Thanks to Sue Britting for bringing this to our attention. Below are links to the information presented at the public meeting with regard to the large landscape NEPA project currently being initiated on the Stanislaus and Sierra National Forests.
Their argument seems to be that they want to work towards NRV, and based on historic conditions and acres burned, that will take doing more than they currently are doing. They have this interesting table in their briefing paper (attached below). Note that the total acreage of both forests is approximately 2,200,000 acres (not sure that is exactly the right denominator to use) so treating 20K acres per year, as they are currently doing, would be about 1 percent. Please feel free to check my math. Based on this table, their desire is to treat 10% of the Yellow Pine Mixed Conifer, but that 100K per year would be about 5%/year of the acres on the two forests. I agree with others the this is perhaps overly ambitious personnel and funding-wise, but I also don’t see that it hurts to be ready NEPA-wise for some unknown increased level of activities and to be able to take advantage of opportunities as they occur.
One suggestion for discussing this.. doing things differently is not necessarily a highly valued trait in Forest Service culture. I can’t remember who said something like “organizational antibodies to change attack new ideas, and suck the life out of them until they are dried up husks and blow away”. In my own experience, it can be hard on employees to be asked to devote their attention to something new, that isn’t “the way we’ve always done it”, and might not work out. So let’s try to assume the best about their intentions, and not give these human beings any unnecessary grief.
The Center for Biological Diversity claims that the Forest Service has not excluded cattle from allotments in the Gila National Forest and the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest that were part of a 1998 settlement between the CBD and Forest Service, and therefore it must reinitiate consultation under the Endangered Species Act for several affected species.
BLOGGER’S COMMENT
While litigation about vegetation management is usually about what the Forest Service says it is going to do, grazing litigation is frequently about what the Forest Service actually did. The July 10 Litigation Weekly included the denial of a preliminary injunction in Concerned Friends of the Winema v. McKay, a long-running dispute over the Antelope Allotment and effects on the Oregon spotted frog. The plaintiffs pointed out problems with the way the allotment had been managed in the past, and Forest Service promised to do better. That was good enough for the court at the preliminary injunction stage:
The Court takes Plaintiffs’ concerns about the history of cattle trespass on the Antelope Allotment and the threat to the Jack Creek OSF seriously. Nevertheless, the Court concludes that the Forest Service has imposed sufficient limitations and safeguards to render the risk to the Jack Creek OSF population speculative, rather than imminent, for the 2019 grazing season.
In making this ruling, the Court is cognizant of the long history of litigation concerning grazing on the Antelope Allotment and the significance of the Forest Service’s new model for managing the Allotment’s resources. In response to Plaintiffs’ motion, the Government and the permittee agreed to substantially reduce the grazing planned for the 2019 season, both in terms of the number of cattle and the areas to be grazed.
It’s harder for plaintiffs to bring post-decisional implementation cases than to stop a decision from being implemented in the first place. In both of these cases, plaintiffs had monitor the allotments. At some point though, the Forest Service track record of what it did is going keep it from doing what it wants to do.
In a new BLM case, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Sierra Club and WildEarth Guardians claim the agency failed to consider new drilling technologies or environmental science, including predicted effects of climate change from proposed drilling near Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. They also claim the oil and gas leases are a thin veil for the extraction of helium, which has other regulatory limitations.
The Oregon federal district court has ordered the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality to do more to protect salmon streams harmed by logging operations. Northwest Environmental Advocates argues that state regulations governing logging on private lands are much weaker than federal regulations governing logging on federal land, so this doesn’t appear likely to affects federal lands even though the state DEQ may have Clean Water Act jurisdiction on federal lands.
I happened to come across the 2018 annual report for the national forest in my neck of the woods, the Mount Hood. Here’s the financial info in the report. It’s interesting to compare the categories.
Anyone know where I might find out how much Congress (and R6) allocated to the Mount Hood?
The District Court of Oregon issued an order adopting all of the magistrate’s March 22, 2019 Findings and Recommendations in favor of the Forest Service concerning the Lower Imnaha Rangeland Analysis Project within the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area on the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest. Those findings were previously discussed here.
On December 10, 2018 the Montana district court granted the Forest Service’s motion for summary judgement and upheld the Johnny Crow Wildlife Habitat Improvement Project on the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest.
The plaintiffs filed a complaint in the Central District Court of California concerning the Tecuya Project on the Los Padres National Forest, approved using the Category 6 Wildlife Habitat Enhancement Categorical Exclusion. Further background is provided by this article.
The plaintiffs filed a complaint in the Eastern District Court of California against the Three Creeks Forest Health and Restoration Project on the Inyo National Forest.
The Center for Biological Diversity alleges that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Forest Service violated the Endangered Species Act pertaining to consultation on the 2015 revised Land Management Plan for the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest and effects on the New Mexico meadow jumping mouse.
The Center for Biological Diversity may add to the complaint (above) against the Tecuya Project on the Los Padres National Forest based on violations of ESA in relation to the California condor.
The 9th Circuit Court of appeals affirmed the district court opinion in favor of the Forest’s management of four grazing allotments for aquatic species. The district court opinion was discussed hereas the Western Watersheds case.
Conservation groups have sued the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service for failing to designate critical habitat, including national forest lands on the Idaho Panhandle National Forest, after the species went extinct within the U. S.
We’ve discussed the draft NEPA regs previously here and here. Right now they don’t include REQUIRING scoping for CE’s and EA’s, and I can understand that as I don’t think many other agencies require it (although they still do it). Here’s an interesting BLM document that talks about internal and external scoping. I tend to be for ideas that harmonize BLM and FS procedures as they make life easier for employees to go back and forth and for the public to understand on interspersed ownerships.
I think, based on the draft reg, that what they are REQUIRING is posting on the SOPA, and the ability for people to comment on the projects in the SOPA by writing in (aided possibly by an email list to interested folks when a new SOPA is posted) (but I could be wrong). But I think it might be useful to look at a real SOPA (the last one I looked at happened to be for the Stanislaus) and here’s the link.
What exactly does the requirement for scoping add, or not, that FS folks would not otherwise do? It seems to me that there are at least three schools of thought (1) line officers will always do the right thing (2) line officers will never do the right thing (that’s how TWS came up with 93.5% with no public involvement, although SOPA plus comments could be considered public involvement), and (3) there is a base level that is more than SOPA plus comments, but less than requiring scoping, that we can imagine and describe, that would leave flexibility but not allow the minimalist line officers to get out of things they should be doing to involve the public.
Given this real world SOPA, what do you think/imagine would be a good minimum requirement? Or do you think it should vary by category of CE or ???
Study Figure 1: Grassland (A) and forest (B) retreat or expansion in response to 21st century climate changes. Blue indicates expansion; red indicates contraction. Forests retreat in all future climates except those associated with aggressive emissions reductions (RCP 2.6)/Sharon’s note: see places where trees are increasing, many under 2.6 and even some under 8.5
You all may have seen the news report “Grasslands More Reliable Carbon Sink Than Trees” I’m not exactly sure whether this site is a source of UC Davis press releases, or a more broad climate communications site.
Their basic argument is that because forests have most of their carbon above ground, and they burn up that carbon in wildfires (the video has a very nice graphic that depicts this), then grasslands are better because their carbon doesn’t burn up. First, note that this statement claims that this scientific information is relevant to policy in terms of California’s cap and trade program.
A study from the University of California, Davis, found that grasslands and rangelands are more resilient carbon sinks than forests in 21st century California. As such, the study indicates they should be given opportunities in the state’s cap-and-and trade market, which is designed to reduce California’s greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.
So we are talking investments conceivably in the next 10 years to reduce GHGs. But what was most peculiar to me was how they went about figuring this out, and some of their results. First of all, they referred to RCP 8.5 as a “business as usual” scenario. If this were a NEPA document, we might say that there is scientific controversy around that claim. Many would say that it’s a “useful worst case scenario” not “business as usual”. Of course, you don’t have to have a Ph.D. in atmospheric physics to think that people might disagree about what’s likely to happen in the future, and that prophecy is unlikely to have a meaningful probability distribution.
Most interesting to me, though, were their efforts to predict where trees would go away and be replaced by grasslands under that climate scenario. This can be seen in the figure above, and also a figure I couldn’t copy that is a placeholder for the video for the paper here.
Tree or grass people might wonder, how could you possibly predict that, given what we know of trees and grasses? Well, it’s possible to link a variety of models. I think the authors did real nice work in explaining their paper, using an open source journal and describing the limitations of their work.
Here’s the first sentence of their results and conclusions:
In contrast to the conventional paradigm, we show that the inherent resilience of grassland vegetation to drought and wildfire (figure 1) translates to a more reliable C sink than forest ecosystems (figure 2) in response to 21st century climate changes.
But their caveats include:
Factors such as species traits, biodiversity, rapid evolution, and human management intervention could alter our model-based findings from the projections provided here. Consequently, our results indicate the potential direction of change as opposed to predictions that consider the full ensemble of ecological, physiological and management factors that can alter pathways and responses of ecosystems to climate change.
(my bold, human management intervention like fire suppression?) In what sense is it realistic to model the carbon impacts of future wildfires while not considering fire suppression?
and
Future work could focus on such factors as the evolutionary history of trees to fire, the physiological adaptations of ecosystems as well as regional species to fire, drought and climate change, the effects of biodiversity on ecosystem resilience as well as a comprehensive analysis of the goods and services provided by forests and grasslands.
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation. I wonder if on their research panels, there is ever a thought of “is there a point at which running models has little real world data that the information produced is not worth funding, or we should be clear that it is basic science with no real-world relevance? NSF doesn’t have to care whether its research is policy relevant, because its mission in broader than that, it’s mission is to “advance the progress of science” but as I’ve argued before, if researchers make the claim that it is, perhaps there should be some kind of standard. For those of you who haven’t seen my effort in this direction here’s a link to Eight Steps to Vet Scientific Information for Policy Fitness.
On wonders whether if the California policy makers had (1) framed the questions they felt they needed answered relevant to their cap n trade program (2) reviewed existing literature on grasslands, forests, trees, drought, fires and climate change, would they have prioritized this kind of study?
I’m pretty sure we’ve talked about these landscape NEPA documents before. They have been questioned for lack of site specificity for treatments. Here’s another one that’s been successful, with an endangered species involved.
It’s the Tennessee Creek Project on the PSICC National Forest. The project area is 16,450 acres, and activities are expected to occur over 10- 15 years. Actions are a mix of thinning, clearcutting (lodgepole) and prescribed burning. Here are the acres treated:
Regenerate lodgepole pine through mechanical means on 3,790 acres.
Thin 2,685 acres of mature lodgepole pine stands. Pre-commercial thin 345 acres of advanced regeneration of lodgepole pine (3,030 acres total would be thinned).
Improve the health of aspen stands through prescribed fire and/or mechanical means on 180 acres.
Utilize prescribed fire on 5,485 acres.
I think it will be interesting to compare this with other successful landscape projects. We could track two things about them, project area, and acres treated divided by years, in this case about 10K/10 years or a “1K a year project.” Due to the number of acres treated this wouldn’t fit into the restoration CE. It’s interesting to speculate if you were a NEPA practitioner and had that CE possible, would you reduce the number of acres to fit, and how much work would that save (knowing that you still wanted to do more acres), with perhaps another future CE? Or is the limiting factor the budget, and your District’s budget allows a certain number of acres treated per year, and then you would decide how many years the work approved in a restoration CE would last?
But the plan, known as the Tennessee Creek Project, which targets more than 16,000 acres of the Pike and San Isabel National Forests, hit a snag a few months after its final approval. On April 23, WildEarth Guardians, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group, sued the Forest Service, claiming that the agency’s plan has miscalculated the harm that would be done to the habitat of the threatened Canada lynx.
The project also represents what could be a disturbing trend in Forest Service practice, where logging projects are approved without specific details about areas that will be logged, said John Mellgren, an attorney with the Western Environmental Law Center that represents WildEarth Guardians.
“The real problem with the project is the Forest Service just drew a big circle on the map,” Mellgren said. “(They) are going to log some part of this circle, but won’t tell you where they are going to log. If they stayed out of those areas, we might not have a problem with the project right now.”
This quote raised some questions for me, because it seems to me that part of a landscape scale project would be to say what treatments would go where, not spatially, but say in terms of lynx habitat. Note: lynx was reintroduced to Colorado.
Sure enough, Judge Hartz did not agree with WEG, and also not on their idea that the project required an EIS. Note to Jon: SRLA figured prominently in the Judge’s discussion.
Here’s a link to his decision. With regard to “site-specific”
But Richardson did not hold that an agency’s EA or EIS always must specify the precise locations within a project area that will be affected. The problem in Richardson was simply that there had been no environmental assessment of the ultimate plan. The earlier assessment contemplated a significantly different project from what was later selected. That is hardly the case here. The EA analyzed what could happen whatever sites were eventually chosen for treatment by the Project, so long as the Project restrictions were satisfied. The Service’s analysis accounted for the uncertainty about treatment locations by evaluating the Project’s effects on lynx in a worst-case scenario in which all the mapped lynx habitat in the Project area is treated, and by including conservation measures to protect high-quality lynx habitat, such as not treating healthy spruce-fir stands or any stands with greater than 35% dense horizontal cover. Moreover, the Service had a valid reason for not identifying specific treatment sites in its EA: it intends to select treatment units based on changing on-the-ground conditions over the 10 to 15 years of the Project. NEPA leaves “substantial discretion to an agency to determine how best to gather and assess information” about a project’s environmental impacts. Biodiversity Conservation Alliance v. U.S. Forest Serv., 765 F.3d 1264, 1270 (10th Cir. 2014). The Service used that discretion reasonably, assessing the Project’s maximum possible effect on lynx habitat while also conserving agency resources and retaining flexibility to respond to changing conditions. See Utah Shared Access Alliance, 288 F.3d at 1213 (“By conducting an EA, an agency considers environmental concerns yet
reserves its resources for instances where a full EIS is appropriate.” (internal quotation marks omitted)). We note that the Service was not postponing the requisite environmental analysis until it picks the specific sites for treatment under the Project; rather, it was saying that such future analysis would be unnecessary because, in its expert opinion, whatever sites it ultimately chooses (within the constraints imposed by the
Project), there would not be a negative impact on the lynx.
Pop-up shops! What is a pop-up shop? They are defined by someone who provides them as “temporary retail spaces that sell merchandise of any kind … Pop-up shops are taking over the retail world and rethinking traditional brick-and-mortar and big-box stores…” The National Forest Foundation apparently had to jump on this bandwagon with Busch beer. So here you go …. , a pop-top pop-up shop, coming to a national forest near you.
Conservation lands in many places have been overrun by crowds attracted by social media. This seems like it has the same potential. It would be interesting to look at the NEPA analysis for these permits. (Do you suppose it’s in grizzly bear habitat?)
From the FS Restoration website https://www.fs.fed.us/restoration/
You can find out the rationale for this proposed CE in a (very nicely explained IMHO) document here. Kudos to the EMC staff! I also liked their benchmarking with other agencies’ CE’s- not sure that that’s been done before.
Here’s the text:
36 CFR 220.5(e)(26). Ecosystem restoration and/or resilience activities on NFS lands in compliance with the applicable land management plan, including, but not limited to the plan’s goals, objectives, or desired conditions. Activities to improve ecosystem health, resilience, and other watershed conditions cannot exceed 7,300 treated acres. If commercial/non-commercial timber harvest activities are proposed they must be carried out in combination with at least one additional restoration activity and harvested acres cannot exceed 4,200 of the 7,300 acres.
(1) Restoration and resilience activities include, but are not limited to:
(i) Terrestrial and aquatic habitat improvement and/or creation,
(ii) Stream restoration, aquatic organism passage, or erosion control,
(iii) Road and/or trail decommissioning (system and non-system),
(iv) Control of invasive species and reestablishing native species.
(v) Hazardous fuels reduction and/or wildfire risk reduction,
(vi) Prescribed burning,
(vii) Reforestation,
(viii) Commercial harvest, and/or
(ix) Non/pre-commercial thinning.
(2) Road and trail limitation. A restoration/resilience activity under this category may include:
(i) Construction of permanent roads up to 0.5 miles.
(ii) Maintenance or reconstruction of NFS roads and system trails, such as relocation of road or trail segments to address resource impacts.
(iii) Construction of temporary roads up to 2.5 miles. All temporary roads constructed for a project under this category shall be decommissioned no later than 3 years after the date the project is completed.
Definition of Restoration
The Forest Service defines restoration in its Ecosystem Restoration Policy (FSH 1909.12 and 36 CFR 219.19) as “the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed. Ecological restoration focuses on reestablishing the composition, structure, pattern, and ecological processes necessary to facilitate terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems sustainability, resilience, and health under current and future conditions. Functional restoration focuses on the underlying processes that may be degraded, regardless of the structural condition of the ecosystem.”
It seems to me that the activities have to meet the legal bar of “activities to improve ecosystem health, resilience, and other watershed conditions”. I don’t really understand what viii means.. as I think the environmental impact is from the removal of trees, and not whether it’s commercial or not.
Here’s what the analysis Matthew posted here says about this:
Broadly defined “ecosystem restoration and/or resilience activities” on up to 7,300 acres, including commercial logging of up to 4,200 acres, as long as it includes at least one restoration add-on (e.g., replacing a culvert to restore fish passage). The CE could be used to authorize up to 6.6 square miles of logging with no public input or environmental analysis.
I actually disagree with the “no environmental analysis”. The deciding official generally lays out the approach to a project from the ID team. You can find your own examples of categorical exclusion decision memos, I collected them for a while. Here’s an example. But I’m talking what the FS actually does and perhaps the folks who wrote this analysis are thinking “the worst that possibly could be done.” But they still have to document why the CE is appropriate in the DM.. so?
Would people like it better if the maximum were say 1000 acres of thinning (no regeneration harvests of living trees?). I think it’s partially a “not trusting that the FS won’t do something really bad with this flexibility”. How could that be reduced? Another collaborative requirement (similar to the legislative CE’s)?
Reflecting their solid training and professionalism, Pine Knot Job Corps Civilian Conservation Students (JCCCC) students worked 13,129 hours on 40 assignments during the 2016 fire season.
I don’t know how many of you saw this editorial in the Wall Street Journal.
You’d think all of this would be reason enough to shut down more centers. But if the Administration had proceeded as planned, some 1,065 Forest Service employees might have lost their jobs. Commence the lobbying. Randy Erwin, their union president, slammed the Administration for “a coordinated attack on the most vulnerable populations in this country: Rural and urban low-income young people hoping to succeed in life.”
On June 5 a bipartisan group of 51 lawmakers signed a letter expressing “strong opposition” to closing the centers. They warned that it was “precisely the wrong time” to cut the centers “after a difficult year of natural disasters and with hurricane and wildfire season quickly approaching.” But fewer than 150 of the 30,000 students served by the Forest Service Job Corps centers train to fight fires. Others sometimes support disaster-response efforts, but the central mission of Jobs Corps is to launch students toward steadier work.
(My bold)
I was curious. Given the locations of the Job Corps centers, I would have thought that more than 150 are trained to fight fires. So I looked online and found this. Job Corps
Participation in CY 2017
Approx. 1200 students deployed to nearly 200 wildfire assignments with over 450,000 hours of support.
Boxelder Mobile Kitchen Unit mobilized within R2.
It shows that combined, they provided help on 412 assignments involving 1,971 participant assignments (many had more than one), for a total of 368,998 hours.
Does anyone know where we could get an accurate number for firefighting and support for 2018, and then, perhaps, we can send it to the WSJ editorial board?
