The Big Debate Over What a Species Really is: New Scientist

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It sometimes seems to me that there is a gap between the ideas that laws have enshrined about things.. and the messiness of dealing with the same things in the real world.  Species is one of the ideas that seemed most difficult for me, as my experience as a population geneticist was that different disciplines who study different taxa often had their own ways of thinking about them.  And hybridization happens.. to geneticists, it’s just another way of generating variation without any negative value associated with them (think jack pine and lodgepole hybrids).

Trying to explain that shifting world of species definitions has been difficult for me, but this article in New Scientist, I think does it well.
Some excerpts:

Darwin recognised that his ideas posed a profound problem for the way biologists define species. Curiously, though, his work didn’t lead to a reappraisal of the concept. Rather, the “modern synthesis” of evolutionary biology – a mid-20th century effort to pull together Darwin’s work on evolution and Gregor Mendel’s on heredity – saw species as a real and distinct level of biological organisation, as valid as the molecule, cell or organism. The synthesis was so influential that it still shapes the way many of us think of species. It is why we tend not to see them as arbitrary. And it explains the popularity of the biological species concept. “That made it into the textbooks,” says Zachos. And from there into the popular imagination.

(and from there into law..)

Behind the scenes, however, a different story was playing out. In the past century, scientists have redefined what a species is time and again, heaping confusion upon confusion (see “Parsing nature”). Zachos identifies no fewer than 32 competing definitions in his 2016 book on the subject, Species Concepts in Biology, and notes that two more have been added since then. This partly reflects the distinct ways that researchers in different subsets of biological science see the living world. Ecologists, for example, focus on environment, resources and adaptations, whereas palaeontologists are more interested in the shape of the fossils they study. It also reflects developments in science, with advances in genetics now making it possible to decode the DNA of individual organisms and reconstruct family trees. The upshot is often acrimonious, with players championing their favoured species concept while simultaneously taking pot-shots at rival ideas.

Specious arguments

The profusion of definitions also causes practical problems because different types of biologists use different species concepts. Put simply, an insect species might not be equivalent to a mammal species or a flower species – even though most of us assume they are. “A lot of research is based on counting species,” says Zachos. “It’s as if we think we’re all using US dollars, but in reality we’re lumping together Japanese yen, euros, US dollars and pounds.” (my italics)

These problems are exposed whenever researchers change their definition of species – something that is happening increasingly often. For instance, in 2011, some biologists studying hoofed mammals shifted from a biological species concept approach to one based on heritable differences. Instantly, the number of species in the group rose from 143 to 279. Zachos and others worry about the consequences of such “taxonomic inflation” for conservation. Inflation, he points out, is often associated with a devaluation of the currency. Society might care a little less about losing a few species to extinction.

It’s a very complex idea, ever-shifting, linked to a legal structure somewhat more difficult, or impossible, to shift. Hence tension.

Conservation Groups File Notice of Intent to File Lawsuit Over Flathead Forest Plan

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The following press release is from Swan View Coalition, Friends of the Wild Swan and Earthjustice. A copy of the Notice of Intent is here. – mk

Conservationists Challenge Abandonment of Grizzly Bear and Bull Trout Protections In Flathead National Forest

New Plan for Flathead National Forest Could Fragment Wild Habitat for Grizzlies and Discards Longstanding Wildlife Habitat Standards

Kalispell, MT – Two Montana conservation groups have notified the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that a newly revised management plan violates the Endangered Species Act by abandoning longstanding protections for key grizzly bear and bull trout habitat in the Flathead National Forest.

The 2018 Flathead Forest Plan purports to maintain habitat conditions that existed in 2011. However, the plan actually abandons key measures that have protected grizzly bear and bull trout habitat on the Forest for more than two decades, allowing new roadbuilding and wildlife disturbances in formerly secure habitat. Swan View Coalition and Friends of the Wild Swan have notified both agencies that they will file a lawsuit challenging the 2018 Plan’s abandonment of wildlife protections if the agencies do not correct their legal violations within 60 days.

“By abandoning the cap on new roads and eliminating the provisions to remove roads, this new plan harms bull trout and native aquatic life,” said Arlene Montgomery of Friends of the Wild Swan. “When road culverts inevitably fail they dump sediment into streams that will clog spawning beds. The Flathead doesn’t have the budget to maintain its existing road system, so they should be reducing the miles of road on the Forest instead of degrading habitat for wildlife and fish.”

“The Flathead is abandoning road removal, the true habitat restoration it says is helping recover grizzly bears and bull trout,” said Swan View Coalition Chair Keith Hammer. “It is replacing that with road building and logging and trying to call that restoration. We don’t buy it and the science doesn’t support it.”

NEW ROADBUILDING THREATENS HARM TO GRIZZLY BEARS AND BULL TROUT

The Flathead National Forest encompasses 2.4 million acres of public land in northwest Montana, including large areas of public land adjacent to Glacier National Park. The Flathead therefore provides key habitat for the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem population of grizzly bears, whose range extends from the Park southward down the spine of the Northern Rockies, as well as a significant stronghold for the region’s threatened bull trout.

Seminal grizzly bear research in the 1990s demonstrated that the presence of roads in grizzly bear habitat, and the motorized and non-motorized intrusion those roads allow, harm bears’ survival. Researchers found that even roads closed to the public can displace bears from otherwise secure habitat because bears learn to avoid such roads and the roads also facilitate motorized trespass and other human access. Roads also threaten harm to bull trout, because roads and the culverts that come with them can send sediment into the streams where bull trout live.

Recognizing these threats, the Flathead National Forest in 1995 adopted a Forest Plan provision called Amendment 19, which limited the number of roads the Forest Service could maintain in the Flathead. To meet this standard, the Forest Service was required to decommission some existing roads, as well as any new roads it built, through revegetation, culvert removal, and other measures intended to ensure the roads no longer function as either a road or a trail.

NEW PLAN PAVES THE WAY FOR MORE ROAD CONSTRUCTION IN THE BACKCOUNTRY

The new 2018 Forest Plan abandons this approach in favor of a requirement that the Forest Service claims will maintain the habitat security that existed in 2011. This new management direction is less protective of grizzly bears and trout, because in many parts of the Flathead, the Forest Service never achieved the standards and goals set by the 1995 plan and the new plan excuses that failure. The change further ignores broad public support for Amendment 19: fully 98% of public comments the Forest Service received during its planning effort supported retaining Amendment 19’s road decommissioning program.

Also, the new plan does not actually commit to maintaining 2011 conditions. That is because it allows new road construction beyond 2011 levels so long as the Forest Service administratively closes the new roads by placing an inadequate barrier—even just a fallen tree—across the entrance. Such new roads would not be counted against total road limits in the Forest, even though such minimal barriers enable continued ATV and dirt bike use in grizzly habitat.

“This new plan is a stealth attempt to allow harmful new roads in key grizzly bear habitat, just as the Fish and Wildlife Service is talking about removing the Northern Continental Divide’s grizzly bears from the endangered species list,” said Josh Purtle, an attorney in Earthjustice’s Northern Rockies office.
Under the lax new plan, the Forest Service has already planned extensive new roadbuilding in the Flathead Forest. A new project proposed in the Swan Valley would build 60 miles of new roads and retain them on the road system indefinitely. By contrast, the Forest Service built only 3.2 miles of new roads in grizzly bear habitat over 14 years under the former, stronger plan.

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Forest Plan Participation 101

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Adam Romanowitz, Photographer

Some tips from a participant in the Manti-LaSal forest plan revision process, which includes developing a “conservation alternative” that “will emphasize the long term health of the forest.”

I’m afraid I’m pretty cynical about the payoff from this approach, but I’d be interested in stories from anyone who feels they had some success.  Part of the problem comes from the fact that the Forest Service creates its own structure for the alternatives it develops (such as the choice of management areas, what the different kinds of plan components should look like, how the plan document will be organized), and an outside alternative that doesn’t line up with this would be difficult for the planning team to document and evaluate.  Then of course there is the, “I am the professional” bias that resists outside ideas, the “don’t take away my power” bias that resists any actual obligations (standards) in the plan, and the “no-change” inertia bias that defines “reasonable alternatives” as those that aren’t much different from the current plan.  At best, it seems like there might be a few surprises that the Forest Service actually likes and tries to use.  Tell me I’m wrong.

It looks like Mary is already encountering some bias:

For instance, the Moab Sun News’ article on the public meeting reported that forest service grazing manager Tina Marian said people won’t see a lot of grazing changes in the new plan that aren’t already being implemented on the ground. She shouldn’t predetermine that outcome. The conservation alternative will recommend changes to how grazing is implemented in the forest (which is a part of Moab’s watershed), like reducing the rate of cattle grazing.

It’s not possible to tell where exactly the Manti-LaSal is in the revision process from their website, but there was a comment period on the “Draft Assessment Report” in June of 2017.  I think the best time to influence alternatives is probably when the Forest must “Review relevant information from the assessment and monitoring to identify a preliminary need to change the existing plan and to inform the development  of plan components and other plan content” (36 CFR §219.7(c)(2)(i)).  Any reasonable alternative would have to be traced back to that information, and if there are disagreements at that point it’s not likely that later suggestions would be well received.

In the example above, what did the assessment say about the effects of cattle grazing? The Forest seems to take the position that “historic” grazing was a problem, but “… (C)urrent grazing practices are not having as large an effect on stream stability, as evidenced by the many greenline transects rated as stable in 2016.”  But then there’s this proof of bias in the Assessment (I’m not familiar with these “directives,” and unfortunately, “Shamo” isn’t in the “Literature Cited”):

Livestock grazing has occurred on the Forest for over 150 years and will continue as part of the Forest’s directives to provide a sustained yield and support local communities (Shamo 2014, USFS 2014).

They’ve got some other interesting issues on the Manti-LaSal:

The alternative will ensure that pinyon and juniper communities are not removed on thousands of acres for the purposes of growing grass for cattle and artificial populations of elk.

It will require the forest to remove the non-native mountain goats that are tearing up the rare alpine area above 11,000 feet in the Manti-La Sal Mountains. It will not allow honeybee apiaries, which would devastate native bees.

And that’s where part of the Bears Ears National Monument is/was.  There was a lawsuit on the goats, and there are several on Bears Ears. 

 

 

Predicting Forest Tree Responses to Climate Change: Some Humility Required

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During the previous discussion on the Northwest Forest Plan Study here,  Lance posted a link to this article (titled “Climate modeling shows significant shifts in 21st century Pacific Northwest coastal forests” YOA (Yay Open Access). The study talks about how climate will change forests composition.  As a forest geneticist, I have always questioned the conclusions of these kinds of studies.  The first time I heard these kinds of predictions, I believe it was a Forest Biology Workshop in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1994 (yes, 25 years ago).  At the time, I thought “if we don’t know how much of a change in climate mature trees can handle, and we don’t know how much genetic variation are in their offspring, how can we possibly predict where trees will live or die?”

One of my tasks in Forest Service R&D was to be on reviews of the Research Stations. I remember one particular Assistant Director, who felt that systems thinking and research was the wave of the future. One of the scientists at the  Station had done some excellent work (IMHO) on how far fish move in streams, that was utterly surprising and important for many reasons.  This AD seemed to feel that this work, and indeed organismal biology, was passe´.  Again, you might ask, if you don’t understand how an organism works, how can you possibly predict what it’s going to do under changing conditions?  Let’s look at a couple of ways of approaching the same topic- how changes in climate will affect tree species in the Northeast.

First we have this newspaper story citing a variety of researchers who talk about climate impacts on forest tree composition (from this interview, it’s not clear if these predictions are based on general principles or specific models), e.g.,

“As the climate warms, we expect to see some of the iconic species of New England, like maples and beeches, pushed out. Those will no longer be there,” he said. “We are going to see things we never even thought of — we’ll see a shift in the face of the forests of New England. You can’t change one thing, and expect nothing else to change along with it.”

We might call this the “have idea and model” approach.

And here is a study by Canham et al. here (YOA)  that may yield information to improve models from using FIA data and measuring tree growth.  They seem to arrive at the tentative conclusion that there are some phenotypic (not genetic) responses to climate change. We might call this the “observe how organisms operate” approach.

Ultimately, it will be critical to understand whether the patterns we have observed represent genetic adaptation or phenotypic acclimation, or some combination of the two. The consequences for responses of these tree species to climate change could be very different depending on that balance. If the results are genetically based, trees within a given location could be much more sensitive to climate change than indicated by the very broad geographic distributions of these temperate tree species. But if the results are phenotypic, this would represent local acclimation that could help buffer species in the face of climate change. Adult tree growth is a dominant term in interannual variation in forest productivity and the attendant ecosystem properties associated with primary productivity, including carbon sequestration and nutrient retention. But from a demographic perspective, adult tree growth is much less important to the geographic distribution and successional dynamics of these temperate tree species than are other life history stages, particularly seedling recruitment and survival, and adult tree mortality (Pacala et al. 1996, Canham and Murphy 2016a, b, 2017). It remains an open question whether the ubiquitous local adaptation to long‐term climate conditions we have documented for adult tree growth in these temperate tree species is present in those other critical life history stages.

Like I said in 1994, if we don’t know how trees adapt, either phenotypically or genetically, we can’t really place much faith in models that try to predict what will happen in the future.  And that’s leaving aside changes in diseases, insects, pollinators, seed spreaders, mycorrhizal associations and so on. But that’s OK- humility in the face of the complexity of Nature is, perhaps, the most appropriate response.

Climate Adaptation: Policy Groundhog Day?

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Yesterday, Matthew posted this piece with an interview with Andrew Revkin. It began

“Once derided, ways of adapting to climate change are gaining steam”

I had a feeling that I had read that somewhere, possibly a long time,  before.   I looked it up, and sure enough, I found this 2007 science op-ed (that is, an opinion piece by scientists, published in Nature)  claiming much the same thing. The authors are Roger Pielke, Jr., Gwyn Prins, Steve Rayner and Daniel Sarewitz.

But perspectives have changed. Adaptation is again seen as an essential part of climate policy alongside greenhouse-gas mitigation. Both the recent Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change and the efforts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change demonstrate that adaptation is firmly back on the agenda. There are at least three reasons why the taboo on adaptation can no longer be enforced.

First, there is a timescale mismatch. Whatever actions ultimately lead to the decarbonization of the global energy system, it will be many decades before they have a discernible effect on the climate. Historical emissions dictate that climate change is unavoidable. And even the most optimistic emissions projections show global greenhouse-gas concentrations rising for the foreseeable future.

Second, vulnerability to climate-related impacts on society are increasing for reasons that have nothing to do with greenhouse-gas emissions, such as rapid population growth along coasts and in areas with limited water supplies. As Hurricane Katrina made devastatingly clear, climate vulnerability is caused by unsustainable patterns of development combined with socioeconomic inequity.

Post-Katrina debate focused on whether or not the event bore the signature of global warming, despite the fact that scientists have known for decades the inevitability of a Katrina-like disaster in New Orleans.

Finally, those who will suffer the brunt of climate impacts are now demanding that the international response to climate change focus on increasing the resilience of vulnerable societies to damaging climate events that — like Katrina — will occur regardless of efforts to mitigate emissions. In 2002, developing countries put forward the ‘Delhi Declaration’, calling for greater attention to adaptation in international climate-change policy negotiations.

Does the above statement about Katrina remind anyone else of wildfires? Of course, adaptation is required, regardless of the proportion of climate change attributed, or attributable, to human impacts.   Most of us who have done climate planning for feds or others have consciously targeted both adaptation and mitigation.  Some groups deal more with adaptation and not so much mitigation (think plant breeders, water engineers).  But why is adaptation not as “cool” as mitigation? Why does it need to be repeatedly rediscovered? What are the forces that have been, and may be continuing to, work against adaptation as having its own place in the sun?

Here are my hypotheses:

(1) First in, last out.  Climate modelers found a primary place in the public conversation and a certain liking of being close to power, plus lots of research funding.  They may be reluctant to give some of that up to adaptation folks. Does anyone know how much federal research goes to mitigation (I’m also interested in the proportion to predicting and analyzing vs. developing technology) compared to adaptation?

(2) Physics envy.  Let’s just say that the traditional biases say the closer you are to organisms and people in your studies, the less cool your research is.

(3) Not as engaging. Media and politicians like getting people worked up, the former so they click, and the latter so they click on donations.  County planning or a new milo variety does not have the same cachet (I guess the word is engagement) as a new study that shows that things are worse than previously thought.

Other ideas?

 

Presto! A “Healthy Forest!”

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The photo above was taken by a volunteer for the volunteer-run Friends of the Bitterroot, a grassroots organization based in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana with a mission “to preserve the wildlands and wildlife and to protect the forests and watersheds of our region as we work for a sustainable relationship with the environment.”

According to FOB, the photo was taken within the Three Saddle Vegetation Management project on the Bitterroot National Forest.

Back in 2013, the Bitterroot National Forest’s planning staff officer, Jerry Krueger, described the project as “It’s sort of a soup to nuts sort of project.”

Well, “nuts” is right.

According to FOB, as part of the timber sale, first this area logged.

Then strong winds blew down many of the remaining trees.

Then the area was salvage logged.

Then the area was burned.

Then herbicides were sprayed on the area.

Presto! The U.S. Forest Service created a “Healthy Forest!”

Intelligent media coverage on wildfires, climate change and fire and climate adaptation

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In my opinion, this is some really intelligent media coverage on the topic of wildfires, climate change and climate and fire adaptation.

Listen here as Eric Whitney, news director of Montana Public Radio, interviews journalist Andrew Revkin. Below is the teaser from Montana Public Radio’s website.

There’s been a change in the response to global climate change. Journalist Andrew Revkin, who’s been writing about the issue since the 1980s for outlets including the New York Times highlights the new response in a recent story for National Geographic.

I had a chance to talk with him about his story, in which he mentions a program supported by Bozeman-based Headwaters Economics, in partnership with the US Forest Service. It’s called “Community Planning Assistance for Wildfire.”

Andrew Revkin is the Strategic Adviser for Environmental and Science Journalism at the National Geographic Society and has written on global warming for 30 years. He is the author of three books about climate, most recently Weather: An Illustrated History, from Cloud Atlases to Climate Change. He covered the environment for years at the New York Times.

NW Forest Plan 25 years later: Wildfire losses up, bird populations down

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Press release from Oregon State today:

 

2-4-19

 

NW Forest Plan 25 years later: Wildfire losses up, bird populations down

By Steve Lundeberg, 541-737-4039, [email protected]

Sources: Matt Betts, 541-737-3841, [email protected]; Ben Phalan, [email protected]

This story is available online: http://bit.ly/2G97xKn.

 

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Twenty-five years into a 100-year federal strategy to protect older forests in the Pacific Northwest, forest losses to wildfire are up and declines in bird populations have not been reversed, new research shows.

The findings, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, underscore the importance of continuing to prioritize the safeguarding of older forests, the scientists say – forests characterized by a complex structure that includes multiple canopy layers, large trees, downed wood and snags.

The researchers stress it’s vital to remember that upon its adoption in 1994, the Northwest Forest Plan was conceived as a century-long plan, and was not expected to show significant positive impacts on biodiversity for 50 years.

“Trees in the northwestern United States are some of the longest-lived and largest in the world,” said Matt Betts of Oregon State University. “Douglas-fir can live to be more than 800 years old and grow to be more than 100 meters tall, so it shouldn’t be surprising that it is hard to ‘restore’ this forest type, and that any plan to do so will take a long time.

“The plan has been one of the most impressive forest conservation strategies in the world, and there is no doubt that it has had a strong positive impact on the conservation of old-growth forests, but our results show that even with these strong conservation measures, bird species living in this system still aren’t doing too well.”

The NWFP, a series of federal policies put in place at the behest of then President Bill Clinton, encompasses 10 million hectares of land, including national forests, national parks, wilderness areas and Bureau of Land Management parcels, in Oregon, Washington and California.

Betts and OSU research associate Ben Phalan led a collaboration that used region-wide bird surveys, forest data and land ownership maps to gauge the plan’s effect on biodiversity so far. Birds are a key indicator of biodiversity.

The researchers examined population trends for 24 widespread bird species for which the Pacific Northwest holds important populations – some associated with older forests, some with diverse early-seral ecosystems, and some with both.

While there have been other detailed studies of threatened species such as spotted owls and marbled murrelets, this study focused on what populations of more-common birds can tell us about wider forest biodiversity.

Populations of bird species associated with older forests – such as the varied thrush, golden-crowned kinglet, Pacific-slope flycatcher and Townsend’s warbler – are continuing to struggle on both federal and private industrial land, the findings show.

On private industrial land, that’s likely due to ongoing timber harvesting, while on federal land it’s due, at least in part, to the recent uptick in fires in the Northwest, in part because of drought.

“All forests in the region evolved with fires to some degree, but now, at a time when old-growth forests are so depleted, stand-replacing fires have become an important cause of declines in bird populations in older forests,” said Betts, professor of landscape ecology and the IWFL Professor of Forest Biodiversity Research in OSU’s College of Forestry. “Evidence suggests that some of the increase in fires is climate related.”

Another important finding, notes Phalan, now based at the Institute of Biology at the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador, Brazil, is that the area of young, complex preforest vegetation – known as “diverse early-seral ecosystems” – isn’t declining as much as the researchers expected, and had increased in some regions.

“Again, that seems to be because new fires are creating quite a bit of early seral,” Phalan said. “There are proposals that more of this vegetation type be promoted via forest management, but our results show that birds in older forests are more likely to be in decline than those in early-seral ecosystems, so we need to be very careful not to reduce our options for recovery of older forests – especially dense, moist forests.”

Diverse early-seral ecosystems support many broadleaf species, shrubs and herbs as well as young conifers, and are important habitats for some bird species. Bird species associated with these habitats that are showing ongoing declines include the rufous hummingbird, willow flycatcher and orange-crowned warbler. For most of these species, however, in contrast to birds of older forests, the declines have not gotten worse.

Betts said that before launching into efforts to create these diverse early-seral ecosystems, more information is needed regarding how much of it there might have been historically in different areas, and how sensitive the associated species are to reduced habitat.

Phalan emphasizes the findings show that efforts to maintain and restore old-growth forests are working, but that it’s harder to prevent stand-replacing fires than to manage logging.

“It was anticipated in the plan that species declines might take decades to arrest,” he said. “It was surprising, though, to learn that species associated with older forests continued to decline much faster than those in early seral. We argue that, because forest regeneration is an inherently slow process, and because fires are going to become more frequent in most forest types, forest plans should continue to emphasize conservation of old-growth habitats.”

 

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Is the Colville “Ground Zero for Privatizing Land Planning in Federal Forests” as in HCN Story?

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The Vaagen Brothers Lumber yard is seen during a tour on Wednesday, June 7, 2017, at Vaagen Brothers Lumber Inc in Colville, Wash. (Tyler Tjomsland / The Spokesman-Review)

Here’s an article from the High Country News, quoting our very own Andy Stahl. This is a great example of a news story in which you can imagine many other ways to deal with the same information and give historical or context from other parts of the country, or government.

First,

Even though Forest Service employees who work on those projects were left out of work, timber sales continued on the Colville National Forest. One reason they were still being processed during the shutdown is that the Forest Service was able to tap into trust funds from past timber sales that are held by individual agency offices, explained Andy Stahl, the executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics.

It seems that other government entities continued during the shutdown based on where their dollars were coming from, according to this news story .

“The NPS currently has funds derived from entrance, camping, parking and other fees collected from park visitors that would typically be used for future projects at parks,” Smith explained in a statement posted to the National Park Services website. “After consultation with the Office of the Solicitor at the Department of the Interior, it has been determined that these funds can and should be used to provide immediate assistance and services to highly visited parks during the lapse in appropriations.”

And of course, as we’ve discussed here previously, there are the many ski areas that were not shut down.

 

And the shutdown isn’t the only reason trained biologists, engineers and habitat planners have to worry about their future working for the Forest Service in Colville. A program pioneered in the Colville National Forest that started in 2013, dubbed the “A to Z” project, allowed the local timber company, Vaagen Brothers Lumber, to hire outside contractors to develop timber harvest plans, making the Colville ground zero for privatizing land planning in federal forests. Last summer, on a tour of the project, which has boosted timber production in the forest, then-interim and now permanent Forest Service Chief Vicki Christiansen touted it as an example of how the agency can embrace public-private partnerships in comments to Capital Press.

When timber-sale planning is outsourced, biologists, engineers and land planners who work for the Forest Service are cut out of much of the process. What’s left is a contracting officer, agency decision-maker and private contractors, Stahl explained. This doesn’t bode well for the federal workers who are typically tasked with writing timber sales and forest plans because agency employees are replaced by consultants, who can do most of the work remotely. Outsourcing the planning of timber management represents a continued trend within the Forest Service of “disinvestment in rural America,” said Stahl.
 

I’m not an expert on the A to Z project, but I’ve heard the Idaho State folks talk about their use of partnership authority (which they seem pretty happy with) and so I don’t know if it’s correct to say that the Colville is “ground zero.” I am curious as to exactly the role of the FS employees- in my experience with “third party NEPA”, it is all reviewed by FS employees. This is not a particularly new trend for developing NEPA documents nor content analysis, anyway. But the general trend in the Forest Service runs back even further. Andy remembers when reforestation contractors were putting government employees out of work (70’s). And then we had no more in-house vehicles and shops. And many remember the inception of the Albuquerque Service Center and how that worked for many women in rural communities. If you were going to look at it from a social justice perspective, the blue and pink collar jobs went away from most FS operations a while ago.

I’m glad Andy raised the issue of disinvestment, though. What do you all think is the best way to keep employees in the most important places doing the most important things with stable or declining budgets?

Cindy Chojnacky Publishes Novel: Return to the Wilds

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Do you or a young teen in your circle need a hopeful reminder of why we go to wild places and fight over their care? Or a gentle warning about the dark side of the human project to civilize the whole world?

Our own Cindy C. Chojnacky (Forest Service retiree and contributor to The Smokey Wire) has just published a novel under the moniker “CindyC,” Return to the Wilds, on impact of wild places with a bit of satire on various forces that threaten them. Bright young students are charged to save the planet, commune with wildlings and ethereal beings and face down dark forces of opposition. The book is pitched as a youth novel but Cindy says friends in her age group—especially those who have worked for government—have enjoyed it too, especially satirical aspects.

If fiction and fantasy are not your forte, you may still think (as I do) that Cindy has done an amazing and difficult thing.  Congratulations, CindyC!

Her description:
Two youths from a sprawling Southwestern metropolis, Babel II, are called to lead a daring conspiracy to rescue the Wilds—parks, reserves, wilderness areas worldwide that are the only undeveloped islands in an increasingly urbanized world. Guided by a mysterious Keeper and helped by Wildlings, the pair and friends use wit and geek skills to outwit Minions of the ominous Dominion, and make a powerful pitch for a change in
the story of human progress.

And here are sample reviews:

.“This strange and wonderful novel seems to follow imaginary threads from where we are today to reach the place created in the book. For me, it evokes bits of the worlds of Narnia and the Hunger Games, with a little Jetsons imagery thrown in….”— children and youth librarian, Sun Valley, Idaho.

“Part Madeline L’Engle, part C.S. Lewis, all adventure and spiritual awakening, Return to the Wilds offers a rip-roaring dystopian-toppling spiritual adventure. A must read for tweens and anyone needing a spiritual uplift in bleak times…”—H.G. McKinnis, author of A Justified Bitch mystery novel.

Return to the Wilds made its e-book debut January 1, 2019 and will emerge as a paperback April 23, 2019—the day after Earth Day. It’s available now at these online retailers:
Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Books-A-Million

Powells

Chapters Indigo

Indie Bound

Again, congratulations, Cindy!