NFS Litigation Weekly October 25, 2019

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Forest Service summaries:  000000_2019_10_25_Litigation Weekly

COURT DECISIONS

The district court denied the plaintiffs’ Motion for Preliminary Injunction sought for the Tenmile South Helena Timber Management Project on the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest.  (D. Mont.)

LITIGATION UPDATE

The district court approved a stipulation to modify the injunction against projects affecting Mexican spotted owls pending further consultation with the USFWS.  (D. Ariz.)  Discussed in detail here and here.

NEW CASES

Plaintiffs contend the Forest Service is asserting federal ownership of Plaintiff’s ten acres adjacent to the White River National Forest.  (Court of Federal Claims)

This case involves several projects related to the Ranch Fire on the Mendocino National Forest and Barryessa-Snow Mountain National Monument where the Forest Service has used a categorical exclusion for road maintenance to salvage timber from 7000 acres.  (D. N.D. Cal.)  A similar case was discussed here.

Plaintiffs claim violations of NEPA and NFMA for the Mission Restoration Project and Forest Plan Amendment #59, which authorized logging, burning, and road building on the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest based on an EA.  (E. D. Wash.)

This lawsuit was filed against the National Park Service and the Forest Service concerning the continued allowance of hunting bison that have migrated out of the Yellowstone National Park to the Custer Gallatin National Forest.  (D. D.C.)  Here’s a background article.

NOTICES OF INTENT

Grazing permittees assert that a biological opinion by the National Marine Fisheries Service addressing 29 allotments on the Malheur National Forest violated the ESA.

The Alliance for the Wild Rockies has supplemented its NOI for the Hanna Flats Project on the Idaho Panhandle National Forest to include violations of ESA associated with consultation on grizzly bears for the forest plan Access Amendment.  (This may be related to the outcome of the Pilgrim lawsuit, discussed here.)

OTHER AGENCIES

The district court has enjoined the BLM from implementing the 2019 BLM Sage-Grouse Plan Amendments because of NEPA violations.  This was explained here.

 

AND MORE FROM THE BLOGGER

  • BLM Grazing

The Western Watersheds Project has filed a lawsuit seeking information (presumably via FOIA) from the BLM about a 2017 grazing initiative affecting six states.  Also, a new lawsuit was filed that challenges parts of the 2019 sage-grouse amendment that allow grazing of research natural areas.  

A court has remanded the decision by the FWS that the species is warranted for listing but precluded by higher priorities for an explanation of why its priority was lowered.  The species is found in high-elevation streams and lakes of the Rio Grande, Canadian and Pecos rivers in Colorado and New Mexico.

  • Mining

The Idaho Conservation League and Greater Yellowstone Coalition are asking a federal court to stop the Kilgore Gold Project on the Caribou-Targhee National Forest.   In Montana, the district court refused to dismiss claims against the Rock Creek Mine on the Kootenai National Forest.

  • Oregon state forests

Counties and other taxing districts have sued because the state has not managed forests for the most long-term, sustainable income as required in a decades-old contract.  Instead, the state is operating under a management plan based on a definition of greatest forest value that includes factors such as recreation, wildlife enhancement and water quality.  Meanwhile, the state is trying to develop a new plan that would gradually increase the number of harvestable acres after adopting a habitat conservation plan for at-risk species.

Modelling for Decisions I: What is Good Enough? For What? And Who Decides?

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From a review of decision support models by Lo et al. Quality was determined by mention in peer-reviewed pubs

One of the challenges facing policy folks and politicians today is “how seriously should we take the outputs of models”? Countries spend enormous amounts of research funds attempting to predict changes from climate change. How far down the predictive ladder from GCM’s to “the distribution of this plant species in 2050” or “how much carbon will be accumulated by these trees in 2100” can we go, before we say “probably not worth calculating, let’s spend the bucks on CCS research or other methods of actually fixing the climate problem.”.

There have been several recent papers and op-eds looking at modeling with regards to economics and climate. And because the models used by IPCC include economic prediction to predict future climate, there is an obvious linkage. Before we get to those, though, I’d like to share some personal history of modeling efforts back in the relatively dark ages (1970s, that is 50 years ago). Modeling came about because of the availability of computer programs. I actually took a graduate class in FORTRAN programming at Yale for credit towards my degree. My first experience with models was with Dr. Dave Smith, our silviculture professor at Yale, talking about JABOWA (this simulation model is still available here on Dan Botkin’s website). Back in the 70’s, the model was pretty primitive. Dr. Smith was skeptical. He told us students something like “”that model would grow trees to 200 feet, but when they know they only grow to 120 feet, they just but a card in that says “if height is greater than 120, height equals 120.”” The idea at the time was that models would be helpful for scientists to explore what parameters are important, and then to test their hypotheses derived from the models with real world data. I also remember Dr. Franklin commenting on Dr. Cannell’s physiological models (Cannell is Austrialian) “it’s modeling to you, but it sure sounds like muddling to me.” Back in those days, the emphasis was on collecting data with modeling as an approach to help understand real world data.

It is interesting, and perhaps understandable, that as models improved, that the concept of “what models are good for” would change to “if we could predict the future using models, we would make better decisions.” Hence, the use of models in decision-making.

I’m not saying that they’re all unhelpful (say, fire models), but there is a danger in taking them too far in decision-making, not considering the disciplinary and cross-disciplinary controversies with each one, not linking them to real-world tests of their accuracy, or especially having open discussions of accuracy and utility with stakeholders, decision-makers and experts. Utility, as we shall see in the papers in the next posts, is in the eye of the beholder. Even the least scientifically “cool” model (say, compared to GCM’s), an herbicide drift model, or a growth and yield model, usually has a feedback mechanism by which you contact a human being somewhere whose job it is to make tweaks to the model to improve it. The more complex the model, though, the less likely there is a guru (such as a Forplan guru-remember them?) who understands all the moving parts and can make appropriate changes. The more complex, therefore, the more acceptance becomes “belief in its community of builders and their linkages” rather than “outputs we can test.” And for predictive models, empirical tests are conceptually pretty difficult because just because you predicted 2010 well doesn’t mean you will predict 2020 or 2100 well.

And at some level of complexity, it’s all about trust and not so much about data at all. But who decides where the model fits between “better than nothing, I guess” and “oracle”? And on what basis?

Please feel free to share your own experiences, successes and not so much, with models and their use in decision-making.

The Attempted Elimination of the Roadless Rule on the Tongass

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David Beebe writes: Most of the last of the large tree rainforests of Amazonia are falling and/or on fire. Most of the last of the large tree rainforests of Southeast Alaska’s Alexander Archipelago are also long gone – permanently gone.

The Roadless Rule and all the remnant wild watersheds it protects are all we have left on the islands of the Tongass National Forest. We can never personally know the full extent of what, and for what, we have lost forever. We can never fully know where and how far the dominoes of irreparable harm such “management” has set in motion across the planet.

If the agency and its industry cynically hiding behind Smokey the Bear and Woodsy Owl; and,

If the Southeast Alaska Native Regional and Tribal Corporations hiding behind their stumps of ancestral cultural values; and,

If all the salaried nonprofit collaborationists hiding behind “conservation” “restoration” and “cultural” values; and,

If Alaska’s elected representatives in Washington DC and Alaska’s Governor all hiding behind a known, tried and failed social, environmental and economic policy —

If all these financially and ethically conflicted agents and cheerleaders of neoliberal colonial plantation “forest management” — “get their way,” a terrible injustice and grandest of thefts of the planet and its future generations will have also been allowed.

Tonka Timber Sale clearcuts, Tongass National Forest( Lindenberg Peninsula, Kupreanof Island – Southeast Alaska 7/12/2019)

Exempting the Tongass from the Roadless Rule would be a mistake

The following piece, written by John Schoen and Matt Kirchhoff, appeared recently in the Anchorage Daily News. Both Schoen and Kirchhoff are retired wildlife ecologists living in Anchorage. They both have research experience working on the Tongass and collectively have more than 70 years of wildlife research and conservation work in Alaska.

The Trump and Dunleavy administrations’ plan to exempt Alaska’s Tongass National Forest from the national Roadless Rule is ecologically and economically unwise. The Tongass is our nation’s largest national forest and contains the greatest remaining area of old-growth temperate rain-forest in North America. The Tongass provides critical habitat for fish and wildlife, including all five species of salmon, deer, bear and other species uniquely adapted to this rainforest ecosystem, such as the Alexander Archipelago Wolf, the Queen Charlotte Goshawk, the Prince of Wales Flying Squirrel, the Marbled Murrelet, and the Prince of Wales Spruce Grouse. Not only does the Tongass support vibrant tourism and fishing industries as well as local subsistence use of fish and wildlife, it also stores more carbon than any other national forest, and plays an important role in moderating climate change.

Supporters of the timber industry point to the small percentage of land area logged as an indicator of the impact. This is misleading, because only one-third of the Tongass supports forests of potential commercial value, and only a small fraction of that is economically valuable. The timber industry has always targeted (high-graded) the largest and oldest trees, but those large-tree old-growth stands have always been rare on the Tongass. An analogy would be fishermen catching only a small percent-age of all the salmon, but catching nearly all the king salmon (the least abundant but most valuable species). Seven decades of high-grading has dramatically depleted the Tongass Forest’s largest (4-10 feet in diameter) old-growth trees. And those rare, old-growth stands provide some of the most valuable fish and wildlife habitats on the Tongass. If the new Prince of Wales timber sale moves forward and the Roadless Rule protections are removed, most of the remaining large-tree forest stands will be clear-cut and their habitat values for wildlife and salmon will be permanently lost. The ecological structure of old-growth forests are not renewable on 100-year timber harvest schedules.

There is strong scientific consensus on the ecological importance and rarity of old-growth forests. In 2003, former Forest Service chiefs Jack Ward Thomas and Mike Dombeck urged that “…harvest of old growth from the national forests should come to an end…” In 2015, seven scientific societies, representing a combined membership of over 30,000 scientists and natural resource professionals, sent a joint letter to Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack requesting that the timber industry on the Tongass transition from old-growth logging to second-growth harvest as rapidly as possible. Today, the Tongass is the only national forest that still clear-cuts old growth. And it is past time to bring that practice to an end.

Exempting the Tongass from the Roadless Rule and further high-grading of the rarest, most valuable old growth will result in unsustainable forest management and risk significant impacts to fish and wildlife as well as jeopardize two of southeast Alaska’s significant economic drivers: fisheries and tourism. According to Taxpayers for Common Sense, the Tongass Forest has lost $30 million on timber sales annually during the past two decades. For both ecological and economic reasons, this is why the Tongass should not be exempted from the Roadless Rule.

Conservation Opportunity?: Large “Trophy” Ranches For Sale

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Cheesman Ranch.
Russ Frisinger, photo

This from the Wall Street Journal via the Colorado Springs Gazette. Seems like a win-win for conservation organizations to buy these and allow the kinds of activities and recreation they would like (or not) without conflicts. Less conflict, more conservation..

Now, as those John Wayne-loving baby boomers age out of the lifestyle or die, they or their children are looking to sell those trophy properties.

That generational changing of the guard has led to an oversupply of ultraluxury ranches on the market. Nowhere is the glut more apparent than in Colorado, where some of the biggest and most storied properties are located.

Jeff Buerger, a local ranch broker with Hall & Hall in Colorado, said there are more large trophy ranches on the market right now than he can recall in his nearly three decades in the business. There are about 20 ranches priced at over $20 million on the market in the state, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of listings.

Some of Colorado’s most prominent listings include a nearly 12,000-acre ranch near Meeker, owned by retired professional golfer Greg Norman, which has been for sale since 2011; it is listed for $50 million. Henry Kravis, the billionaire co-founder of private-equity giant KKR, put his Colorado ranch, known as Westlands, on the market for $46 million in January. Discovery Channel founder John Hendricks relisted his ranch near the Utah border, plus an adjacent resort, for $279 million in May. (He and his wife, Maureen Hendricks, first put the property on the market for $149 million two years ago; that price didn’t include the resort.

Despite a strong local economy, buoyed by tourism, the aerospace industry and the cannabis industry, the surge in supply has led to a lack of urgency from buyers — and is putting downward pressure on prices. Some ranches have sat on the market for years. “Savvy investors… take their time to compare and contrast. They get analysis paralysis,” Buerger said.

For the children of ranchers, the Wild West doesn’t always have the same draw as it had for their parents. Ranch operations are labor intensive, and keeping up with costs can be a struggle. And grandchildren would often rather play videogames and hang out with their friends than go fly-fishing in the wilderness.

“If you look back in the day to the ’70s and ’80s, there were these guys … raised with this mythology of the West,” said Ken Mirr, a local ranch broker. “It was attachment to something Hollywood produced. Their children aren’t necessarily always as interested in operating the properties. Sometimes the kids just see cows and think ‘What should I do with this?’”

Many of the ranches have sprawling mountainous landscapes, forests, meadows, rivers, fisheries and big-game-hunting facilities. Kravis’s has its own golf course. Operating costs vary dramatically, depending on how much infrastructure ranchers have on their land and the level of agricultural activity but can often be millions a year.

And ranching is an increasingly tough business. The increasing expense of upkeep and infrastructure, coupled with the declining price of beef, is squeezing ranchers on both ends, experts said.

“I know a lot of multimillionaires who run cattle and still lose millions of dollars a year,” said Tony Caligiuri of Colorado Open Lands, a land-conservancy group. “One guy I talked to recently in oil and gas said he’s hoping to get his loss down to $1 million a year. His ranch hasn’t turned a profit the whole time he owned it.” In some ways, wealthy ranchers who can afford losses are keeping the industry afloat, Caligiuri said.

Unlike other sectors of the U.S. high-end real-estate market, ranches can’t fall back on international purchasers. Broker Tim Murphy said there is virtually no demand for ranches from international buyers, many of whom “don’t get it.”

For ultrawealthy out-of-town owners, these ranches are frequently geared toward fishing and hunting. But some want the experience of actually herding cattle and plowing fields — and often face lower property taxes if they engage in agricultural activities. Others lease some of their land to local ranchers. “They have high-stress, fast-paced lives,” Belton said. “When they can spend some time going around and around on a tractor, it’s cathartic.”

As the cowboy romance fades, sellers are also trying a new tack: targeting conservationists.

“The last wave of buyers was the baby boomers who fell in love with John Wayne and wanted that experience for themselves,” Buerger said. “Today, it’s more about conservation. You’re starting to hear more landowners talking about wildlife habitat enhancement and ecological work.” Other targeted groups include wealthy families from the East Coast or Silicon Valley.

To fans of “Practice of Science Friday,” that feature will return next week.

Recovery from 250,000 Acre Windstorm on the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest and Other Land Ownerships

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Trees sheared off at heights of 10 to 15 feet are a common sight in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest following a severe windstorm July 19 and a smaller storm the next morning. (Photo: Larry Parnass / For the Journal Sentinel)

Larry Parnass wrote this story about a July windstorm in Wisconsin- worth reading in its entirety- also excellent photos. For westerners, it’s interesting that even though they have a healthy forest products industry, they too suffer from needing to remove the kind of woody material for which there is no market, or the prices are so low that removal can’t pay for itself. Too bad they can’t do chip and ship, as we previously discussed for Northern Arizona. Also the need to clear roads and keep people safe from falling trees seems like some of our insect-induced disturbances. We don’t hear much about the forests in the upper Midwest and I, for one, would like to hear more.

Their devastation remains topic No. 1 across Oconto and Langlade counties. As repairs and cleanups continue three months later, officials who manage federal, state and county forests still labor to grasp the extent of damage. The U.S. Forest Service estimates that at least 63,000 acres of the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest were affected — a land area larger than the city of Milwaukee.

That impact doesn’t include blowdowns in state and county forests in the area, all of which have sent timber and pulpwood prices tumbling due to oversupply, taxing the ability of forest managers to get salvage wood to market before it spoils.

In early August, the state Department of Natural Resources, using initial field and aerial surveys, pegged the damage at more than 250,000 acres — that’s 390 square miles — including 14,577 acres of state land and 53,647 acres of private land open for public recreation.

Barron and Polk counties in northwest Wisconsin were also badly hit, with spotty storm damage in Wood, Portage and Waupaca counties west of Green Bay.

Richard Lietz, Oconto Falls team leader for the state DNR’s Division of Forestry, has walked battered woodlands with private landowners, offering advice. “It’s a lot to take in. It comes as quite a shock,” he said. “There are hundreds and hundreds of people that are affected.”

John Lampereur, a U.S. Forest Service staff member in the Lakewood/Laona Ranger District, calls the storm a once-in-a-career event. After seeing tangled mounds of jack-strawed trees, some in piles 15-feet deep, Lampereur made a prediction.

“I told my wife. ‘This is going to change everything. We’re going to be working on this for 10 years,’” he said.

Lampereur, the Lakewood district’s expert on forest management, estimates that at least 10,000 acres of forest saw complete blowdown.

“The scale of it is so big that you feel powerless to effect what you consider meaningful change,” he said. “We’re going to do our best. To say that we are going to clean up 50,000 acres, it’s not happening.”

Simply put, there is too much wood for the region’s forest-products industry to handle, even in a state that ranks in the top 10 in this sector.

“We’re only going to be able to absorb so much,” Lampereur said of forest products going onto the market as a result of the storm. “We’re kind of a can-do bunch. It’s hard to swallow your pride and say we’re not going to be able to do it all.”

The Forest Service Is About to Set a Giant Forest Fire—On Purpose

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From The Atlantic:

The Forest Service Is About to Set a Giant Forest Fire—On Purpose

A man-made blaze on a remote Utah mountainside could provide valuable insights into the behavior of the powerful wildfires growing more and more common out West.

It will be among the fiercest controlled burns scientists have ever studied in the wild—“as close to a wildfire as you can expect,” says Roger Ottmar, the principal investigator for the Forest Service–led Fire and Smoke Model Evaluation Experiment (FASMEE). The goal? To collect data on every aspect of the fire at once, in order to improve the models scientists and land managers use to predict the impacts of fires. That will allow the agency to oversee more controlled burns on landscapes that need fire to thrive, and the data will also provide insight into the large, intense blazes that keep erupting across the West—the types of unruly fires that climate change and changing land-use patterns are making more common.

Taxpayers prop up the biggest carbon culprit in Oregon: timber

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Oregonians lose hundreds of millions of tax dollars a year subsidizing the forest industry. Enough, says John Talberth, of the Center for Sustainable Economy. Read the full story by Emily Green of Street Roots News.

The Center for Sustainable Economy is calling attention to how taxpayers subsidize one of the greatest contributors to climate change in Oregon – to the tune of at least $750 million per year, according to its analysis.

The Portland-based think tank has determined big timber is topping the list of carbon emitters in the state, finding that industrial logging is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. Last year, researchers at Oregon State University and University of Idaho corroborated those findings.

While state officials have largely ignored these studies, the Oregon Global Warming Commission has been working with the Oregon Department of Forestry on a Forest Carbon Accounting Project aimed at calculating the net emission of carbon from logging once factors such as carbon stores in wood products are taken into account. Their final report is expected in June.

Internationally, nations including the U.S. have agreed to phase out environmentally harmful subsidies. This should include subsidies and tax breaks going to Oregon’s multibillion-dollar timber industry, which is emitting more carbon dioxide than the state’s transportation sector, argues John Talberth, senior economist at the Center for Sustainable Economy – especially considering the sale of Oregon timber is increasingly benefiting foreign investors.

Earlier this year, however, Oregon lawmakers went the opposite direction when they wrote additional tax breaks for the timber industry into their failed Clean Energy Jobs bill, House Bill 2020, in an unsuccessful effort to get support for the legislation from the industry.

During the same legislative session, the Center for Sustainable Economy pushed House Bill 2659, which would have made the receipt of timber subsidies contingent upon good land practices. The bill failed to get out of committee, but Talberth said he believes the bill “has a fighting chance” should it be introduced again in the short session next year.

In the meantime, Talberth’s organization, which advocates for utilizing Pacific Northwest forests for their carbon-sequestering abilities, has taken aim at the timber industry tax subsidy issue.

In May, the center put out a report, “Environmentally Harmful Subsidies in the U.S.,” finding that logging programs in national forests are costing U.S. taxpayers $1.8 billion per year.

Late last month, Talberth gave a presentation in a packed room at outdoor clothing retailer Patagonia’s downtown Portland office on how state and federal subsidies are affecting Oregon taxpayers.

We asked Talberth to break down how the timber industry is costing Oregon taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars every year.

John Talberth: There are three major categories. There are tax breaks – complete exemptions – from property taxes, for example, on standing timber, property tax exemptions for logging equipment, and property tax exemptions for logging roads.

Then there are special rates. Forestland owners pay property taxes at a very reduced rate compared to other landowners.

Then there is a whole category of direct assistance in the form of grants, technical assistance, low-interest loans, cost share assistance, industrial development bonds and money spent promoting wood products through the Oregon Forest Research Institute, one of the timber industry’s favorite propaganda machines.

And then there are the other types of subsidies, like below-cost timber sold off federal land.

We just recently did an analysis; those subsidies nationwide amount to about $2 billion a year.

So when you add it all up, and this is just a partial tally, we’re still in the process of putting out a report on this, it’s over $750 million a year, just in Oregon alone.

Emily Green: So this is a combination of subsidies on private land and federal land that is costing taxpayers in lost revenue and payouts.

Talberth: Correct.

Green: Do private timber companies operating in Oregon need these subsidies to be profitable, or is it unnecessary?

Talberth: I think it’s completely unnecessary. These are multibillion-dollar companies making record profits right now. Not every state subsidizes them, and they’re doing just fine.

I think a lot of these subsidies are doing nothing but shoring up profit margins at these companies that are already high enough. We don’t need to worry about infringing on their profit margins and them going out of business because these subsidies are chump change to them.

Green: There have been some changes to forestland ownership in recent years. I was wondering how that looks in Oregon. Are the companies that are profiting off our natural resources here, are they mostly locally owned at this point?

Talberth: They’re not. One of the most alarming aspects of forest ownership trends over the last 15 years is the loss of locally owned, vertically integrated companies to these international investors.

Right now, the majority of industrial forestlands in Oregon are owned by Wall Street investment organizations and companies, and a growing share of those are foreign investors and foreign companies.

In terms of foreign corporation ownership growth in the United States, the most rapidly increasing share is productive forestland. This is a big concern from a number of standpoints, including the environmental destruction that’s happening on the ground from these companies that are short-sighted, but also in terms of food security and water security. And it’s not just forestland; it’s farmland as well. These companies are moving in and grabbing up U.S. forestland and farmland, and we should all be concerned about that. Not just from an environmental standpoint, but from a social justice standpoint and from a community stability standpoint.

Green: Do you have any idea at this point of what percentage is foreign-owned or which countries are most aggressive in this land acquisition?

Talberth: The USDA Farm Service Agency has pretty detailed accounting of forest ownership in the United States, and we’ve just begun to unpack all that data. But, I know that Canada is a very large investor in U.S. forestland.

(Canada holds 191,635 acres of land in Oregon, according to the Farm Service Agency’s 2017 report. In all, 818,049 acres of agricultural land in Oregon are foreign held, including 555,134 acres of forest.)

Green: At Street Roots, we frequently cover affordable-housing issues, and one thing we’ve heard over and over again, especially in rural Oregon, is that building affordable housing isn’t penciling out because of the high cost of building materials, and part of that is lumber costs. At the same time, we’re in this lumber-rich state, but we’re shipping a lot of our raw logs elsewhere to be milled.

Talberth: We don’t have the quantitative data, but obviously this is just basic market dynamics – if the wood is going to the highest bidder and the highest bidder over the past decade or so has been increasingly foreign markets, Asian markets – and they reached their all-time high about a year and half ago – and it was largely due to the demand from foreign countries.

And this is one of the big problems of having an increasing share of forestlands in the state owned by international investors. They’re looking to use forestland in the U.S. for the export market, and that’s why we have log shortages at our local mills – because a lot of it’s being exported.

Green: Your organization released a report in May that, in part, highlighted how the national logging program is losing taxpayers $1.8 billion per year. How is that possible, if we’re harvesting all these logs off our federal forestlands, shouldn’t that be bringing in a profit?

Talberth: We believe the federal government is under a statutory obligation, and we have yet to press this in court, to make sure that its needs are being managed in a manner that maximizes social and economic benefits to the local communities, and that includes, when it does sell timber, getting a fair return on that timber, not losing money and subsidizing the timber industry.

It ought to be getting all of the cost that the pubic is incurring back, and instead, the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management are selling logs to private mills at a drastically reduced rate that doesn’t even come close to offsetting any of the agency costs.

This is a form of environmentally harmful subsidy that nations around the world have agreed needs to be combatted, and yet, our Forest Service and BLM are prime culprits when it comes to environmentally harmful logging practices.

Green: Are these agreements something the U.S. ever signed on to?

Talberth: Yes, absolutely. The U.S. is party to international agreements like the one brokered at the Rio+20 Earth Summit and participates in programs administered by agencies and institutions such as the Organization for Co-operation and Development and International Monetary Fund that seek to phase out environmentally harmful subsidies. Despite this, subsidies for harmful logging practices are expanding in scale and scope.

Green: The Trump administration wants to increase logging by about 40% on national forestlands. By increasing logging that much, is there any potential for that to begin to make our national forests profitable to taxpayers?

Talberth: First of all, we object to the very idea of using federal forestlands for private profit at all. These are the only places in the country where the public has rights to recreation, to clean water, to wildlife. There are industrial forestlands that are managed exclusively for timber, so it doesn’t make any sense at all to have a commercial timber sale program on public lands at all. But if that program is going to happen, then at bare minimum, the public has a right to getting a fair return from those investments, and we’re not even close.

Green: During your presentation at Patagonia, you said there was a way to “log, but leave the forest behind.” Can you explain how that works and also, wouldn’t this kind of forestry increase building costs even more?

Talberth: In terms of the role of forests in Oregon’s climate agenda and the U.S. climate agenda, we believe two things need to happen. One is the federal public lands and state public lands – even lands managed by counties – should be managed as carbon reserves. We should phase out logging on those lands and let them grow to capture and store carbon.

On private lands, we believe we need to make a transition from industrial forest practices to climate-smart alternatives. Climate-smart alternatives are ways to log a forest and leave canopy behind. So, individual tree selection and patch-cutting techniques – there is a technique called variable density thinning that has been demonstrated – all these techniques are ways to get wood out of the forest but leave the canopy intact and obviate the need for chemical spraying and plantations and replanting – just let the forest regenerate itself.

In the short run, it means we get less volume from the forest, but that’s OK because we’re wasting enormous quantities of wood. But in the long run, these techniques have the potential to actually maximize a landowner’s revenue and add some value to the forest.

Once these forests get bigger and older, and these big trees become the norm instead of small plantation trees, the wood that comes off these lands is actually of higher quality and of higher volume than the wood coming off plantations on an acre-by-acre basis.

Green: Some last-minute subsidies were added to HB 2020 to benefit the timber industry. Is that something you expect to see again if they consider this bill in the short session next year?

Talberth: I think that the political strategy of appeasement, of trying to buy the timber industry’s support, backfired so severely and so catastrophically that legislators will be foolish to try to do that again.

I think legislators just need to focus on the scientific facts and the scientific reality that we cannot continue to have these industrial forest practices in our state, that we need a rapid transition to climate smart alternatives, and that means directly regulating the timber industry as part of any climate bill that’s adopted.

Green: They were doing these giveaways to the timber industry, but the timber industry was completely exempted from the bill to begin with.

Talberth: Yeah, they were completely exempted, and then as a sweetener, they threw these last-minute subsidies to make sure that wood supply wouldn’t be restricted and that transporting logs wouldn’t be more expensive, and yet they still got burned.

Green: Coming back to that $750 million figure that these subsidies are costing Oregon taxpayers: If the state was able to move to some sort of system where the land was incentivized for carbon storage as opposed to timber harvesting, would we be seeing a savings to Oregon taxpayers in any way?

Talberth: There would be a savings. Right now, a lot of these tax breaks and subsidies just need to be rescinded – for instance, the below-cost timbers sales or the tax exemptions for logging roads and logging equipment.

But a portion of the tax revenue that counties would receive as the result of rescinding all these harmful tax breaks should be set aside to reinvest in promoting these climate smart practices, because in the short term – the next couple of decades – we’re going to need to subsidize these practices to help nurture the new generation of forestland owners who know how to do these practices. That is going to cost some money, but it’s well worth it. Getting these practices up and running so that our forests become a major, natural carbon sink – rather than a big source of emissions – is one of the most important investments Oregon can make.

Rocky Mountain Restoration Initiative- Focused Landscape Restoration

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In La Plata County, about 53,800 people, or 96.9% of the total population, live in the wildland-urban interface where residents are at-risk of wildfire. A pilot project aims to build a better buffer around these homes.
Durango Herald file
I hadn’t heard about this effort until the the Durango Herald story here. The article has great photos, also it was interesting that 96.9% of folks in La Plata County live in the WUI. The National Wild Turkey Federation is coming out with more info later this week, so stay tuned.

Southwest Colorado could be the focal point of a pilot project that seeks to make strides in improving forest health in the face of increasing dangers from wildfire, disease and beetle kill.

Earlier this year, the National Wild Turkey Federation approached the U.S. Forest Service to talk about the challenges in forest management that impede fast-paced and large-scale landscape restoration.

In the past, the Forest Service has tried to spread its budget for forest health projects evenly across a landscape, said Kara Chadwick, supervisor for the San Juan National Forest.

“We’ve been struggling with this as an agency for a while,” Chadwick said. “We get a little bit done everywhere.”

But forest officials started to wonder: What if you directed all your resources, in terms of time and money, to one or two places to accomplish critical improvements, rather than make slow progress in multiple places.

“The idea is to focus in one place, and once you’ve achieved that change on the landscape, move to another,” Chadwick said.

The project is called the Rocky Mountain Restoration Initiative, or RMRI.

Colorado was chosen as the state to pilot the project for several reasons: It’s home to the headwaters of four major river systems; nearly 3 million people live in the wildland-urban interface; and outdoor recreation is a big part of the state’s economy, to name a few.

Within the state, three regions are being considered to test the project: the central Front Range, the Interstate 70 corridor and Southwest Colorado.
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The idea, Chadwick said, is to work across all boundaries – federal, state and private lands – to make “transformative change” on the landscape through projects like forest thinning, prescribed burns and boosting logging operations.

Chadwick said areas around Durango, west along the U.S. Highway 160 corridor and up to Dolores could be areas of particular focus.

In La Plata County, for instance, about 53,800 people, or 96.9% of the total population, live in the wildland-urban interface.

Another major part of the program is to improve and protect watersheds. Mike Preston with the Dolores Water Conservancy District said the pilot project could also be used to thin badly overgrown ponderosa forests in the Dolores River watershed.

Past forest management practices have created too-dense tree stands, which can exacerbate issues with wildfire and beetle spread, as well as suck up an inordinate amount of water, Preston said. Encouraging prescribed burns and forest thinning through harvest sales could help with all these issues, he said.

“The problem is, with limited resources available to advance forest health, the pattern has been to spread resources across the entire forest,” he said. “With this project, we’re attempting to concentrate on one or two projects and see what can be accomplished moving more aggressively and timely.”

Chadwick said the hope is to have a final decision on the pilot project by this December. Any work on the landscape would have to go through the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires a study on the environmental impacts of a particular project.

“I think we can get a lot of really good work done, and in the process, build better relationships across the landscape,” she said.

USFS research confirms most CA fires occur in areas of WUI with sparse or no vegetation, but more people

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Photo by LA Times

This morning I got an email from U.S. Forest Service Research News, which including a link to this new research from the USFS and partners concerning wildfires in California.

While the research may be surprising to some, it’s not at all surprising to many of us who have said the same thing going back a few decades now. We’ve had perhaps over a hundred debates about this on the blog over the years. Heck, Dr. Jack Cohen’s research documented much of this going back into the 1980s, if not even earlier. Richard Halsey and his California Chaparral Institute have been also talking about these issues for at least 20 years. And those of us who’ve been branded as “environmental terrorist groups” – and blamed for California wildfires by the likes of former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke – have been also trying to get the public and policy makers to understand the dynamics at play for decades as well.

Remember, it’s been very common for politicians from through the country (but especially the West) to use wildfires in California as the reason why we need to dramatically increase logging on our public lands by systematically weakening bedrock environmental laws. While that may make for good politics when people turn on their TV’s and see flames, it doesn’t make for good policy that will protect communities, firefighters and save lives and money.

Most California Fires Occur in Area of Wildland-urban Interface with Less Fuel and More People

Madison, WI, September 24, 2019 – In California, the state with more building destruction by wildfire than all of the other states combined, new research by a U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service scientist and University of Wisconsin-Madison partners found something surprising. Over nearly three decades, half of all buildings destroyed by wildfire in California were located in an area that is described as having less of the grasses, bushes and trees that are thought to fuel fire in the wildland-urban interface, or WUI.

The study by H. Anu Kramer with Forest Service scientist Miranda Mockrin and colleagues, “High wildfire damage in interface communities in California,” notes that a portion of the WUI defined as “interface” and characterized by having more homes but relatively little wildland vegetation experienced half of the building losses due to wildfire but composed only 2 percent of the total area burned by the wildfires assessed in the study. The study was recently published in the International Journal of Wildland Fire and is available at: https://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/58348

California’s expansion of housing within and adjacent to wildland vegetation is not unique; the most recent assessment shows that the WUI now includes about one-third of homes in the United States. As wildfire management has become more complex, costly and dangerous, defining what constitutes WUI and defining more specific types of WUI has become more important as local communities strive to apply resources and policy-decisions where they will be most effective in saving lives and property.

The Federal definition of WUI describes two specific areas: “interface” WUI includes developed areas that have sparse or no wildland vegetation, but are within close proximity of a large patch of wildland. “Intermix” WUI, on the other hand, is defined as the area where houses and wildland vegetation directly intermingle. Both are separate from “rural” areas, which may be characterized by agricultural land and low-density housing and development (less than 1 house per 40 acres).

“Our findings show that WUI areas do experience the vast majority of all losses, with 82 percent of all buildings destroyed due to wildfire located in the WUI,” Mockrin said. “We were surprised to find 50 percent of all buildings lost to fire being destroyed in the interface portion of the WUI, however. Many risk reduction plans focus on natural vegetation fueling fire, but in the interface WUI where so much of the destruction is occurring, we have to consider finer-grained fuels such as wood piles, propane tanks, and cars.”

Study findings suggest that wildfires are still rare in urban areas. The Tubbs fire that struck Santa Rosa, Calif., in 2017 was similar to other California wildfires in that the majority of buildings lost in the fire were located in the WUI; however, the Tubbs Fire was unique in having 25 percent of all destruction occurring in urban areas. In comparison, 4 percent of destruction occurred within urban areas in other California fires. Other recent and highly destructive fires, including the 2018 Carr, Camp and Woolsey fires, included no urban area within their perimeters, exemplifying the rarity of the Tubbs’ building destruction in urban areas.

“Although the Tubbs fire was not the norm, it seems like every fall there is a new record-setting fire in California, with three of the five most destructive fires in state history having burned in the last 5 years and the deadliest California fire (the Camp fire) burning last year,” Kramer said. “These fires are fueled by the homes themselves, landscaping, and other man-made fuels that are seldom included in the fire models that are used to predict these fires. Our work highlights the importance of studying and mitigating the fuels in these interface WUI areas in California where most of the destruction is occurring.”

In addition to solidifying definitions of interface and intermix WUI so communities can address their different attributes in wildland fire planning, researchers suggest that fire behavior models should be revisited.

The study was co-authored by Volker Radeloff of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Patricia Alexandre of the University of Lisbon.

Journalist Request for Stories and Contacts on National Forest Conflicts

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Here’s a chance to help out a journalist:

From Larry Parnass: A hearty hello to ‘The Smokey Wire’ community. I am an investigative reporter examining conflicts regarding management of our national forests. I am eager to expand the range of my reporting through contact with people immersed in these issues. I’ve been struck by the variety and depth of views shared on The Smokey Wire and believe I can learn a lot from participants. Anyone willing to be in touch can email me at “[email protected]”.