Wyoming Public Lands Initiative and WSA’s

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The differences between Montana and adjacent states are always interesting to note. Jon reminded me of that with his post about the WSA poll here. In Wyoming, the next state to the south, the state initiated what is known as the Wyoming Public Lands Initiative.

Here’s a link:

A voluntary, collaborative, county-led process intended to result in one, multi-county legislative lands package that is broadly supported by public lands stakeholders in Wyoming. The ultimate goal is a new federal law that governs the designation and management of Wyoming’s Wilderness Study Areas (WSAs); and, where possible, addresses and pursues other public land management issues and opportunities affecting Wyoming’s landscape.

I first heard of this by reading articles in the Wyoming Livestock Roundup on the Sublette County Advisory Committee. What struck me about the discussions was the scale of knowledge that the participants had, and the knowledge of the country and specifics of concerns. What also struck me was how little was about timber management and oil and gas, and how much was about different forms of recreation. Really, a lot less controversy in terms of management and more in terms of words (wilderness or not?).
Somehow it look as if someone’s marketing has a dual switch Wilderness or Destruction.

Here’s an example…

Smitherman said we are close on Lake Mountain, but we need to look at the West Lake Management area, the language of forest management practice. The biggest issues are in Shoal and Scab. We started with 42 thousand acres well protected. Conservation gets five percent of that. He said he can’t sell it, and he represents 15 groups.
Smutko (he is one of the facilitators, from the Ruckleshaus Institute at UWyo.) asked if Smitherman could offer a suggestion, concrete proposal.
Smitherman responded Scab as wilderness, and an addition in Shoal. Landers said this is where we butt heads, that neither of them can sell it. Lanning said
initially he had no problem with Scab for wilderness, but the committee ought to be looking more objectively at strong management rather than the title. With the o
objectives under the NCA you get all the protections you get under wilderness, but it allows for trail to be maintained easier.
On the north end, where there is cheatgrass, it can be sprayed by aerial means. That aerial treatment is not ongoing, it is only needed until vegetation can out compete cheat grass . Once achieved spraying is no longer necessary.

It’s from the April 12 2018 Sublette meeting summary, but you could look at probably any of the meeting notes from any of the groups, and see the same degree of specificity. Here’s another one:
Recommendations from the Fortification Creek Study Group.

Due to Public Comment and additional discussion by Committee Members, the following recommendation was agreed on.
Hard Release from Wilderness Designation (meaning the area could not be reconsidered for Wilderness designation again), with a permanent designation entitled “Fortification Creek Management Area”. The management intentions for this area follow:
1. Inclusion of a Map of the present Fortification Creek Wilderness Study Area showing the exterior boundary.
2. Management area represents only federal lands within this boundary.
3. No new surface disturbance unless needed for fire suppression.
4. No new permanent roads.
5. Maintain existing characteristics.
6. Existing uses continued such as grazing, hunting, and recreation.
7. No motorized or mechanized vehicles allowed other than reasonable fire suppression, weed and pest control, wildlife and stock water, or emergency needs.

It sounds like some folks start with management restrictions and then find a designation (National Conservation Areas, National Recreation Areas, Management Areas) but others are attached to big W Wilderness. There are two ideas here (which restrictions) and (how permanent). Permanency can be addressed via other legislative land designations besides Wilderness.

Even the Wilderness Society does not say that success is the greatest number of acres in Wilderness. At least not in this presentation by Paul Spitler here where he describes a variety of legislative land deals involving wilderness and other transfers, designations and so on, including two in Montana as successful.

Voting for/against Wilderness

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Seriously.  Bonner County, Idaho is holding an advisory vote on whether its residents want the Scotchman Peaks area to be designated as Wilderness.  Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, has indicated he will follow the advisory vote result.

One one hand, this is a good way to get information about policy preferences that opinion polls and candidate elections may not.  But really, how much weight should one county’s vote carry in making decisions about national forests?

Here’s a detailed fact-check developed to help voters.  Importantly, this area has been recommended for Wilderness in the Idaho Panhandle and Kootenai revised forest plans.  Watch for the results of the referendum on the May 15 primary ballot.

Montanans like their Wilderness Study Areas

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But their elected representatives don’t.

The results of a new poll show that a majority — 57 percent — of Montanans wanted WSAs to continue to be protected, and another 24 percent said they wanted a more case-by-case review of how the areas should be used.

Sen. Steve Daines and Rep. Greg Gianforte, both Republicans, have introduced bills in Congress to open up areas now protected as WSAs.

The University of Montana’s Crown of the Continent and Greater Yellowstone Initiative commissioned the poll of 500 Montana voters and hired both Republican and Democratic firms to conduct the survey. It found that only 11 percent of those polled favored Gianforte’s proposal to eliminate protections for 29 WSAs.

“They were opting for something other than what’s proposed in Congress,” said pollster Lori Weigel, who led the Republican half of the bipartisan polling team.

Daines and Gianforte discounted the poll, noting they had the support of local county commissions for their legislation.

Obviously the county commissions did not get this support from their constituents, and they have been accused of selective listening.

Daines’ staff challenged the validity of the poll.

David Parker, a Montana State University political science professor, said after reviewing the survey questions, “I object to the notion it’s a push poll. It’s pretty innocuous the way it’s worded.”

Parker said the UM poll appeared consistent with other regional surveys showing strong bipartisan support for public land protection.

I guess this is what happens when a popular issue is not a high priority for voters.  You look the other way on the environment and vote for someone who’ll give you your tax cut.

Here’s a summary of some of the other findings of the survey – including:

When asked by the pollsters if they would support or oppose dedicating additional, existing public lands as wilderness areas in Montana, 57 percent expressed support and 35 percent said they would be opposed.

Oregon to look again at western forest habitat conservation plan

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The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Oregon Department of Forestry have received a $750,000 federal grant to explore the possibility of a habitat conservation plan for state-owned forests west of the Cascades.  HCPs are authorized by §10 of ESA, and they allow the state to obtain an incidental take permit to kill or injure listed species if that happens in accordance with the plan.   The plan would consider species including the spotted owl and marbled murrelet and set guidelines for timber harvesting and recreational use.  A previous attempt to create a plan ended in 2008 without new guidelines being adopted. Without the HCP and permit, harming listed species is illegal for anyone.  “Harm” is defined to include significant habitat modification or degradation which “actually kills or injures fish or wildlife by significantly impairing essential behavioral patterns, including, breeding, spawning, rearing, migrating, feeding or sheltering” (50 C.F.R. § 222.102).

 

 

NFS Litigation Weekly May 4, 2018

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Litigation Weekly May 4

In a 2-page opinion, the circuit court upheld the decision by the Plumas National Forest to designate only 234 of 1107 miles of user-created routes as open for motorized travel, including the process of cooperating and coordinating with the local counties who wanted more.  (9th Cir.)

(New case.)  Plaintiffs claim that closure of a road to a site where a protesters are obstructing tree clearing for a pipeline across Washington and Jefferson National Forest lands is a violation of their First Amendment rights of free speech and assembly.  (W.D. Va.)

(New cases.)  Both cases claim violations of the 2015 Sage-Grouse Amendments to BLM land management plans in Montana and Idaho in relation to specific oil and gas lease sales and other policy changes.  (D. Mont, and D. Idaho)

Having Trouble With NCFP Digest?

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A while back someone mentioned they were having trouble with the Digest function not working. Since then I replicated the problem (only one post shows up when more posts were posted). If other have had this or any other problems, please describe them in the comments below. If anyone knows WordPress, and could help work on this problem, that would be terrific! Or if someone could send $ for me to hire someone to troubleshoot it..that would be greatly appreciated also.

Mediation, Arbitration and Collaboration in Natural Resource Decisions: Guest Post by Peter Williams

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Many of you may know Peter Williams from his work in the Forest Service on collaboration. Here is a link to what he is currently doing at the Partnership and Community Collaboration Academy. Thanks to him for writing this for our blog (at my request)! Quite a bit to think about here.. thanks again, Peter!

“As the USFS pursues changes in environmental analysis and decision making, matters of decision process are receiving attention, including dispute resolution. There are numerous schools of thought about decision making, dispute resolution, and decision processes. Some of the thinking is very divergent; most people have a limited understanding of the complexity of that thinking, at least outside of academics and lawyers, despite the fact that making decisions is one of the more basic human actions.

When a dispute occurs, arbitration and mediation are often mentioned as tools or techniques to reach agreement with the assistance of a third-party, either a mediator or arbitrator, also called an arbiter. Generally, the basic difference between arbitration and mediation is the decision maker: under arbitration, the arbitrator has the decision authority if the parties fail to reach agreement; under mediation, the parties make the decision and the mediator guides the process. There are exceptions, like with non-binding arbitration, where there is no enforcement of the arbiter’s decision on the parties. With non-binding arbitration, the arbiter still has the decision authority, but the parties are not bound by the decision, which obviously limits the arbiter’s authority.

Both arbitration and mediation are considered “alternative dispute resolution” (ADR) skills or techniques, with the other ADR techniques including collaboration and negotiation. The 1996 Alternative Dispute Resolution Act (ADRA) authorizes federal agencies to use ADR techniques to supplement other dispute resolution methods when the parties agree; yet, it specifically prohibits use of ADR techniques if, among things, other parties not involved in the proceeding may be significantly affected. For this reason, arbitration under ADRA fits poorly with natural resource management planning and public land management planning. Other ADR approaches, however, do fit well.

A collaborative approach is typically consistent with ADR concepts, for example, while also addressing public land management process issues. Public land management decisions are often a particular type of decisions because the scale of the interests can be so large, well beyond the narrower scope of a typical business dispute or administrative dispute involving a relatively small number of parties. For these reasons, a collaborative approach can be a good choice if the process is designed well. For example, a good process design will address the public engagement required under NEPA, the information collection constraints under the Paperwork Reduction Act, and the sunshine requirements under FACA, as well as any other procedural requirements identified during the process design phase.

In addition, a collaborative approach is fundamentally learning-oriented because it is about jointly coming to understand the issue, context, history, and implementation-oriented options. It is a “diagnostic” approach, as opposed to a prescriptive or predictive approach, because a shared understanding emerges from the broader group. Part of the understanding that emerges is about interests, as opposed to positions. In more traditional planning or decision processes, positions stated at the beginning of the process are treated as fixed, with little learning encouraged to reframe positions or to understand the interests underlying those stated positions.

A collaborative approach to a decision can extend into a collaborative approach to implementation as well as to monitoring, evaluation, and other forms of feed-back, all because of the continuous learning aspects of a good collaborative process. Arbitration and mediation, in contrast, tend to be one-off processes during which a narrow set of disputed issues are addressed. In this sense, arbitration and mediation generally remain in the category of adversarial dispute resolution approaches. Collaborative approaches are in a separate category and it can take careful work to move from an adversarial relationship to a more collaborative one, recognizing that even most collaborative efforts still allow for adversarial disputes to be addressed. In other words, one can work in a collaborative way while also recognizing that adversarial disputes can occur. When those happen, though, the foundation of collaboration often allows those disputes to be worked out more quickly and more constructively, often in a way that allows a return to the more generally collaborative approach.

Returning to the larger category of collaborative approaches, there is collaborative planning and collaborative decision making, as well as collaborative learning and collaborative evaluation or assessment. All of these are related and readily integrated.

Small Steps Toward Building a Brighter Future

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[U]nceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. — Phillip K Dick

On Earth Day Sharon tried to spread a message of optimism in a feed from PERC’s Executive Director Brian Yablonski. A couple of us failed to find any optimism there. Here is why: Yablonski and others who call themselves “Free Market Environmentalists” adhere to what many economists view as a particularly narrow field of economic thought labeled the Austrian School.
(See also My Wars Against Economic Fundamentalism (Iverson, 2011)) (See also: neoliberalism: Wikipedia, Guardian)

Main tenets of the Austrian School are: free markets, individualism, and “curbing the size of the state”.

Economists who frame the subject more broadly—as political economy—don’t view markets as necessarily “free,” neither government as necessarily “bad.” Most economists allow for government action as a legitimate part of broader workings of democratic politics (including wealth redistribution). Austrian School economists do allow for altruistic behaviors on the part of individuals, e.g. community or sectarian service and contributions, but believe government to be an ineffective or perverse tool for such. Austrians usually allow for government provision of national defense, but not much more from government. It is the disallowance of space for broader democratic governance I find most off-putting in the practice and politics of the Austrian School. For more on that, see Democracy in Chains: The deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America, by Nancy MacLean, 2017. (reviewed here (The Atlantic, 2017), reviled here (Critical Inquiry, 2017).

A World of Three Zeros

Recently I stumbled onto an interesting, uplifting book titled A World of Three Zeros: The new economics of zero poverty, zero unemployment, and zero net carbon emissions, 2017 by Muhammad Yunus. (reviewed here (New York Times, 2017).

I haven’t read the book yet so I don’t know how the author attempts to solve the “zero net carbon emissions” problem, but the other two resolutions come about largely by people rethinking both the nature of business and human nature.

Business is recast in part as “social business” where the goal is to solve problems not just to make money. Yunus allows for conventional businesses, but suggests the need for many more “social business” enterprises that focus more broadly than simple profit—to solve social problems.

“Human nature,” says Yunus in the New York Times book review (2017), has been misinterpreted by the Capitalist System. Yunus argues, “In capitalist theory, it is assumed that man is entirely driven by self-interest. That’s definitely not the description of a real human being. Human beings are selfish, and at the same time they are equally selfless, if not more.” Hence his focus on “social business.” My guess is that Yunus also believes in democratic governance to help in this effort as well. But that can not happen until and unless we rid our culture of the serious misinterpretation of human nature he notes.

For the Common Good

Yunus is not the first to point out these problems. Almost 30 years ago, I used to champion Herman Daly and John Cobb’s book For the Common Good: Redirecting the economy toward community, the environment, and a sustainable future, 1989. (reviewed here (Scott London, 1995)).

Daly and Cobb’s message was similar to that of Yunus, but just gave general recommendations without many of the specifics Yunus now adds after successfully testing them in real-world settings.

Daly and Cobb were largely ignored, and shunned and derided by many in the economics profession. But that was way before pretty much all the wealth began to increasingly find its way into fewer and fewer hands (New York Times, 2017). Let’s hope Yunus’ message is afforded a more cordial hearing.

Here is how Yunus sums up our current plight (from NY Times article, but likely from his book):

“We need to abandon our unquestioning faith in the power of personal-profit-centered markets to solve all problems and confess that the problems of inequality are not going to be solved by the natural working of the economy as it is currently structured,” Yunus writes.

“This is not a comfortable situation for anyone, including those who are on top of the social heap at any given time. Do the wealthy and powerful … like having to avert their eyes from the homeless and hungry people they pass on the street? Do they enjoy using the tools of the state — including its police powers and other forms of coercion — to suppress the inevitable protests mounted by those on the bottom? Do they really want their own children and grandchildren to inherit this kind of world?”

Forest Service prosecutes mudders

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The federal government does go to court sometimes to protect our natural resources, here in North Dakota:

Three men accused of damaging U.S. Forest Service land four years ago while going mudding in the Little Missouri National Grasslands now face criminal charges in federal court.

Five full-sized pickups got stuck in the mud in the area known as Estes Springs. The individuals involved then got two road graders to try to recover the pickups, but then got the road graders stuck in the wet and muddy conditions.

The area has signs indicating it is National Forest Service land and directing the public to stay on established roads and trails.

Jan Swenson, executive director of the Badlands Conservation Alliance, saw photos of the incident four years ago and said it looked like the pickups had driven donuts in the mud following a rainstorm.

“It is great to see the Forest Service following through,” Swenson said. “It would be encouraging to see other government entities follow through on enforcement issues as well.”

Public Service Recognition Week- Thanking FS Employees For Their Service!

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Memorial Grove Ceremony, Monument, CO, May 5, 2018

This is Public Service Recognition Week.
Saturday I attended the Memorial Grove Ceremony, put on each year to honor Forest Service employees from the Rocky Mountain Region who have died in the last year. It’s a time and place to see new employees with tattoos and piercings doing some of the same kind of work as the oldest honoree had done when he joined the Forest Service in 1906. Over a hundred years of people history.

Tom Thompson, is a major mensch, both while working, and now, as he carries on honoring the soul of the Forest Service. He’s a major mover behind the Museum of Forest Service History, NAFSR, and so many other activities that I can’t enumerate them. One of the many things he does is to conduct all the research and contact the families each year for the Memorial Grove ceremony. He’s also a gifted writer and speaker. Saturday he said “it’s not the process or the policy that makes the Forest Service, it’s the people.”

Hearing the members of the families talk about their loved ones, it struck me how different their jobs had been, e.g. heavy equipment operator, receptionist, archaeologist, NEPA expert and so on. Through their stories, it also struck me that many of the administrative positions were appreciated as opportunities for steady and decent incomes for women at the time, even the adventure of working on fires, in a time in which women were not encouraged to get away from home for adventure. How much we all have changed since 1906! And yet there is something binding us beyond a paycheck..

People nowadays make fun of the “Forest Service family” idea, when people all lived together on districts, helped each other out, raised their kids together and so on. Perhaps that part of culture has run its course. But there is still a significant connection among people in the Forest Service. Call it a tribe, call it a community or whatever. Sometimes you can’t really feel it until you are not in it, when you leave or retire.

I remember a dear and wonderful colleague, with whom I had worked closely for seven years, whose last work act with me, at the behest of our mutual superior, was to give me a poor performance rating and try to remove me from my job. He has since gone on to the Big District in the Sky, but my memories of him are never of those bureaucratic machinations, but rather of everyday days working together, learning, laughing and having a beer and telling stories. As I reflect on this, those moments were absolutely what was real. The bureaucratic drama, even though it felt personal at the time (how could it not?).. was only a blip on the screen of our souls’ journeys.

For those of you working in the FS today, I hope you can take a day to appreciate your colleagues and your daily experiences in this moment. Even to the folks who aren’t big on mushiness, for once a year to say “hey, I appreciate this about you,” can’t be too bad.

And for those of you not working for the FS at this moment, we can freely tell any of those folks we’ve dealt with “hey, thanks for serving, I appreciate this about you.” And even if you don’t know them personally, you can write a note to the District that has your favorite campground, or your favorite FOIA folks, and just say thank you.

Finally, one thing that came through loud and clear from the families at the Memorial Grove Ceremony was that their family members “loved the Forest Service.” It’s easy for me to say, as a retiree with some of the fun and none of the bureaucracy, that I did and I do. For those of you currently working, today might be a good day to honor that feeling as well. In spite of …. and ….., I still love it, or not. Is that flame is sputtering, or strong, or out?