Gunnison Sage Grouse: Who Chooses What To Do When We Don’t Know What Will Work?

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I thought this storyin the Denver Post was interesting. It raises a question, though, we don’t really know why populations are declining, but the lawsuit from Western Watershed seems to be about grazing. This is not surprising, since that seems to be something WW doesn’t like. For whatever reason, WW doesn’t seem to have the point of view of many (at least in Colorado and Wyoming) that losing public lands ranchers also means losing the home ranch, and the home ranch then tends to become housing developments. And residential development is another threat to the sage grouse.

Grazing as a direct cause of the recent decline seems unlikely Grazers have been grazing maybe since the 1870’s and we can imagine that practices have improved through time. So apparently grazing and GSG have coexisted for the last 150 years. Here’s a story in the Crested Butte Journal about ranching in the valley. So why stop that if it’s not the cause?

If other things (known and unknown) are responsible for the decline (we are talking since the 70’s) why target grazing in the lawsuit? Will it actually help the bird? We don’t know, since we don’t know why it’s declining. For a while, as you can see, since 2005, the collaborative groups and ranchers seem to have made an impact.

CPW provides these population estimates:

In the years after it was named a new species, millions of dollars were spent on conservation efforts. Gunnison County hired a sage-grouse coordinator in 2005. The federal government paid for aerial seeding to provide food for the grouse and changed their mowing practices to cater to the bird. In 2014, the species was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

The Gunnison sage grouse numbers increased between 2004 and 2007, and annual counts of the males at the breeding grounds have shown the total population hovering between about 4,000 and 5,000 since then — until 2018, when the numbers began to plunge.

The total population was estimated at 3,500 in 2018, 2,100 in 2019 and 2,500 this year, according to data provided by Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

It could be part of a cyclical decline, a temporary dip driven by drought and two tough winters, but with so few birds left and with their habitat continually shrinking, the drop has raised alarm bells for conservationists, and for Braun.

Still, efforts are underway to protect the birds, said Jessica Young, who pushed Braun to recognize the birds as a separate species when they worked together beginning in the 80s.

“Since I live in Gunnison and make my life in Gunnison, I see day in and day out how hard people are working on the issue,” she said. “What he sees from the outside is the numbers, and the decline and the small populations literally starting to wink out. So we see two different worlds. I’m deeply concerned about them. I absolutely consider them imperiled….but I might have a bit more hope because of how hard I’ve seen people try.”

It’s interesting how Jessica Young talks about “different worlds”; it’s something I’ve heard quite a bit with these kinds of controversies. We’ll be discussing this more when we get to The Battle for Yellowstone.

In early December, the Center for Biological Diversity and Western Watersheds Project filed a lawsuit against the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, alleging that the federal agencies have failed to do enough to protect the Gunnison sage grouse.

The lawsuit, one of many over the years, takes aim at the amount of grazing that is allowed on publicly owned sage grouse habitat, arguing that the grazing is harming the birds by destroying vegetation they rely on, limiting their ability to breed and hide from predators.

“Ultimately the bird is critically imperiled and something has to change,” said Talasi Brooks, staff attorney at Western Watersheds. “Maybe it’s taking cows off the land, maybe it is changing the season of use…but one way or another, any movement toward actually doing something about the threat of livestock grazing to the sage grouse would be a good thing.”

It sounds like ranchers and the BLM and other cooperators, have, indeed, been assiduously doing things.. and they seemed to be working, but took a sudden downturn associated with heavy snow years. It seems to me that it’s another case where we don’t really know why populations are declining, but litigators round up the usual suspects that they don’t want around. Using lawsuits as a policy tool in this case can 1) place the pain on certain groups that the litigatory groups don’t approve of, and 2) placing the power to place that pain outside the hands of local people (justice question), and 3) having policy with impacts on folks’ livelihoods determined in settlements behind closed doors, without knowledgeable on the ground people, nor the public involved (both a justice and “are you getting the best information to decide” question).

It can effectively cut local people and their knowledge out of the decision-making process, which has serious justice implications IMHO. It can also simply not work for the species, as the target groups may not be the cause of the problem, and these changes could possibly make things worse for the bird.

100 Years Ago- Health Camps for the Spanish Flu.. Arthur Carhart and the History of National Forest Camping

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Campers in what was the Davenport group in the mountains west of Pueblo (CO). The FS’s Davenport Campground remains west of what was considered the Agency’s first camp, envisioned between 1919 and 1920. Photo courtesy of the Forest Service.

Here’s an interview with Ralph Swain, long-term Forest Service regional recreation specialist in the Colorado Springs Gazette.

And Swain can’t help but laugh now. Because of how obvious the answer became, yes. But also because he now knows there was a lesson from 100 years ago.

In 1920, Coloradans were still dying, though less frequently, from the flu that had taken the country by storm two years prior. Also in 1920, there was a young man by the name of Arthur Carhart who was in the final stages of developing a recreation site intended to meet the demands of new outdoor masses.

In the San Isabel National Forest west of Pueblo, there was to be a “health” camp, as Carhart tended to call it.

It would become an inspiration for Forest Service campgrounds everywhere.

This has been a recent point of research for Swain, a passionate, amateur historian. Carhart “would’ve anticipated it,” Swain says of today’s crowding in the woods. “He would’ve said, ‘Oh yeah, they’re gonna come, and they’re gonna come in droves.’”

As they had been from Pueblo during World War I, escaping the heat and troubles of civilization for the cool, refreshing wilds of the Wet Mountains.

It was a troubling time indeed. In 1914, before men left for the conflict in Europe, before they contracted the fast-spreading sickness in the trenches, they were reeling from labor wars close to home. Miners, women and children died in the Ludlow Massacre, the fallout of which reached a short distance north to John D. Rockefeller’s steel empire in Pueblo.

“As a result,” reads a paper prepared by and for the Forest Service, “the local community sought increased and safe access to the newly discovered benefits of hunting, fishing, and family gatherings on public lands.”

This, researchers have noted, was all part of demands for more leisure and higher pay and the kinds of safer, 40-hour workweeks that were being negotiated in cities nationwide, not just in Colorado’s second-largest metro, as Pueblo was then.

..

The Squirrel Creek concept included brief pull-offs for cars to reach “private” sites, along with picnic tables, water pumps, trash receptacles, fire grates and latrines.

“This new idea called ‘camping’ took off,” the Forest Service later recounted.

Squirrel Creek Canyon was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2005. Though much was destroyed in a 1947 flood, remains of the old campground can still be found along the Squirrel Creek Canyon Trail, west of Pueblo Mountain Park and east of Davenport Campground. The canyon is about 5 miles north of Lake Isabel, the destination that Carhart also envisioned.

Largely lost around that old campground is a trail from Carhart’s day. Wingate hopes to revive it in the next couple of years, pending funds. “As a remembrance of what it was like,” he says.

The Smokey Wire Website Tune-Up

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Sadly, our wondrous web guru Hillary has moved on from the web business. Fortunately, we have a team of new web gurus at Cloudnine Web Design. They are doing mysterious behind the scenes things at the website to make it run better. If you run into new or different difficulties with the site, send please me an email at terraveritas at gmail and they’ll figure out what’s going on. Thanks!

Getting the Band Back Together? Forest Service Leadership Predictions from E&E News

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Forest Service Chief Vicki Christiansen on Capitol Hill last February. Francis Chung/E&E News

Thanks to Rebecca Watson for this one..

“Christiansen appears safe in the position, former Forest Service officials and policy insiders say, if the Biden team determines she can deliver on the incoming administration’s increased commitment to climate action and decreased emphasis on timber harvesting.”

Just for the record, if you use Headwaters’ handy interactive map and graphs of timber volumes.. they look remarkably invariant to Administrations. I’d think that was because Congress gives the FS bucks to do it. Plus there’s the desire of many states (including the politically influential California) to increase funding for fuel treatments and increase the ability for the wood to be used (and paid for). And, of course, Bonnie and others know all that. So I’d guess that “decreasing emphasis on timber harvesting” might be more nuanced than reported here.

Other Forest Service officials Bonnie served with include Deputy Chief Chris French; Associate Deputy Chief Christine Dawe, who ran timber programs during the Obama administration; and Glenn Casamassa, who helped write the agency’s planning rule in 2012 and is now regional forester in Region 6, covering the Pacific Northwest. The undersecretary for natural resources and environment, Jim Hubbard, was deputy chief for state and private forestry under Bonnie, but as a political appointee now, Hubbard wouldn’t be expected to remain.

Bonnie “can’t help but notice a strong continuity in staffing on the team,” said a forest industry source with relationships inside the agency.

….

The Forest Service chief works most closely with the undersecretary for natural resources and environment. It’s a critical relationship and a delicate one to keep untarnished by politics, said Dale Bosworth, former chief from 2001 to 2007. During his term, he said, the relationship amounted to, “I don’t screw with politics, and you don’t screw with policy.”

Sometimes the line blurs, Furnish said. Prior to the Clinton administration, the agency took pride in its leaders’ surviving the turnover of administrations, he said. But in 1993, the Clinton administration fired agency Chief F. Dale Robertson and brought on Jack Ward Thomas, a wildlife biologist who had written on protecting the northern spotted owl and wasn’t a career government employee.

The appointment was a “bloody coup,” said Furnish, who retired in 2016 after a 34-year career with the Forest Service.

Former officials and lobbyists who worked with the Forest Service recall Thomas’ tenure as a lesson in what happens when politics creep into decisions on Forest Service leadership. In 1994, Republicans gained control of the House, and Thomas — who had kept on top Forest Service managers from the prior administration — became torn between newly influential timber interests and environmental groups, both of which turned against him.

No, Thomas was absolutely a career government employee. He worked as a research scientist and had not been to SES training nor certified, but had a lengthy and impressive career IN THE FOREST SERVICE. I’m a former WO drone who got to see Thomas operate during this period. My interpretation would be that he had legitimate policy disagreements with the Undersecretary and his allies, probably based on his real world experience. I can’t see him as being “torn,” I can see him picking the position in each case he thought to be correct. But that’s just me.. who else was there at the time?

Also Jim retired in 2002, I thought. Maybe he can chime in here.

I found this a little creepy..

Agency officials who embraced the Trump administration’s change and helped craft it may find themselves out of step with the incoming USDA leadership. That might include the regional forester for Region 10 in Alaska, Dave Schmid, Stahl said in a post on the forestpolicypub.com blog and in his email to E&E News.

While I appreciate the nod to TSW (albeit not by name, sigh) I’d have to disagree with Andy. I don’t know how you measure “embracing” , but those who “helped craft it”.. really? So those who applied for a detail.. or maybe those requested by name, who said yes. I feel that feds should be free to carry out orders from any color of politicals without being monitored by the Enthusiasm Police for potential future punishment.

It would have been nice, perhaps, to have interviewed someone from NAFSR.

December litigation that doesn’t directly involve the Forest Service

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Five new lawsuits were filed against the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service related to species found on national forests.

The Center for Biological Diversity and Maricopa Audubon sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for failing to update the critical habitat designation for the endangered Mount Graham red squirrels on the Coronado National Forest.

A coalition of conservation organizations has sued the U.S. Department of Interior and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the Montana District court on grounds that the government has failed to prepare a recovery plan for Canada lynx after being ordered by a court to do so by January 2018.

Seven environmental groups have filed a lawsuit in the Northern District of California that seeks a court order requiring the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service to complete its five-year review of the owl’s protected status and to issue a final decision on the petition to upgrade the owl from a threatened to endangered species.

Two lawsuits, involving 25 plaintiffs, have been filed in the Montana District court against the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service and its decision to not list the wolverine as a threatened or endangered species on October 8.

The Center for Biological Diversity has filed a lawsuit in the District of Columbia District court challenging the Trump administration’s recent termination of a program aimed at restoring grizzly bears to the North Cascades in Washington.

The BLM was sued over its management of the Carrizo Plain National Monument.

The Center for Biological Diversity and Los Padres Forest Watch have sued the Bureau of Land Management in the Central District of California court to reverse its approval of what would be the first new oil well and pipeline in Carrizo Plain National Monument since it was established in 2001.

Other oil and gas litigation involving public lands and waters.

  • Beaufort Sea (court decision) (includes a link to the opinion)

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the proposed Liberty project, which would have involved the construction and operation of a nine-acre artificial island and a 5.6-mile pipeline along the Alaska coast in the Beaufort Sea.  The court faulted to Bureau of Ocean Energy Management for arbitrary modeling of economic effects of climate change, and the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service for inadequate analysis of effects on polar bears.

Native Alaskans and environmental groups are asking a federal district court to block the Trump administration from selling oil drilling rights on the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on January 6th.  Environmentalists were already challenging the Interior Department’s August decision to formally authorize an oil auction.

Earthjustice filed a lawsuit in the District Court of Alaska challenging the Willow Master Development Plan oil and gas project in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve in the western Arctic because of its effects on climate change and polar bears.  Earthjustice sued the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on behalf of the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace.

We have discussed the topic of “political interference” in agency decisions; here is a case about that.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona found sufficient evidence of bad faith to grant a motion authorizing discovery and compelling the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) to produce internal documents showing whether political corruption influenced an abrupt reversal of policy regarding a huge property development near the San Pedro River.  The court stated:

“Director Spangle plainly admitted that he was forced to concur on a decision that was his to make…  Director Spangle’s statements call FWS’ entire decision-making process into question. These statements, at the very least, support a showing of bad faith sufficient to warrant deliberative materials and limited extra-record discovery.”

And the Colorado pooping story (which does directly involve the Forest Service) continues.

David Lesh posted a photo on social media that allegedly showed him defecating in Maroon Lake on the White River National Forest. U.S. Magistrate Gordon Gallagher ruled Oct. 30 that because of Lesh’s latest action, he was prohibited from “entering onto, being on, or remaining on National Forest System Land” while awaiting disposition of his court case.  Lesh’s attorney filed a motion Nov. 24 contending the Maroon Lake picture was a fabrication and should not have triggered the forestland ban.  In response, the government brief said, “The actual position of the Government has been and continues to be that the mere posting of the Maroon Lake photo was an act of impermissible defiance to the Court’s authority by the defendant, regardless of whether the image is genuine or not.”

 

 

 

NFS Litigation Weekly December 4, and December 23, 2020

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The December 23 Forest Service summary is here:  Litigation Weekly December 11 18 23 2020 Email

Case materials are provided in the links below.

(There is no actual summary for December 4, but there was one case noted in the cover email.)

COURT DECISIONS

On December 1, 2020 the Eastern District Court of Washington issued a favorable decision to the Forest Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, regarding the Mission Restoration Project and Forest Plan Amendment #59 on the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest.  The Project was consistent with the forest plan and did not violate NEPA (with an EA) or ESA (not likely to adversely affect grizzly bears).

On November 24, 2020 the District Court of Montana dismissed the case against the Gold Butterfly Project and a project-specific forest plan amendment as moot for lack of jurisdiction, since the Bitterroot National Forest withdrew the record of decision on August 28, 2020 to provide additional review and analysis.

On December 3, 2020, the District Court of Idaho issued another decision against the Forest Service on the Lost Creek-Boulder Creek Landscape Restoration Project on the Payette National Forest, denying Defendants motion to alter or amend the court’s summary judgment in favor of plaintiffs, resulting in the total vacatur of the 2019 decision.  (The original court decision is provided here, with links to other discussions.)

NEW CASES

On November 30, 2020, WileEarth Guardians and Western Watersheds Project filed a complaint in the Eastern District Court of Washington against the Forest Service, challenging the authorization of domestic sheep grazing on seven allotments within the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest regarding continuing failure to reduce the risk of contact between domestic sheep and bighorn sheep, and alleging NFMA and NEPA violations.

On December 7, 2020, Center for Biological Diversity and Western Watersheds Project filed a complaint in the District Court of Colorado against the Department of Interior, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, and the Forest Service, regarding the Gunnison Basin Candidate Conservation Agreement’s Biological Opinion, for development, recreation, and livestock grazing authorizations in the Gunnison Basin, including the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forest.  More information can be found in this article.

On December 7, 2002 Conservation Northwest and WildEarth Guardians filed a complaint in the Eastern District Court of Washington against the Forest Service regarding the modification to the vehicle class use designations and the motor vehicle use maps, which opens 117 miles of roads in the Colville National Forest to vehicle uses.  They allege violations of ESA, NEPA and the Travel Management Rule.  This article provides more background, including on Conservation Northwest as an infrequent plaintiff.

OTHER CASES

  • Appalachian Voices v. U.S. Department of Interior ( 4th Cir.) (As described in the December 4 Litigation Summary email.) 

On November 18, 2020 the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied appellants motion for a temporary stay of activities on the Mountain Valley Pipeline where protected fish are located. However, this order does not lift a hold on permits issued by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on November 9, 2020, which prevents the Mountain Valley Pipeline from completing stream crossings.  (See next case.)

On December 1, 2020 the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay on the use of a streamlined Nationwide Water Permit 12 (issued by the U.S. Corps of Engineers) for the Mountain Valley Pipeline in the Huntington, West Virginia on the Jefferson National Forest.

Blogger’s update:  The Forest Service has released its Final Environmental Impact Statement supporting eleven amendments to the forest plan and approving the permit to cross national forest lands.  Additional information may be found in this article.

 

BLOGGER’S BONUS

On September 14, Defenders of Wildlife filed a notice of intent to sue the Rio Grande National Forest (as well as the Fish and Wildlife Service) for violating the Endangered Species Act with its adoption of its revised forest plan.  They assert that, when it revised the plan, it, “abandoned key habitat protections that have been in place for more than a decade that significantly limited the logging allowed in important habitat for the threatened Canada lynx,” and that, “the new standards open up hundreds of thousands of acres of lynx habitat in the Rio Grande National Forest to largely unregulated logging, increasing the threat to the small and struggling Colorado lynx population.”

Happy New Year Everyone! And May All Your Supply Chains Be Like Well-Orchestrated Ballets

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Let’s face it, most of the topics we discuss here are..well.. not of interest to most people, including friends and family. But last week, Steve Wilent shared this in his E-Forester weekly, which could easily become chatworthy at any New Year’s Eve shindig. The title is “What Everyone’s Getting Wrong About the Toilet Paper Shortage.”

Faced with this mystifying phenomenon, media outlets have turned to psychologists to explain why people are cramming their shelves with a household good that has nothing to do with the pandemic. Read the coverage and you’ll encounter all sorts of fascinating concepts, from “zero risk bias” to “anticipatory anxiety.” It’s “driven by fear” and a “herd mentality,” the BBC scolded. The libertarian Mises Institute took the opportunity to blame anti-gouging laws. The Atlantic published a short documentary harking back to the great toilet paper scare of 1973, which was driven by misinformation.

Most outlets agreed that the spike in demand would be short-lived, subsiding as soon as the hoarders were satiated.

No doubt there’s been some panic-buying, particularly once photos of empty store shelves began circulating on social media. There have also been a handful of documented cases of true hoarding. But you don’t need to assume that most consumers are greedy or irrational to understand how coronavirus would spur a surge in demand. And you can stop wondering where in the world people are storing all that Quilted Northern.

There’s another, entirely logical explanation for why stores have run out of toilet paper — one that has gone oddly overlooked in the vast majority of media coverage. It has nothing to do with psychology and everything to do with supply chains. It helps to explain why stores are still having trouble keeping it in stock, weeks after they started limiting how many a customer could purchase.

In short, the toilet paper industry is split into two, largely separate markets: commercial and consumer. The pandemic has shifted the lion’s share of demand to the latter. People actually do need to buy significantly more toilet paper during the pandemic — not because they’re making more trips to the bathroom, but because they’re making more of them at home. With some 75% of the U.S. population under stay-at-home orders, Americans are no longer using the restrooms at their workplace, in schools, at restaurants, at hotels, or in airports.

Georgia-Pacific, a leading toilet paper manufacturer based in Atlanta, estimates that the average household will use 40% more toilet paper than usual if all of its members are staying home around the clock. That’s a huge leap in demand for a product whose supply chain is predicated on the assumption that demand is essentially constant. It’s one that won’t fully subside even when people stop hoarding or panic-buying.

….

In theory, some of the mills that make commercial toilet paper could try to redirect some of that supply to the consumer market. People desperate for toilet paper probably wouldn’t turn up their noses at it. But the industry can’t just flip a switch. Shifting to retail channels would require new relationships and contracts between suppliers, distributors, and stores; different formats for packaging and shipping; new trucking routes — all for a bulky product with lean profit margins.

Because toilet paper is high volume but low value, the industry runs on extreme efficiency, with mills built to work at full capacity around the clock even in normal times. That works only because demand is typically so steady. If toilet paper manufacturers spend a bunch of money now to refocus on the retail channel, they’ll face the same problem in reverse once people head back to work again.

“The normal distribution system is like a well-orchestrated ballet,” said Willy Shih, a professor at Harvard Business School. “If you make a delivery to a Walmart distribution center, they give you a half-hour window, and your truck has to show up then.” The changes wrought by the coronavirus, he said, “have thrown the whole thing out of balance, and everything has to readjust.”

Renewable Rush on Federal Land: Target in Covid Relief Bill

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Here’s a story from Bloomberg:

President-elect Joe Biden’s ambitious climate agenda got a shot in the arm with the Covid relief bill, environmental attorneys say, particularly with provisions that will open up wide swaths of federal land to renewable energy development.

The measure, which President Donald Trump signed into law on Sunday, requires by 2025 an increase of at least five times the amount of solar, wind and geothermal energy production currently on federal land. It also creates a new office in the Bureau of Land Management to coordinate renewable energy permitting among all federal lands agencies, including those in the Interior and Agriculture departments

I was wowed by the idea quoted “requires by 2025 an increase of at least five times the amount of solar, wind and geothermal energy production currently on federal land.” But that’s not actually what the bill says.

Here’s the actual text for the goal:

SEC. 3104. NATIONAL GOAL FOR RENEWABLE ENERGY PRODUCTION ON FEDERAL LAND.
(a) IN GENERAL.—Not later than September 1, 2022, the Secretary shall, in consultation with the Secretary of Agriculture and other heads of relevant Federal agencies, establish national goals
for renewable energy production on Federal land.
(b) MINIMUM PRODUCTION GOAL.—The Secretary shall seek to issue permits that, in total, authorize production of not less than 25 gigawatts of electricity from wind, solar, and geothermal energy projects by not later than 2025, through management of public lands and administration of Federal laws.

Seeking to issue permits is not exactly requiring production, which is just as well, given that that seems to be an unrealistic target.

We’ve been following the Chokecherry Sierra Madre project, so I thought I’d try to relate that to this target. CSM would produce 3 GW, so we would need maybe eight of those in five (target 2025, this is 2021 so maybe actually four) years. That doesn’t seem too difficult…except folks have been working on our example project since 2006.

BLM says “As of March 2018, there were 35 BLM-approved wind energy projects on public lands with 3,284 megawatts of total installed capacity, enough to power one million homes.” so it’s clear that CSM is more giant project. But it has a big footprint, also.

Here’s BLM on solar:

The BLM approved its first project to generate solar energy on public lands in October 2010, and as of March 2018 had approved 25 solar projects, totaling 6,319 megawatts (MW) of installed capacity.

The Western Solar Plan guides development of utility-scale solar energy development on public lands. The plan established an initial 17 Solar Energy Zones in 2012 with access to transmission corridors and areas with high solar potential. Two additional Solar Energy Zones were designated in 2013. If fully built-out, projects in these zones could produce as much as 27,000 MW, enough to power eight million homes.

This plan is complimented by the BLM’s Solar and Wind Energy Rule, which became effective on January 18, 2017. The rule brings down the near-term rates and fees paid by solar developers on BLM-managed land, ensures transparency and predictability, and allows for competitive bidding processes. The rule also reduces land and resource conflicts by incentivizing the development of solar projects in designated leasing areas (DLAs). These are areas that are the most amenable to solar development from both a remediation and a generation standpoint.

Where might these places be: here’s a link to the Solar Energy Zones.
Here’s a link to BLM’s mapping of wind energy areas, mapped with restrictions.

Three points.. First is that FS land does not seem to be part of BLM’s mapping?

Second is that wind areas seem to overlap with sage grouse habitat, to some extent, in the Interior West.

Preventing solar and wind power from harming the ecosystems and their plants and animals was one of the Obama administration’s biggest challenges with renewables, and it may be one for the incoming administration as well, said Danny Cullenward, an energy economist and lawyer at Stanford Law School.

“The incoming Biden administration will have to balance pressure to identify a clear path for building new clean energy infrastructure with ongoing concerns about the dilution of federal protections for wild lands and critical habitats,” Cullenward said.

Third, it will be interesting to see what this level of pressure will do to analysis and permitting efforts.

End of 2020 The Smokey Wire Business

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We’ll be discussing the ideas in this book starting in two weeks.
Happy New Year to everyone!

1) You may be in the middle of donations for the end of tax year. While The Smokey Wire donations are NOT tax deductible, I know for me this is a time when I look at my portfolio of donations for the year, and supplement where I have forgotten some areas, or not given enough, regardless of deductibility. Donations to The Smokey Wire are always appreciated!

2) In two weeks (January 12 or so) I’ll be starting discussion of another book- this one Justin Farrell’s 2015 book The Battle for Yellowstone.
We’ve touched upon some ethical, moral and cultural dimensions of various forest policy conflicts in the past and it’s time, I think, to jointly work on developing a shared thought structure to talk about these dimensions more directly. What I like about Justin’s book is that he addresses the moral, spiritual, historical, social and so-called “natural” science dimensions in a holistic way. A review in The Economist called it “the most original political book of early 2015.” You can get it on Kindle for $14.00 and used for more; it might be available in some libraries. I’m going to summarize some of his ideas and use excerpts, so you’ll be able to participate without reading it yourself. You might get more out of it, though, by reading the book, or at least skimming parts that look interesting to you. It is long, academic and repetitive in spots, but for me, wherever I dive in something interesting pops up.

3) I am really far behind in posting interesting stories, and new ones are coming in rapidly. So, at least for a while, I’m going to have posts with round-ups of multiple articles, as well as more individual posts per day, until I get through this pile.

4) As always, please contact me if I asked for information and never posted on it… like I said, I have a tall virtual pile and I could have lost track.

5) If you are interested in volunteering for The Smokey Wire, doing research or writing a post.. let’s talk! Email me at terraveritas at gmail.

Sabelow Series in the Sacramento Bee II: In Devil’s Garden, California’s majestic wild horses trapped in no-win fight for survival

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Ken Sandusky, a spokesman for the Modoc National Forest, looks at a headwaters spring where the native grasses were trampled and eaten by horses on Sept. 11, 2020. “It should be a little oasis. And it’s gone,” he said. Ryan Sabalow [email protected]

I agree with Emily, this is a pretty even-handed look at the issue in a specific place.

Here are a couple of questions:
1. What’s best for the horses? Who decides that with what values? Who decides whether sterilization is inhumane?

2. Sabelow’s observations on a specific site vs. Koncel’s general statement. In a contentious disagreement like this, is there a place where claims and evidence can be discussed in an open forum (this reminds me of the idea of the conflict resolution technique of joint fact-finding)? But will joint agreement on facts help when values themselves are so different?

3. Degrees of “wildness”

‘IT SHOULD BE A LITTLE OASIS. AND IT’S GONE’
Out here, the ranchers who have a permit to graze cattle are required to build barbed wire fences to keep their livestock out of some of the protected springs that bubble up from the lava rock. These permanent riparian areas are critical to the long-term survival of native wildlife in this high desert.

The fences, which deer and elk are able to leap, must have a smooth wire along the bottom to allow local pronghorn antelope, which can’t jump very well, and smaller animals to crawl under.

The fences can be no match for the horses. At one site I visited, the horses pushed down the barbed wire, shearing many of the metal T-posts off at the base. The lush native grasses around the protected spring were so mowed from horses’ teeth it looked like a putting green covered in piles of horse droppings.

“This site should be surrounded by vegetation,” said Sandusky, the Modoc National Forest’s public affairs officer. “It should be a little oasis. And it’s gone.”

The horse hooves had turned much of the soft soil around its rock-armored headwaters into a pockmarked bog. Sandusky told me in other parts of the forest, the horses had trampled less-rocky springs so much that they had actually stopped flowing.

She’s not wrong about the disproportionate numbers. Each year, some 26,537 cattle graze on the Modoc National Forest under 82 federal permits issued to ranchers.

The Forest Service defends the practice, saying it’s obligated under federal law to allow grazing. Cattle ranchers are required under the terms of their permits to leave a percentage of the forage, and they’re required to keep their cattle from grazing around protected springs.

On the Modoc, the cattle are allowed on these lands only for three to five months.

“You take them to another range or you take them off the range altogether,” Sandusky said. “With horses … they’re out here 365. There’s no way to manage the overuse of the resource.”

Koncel, though, was having none of that. She insisted that cows — not horses — are responsible for the majority of the damage to riparian areas.

“Wild horses don’t do that,” she said. “They drink, and they move out.”

At the spring I visited, there were only a few cowpies scattered among the piles of horse apples, and it was clear the horses had been in there for months.

Koncel’s solution to addressing the overgrazing issue: reduce the numbers of cattle on the range, and use a type of birth control called PZP, shot from a dart, to keep the horses’ numbers in check.

While it’s shown promise in some areas, it would be a major challenge to dart mares multiple times across hundreds of square miles of rugged terrain in Devil’s Garden.

A more practical solution might be to round up mares once and surgically sterilize them — a plan the Trump administration proposed on BLM lands — but horse advocates believe that is inhumane. This month, they sued the feds over it.

Degrees of Wildness (care versus Nature)

But what about the mountain lion preying on those foals out here?

“That bothers me. But I also think if we think of wild horses as being wildlife, then we have to accept that.”

What about a bad winter causing horses out here to starve or their watering holes to freeze?

“There are areas that have been suffering from drought, and there have been emergency gathers, but one then has to step back and say, ‘OK, truly, instead of taking the horses off, why not give them supplemental hay or water and keep them on?’ ”