with. But there are others, including elected officials that think “more is better.” What is success?
Law profs like Mark tend to be very careful with language. So he says “monitoring the impacts that various activities and events have on land resources, and adapting management to meet the goals and objectives laid out in plans over time.” Also he says “ensure that that the evolving goals and objectives..”. But I’m not sure that plan goals and objectives actually can evolve based on the difficulty of doing plan revisions. Yes, you could amend a plan to change the goals and objectives, but … I don’t think I’ve seen that done. Perhaps one of you has. It seems to me that there are Forest Plans on the shelf or on the computer, and there is the adapting to post-fire, different budget priorities, new recreationists, etc. that goes on every day. Forests do adapt, but not necessarily through formal monitoring in an LMP.
So monitoring DC’s may be difficult, based on how general they are, objectives could be fairly straightforward to measure, but where would you measure “impacts of various activities and events”? I’d think mostly at the project level, because you would design the next project in light of those observations. And if you measure something like wildlife across a broad area, generally biologists aren’t sure what exactly are causing increases or declines (weather? disease? hunters? and so on). That’s why people design research experiments to tease out impacts, e.g. mountain bike impacts and so on.
For those of you who remember Chief Jack Ward Thomas and his and subsequent efforts on monitoring, these discussions will not seem new. Federal agencies “should” monitor their impacts but what, and how, at what scale, and who decides? Here we are with twenty five more years under our belts and we don’t seem any closer to resolving the question. Then there were the “Adaptive Management” areas of the NW Forest Plan, as well as that monitoring plan. I wonder how well that has worked; whether anything found at that scale changed project-level decisions.
It almost seems to me that people are and have been adaptively managing, but it’s the degree of formality/transparency that’s the real underlying issue.
Does this sound like something I might write (if I were a better writer?):
“The public land use planning process is broken. The land use plans of the principal multiple-use agencies—the United States Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (“BLM”)—are unnecessarily complex, take too long to complete, monopolize the time and resources of public land management agency staffs, and fail to engage the general public in any meaningful way. Moreover, the end result is too often a plan that is not sufficiently nimble to respond to changing conditions on the ground, a problem that appears to be accelerating due to climate change.
It might seem easy to chalk up these problems to the inherent complexity of public land management. But what if public land management were not so complicated? What if the relevant agencies could rethink their current planning models and break down their decisions into more accessible and more manageable chunks?
In this article, I suggest a new public land use planning framework with the potential to make planning more logical, more efficient, and more effective at achieving the goal of the smart management of our public lands that everyone wants. Moreover, this new approach can be carried out in a way that makes planning more accessible to interested members of the general public, thereby enhancing opportunities for meaningful engagement with public land decision-makers.
The ideas proposed here should not be viewed as final or inviolate. Rather, they are offered as an opening bid worthy of testing and debate. We cannot address the crisis facing the current land use planning program if we are unwilling to try new things. Perhaps the ideas presented in this article, even if tried, will be found wanting. But it is my hope and belief that we can and will learn much from rethinking the current public.”
What’s interesting to me is that the problem as framed could lead to completely different solutions as in the 2005 Rule, the 2012 Rule, and Andy Stahl’s KISS Rule. It also reminds me of when planners talked about forest plans as a “loose-leaf notebook” due to the need to deal with changing conditions. We’ve been talking about the same problems for at least 30 years (1992 OTA Report).
But the article was actually written by Mark Squillace, Professor at U of Colorado Law School, so we can assume that he might come up with something quite different. For those of you have been with TSW since the beginning, you might remember that Mark and his students participated in many stimulating practitioner/academic discussions of forest planning with me, John Rupe (forest planner extraordinaire) and Rick Cables. This paper is 65 pages (in the Harvard Environmental Law Review!) and it’s possible you might not want to read the whole thing, so you might want to focus on the proposed solution Squillace begins to describe on page 437, or applying that to the White River National Forest on page 463. Or you might want to start and see if you agree with his “problems with the public planning process” on page 433. I’ll pull out ideas that strike me to highlight in one or more subsequent posts, but if you want to support or take issue with something in the paper, you are invited to provide a post or post a comment as well. Just send any posts to me at terraveritas at gmail.
Let’s take Squillace at his word, as an “opening bid worthy of testing and debate.” I always thought that (since the 2000 Rule) that the Committee of Scientists should have been charged with with “how can we design a process that minimizes the burden and maximizes the utility of filling statutory responsibilities for NFMA and in addition helps build supportive relationships for plan implementation?” In dealings with the legal folks though I’ve generally found them to operate from the presumption that planning is useful. Perhaps it was all that reading on strategic planning when I worked in RPA that led me to be questioning… e.g. what exactly about it it useful or necessary? Are there simpler ways to achieve the same outcome? Do approaches adequately consider uncertainties (known unknowns and unknown unknowns)? And how does Squillace’s proposed solution fit in with your own forest planning (and landscape planning) experiences?
Chief Justice John Roberts this week openly urged opponents of sprawling national monuments to continue their legal fight, suggesting the Supreme Court may be eager to take a fresh look at precedent it first set a century ago.
The Supreme Court declined on Monday to weigh in on whether President Obama exceeded his authority under the Antiquities Act when he created a marine national monument in the Atlantic Ocean (Greenwire, March 22).
But in a four-page statement, Roberts questioned how presidents have implemented the law and suggested other cases that might be better suited to Supreme Court intervention.
In his statement, Roberts wondered whether presidents have abused the 1906 law by ignoring a provision requiring that monuments be “limited to the smallest area compatible with the care and management of the objects to be protected.”
“Somewhere along the line, however, this restriction has ceased to pose any meaningful restraint,” Roberts wrote. “A statute permitting the President in his sole discretion to designate as monuments ‘land-marks,’ ‘structures,’ AND ‘objects’ — along with the smallest area of land compatible with their management — has been transformed into a power without any discernible limit to set aside vast and amorphous expanses of terrain above and below the sea.”
WASHINGTON – The Interior Department today released additional information about the upcoming virtual forum regarding the federal oil and gas program, including the public’s viewing options and ability to submit written input to inform Interior’s review.
The public forum is part of Interior’s comprehensive review of the federal oil and gas program as called for in Executive Order 14008 and will feature several panels to highlight perspectives from invited participants including industry representatives, labor and environmental justice organizations, natural resource advocates, Indigenous organizations, and other experts.
DATE: Thursday, March 25, 2021
TIME: 1:00 pm – 4:30 pm ET
REGISTRATION: The forum will take place via Zoom Webinar. Anyone interested in viewing the forum may register via Zoom. A livestream of the event will also be available at doi.gov/events. The forum will be recorded and have live captions.
The information gathered at the forum will help inform an interim report from the Department that will be completed in early summer. The report will include initial findings on the state of the federal conventional energy programs, as well as outline next steps and recommendations for the Department and Congress to improve stewardship of public lands and waters, create jobs, and build a just and equitable energy future.
Members of the public can submit additional information through April 15 to inform Interior’s interim report at [email protected].
