This article from a Northern California newspaper highlights a big problem for the state: with just 25 mills, there are few options to processing logs from USFS and other projects, and transportation costs are often prohibitive.
The Camp Fire left a staggering million trees dead or dying — at least — and the logs have almost nowhere to go.
Because Butte County has a dearth of local sawmills and biomass power plants, the high costs of transporting logs hours away is hampering the removal of burned trees. That raises the hazard for those returning to the burn scar: there are at least 400,000 trees at a high risk of falling in Paradise and Magalia, according to a survey by Sierra Timber Services. So local officials are now considering a slate of options to process the trees locally, from restarting a biomass power plant in Oroville to building a wood-powered heating and cooling system in Paradise.
The following piece was written by Steven Krichbaum, a PhD conservation biologist and longtime forest defender. Many of us in the forest protection community have been pushing some of these same ideas for almost twenty years now.- mk
It seems both major parties can be sadly misinformed about forests and fires. The president recently promoted logging as a way to curb fires even though studies have clearly shown it to be ineffective. Now two western Senators, Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., and Steve Daines, R-Mont., intend to introduce legislation to further Trump’s agenda.
The most comprehensive scientific analysis conducted on the issue of forest management and fire intensity found that forests with the fewest environmental protections and the most logging actually tended to burn much more intensely, not less. For instance, the Camp Fire which destroyed the town of Paradise, Calif., began in an area that had burned a mere ten years before and was then salvage logged.
Research on the “home ignition zone” by Dr. Jack Cohen of the U.S. Forest Service’s Fire Science Laboratory makes clear that the only strategy that consistently works for reducing fire impacts to human habitation, is to focus on the land within 100 feet of houses, not logging distant forests.
Defensible space
Reducing flammability within this 100-foot “defensible space” involves basic precautions such as fire-resistant roofing, pruning branches and small trees, and keeping gutters clear of dry leaves and needles. Also keep in mind that more than half of all the acreage that recently burned in the West occurred in non-forest vegetation like chaparral, sagebrush, and grasslands.
But it’s always the same prescription for our National Forests and Bureau of Land Management lands: We need more stumps. Stumps for timber, stumps for wildlife management, stumps for restoration, and now stumps for fire management. The underlying consistency behind these rationalizations is the habitual dismissal of the critical importance of old and dead trees, wilderness conditions, natural disturbances, and limited roads to healthy forests.
In this case, both the Dec. 21 Executive Order (Federal Register Jan. 7, 2019) – that expedited logging on an area of our public lands larger than the entire state of Massachusetts – and now the Feinstein-Daines bill, use a tragedy to push the same thing that would be pushed even if the tragedy didn’t happen. Disregarded are fire drivers such as previous logging and extreme weather events. Not a peep about defensible space. No, instead come up with ‘more stumps!’
Pre-empting lawsuits
And this benighted approach to forests gets even worse. To expedite logging, Daines and Feinstein plan to legislatively slow or stop so-called “frivolous” lawsuits, in effect locking the public out of management decisions on our public lands. Whenever politicians feel compelled to pre-emptively lock the public out of our day in court, it’s a sure tell that something is rotten.
They must know that their proposal won’t withstand scrutiny in any court worth its name. Here’s a message to Daines and all those who think like him: Americans involved in legal efforts to stop the desecration of our public lands and their wildlife are not frivolous. According to you, we “frivolous” taxpayers get to subsidize the degradation and destruction of our precious homelands, we just don’t get to have a real say in it.
We do need new legislation, but not the toxic brew Feinstein and Daines are cooking up. We need legislation and policies that free the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management from the internal and external pressures that promote and prioritize commercial logging and other exploitation. The focus must be on real protection, not legislation that exacerbates both the pressures and the underlying fire problem. Congress needs to drop this disastrous bill and instead facilitate protection of the “defensible space” around homes and development. And then pass legislation that puts an end to the ongoing logging-grazing-drilling-mining horror show on our public lands once and for all.
Steven Krichbaum, PhD, conservation biologist, forest protection activist for 30 years with grassroots groups. He lives in Staunton, Virginia.
In pre-Colonial times, California’s forests burned regularly, thanks to lightning strikes and fires deliberately set by Native Americans.Photograph by Kevin Cooley for The New YorkerThanks to a Smokey Wire reader for this one!
The story is about Sagehen Creek Field Station run by UC. Well worth reading in its entirety. Lots of leadership, including by Scott Conway the silviculturist as well as I’m sure many others on the District, the Sagehen Creek folks, collaboration and patience. Sure, we all talk about the need for prescribed burning, but in this New Yorker story, the fact that it is University of California researchers saying it (and mechanical treatments prior) gives it extra cred in some communities.
As he led us through the trees, Brown pointed out that we were following an old railroad bed. Sagehen was clear-cut in the mid-nineteenth century to help build the railways and mines of the gold-rush era. (Sutter’s Mill, where the first gold was discovered, in 1848, is less than a hundred miles away.) After loggers felled the large trees, smaller ones became fuel for locomotives, and the eastern slopes of the Sierra are so dry that there are still stacks of cordwood left over from the eighteen-eighties. Nearby, Brown bopped up and down on pine needles that coated the ground. “See this?” he said. “These go down ten inches deep in places.”
In 2004, one of Brown’s colleagues at Berkeley, a fire scientist named Scott Stephens, came to Sagehen and took samples from the stumps of huge trees cut down during the gold-rush era. Examining tree rings and scorch marks, Stephens was able to construct a record of fires dating back to the sixteen-hundreds. His findings confirmed that, in pre-Colonial times, Sagehen burned regularly. Those fires sometimes occurred naturally, from lightning strikes, but they were also deliberately set by Native Americans. The consensus now is that the entire Sierra Nevada burned every five to thirty years.
So they tried to design some SPLATS (previously discussed here in an TSW interview with Dr. Mark Finney.
Brown and the rest of the Sagehen planning team decided to pursue a strategy that had recently been developed by a Forest Service scientist at its Rocky Mountain Research Station. Affectionately known as splat, for Strategically Placed Landscape Area Treatment, the technique involves clearing rectangular chunks of forest in a herringbone pattern.This compels any wildfire to follow a zigzag path in search of fuel, travelling against the wind at least half the time. The splats function as speed bumps, slowing the fire enough that it can be contained, while allowing the Forest Service to get away with treating only twenty to thirty per cent of any given landscape.
Adapting the splats to Sagehen’s terrain took four years. Then, just as the plan was being finalized, a paper was published documenting the unexpected decline of the American pine marten at Sagehen. The marten, a member of the weasel family, is not endangered, but its population levels are seen as a useful proxy for forest health. Soon, the Sagehen planning team heard from Craig Thomas, the director of the environmental group Sierra Forest Legacy, which has a long history of litigation against the Forest Service. Thomas asked them to redesign the project, with an eye to protecting marten habitat.
Thomas, a small-scale organic farmer in his seventies, told me that he was astonished when the Sagehen group, especially the Forest Service, seemed open to the idea. “Instead of getting their backs up, they jumped in with both feet,” he said. Conway recalled his own response a little differently. “I was, like, really?” he said. “It meant a bunch of complexity, and making this project, which was already really too long, much, much longer.” Still, as Thomas recalls, Conway “went away and read every marten ecology paper in existence by the time the next phone call happened. And I went, Ah, this is somebody I think I want to work with.”
So in 2010 the team, which had now been working together for six years, began planning all over again, this time with an even larger group of collaborators and a more expansive goal. “It started as science, but it became diplomacy,” Brown told me. “How could we get all these people—groups that didn’t trust each other, were actively suing each other—to a consensus on what was best for the forest?”
Brown secured grants, hired a professional facilitator, and brought together loggers, environmental nonprofits, watershed activists, outdoor-recreation outfits, lumber-mill owners. Sometimes there were upward of sixty people at meetings. Scientists from all over the region presented the latest findings on beaver ecology or the nesting behaviors of various bird species. To categorize Sagehen’s diverse terrains—drainage bottoms with meadows and those without, north- and south-facing slopes, aspen stands with conifer encroachment—working groups hiked almost every yard of the forest.
Arriving at a consensus took years of discussion, but, in the end, the strategy the team decided on turned out to mimic the way fire naturally spreads. For instance, fire burns intensely along ridges and more slowly on north-facing slopes. Martens, having adapted to these conditions, rely on the open crests to travel in search of food and mates, while building their dens in shadier, cooler thickets. Following the logic of fire would create the kind of landscape preferred by native species such as the California spotted owl or the Pacific fisher—a mosaic of dark, dense snags and sunlit clearings, of big stand-alone trees and open ridgelines connecting drainages. Conway then led an effort to formulate a detailed implementation plan whose treatments varied, acre by acre, according to the group’s predictions. Some areas were to be left as they were, some were to be hand-thinned with a focus on retaining rotting tree trunks, and some were to be aggressively masticated and then burned.
Typically, a Forest Service project takes two months to plan. Sagehen had been in the works for nearly a decade, but Brown eventually achieved the impossible: a plan that everyone—environmentalists, scientists, loggers, and the Forest Service—agreed on. Then, three days before the group was due to sign off on the plan, there was yet another hitch: in one of the units of Sagehen that were scheduled to be burned, a Forest Service employee discovered a nesting pair of goshawks—raptors that are federally protected as a sensitive, at-risk species.
This time, it was the conservationists who compromised. “I could have said, ‘O.K., this area is now off limits, and if you don’t believe me I’ll sue your ass,’ ” Craig Thomas recalled. But, after some discussion, he agreed to stick with the plan. He knew that burning might make the birds leave or fail to fledge young, but, he told me, “the collaboration effort and what we had accomplished together mattered more.”
But, despite the success of the project, enormous challenges remain. The Forest Service struggles to muster the resources and the staff necessary to burn safely. The California Air Resources Board restricts prescribed burns to days when pollution is at acceptable levels and the weather likely to disperse emissions from fire. In practice, this means that burning can occur only during a few weeks in the spring. In summer and autumn—the seasons when forests would burn naturally—the state’s air usually falls foul of the Clean Air Act. These are also the months that are most prone to uncontrollable wildfires, whose smoke is far more damaging to human health than that from prescribed fire. But, perversely, because wildfires are classified as natural catastrophes, their emissions are not counted against legal quotas.
Across the region, the Forest Service is devising projects to thin and burn on the Sagehen model. Meanwhile, Brown has helped launch the largest forest-restoration venture yet undertaken in California: the Tahoe-Central Sierra Initiative. It encompasses an enormous swath of forest that extends as far north as Poker Flat, level with Chico, and as far south as the American River, level with Sacramento. Brown’s goal is to return fire to three-quarters of a million acres in the next fifteen years.
This may sound like the same old..but again, why not export chips? I’d expect to see something more organized in California or with other states to develop markets for this material, e.g.chips to South Korea in Arizona, CLT mill in Washington, and so on. At least there would be folks at Cal working on this. When did using stuff become less-cool research? Back in the day. it would have been a good research consortium proposal with related education and extension to apply for NIFA grants. We have been talking about this for at least 20 years..
Brown has begun working with a group of researchers at U.C. Santa Cruz to imagine the outlines of a timber industry built around small trees, rather than the big trees that lumber companies love but the forest can’t spare. In Europe, small-diameter wood is commonly compressed into an engineered product called cross-laminated timber, which is strong enough to be used in multistory structures. Another option may be to burn the wood in a co-generation plant, which produces both electricity and biochar, a charcoal-like substance used to replenish soil. Brown has also been talking to a businessman who hopes to burn waste wood to heat an indoor greenhouse-aquaculture operation. His vision is to provide organic vegetables and shrimp to buffets in Las Vegas, and then to interest California’s cannabis farmers in using shellfish-dung-enriched biochar as fertilizer.
Here’s also a link to George Wuerther’s comments published elsewhere. https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/09/02/what-the-new-yorker-got-wrong-about-forests-and-wildfires/
There are sidebars that scientists working at Forest Service Research Stations or professors in forestry schools must observe if they want to keep their jobs and/or funding. These individuals do not fudge the data, but they start with specific questions and assumptions that beget certain conclusions.
Really? And others don’t frame questions that beget “certain conclusions”?
This is perhaps the first chance (in history) to synthesize a group history from the ways different people remember it. As such, this is an invitation for all of us to give our perspectives from that time period, and see how or if they fit together. And if it only covers a piece of our own humble Forest Service history rather than say, the Cuban Missile Crisis, well then so be it. Now, back to Jim Furnish and his experience with Undersecretary Jim Lyons. For those of you who don’t remember that period, there was a Committee of Scientists which included a lawyer (I think they really meant a “committee of scholars”). Note as different groups of scientists and scholars are brought in to give advice, disagree (at least the COS) internally, and are used to support essentially the answer to a non-science question (which thread of sustainability should be dominant in forest planning). Is that a question that should be resolved by “eminent scholars”? For newbies to all this it’s not hard to draw a line between the “sustainability is #1” esoteric discussion, as Jim terms it, and the concept of “ecological integrity” in the 2012 Rule.
“The Good: Along with the Roadless Conservation Rule, the FS was revising NFMA planning regulations (remember?). To be blunt, Dombeck loved the Roadless issue; Planning, not so much. But Jim Lyons was another matter. He was totally into the planning regulation, and behaved very hands-on throughout the process. Regrettably, almost anything Lyon said when the national leadership team met to process sections of the new regulation (even if credible) was met with skepticism, owing to a lack of trust. Sally Collins, later to become Assoc Chief, had joined my staff from Deschutes NF in OR as my Assoc Dep Chief. We both had abundant planning experience, and had each served on a planning advisory group appointed by Lyons to prep for the new regulation. Sally and I concluded that Lyons needed to allow the regulation to proceed without his direct intervention; his efforts were counterproductive as he was not the right messenger.
We approached Lyons with our assessment, and asked that he trust us to shepherd the regulation through to its publication as a draft rule in the Fed Register. We promised to keep him abreast of progress, and would see to it that his concerns were addressed along the way. Bear in mind that the planning regulation was “his baby”, but he weighed the matter seriously and begrudgingly agreed. This was a difficult regulation, as it forwarded concepts and ideology at odds with past practice, but we got it done after smoothing out the process. I give credit to Lyons for harnessing his ego to serve a cause he cared deeply about.
A brief sidebar: the concept of sustainability fostered heated debate while preparing the planning regulation, the crux of the matter being whether economic, social, and ecological sustainability were indivisible, or could be viewed as unique but related features. This topic devolved into a largely esoteric argument between research station directors and Lyons, while regional foresters seemed dull to the topic. Researchers argued for indivisible, tilting at the notion that ecological sustainability become the “guiding star” for the Forest Service, as was articulated by the Scientific Committee headed by Norm Johnson (OSU). Lyons and Dombeck decided the sustainability issue emphatically at a national leadership meeting for one “3-stranded rope” made up of unique and separable economic, social, and ecological parts. End of story! Remarkably, FS science leaders then created a 21-page “encyclical” making their case yet again. Lyons had had enough. He asked Oregon St Univ to empanel a group of eminent scholars to tackle the question. They sided with Lyons. End of story, again.
I use the planning regulation, which was achieved toward the end of Lyons’ 8-year tenure, to make the argument that Lyons learned some valuable lessons along the way about how to work effectively with the agency. He behaved arrogantly and could be condescending early on, and few could forget his handling of the firing of Robertson and Leonard, and appointment of JW Thomas. I found him to be dedicated, thoughtful, and supportive, all things which Tenney was not.
And here’s my main point about the intersection of politics and resource policy: the days of the FS being relatively immune from political tampering are long past (if they ever existed). Each administration will make personnel changes (i.e. fire Chiefs and others) to suit their aims, in hopes that “their people” will be compliant. The illusion that a “career Chief forester” is an essential ingredient to an independent agency is sort of laughable today. That said, because the FS has a trust relationship with the public and their lands, they have an obligation to engage in “principled dissent” when necessary to blunt ill-advised political machinations. Any Chief might lose a tough argument, but every Chief should fight for what’s right by the land. And fight hard!”
Nobody bit on my late comment on the Tenmile South litigation (Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest):
One piece of this decision is new to me: “My decision also includes restricting bicycle travel to system roads and trails.” Prohibiting bikes off-trail seems obvious, but it was criticized, and I wondered if this is commonly being addressed in travel planning.
I know there’s some readers with opinions on this, so I’ll try again. Here’s the same decision on the Arapahoe-Roosevelt National Forest, captured in this headline “New rule in Arapaho National Forest limits bikes to designated trails:”
On Monday, the Forest Service announced that bicycles will no longer be allowed off designated trails and roads in the Sulphur Ranger District, which covers the Arapaho National Forest. The restriction applies to all kinds of bikes in both the summer and winter.
“A key aspect of this project is to balance all these trail improvements with the conservation of wildlife habitat, watersheds and other natural resources we value,” Ranger Jon Morrissey said. “Part of finding that balance is curbing the proliferation of user-created routes and keeping the impacts to the trails system so that wildlife and other resources can thrive.”
Off-trail use is how user-created trails are created, right? (And I’ll argue it takes a lot fewer bike users – like maybe one – to create a trail than foot users.) And the impacts of user-created trails seem like they would be not wanted on public lands just about everywhere. Yet there is no specific requirement for the Forest Service to address this problem like there are regulations for motorized use that require travel planning and designation of routes. So while there are designated system trails, there is apparently no requirement for bikes to stay on them. Should there be a national prohibition? Should forest plans identify areas where off-trail use is a desired condition?
Professor John Ruple argues that “Congress never granted the President authority to reduce a monument’s size. Neither the Act itself nor any legislative hearings leading to the Act’s passage mention altering a monument once created.”
Much of the article focuses on Ruple’s stance. But the last paragraph:
“Other scholars, such as Jonathan Wood of the Pacific Legal Foundation, contend that an argument like Ruple’s is too formalistic and would have drastic implications for the administrative state. Wood argues that a President commonly amends orders and rules put in place by a predecessor. Not allowing this, Wood argues, would make any one President too powerful.”
We’ve discussed this issue in the past, such as here:
There are so many interesting things we can discuss about Jim’s observations.. the personal chemistry of liking and trusting, the buddy system, litmus tests for worldviews and “ethics”, figuring out what people are like based on what you hear about them (AKA..gossip?). Holy Smoke! It’s amazing that any of us stayed employed :). Oh, that’s right, it’s hard to fire us…
Sidenote: I checked back on the question of whether the Regional Foresters work for the Deputy Chief for National Forest Systems or for the Chief. From another former Deputy Chief for NFS.
I suppose it is a bit of both of in reality. As I remember it, I actually gave them their performance reviews and felt every bit their supervisor but whenever the Chief wanted he certainly had direct ties to each and in some cases an specific RF would try to go directly to the Chief if they thought that might be to their advantage, especially on cross functional issues regarding S&PF or administration and budget.
(Note that Fire is in S&PF).
Now on to Jim Furnish’s post.
“Next up: Jim Lyons, who came to USDA in 1993 from a lead staff position with the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and remained Undersecretary for Clinton’s full term.
The Bad: I’ll be honest; I did not claim membership in the good ol’ boys club of forest supervisors when I became Deputy Chief in 1999. As timber production plummeted following the spotted owl crisis, Siuslaw NF, as well as I, became somewhat inconsequential in the larger scheme. I turned my attention to fixing roads, and protecting owls, salmon, and marbled murrelets, and struggling to develop a restoration model for a way forward out of the timber morass. Although, we were largely ignored in the PNW, Dombeck and Chris Wood, his policy advisor (and now Pres of Trout Unlimited) liked what they saw.
As Deputy Chief for National Forests, all personnel selections at the level of forest and deputy supervisor, regional director, regional and deputy forester, and DC NF program directors, had to be endorsed by me. Selections came to me as #1, #2, and #3 for my approval; I then had to brief the national leadership team on my assessment and selection rationale, occasionally bypassing the #1 candidate in favor of another. After discussion, the Chief made the final call and an offer was processed through. Except for Senior Exec positions, which went to the Undersecretary, who had veto power. For context, there are about 125 NFs, 9 Regions,and 10 national directors. In my brief 2 ½ year tenure, I processed about 125 selections.
We had a big problem when I arrived in May 1999. A huge backlog existed of unfilled positions, or more accurately, “pending decisions.” I assessed that Dombeck, having spent several years at BLM, was out of touch with FS field leaders. Lyons, similarly, didn’t know many except by reputation, but had strong views about personnel. As he traveled throughout the US, he met many leaders; some he liked, many he was wary of. After Dep Chief Gray Reynolds was ousted by Dombeck and Lyons, Bob Joslin filled the post but retired quickly thereafter. Distrust and indecision filled the gap as Dombeck felt he simply could not trust the process to deliver people with a necessary “land ethic” to carry his agenda. This engendered distrust on the part of regional foresters in particular, whose selections stood idling in DC.
I had been around enough that I knew, or had at least met, virtually every candidate for these select jobs. And I knew who I could trust when vetting a candidate for a particular position. I’m not bragging when I say I was key to breaking the gridlock. Dombeck trusted me enough to (almost always) accept my decisions. Lyons was another matter. He enjoyed his ability to pull strings to get people he knew and liked into positions (and prevent those he didn’t like), and had been infamously active in this arena since early in his tenure as Undersecretary, earning much scorn. This had a negative effect on field morale (putting it mildly). To be fair, both Dombeck and Lyons had legitimate concerns about finding leaders who shared their vision for a more progressive and “green” agenda, less reliant on logging.
Lyons and I did not visit this issue often, but we had a quite blunt talk about him needing to trust me and relinquish his grip on personnel selections. Slowly, the spigot opened and water flowed. I can well remember Lyons looking into my eyes occasionally and asking if so-and-so was “up to the job.” I think he had interfered unreasonably in personnel matters (Lyons would disagree, I’m sure), but he changed. He learned to let go.”
Next post: The Good, about Jim Lyons and the 2001 Planning Rule
It seems like most TSW folks who have commented here are against the Interior electric bike order. It may be similar to the proposal to close FS Job Corps Centers, in that a reaction from the public can get the decision turned around. To that end, I’m posting what the Colorado Mountain Club sent out this AM in terms of how to comment. I’m sure most of you probably belong to groups that have this handy “contact everyone” button. If you aren’t on a mailing list for this easy mode of commenting, maybe other TSW folks will know a national or state group that has the same approach to easy commenting. I’m sure you don’t have to be a member of the organization. If not, there is always the approach of contacting each individual separately.
Here’s what the Colorado Mountain Club has:
On August 29, 2019, Department of the Interior Secretary Bernhardt released an order to allow electric bicycles (e-bikes) on non-motorized trails. While some front-range communities allow Class 1 e-bikes on trails, this policy includes full-throttle e-bikes and Class 3 pedal assisted bikes whose motors can engage while traveling as fast as 28 miles per hour. At a national scale, this sweeping policy will truly change the dynamic of trail experiences on federal public lands.
DOI Policy (08.29.2019): https://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/elips/documents/so_3376_-_increasing_recreational_opportunities_through_the_use_of_electric_bikes_-508_0.pdf
Wilderness Society Press Release: https://www.wilderness.org/articles/press-release/national-groups-blast-interior-dept-opening-non-motorized-trails-e-bikes
Talking points:
This policy would affect hundreds of miles of hiking trails on BLM lands throughout Colorado in communities like Salida, Fruita, Grand Junction, Ridgway, Del Norte, Canon City and many more.
By issuing a sweeping policy to allow e-bikes on non-motorized trails, the agency is blatantly ignoring existing travel management rules and regulations. This undermines the bedrock laws that protect human-powered recreation and the backcountry landscapes and natural resources we enjoy.
While e-bikes are a very appropriate mode of travel on public lands, they have a motor and should be regulated in accordance with existing travel management rules. There are thousands of miles of motorized trails and roads in Colorado that are already legally accessible to e-bikes.
If any non-motorized trails are to be considered for e-bike use, the agency should carefully analyze impacts to current users, wildlife and natural resources before allowing e-bike designation.
E-bikes tend to be ridden faster than regular bikes, resulting in more speed differential between them and other trail users. This amplifies conflict and danger.
E-bike access on backcountry non-motorized trails may create situations where mechanical breakdowns, accidents or other emergencies could be catastrophic and put added strain on search & rescue organizations.
Public comment is an essential part of the decision making process on federal lands and input should’ve been requested in advance of such a far-reaching policy change.
As you can see in the image above, you can just click on a few things, add some sentences and it sends the comments to a bunch of relevant individuals at once.
A new DOI policy states that “E-bikes shall be allowed where other types of bicycles are allowed” – including hundreds of miles of non-motorized trails on BLM and National Park lands in Colorado. The policy not only creates a huge potential for user conflict but sets a danger precedent for allowing motorized vehicles on non-motorized trails and dismantling the Travel Planning Rule.
Although a rule-making process and public comment period will commence in the future, we urge you to please take a moment now to share your concerns with your legislative representatives and DOI officials.
Check out the Background Info tab for details and talking points
Review the DOI E-Bike Policy
Craft your comments below with details about how this will affect your favorite recreation spots
Through this action alert you will be able to:
Send a letter to your federal legislators
Send a letter to top DOI, BLM and Park Service officials
Submit a letter to the editor of your local paper
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The 204 Cow Fire in eastern Oregon started yesterday, 8/29, and has burned 5,516 acres since then, mostly on the Malheur National Forest. From InciWeb:
Lower elevations mostly lodgepole pine with a large amount of dead and down. Mid-slope mixed conifer with dead standing and punky down wood. High elevations old fire scars with sparse fuels.
Here’s an image from the USFS, an example of the “mostly lodgepole pine with a large amount of dead and down” in the area — a tough fire to fight and one that, if left alone, would likely be stand replacing. This is not a pure lodgepole stand — lots of true fir, Doug-fir, etc.
Interior Secretary David Bernhardt issued an order yesterday that will require the National Park Service to open nonmotorized trails to e-bikes — a move that drew quick fire from green groups.
Under the long-awaited decision, e-bikes — electric bicycles — will be regulated the same way as human-powered bikes.
“E-bikes shall be allowed where other types of bicycles are allowed; and E-bikes shall not be allowed where other types of bicycles are prohibited,” Bernhardt said in his order.
With e-bikes growing rapidly in popularity, Bernhardt and other supporters say the order will make public lands more accessible to many Americans, including older people and those with disabilities who rely on them.
