Sierra Club Comments

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I have seen a trend in postings from the Sierra Club, on their Facebook page. Online petitions have been popular with eco-groups but, those petitions really don’t do anything. They seem to be a way of riling up their followers, gathering personal information, and receiving donations. There is also a sizable amount of people commenting who do not side with the Sierra Club.

The particular posting I will be presenting regards the Giant Sequoia National Monument, and how the Trump Administration would affect it. The Sierra Club implies (and their public believes) that Trump would cut down the Giant Sequoia National Monument, without immediate action. With over 500 comments, there are ample examples of what people are thinking.

 

“So much of the redwoods and Giant Sequoias have already been cut down… the lumber trucks involved had signs which read ” Trees… America’s renewable resource”… and just exactly how to you “renew” a 2 thousand year old tree??? When a job becomes even remotely scarce, one must find a new occupation. Having cut down the redwoods,(RIP Pacific Lumber and the “Redwood Highway”) and when they’ve cut down the national forests (public lands), are “they” going to insist on the right to come onto my land and cut down my trees as well… to provide jobs for the lumber industry? The National forests and Monuments are public lands, and no one has the right to turn them over to private interests for money making purposes. When are they going to see that there is a higher calling here? The forests provide for much of the fresh air we enjoy… they take in the carbon monoxide we exhale, and they exhale the oxygen so necessary to us. They each also take up 300 gallons of water, so provide for erosion control, and I could go on forever with the benefits of trees… but there will still be short sighted detractors who are only able to see the dollar signs in this issue. If providing jobs is the object… bring back our manufacturing jobs from overseas, all you big companies… your bottom line profit will be less, but you will have brought back the jobs to the USA, and you claim that is the object…???? Investing in the big companies in order to get rich does not make the investing noble or honorable when it is condoning taking jobs off-shore to enrich the few. … at the cost of the lost jobs for our people. Love your neighbor..”

I think that statement speaks for itself. Well-meaning but, misinformed.

 

“Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile. Keep loggers out of National Giant Sequoia Forests. Forest rangers and the National Parks already do controlled burning when needed to protect forest ecosystem health. The idea that commerical logging companies can be trusted with that task is preposterous.”

I wonder if he had noticed all those dead trees inside the Monument. Another example of not knowing who is taking care of the Monument.

 

“No such thing as controlled logging look at the clear cut coast. Once you let them in they will take it all and say Oops. A long time ago Pacific lumber clear cut thousands of acres illegally and Department of forestry did nothing. Things have not changed.”

Yes, things have changed. Logging IS controlled in Sierra Nevada National Forests… for the last 26 years.

 

“Destroying over 200k acres of sequoias and leaving ONLY 90k acres is NOT “CONTROLLED LOGGING “. OUR planet needs trees to produce oxygen and just how long do you think those jobs will last?”

Someone thinks there is a HUGE chunk of pristine pure Giant Sequoia groves. Thinning forests is not destruction, folks.

 

“I went to sign this and put my address and what not but then I skipped over my phone number and it won’t let me sign it! Unless you give your phone number it’s not going to San. I will not give out my phone number. Is there another way to sign for this?”

There were many comments like this one.

 

“They are both classified under same genisus of Sequoia, It’s their enviroment that makes them different. The Redwood trees (Sequoia sempervirens) along N Cal coastline and then the Sequoias trees (Sequoiadendron giganteum) found in the Sierra Nevadas mountain regions are the same yet very different trees because of the chactoristics. Both trees share their unique and acceptional height and massive girth size, they share the same red wood tones.”

Someone thinks they are an authority in tree Taxonomy.

 

“As someone who works in timber, don’t blame it on us! Many foresters care about sustainable forestry. I hate Donald Trump just as much as anyone who cares about the environment”

Well, that is sure saying something, eh?

 

“The forests are being burned down by all these un-natural wild fires that are created by the powers that be to carry out agenda 21/30. It’s not a secret but most people don’t want to see it & the common mentality is if we don’t see it, or address it, it will go away. Right?”

There’s more and more loonies out there saying this stuff, and blaming “Directed Energy Weapons” for starting all the wildfires.

 

“There will be no more forest in America, it will be a big cacino and golf courses.”

And there’s other conspiracy theories out there, too!

 

“The most deushiest thing ever! Poor Trees “

People do believe that Trump would clearcut the Giant Sequoias.

 

“Oh yes look what tree hungers did to Oregon”

I love a well-mispelled insult!

 

“No More RAPE AND MURDER OF OUR TREES”

I wonder what real violent crime victims think of this comparison. Should we let those trees be horribly burned alive, or eaten by insects, resulting in a long and slow starvation death? *smirk*

 

“Wth…. He truely is satin”

Soooo smoooooth!

 

“Drop big rocks on their heads. Something like Ewoks from Return of the Jedi all those years ago. Ewoks were “original” monkey wrenchers.”

That’s a lovely solution! Violence will fix everything!

 

“I think you could stand to be a bit less adversarial in your comments. Oil has nothing to do with this subject and devalues your argument. There is no reason why the land cannot be managed without giving it away to unregulated for-profit companies. That is the right answer.”

Yep, there just might be oil underneath those giant trees. Yep, gotta cut em all down to make sure! Misguided but, kinda, sorta, on the right path.

 

“The devil could burn it all down there because most of the state is so ungodly. Trump isn’t your problem. Godlessness and son keeps your minds and state in a state of anarchy. Poor people. I will keep praying you will find out that you all need to pray to the living God.”

Yep, because…. ummm, …. God recognizes where California’s boundaries are???!!??

 

“Try direct energy weapons”

Certainly, the Reptilians and Nibiru are to blame, fer sure, fer sure.

 

“Because of Monoculture”

Blame the old clearcuts!

 

“Anyone cutting a tree should be SHOT!!!!”

And another violent solution.

 

“The lumbar goes to China and else where, not used used in USA, great loose loose thing.the logs get shipped out of country destroys old growth forest well some one will make $$$$$ of it but it won’t be you”

Dumb, dumb!

 

“Its not about forest management its about trumps business buddies being allowed to buy the land and develop it”

And even another conspiracy theory. People love to say “I wouldn’t put it past him” when promoting such stuff.

This American mindset, on a world stage, is troubling. People proudly display their ignorance and stupidity to fight a non-existent issue. America doesn’t believe the truth anymore, and the Sierra Club, and others, are spreading misinformation through phony petitions.

 

 

The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation is funding a $1000 ‘bounty’ per trapped and killed wolf in Idaho

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And no, even though it seems like this would be news from 1919, it’s happening today, in 2019. In fact, the following propaganda poster was just posted by the “Foundation for Wildlife Management” on their Facebook page yesterday:

I could find no information indicating that this up-$1,000 ‘bounty’ – I mean “reimbursement” – per trapped and killed wolf wasn’t available if the wolf was trapped and killed on federal public lands throughout Idaho, including deep within federally designated Wilderness areas. If that’s indeed the case, how in the world can the U.S. Forest Service and other federal land management agencies allow a $1000 bounty per dead wolf on America’s federal public lands, especially within Wilderness areas?

Even if federal public lands are excluded from this $1000 wolf-bounty trapping “contest,” how in the world can a group like the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and the Idaho Department of Fish and Game fund the bounty? It must be legal for IDFG to do this. How the Elk Foundation thinks funding a $1000 bounty on wolves in the year 2019 is ethical, scientific or follows the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, which the RMEF claims to follow, is a mystery.

I did notice on the Foundation for Wildlife Management website that they claim that in 2018 they got a $25,000 grant from the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. They also claimed that this was the third year in a row they got $25,000 from the RMEF, meaning a total of $75,000 given by the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation in three years.

According to the Idaho rangeland commission, wolves have killed 700 cattle and 550 sheep in Idaho since 2009. That works out to roughly 77 cattle and 61 sheep killed per year by wolves, through-out the entire state of Idaho. There are roughly 2.6 MILLION cattle and sheep in the state of Idaho. That means that over the past decade wolves have killed approximately 0.005% of all cattle and sheep in the state. How many cattle and sheep were killed in Idaho over the past decade by natural causes, including weather? How many were killed by domesticated dogs? Or by disease and malnutrition? How many of the 2.6 million cattle and sheep in Idaho were killed in slaughter-houses over the past decade?

For comparison, the last intensive wolf count in Idaho was done in 2015 when officials said the state had an estimated 786 wolves in the entire state. That’s also the last year Fish and Game was required to do that type of count after wolves were removed from the Endangered Species List.

Erik Molvar, a Laramie, Wyoming-based wildlife biologist and Executive Director of Western Watersheds Project, had this piece published in the Idaho Statesmen last October, which sheds some more light on Idaho’s supposed “wolf problem.”

The Cattle Association neglects to mention that Wildlife Services, the federal agency tasked with killing native wildlife for the agriculture industry’s benefit, has been actively promoting a program of exaggerating wolf kills by classifying dead livestock lacking any bite marks as wolf kills. This is an agency struggling to justify its own existence, inflating wolf-kill numbers to create an artificial crisis. Color us skeptical, and we would be happy to take the association up on its offer of joining them out in the field.

Between July 2017 and May 2018, this federal agency spent over half a million taxpayer dollars and killed at least 53 wolves in Idaho to avenge livestock depredations, despite mounting scientific evidence showing that predator killing doesn’t reduce livestock losses.

Moreover, most of Idaho’s beef cattle get shipped off to feedlots at year’s end, and from there, to the slaughterhouse. Since beef cattle are bred and raised to be killed, it is hard to ask the public to accept that in rare instances when a cow ends up on a wolf’s menu rather than a human one, that this is somehow unfair and represents a moral outrage. Much less a reason to try to kill the “offending” wolf, or any other wolf they can find, in retribution.

We humans should try harder to fit in with the natural order of things. If livestock are to be pastured in the untamed West, a few losses to the native predators is just part of the cost of doing business. Cattle and sheep would be much happier and more productive grazing on pastures with deep soils and abundant rainfall east of the Mississippi, instead of damaging the arid lands — and fragile fish and wildlife habitats — of the West. And in these more ecologically suitable areas for non-native livestock, cattle and sheep producers can find pastures far from the nearest wolf, if wolves are really an overwhelming concern.

Nonlethal methods to discourage wolf predation on livestock are also a workable alternative. In the Tom Miner Basin of Montana, just outside Yellowstone National Park, cattle producers have avoided high levels of predation by native wildlife despite burgeoning populations of both wolves and grizzly bears.

The West is a wild and untamed place, and Westerners like it that way. We are hardy, self-reliant folk who aren’t afraid of “the big bad wolf” of fairy tales. In fact, wolves, grizzly bears and other native predators are an important part of that untamed legacy. We neither need nor want a taxpayer-subsidized agency to kill off our native wildlife.

I couldn’t agree with Molvar’s sentiments more. Should America’s public lands and Wilderness areas be places for native wildlife, or should they be places where private ranchers let their cows and sheep graze for literally pennies on the dollar? According to the BLM, “the Federal grazing fee for 2018 will be $1.41 per animal unit month (AUM) [a cow and her calf, or five sheep] for public lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management and $1.41 per head month (HM) for lands managed by the USDA Forest Service.” [Update: The federal public land grazing fee for both 2019 and 2020 was reduced to $1.35 per AUM, the lowest fee allowed.]

Besides, if as the Foundation for Wildlife Management claims, “Wolf numbers are so high the #1 killer of Idaho wolves is now other wolves”….You’d sure think you won’t need to offer trappers up to a $1,000 reimbursement to trap and kill wolves across the state, including on lands that are owned equally by everyone in America.

And just how many mighty hunters walk and drive around Idaho with high-powered rifles (including a lot of AR-15s, and other assault-style weapons) every year during hunting season? I bet the success-rate for elk hunting in Idaho is much, much greater than the success-rate for wolf-hunting. How can that be if the state is crawling with wolves, which have supposedly eaten all the elk? There has got to be tens of thousands of elk and deer hunters in Idaho who are also carrying a wolf tag. Why can’t they find the wolves? Maybe it’s because there are only about 800 wolves in the entire state of Idaho and the wolves kill a tiny, tiny fraction of the cows and sheep in the state, often times when the private livestock is grazing on federal public lands and Wilderness areas, at less than $1.50 per month per animal unit.

Then again, Idaho is (in)famous for being a state where a lot of people talk about the SSS when it comes to wolves: “Shoot. Shovel. Shut up.” So maybe there are actually a lot less wolves in Idaho, then the official count in 2015, which put their numbers at approximately 786.

That poster at the top of this post was put up on the Foundation for Wildlife Management’s Facebook page last night. One of the first comments on that FB post is the following image. It hasn’t been removed, but it’s gotten a bunch of likes.

You can respectfully let the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation know how you feel about this issue by calling 800-225-5355. The Idaho Department of Fish and Game can be reached at 208-334-3700.

P.S. According to the Dictionary, the definition of “bounty” is: a sum paid for killing or capturing a person or animal.

It’s Not OK to Illegal Poach Trails in Unstaffed National Parks, Monuments and Wilderness Areas During Trump’s Shutdown

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“From mountain bikers in California to snowmobilers in Montana, renegade adventurers see the shutdown as a chance to get away with anything. They need to stop.”

That’s the sub-heading to a story that appeared in Outside back on January 11, 2019.

Here are some interesting accounts from the article (emphasis added):

On Sunday, January 6, two western Montana skiers headed out for a tour. They drove snowmobiles to the border of a federal wilderness area, then switched to backcountry touring gear, expecting to break trail through powder. Instead they found themselves following fresh tread tracks. In the distance, two snowmobilers were high-marking a bowl that was clearly within the designated wilderness. The outlaw motorists paid no mind to the skiers, who were obeying the social contract, and eventually buzzed within 20 feet of them.

Due to the government shutdown, the skiers couldn’t report the incident to rangers, but one of them called the local sheriff with a description of the sleds as well as a truck and trailer that was parked at the trailhead. (He shared these details with me on the condition of anonymity.) The sheriff’s office, not often tasked with public-lands violations, appeared indifferent. As for the throttle-twisting malefactors, one presumes they saw the government closure as an opportunity for an illegal joyride. “They were being so blatant about it,” the skier told me. “It sure seemed like they knew exactly what they were doing—and they didn’t care.”…

In Northern California’s Marin County, mountain bikers have begun poaching the singletrack in Muir Woods National Monument and Point Reyes….Mountain bikers in particular have long dreamed of rolling the trails in national parks and wilderness areas. The former tend to offer zero off-road access except, in rare cases, to flat “carriage roads,” while the latter ban mountain bikers (and snowmobilers) entirely. Such restrictions can be soul crushing to sports-minded visitors. “The mountain-biking access is so bad in Marin that the shutdown gives us a chance to ride trails we normally can’t get on,” says a source who didn’t want to be identified. “We’re not cutting new trails or riding steep trails that aren’t suited to bikes. We’re riding established trails that the equestrians and hikers refuse to share with us. It’s like looking at a bunch of untracked powder and not being able to ski it.”…

The irresponsible dregs violating our national parks and wilderness areas right now are acting like high school kids throwing a kegger because their parents are out of town. Even if, like the Marin bikers, you don’t believe you’re damaging the environment, ignoring the law has consequences, whether or not the rangers are on duty.

Clearcutting and Fuel Treatment in California: Will the California Forestry Association Call out Sierra Pacific’s Clearcuts?

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This is land owned – and clearcut – by Sierra Pacific Industries. It is located approximately 15 miles north of the town of Paradise, California. The 2018 Camp Fire did not make it this far north.

Consider this a companion piece to the post that Sharon just made here.

In this piece from August 2018 – two months before the historic and deadly wildfires in Paradise, California – the following section caught my eye:

Push for regulatory relief

Meantime, the [California Forestry Association] wants to change rules and regulations to make it easier for private industry to thin forested land. The group also suggests increased logging could benefit rural areas in Northern California where poverty and job losses have been problems.

[Rich] Gordon, the [California Forestry Association president and] CEO, insists the industry isn’t pushing for more clear-cutting of forested lands — a practice the Sierra Club opposes. Rather, he said, the industry advocates “selectively removing smaller trees on a landscape so that the bigger trees (which are more resilient to fire and store more carbon) can survive and do better.”

Kathryn Phillips, director of the Sierra Club California, said the environmental group is not opposed to what she calls “selective logging and those sort of things. We’re opposed to going in and unnecessarily disrupting the environment and doing forest management practices that will lead to worse fires, and some forest practices do.”

She said the practice of clear-cutting and planting trees all at the same time creates added risk for the forest because “you don’t have diversity. That makes them more susceptible to fires. Older trees tend to burn less and slower. So you want to have a lot of diversity.”

Some conservative lawmakers believe environmental groups share blame for the state’s current fire risk.

“Extreme environmental groups have for years stated that we shouldn’t thin our forests because of the benefits of carbon that is stored,” said Assemblyman Travis Allen, R-Huntington Beach. “However, the carbon that is currently being released with these out-of-control wildfires is dramatically greater than we would have if our forests were responsibly managed.”

As I posted as a comment over at Sharon’s original blog post, above and below are some visual examples of “responsibly managed” (?!?) Sierra Pacific Industries lands that are located within 10 to 25 miles, just north of Paradise, California. Will Rich Gordon, president and CEO of the California Forestry Association demand that Sierra Pacific Industries immediately halt all clearcutting and focus only on “selectively removing small trees?” Also, what type of “regulatory relief” is really needed to “selectively remove small trees?”

These clearcuts on Sierra Pacific Industries’ lands sit about 25 miles north of Paradise, CA.
Here’s a map of Sierra Pacific Industry’s land holdings, taken directly from the SPI website.

Still More Agreement About Fuel Treatment: Conservation Colorado and former Secretary Zinke

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In this article from Colorado Politics, Joey Bunch, a political reporter, talks about a press conference after Trump’s “raking the forest” comment.

“Yes, the temperatures are getting hotter, the seasons longer,” Zinke said. “But there are active forest management principles we need to go forward on. One is to remove the dead and dying trees, to thin, to do prescribed burns late in the season rather than mid-season.”
Both secretaries said the Trump administration needed more authority from Congress to get ahead of fires by expanding “good neighbor” programs with local governments, expanding the fight against diseases and insects and managing funding better.

Bunch spoke with Scott Braden, the wilderness advocate for Conservation Colorado, the state’s largest environmental organization, who talked about points of agreement with Zinke.

He and Zinke had points of agreement, however. The landscape is increasingly dry, they said, and a century of fire suppression has built up a powder keg of brush and weeks awaiting their spark.

Braden went farther: Building houses and communities in these vulnerable places worsens the risks and raises the cost of solutions.

“Pretty simple,” he responded in an email when I asked his opinion. “Solutions, less so.

“We need to build smarter, fire-resilient communities where vulnerable (hello, Woodland Park, the next Paradise), address climate and reduce fuels (prescribed burns, not fighting every fire, thinning and fuels reduction, which is not the same as logging all the big trees; the big trees are the fire-resilient ones you want to leave).”

Thinking about our previous discussion about California, it seems like the difference between Colorado and California is that we think -if people would actually buy thinned material, that would be a good thing, so we don’t have to burn it. And dead trees are not particularly “fire resilient” and we have lots of those. Perhaps superstitiously, I would prefer if Braden hadn’t targeted my neighbors as “the next Paradise.” Especially since they have been leaders in community fire efforts.

The summary from Bunch: Again, it sounded like the two sides, at least in rhetoric, aren’t that far apart about tackling the symptoms, even as they differ on the cause. “We’ve talked about active forest management for a long time,” Zinke said. “The talking is over. Now it’s time to act.”

That sounds like, “Grab a rake, Colorado.”

We have one more type of straw project to add to the list:
1. FS clearcutting in California
2. Fuel treatments in backcountry
3. Fuel treatments taking out big fire-resilient (living?) trees

So the only thing this Administration and this environmental group disagree about is their approach to climate change mitigation? That seems to leave lots of opportunities for agreeing on priorities and on-the-ground community planning, fuel treatment and prescribed fire and all the rest of it. It would turn out that we’re all in agreement- and what’s wrong with (admitting) that?

Clearcutting and Fuel Treatment in California: Do the CFA and the Sierra Club Agree?

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In reading the press about wildfires in California, I took notice of whom was quoted about what. Of all of the stories, I found this one particularly interesting and different in terms of the people interviewed. Jeff Daniels, a CNBC reporter, interviewed the head of the California Forestry Association and a representative from the Sierra Club. Now, you would expect them to have different views on mechanical fuel treatments- but perhaps not so much.

“The industry is certainly prepared to assist and encourage and support the thinning of our forests,” said Gordon. “We can actually have more resilient, fire resistant forests if we thin them a little bit.”
Wood agrees that the selective removal of trees to reduce fuels and a more robust timber strategy in the state “can be a piece of the puzzle” to reduce the fire risk.

Note that Gordon does not say that we can “log our way out of having fires”- he says it’s a “piece of the puzzle to reduce fire risk.” Here’s what he has to say about clearcutting:

Gordon, the trade group’s CEO, insists the industry isn’t pushing for more clear-cutting of forested lands — a practice the Sierra Club opposes. Rather, he said, the industry advocates “selectively removing smaller trees on a landscape so that the bigger trees (which are more resilient to fire and store more carbon) can survive and do better.”

So it sounds like CFA is in agreement with the Sierra Club. Here’s what a representative of the Sierra Club said:

Kathryn Phillips, director of the Sierra Club California, said the environmental group is not opposed to what she calls “selective logging and those sort of things. We’re opposed to going in and unnecessarily disrupting the environment and doing forest management practices that will lead to worse fires, and some forest practices do.”

She said the practice of clear-cutting and planting trees all at the same time creates added risk for the forest because “you don’t have diversity. That makes them more susceptible to fires. Older trees tend to burn less and slower. So you want to have a lot of diversity.”

So CFA and the Sierra Club are in agreement? Of course, Phillips might be talking about private lands. And I don’t think that the FS has been doing clearcuts for some time.. so..

One thing that I wondered about is whether the Sierra Club has changed its mind about “logging in the National Forests”. Some of us remember about 25 years ago, when that one of their positions (here’s one story about it). Did they change their minds about selling trees from federal forests sometime in the last 25 years? Was there an announcement?

If the Sierra Club and CFA have the same point of view, then, where is the conflict? Does someone know of a specific recent fuel reduction project in the National Forests of California that the Sierra Club was opposed to and why?

Federal Court Dismisses Resolute Forest Products’ $300 Million Racketeering Lawsuit Against Forest Protection Activists

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Here’s a copy of the press release:

Today, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California issued a landmark decision [1] dismissing all claims under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) in the case brought by Resolute Forest Products against Greenpeace Inc., Greenpeace Fund, Greenpeace International, Stand.earth, and five individual defendants [2].

The same court had previously dismissed the entire case and ordered the logging company to pay defendants’ legal fees in October 2017. However, Resolute Forest Products decided to file a repackaged version of the same baseless claims three weeks later. According to today’s order, the case will continue without the highly contentious racketeering charges and the vast majority of defamation claims.

Greenpeace USA General Counsel Tom Wetterer said in response to the decision:

“The judge’s decision to throw out the abusive racketeering charges is a positive development and a win for advocacy. From day one, it was clear Resolute intended to bully legitimate advocacy organizations and forest defenders by abusing laws designed to curtail the mafia. The judge made it clear this would not be tolerated. If the logging giant continues to pursue its desperate strategy to silence civil society by appealing this decision in the U.S. or continuing its legal attack in Canada, we are confident such tactics will meet the same dead end. Millions around the country and the world agree that free speech is vital for the protection of our communities and the planet. Together, we will fearlessly fight the remaining very narrow defamation charges and prevail because our work is grounded in the best available science.

“Today’s landmark decision should be a lesson for other corporate bullies attempting the same underhanded legal tactics, like Energy Transfer, that they will not succeed in attempts to criminalize free speech. We will continue to speak truth to power.”

The charges dismissed today were included in Resolute Forest Products’ second strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP) aiming to silence Greenpeace entities. In 2013, the logging company filed a separate defamation case against Greenpeace Canada and two staff members in Ontario. This case is still pending and Greenpeace Canada continues to vigorously fight the remaining claims.

Greenpeace defendants in the U.S. are represented in court by the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine; EarthRights International attorneys have provided advice and support as consulting counsel.

Katie Redford, Co-founder and Director of EarthRights International, added :

“Companies like Resolute have always tried to use their money and power to scare their critics into silence. Nobody likes a bully, and these legal bullying tactics will not prevail. Now, more than ever, we are committed to defending the free speech rights of individuals and organizations like Greenpeace, and so many others, that our democracy and our planet depend upon.”

ENDS

Notes:

[1] Click here to download a copy of the order, or copy this to your browser: https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/MTD-Decision-GP-RFP-2019.pdf

[2] On May 31, 2016 Resolute Forest Products filed a CAD$300 million lawsuit under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) and other claims in the United States District Court for Southern Georgia, against Greenpeace International, Greenpeace, Inc., Greenpeace Fund, Inc., Stand.earth (formerly ForestEthics), and five individual staff members of these independent organizations.

The case was transferred to Northern California on May 16, 2017 when Resolute failed to demonstrate that the case should be heard in Georgia. On October 16, 2017 the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed Resolute’s claims. Three weeks later, Resolute’s lawyers filed a repackaged version of the same claims against the same individual defendants in the same court.

This bully racketeering case is Resolute’s second strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP) aiming to silence Greenpeace entities. In 2013, the company filed a CAD$7 million defamation case against Greenpeace Canada and two staff members in Ontario, which is still pending. Click here for more information about the existing legal cases between Resolute Forest Products and Greenpeace, or copy this to your browser: http://www.greenpeace.org/resolutelawsuits/

[3] In August 2017, Kasowitz Benson Torres LLC filed a US$900 million lawsuit on behalf of Energy Transfer, the company behind the Dakota Access pipeline, against Greenpeace, Inc., Greenpeace Fund, Inc., Greenpeace International and others for defamation and other claims, including some under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). Kasowitz Benson Torres is the same law firm representing Resolute Forest Products, making the Energy Transfer’s case the the second strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP) Kasowitz filed against Greenpeace entities, alleging that legitimate advocacy work is criminal activity. Kasowitz Benson Torres is one of President Donald Trump’s go-to law firms. Click here for more information about the existing legal case between Energy Transfer and Greenpeace, or copy this to your browser: https://www.greenpeace.org/defendingprotest

Seeking Coverage of All-of-the-Above “Living with Fire” Strategies

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With or without figuring out what proportion of climate change is caused by which aspect of human activity (CO2, land use changes, particulates and so on), destructive wildfires (forest, shrub, grass)  are happening today, and likely to increase into the future.  Each area of the US is different, though, Minnesota is not New Hampshire and Florida is not New Mexico.  So each area has to find its own way.  Still, there are discussions we can have in common.

As we’ve talked about before in our discussion of fire “worseness”, we don’t really have to calibrate how much worse fires are than they used to be to simply say “wildfires can be damaging to people, infrastructure, watersheds, and wildlife, yet fire is part of our landscapes. How can we jointly best deal with it.?”

Below are some problems and some possible solutions that folks have identified, and who is responsible for discovering and implementing the solutions:

(1) Worse fire weather, longer fire seasons, long-term fuels build-up: better suppression technology, more bucks for suppression, better models of fire behavior, (fire suppression organizations, fuels specialists, technology development folks and fire scientists)

  • mechanical fuel treatments, prescribed burning and wildland fire use are all part of changing fire behavior such that suppression can be easier.* For people to be comfortable with PB and WFU requires confidence in suppression if things go awry, which tracks back to improving suppression.

(2) More people living in fire prone areas – better access for evacuation, better warning systems, better planning of subdivisions, plus upgrades to existing ones.  (County planning and zoning, emergency services, Firewise, CWPPs, insurance companies, technology developers for fire proofing homes and other infrastructure, homeowners)

(3) More human-caused ignitions- (education, law enforcement).

(4) Human-caused climate change (energy companies, industry, land use, agriculture, individual behavior….)

Please feel free to add any other problems, solutions, and who can develop and implement solutions. One thing that I’ve noticed from watching the press over the last year is that much time is spent on mechanical fuel treatments and climate change, and how relatively little time is spent on the other topics. Sometimes the experts quoted don’t have on-the-ground experience with any of the solutions.

I’ve also noticed that the idea that “people should just not move to places with wildland fire” seems to have been a bit changed by fires hitting towns like Santa Rosa, Malibu and Paradise.  One of the reasons it appears that people move to the shrublands of southern California is a lack of affordable housing closer to the center of town. If population increases, and you don’t densify existing areas, people have to go somewhere.  It may be wooded areas, it may be shrubby areas, or even grassy areas. Many people don’t want to live in a dense environment and many cities can’t just decide to densify without substantial pushback.

When I think about “Living With Fire” this way, and the press coverage, I generally think of two things. First, how much is occupied by the relatively tiny discussion over mechanical fuel treatment (not helped by Presidential tweets)? How much of this is an artifact of previous debates and discussion about public lands? How much of this is fitting a complex problem into a good guy-bad guy narrative? Most of the more complex stories I’ve read have been in local papers.

The second thing I’ve noticed is how few articles I’ve seen on what people are doing to work on better suppression technologies, emergency communications, planning and zoning, and so on.  So I am going to try to highlight examples I’ve found in the next few postsand I encourage you to send me links to ones you’ve found, or post in the comments below. I will also highlight some examples of stories that suggest people are not all that far apart on the mechanical treatment debate.

 

 

 

 

Are Trees Good or Bad for Climate Change? Nature News Story

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At 304 metres high, the Zotino Tall Tower Observatory measures gases and aerosols above taiga forest in central Siberia. A similar tall tower in the Amazon makes measurements above the tropical rainforest.Credit: Michael Hielscher/MPI

 

Forests (albeit not so much individual tree species) tend to pretty much do their own thing without human intervention. Sometimes humans cut forests down, and other times humans plant trees. In the Nature article here, case, people are researching whether it makes sense to do these activities specifically for climate change mitigation reasons.  There are separate issues around changing forests for adaptive reasons (e.g., increasing resilience through encouraging diverse species, more fires means greater need for fuel treatments, cut trees to increase water supplies and so on).  In all of these discussions, climate change factors have to take their place in the universe of other pros and cons of changing forest management.

There’s quite a bit about VOC’s in this article as well as albedo.  The VOC’s may remind you of Ronald Reagan and his famous quote about polluting trees (for those of you of a certain age). Here’s a link to a story about that from 2004. But now back to the Nature news story.

Researchers are now turning to sophisticated computer models and using larger and more-comprehensive data sets to nail down exactly what forests in different places do to the climate. In some cases, the results have been sobering. Last October, a team led by ecologist Sebastiaan Luyssaert at the Free University of Amsterdam modelled a variety of European forest-management scenarios8. The researchers concluded that none of the scenarios would yield a significant global climate impact, because the effects of surface darkening and cloud-cover changes from any added forests would roughly eliminate their carbon-storage benefits.

To estimate the climate impact of planting forests in different parts of the United States, ecologist Christopher Williams at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, is combining global satellite data collected over more than a decade with carbon-sequestration figures based on data from the US Forest Service. He has found in preliminary work that adding trees to the US west coast and to regions east of the Mississippi River makes sense, climatically speaking. But albedo changes make forest planting in the Rockies and the southwestern United States a bad deal for the climate in most cases, because the conifers that thrive in those regions are dark and absorb more sunlight than do underlying soils or snow. He hopes to turn this research into a standardized methodology that forest managers can use to assess a project’s climate impact.

Getting planners to adopt such methods could prove challenging, however. Williams has found that some resist considering albedo effects, including representatives of companies hoping to sell carbon credits for forest projects. “Even other scientists sometimes have disbelief in the magnitude of the albedo effect, or even its existence,” he says.

“I have heard scientists say that if we found forest loss cooled the planet, we wouldn’t publish it.”

These controversies may be important to people doing carbon credit trading (which is rife with other issues and problems).  Maybe one of the reasons people in the Southwest and Rockies may still want to plant trees is that they provide valuable ecosystem services regardless of climate impacts. Maybe this is one of those cases in which people might not use scientific information, not because scientists disagree and are waiting for a degree of completeness or agreement, nor because of a mistrust of models with unknown measurements and assumptions, but because climate is one environmental concern, but not always the top one.

 

 

Shutdown, Wildfire Suppression Prep and Thinning and Prescribed Burns- Western Senators’ Letter

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Once again, I have to say that I am totally against shutting down government as a policy tactic.  I think it’s interesting to watch who calls out which negative effects (e.g., National Parks, wildfire suppression).

There are slightly different versions of this AP story in different places.  Here is the one from Colorado Politics. The basic story is that Democratic western senators wrote a letter to President Trump pointing out the negative effects of the federal shutdown on fire preparedness.

Conservationists and fire managers say there are other concerns.

Clearing and thinning projects and planned burns on federal land that could lessen fire danger by weeding out flammable debris also are largely on hold in California, Oregon and elsewhere. Private contractors say they have received letters telling them to stop the work.

There’s already a backlog of such projects in federal forests in Oregon and Northern California, said Michael Wheelock, president of Grayback, a private contractor in Grants Pass, Oregon.

Intentional fires can only be set in a narrow winter window before temperatures and humidity falls — and that is rapidly closing, Wheelock said.

“Every week that goes by, it’s going to start increasing the impact,” he said.

Notice that in this version “conservationists” are included in those who want “clearing and thinning projects and planned burns.”

Yet the actual letter by the Senators did not mention those activities specifically.

Beyond the significant implications of halting firefighter training and recertification efforts, the shutdown is also delaying critical forest health projects across the country. Press reports indicate that hazard tree removal, pile burning, and other important forest restoration activities are on hold indefinitely. By stopping these important forest management activities, during the very winter months when it is safest to carry many of them out, you are needlessly putting people and rural forested communities at risk.

(My bold) For those of us who talk about this all the time, hazard tree removal is not the same thing as thinning, and pile burning is not the same as prescribed burning. Was this just an inexperienced staffer who wrote the letter, or a careful parsing of words? Or would it not be OK to say that efforts to reduce thinning and prescribed burning are “needlessly putting people and rural forested communities at risk?” Are western Democratic elected officials in an awkward spot? Would they have to support “thinning without logging” or “burn piles, don’t use the wood” to not put “forested communities at risk” and also satisfy their environmental group supporters who are against selling thinned trees?