The Smokey Wire : National Forest News and Views
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It’s starting to look like “A New Century of Forest Planning” may ultimately come to refer to the hundred years or so it takes to get a new planning rule implemented. Will the “Hundred Years War” come to signify the length of the timber wars? Way back in the 1900’s, Chief Dale Robertson was convinced … Read more
Here is a post from a short-lived blog I ran in 2005, Forest Planning Directives, about Forest Service planning Manual/Handbook rewriting. I think it may shed light on our planning rule critique as well. And it can serve as a guidepost, for the inevitable Manual/Handbook rewriting that will ensue just after the Draft Planning Rule … Read more
Forest Service Chief Tidwell responded this week to the agency’s “morale focus groups,” which convened in response to the Forest Service’s basement-dwelling rankings as a good federal agency workplace. In the survey, employees ranked Forest Service leadership 217th out of 223 federal agencies. Tidwell’s response? He appointed a new director for the Office of Communications … Read more
As our readers know, there has been a considerable amount of debate on this blog regarding place-based national forest legislation (e.g., the Tester and Wyden bills). A while back I put together some tables comparing various bills and formalized agreements, to see how they approach things such as NEPA, restoration, and other matters. [Here it … Read more
The last panel at the Science Forum talked about the latest thinking in how to do planning, bringing together the information from the first four panels. Clare Ryan from the University of Washington spoke about policy design and implementation, especially best science. (slides pdf) When thinking about policy, we think about policy goals contained in the policy … Read more
Yesterday morning we visited the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals to listen to the appeal of Judge Brimmer’s decision on the 2001 Rule. There were three judges presiding,Anderson, Murphy and Holmes. Since this is Women’s History Month, I have to point out that all the lead counsels, and all the judges were male. The ratio of female to … Read more
Jim Burchfield January 18, 2009 If genuine, deliberative collaborative processes become an inviolate principle in the development and implementation of a new generation of National Forest plans, then the geographic scale of planning becomes one of the most important early decisions in the establishment of planning rules. I will argue that a vital, but not … Read more