Post Wildfire Recreation Planning: Waldo Canyon

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We’ve talked before on this blog about fire recovery, restrictions and rebuilding recreation infrastructure post-fire. I thought this was an interesting approach..funding is coming from the State to start a planning process. Here’s a link to the article from the Colorado Springs Gazette:

The Rocky Mountain Field Institute received a $45,000 planning grant for the trail and canyon from Colorado Parks and Wildlife State Trails Program, Peterson, the nonprofit’s executive director, announced Friday.

“Because of the hard work of so many (since the Waldo Canyon fire), we can begin to look toward the future of the entire Waldo Canyon area to provide new opportunities for outdoor recreation and public access,” she said.

The funding comes five months after the U.S. Forest Service reopened the burn area accessible from Rampart Range Road.

The planning process is not as simple as restoring the network of trails that existed before the 2012 fire, Pikes Peak Ranger Oscar Martinez and Peterson explained. The Waldo Canyon Trail in Ute Pass west of Colorado Springs was washed away by flooding, which necessitates a complete trail realignment; the U.S. 24 trailhead has insufficient parking and traffic safety concerns; and people’s expectations of what the canyon can offer recreationally have changed.

“If you looked at the usage before the burn, it was a popular trail, but our use numbers from a recreation standpoint have skyrocketed since,” Martinez said. “And along with that, we’ve gotten a lot of the requests from the public for additional uses. In those five years, those numbers and what people hope we do with that landscape have changed.”

The planning process also offers opportunities for trail expansion, Peterson said.

“We can look at new trailhead locations, new trail designs, dispersed camping locations on Rampart Range Road and possible trail connections to places like Blodgett Peak Open Space,” she said.

Those options would not have existed without the patience to allow the vegetation to regrow, the soil to stabilize and the safety hazards to wane.

“People may say that five and a half years was too long, but these things take time,” Peterson said.

Working with the U.S. Forest Service and Trails and Open Space Coalition, RMFI will use the grant to hire a consultant to facilitate a “Waldo Canyon Roundtable.” Modeled on the Bear Creek Roundtable, the public input process will be designed to draw recreationists, conservationists, land managers and other interested parties into a conversation about public access and resource protection.

The consultant, Peterson explained, will eliminate agency biases and relieve RMFI of the time-consuming components of public engagement.

Also, I thought the following quotes are interesting. The generality (cannot expend resources on planning) is not correct. Folks spend millions on forest plans, for example, travel management plans, project plans and so on. Perhaps this is function of the gap between needs and budget in recreation. Good news.. others are filling in some of the gaps.

As a multiple-use agency, the Forest Service usually cannot expend resources on planning.

“As a federal agency, we get support to build trails. We don’t get the support necessarily, in time or money, to fund the planning piece,” said Martinez. “The grant allows us to spend the energy to ask questions of what do we do here? What do we want to see here? What do we want to build here?”

Secretary Perdue’s Email re: Interim Chief Christiansen

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Here’s the note from Secretary Purdue:

Dear Forest Service Family:

I want you to know that I understand that it has been a difficult week in the Forest Service. While challenges remain in fostering a workplace that is rewarding, responsive, and respectful, the Forest Service has taken concrete steps to improve the working environment for all employees. In fact, the Office of Inspector General is issuing a report on those issues later today, which will confirm progress with new processes to combat sexual harassment and protect victims from retaliation. The report will also highlight ongoing concerns and make constructive recommendations on what can be done better. At the same time, the Forest Service must focus on the mission of promoting and maintaining healthy and productive forests for the taxpayers and future generations.

To help achieve these goals, today I have appointed Vicki Christiansen as Interim Chief of the Forest Service. Vicki has been serving as Deputy Chief of State and Private Forestry in the agency and brings with her the experience of a long career in forestry, natural resources, and fire leadership positions. She takes on her new role during a time of challenges and new opportunities at the Forest Service, and I trust everyone will make her feel welcome.

As you know, our policy priorities for the Forest Service include returning forests to health and productivity, finally fixing the problem of fire funding, and making sure that Good Neighbor Authority is more than just a slogan. With seven years at the Forest Service and 30 with the states of Arizona and Washington, Vicki knows what is needed to restore our forests and put them back to work for the taxpayers. As a former wildland firefighter and fire manager, she knows first-hand that failure to properly maintain forests leads to longer and more severe fire seasons. And as a former State Forester, she knows the benefits of Good Neighbor Authority and how best to partner with our state and local colleagues. Vicki’s professional experience will complement these efforts and help us achieve those objectives.

As we promote and maintain healthy, productive forests and preserve our natural resources, we will work to ensure a place where people can work with respect and dignity.

I am confident that the entire Forest Service family will rally behind Vicky Christiansen as Interim Chief as we move forward.

Sincerely,

Sonny Perdue

Secretary

Yup, IMHO choosing a woman as interim is a good symbolic stroke, as well as someone who understands the Fire Biz. FWIW I also think that choosing someone who came up through State and Private will add some thought diversity.

Handicapping the Race for New FS Chief

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With the Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, and National Park Service all without permanent directors, who knows when the Forest Service can expect a new Chief to replace the retired Tony Tooke. Here are FSEEE’s office pool candidates:

1) Lenise Lago. Lago is currently acting Associate Chief, filling the seat normally occupied by Dan Jiron, who is acting Undersecretary for Natural Resources and Environment where he oversees the Forest Service. Lago’s permanent position is Deputy Chief for Business Operations, which includes Human Resources. In 2016, she testified that the Forest Service “has worked diligently over the last five years to make meaningful progress” on sexual harassment, citing as evidence that only three instances were reported that year. Whether her testimony is viewed as real progress or a cover-up in light of widely-reported news stories that paint a different picture may affect her chances of becoming the next chief.

2) Leslie Weldon. Weldon has been Deputy Chief for National Forest Systems since 2011. She’s punched her card as district ranger, forest supervisor and regional forester. A biologist by training, Weldon’s rise has been steady and without major controversy (okay, someone on this blog will disabuse me of that naïveté!). She would be the first African-American chief. Cutting against her chances may be a perception that she’s too closely linked to the policies of the Obama administration.

3) Vicki Christiansen. Christiansen is Deputy Chief for State and Private Forestry. She’s been with the Forest Service for only 7 years and, thus, did not work her way up the ranks. Her pre-Forest Service career includes stints as Arizona’s and Washington’s state forester. If Trump learns she’s an expert in using explosives to blast firelines, she’s a shoe-in for the Chief’s job.

Question for the reader: Who should be added to the mix?

PBS NewsHour: Tony Tooke, head of U.S. Forest Service, stepping down amid sexual misconduct allegations

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Breaking news from PBS Newshour:

The chief of the U.S. Forest Service is stepping down amid allegations of sexual misconduct and an investigation commissioned by the United States Department of Agriculture into his own behavior.

Tony Tooke, who became chief in September after nearly four decades with the agency, wrote in an email to staff Wednesday that his retirement was effective immediately.

The news comes days after a PBS NewsHour investigation revealed a widespread culture of sexual harassment and assault within the agency, and retaliation against those who reported it.

That investigation also revealed claims of sexual misconduct against Tooke, including relationships with his subordinates before he became chief.

The United States Department of Agriculture confirmed last week it had “engaged an independent investigator” to look into claims about Tooke’s behavior.

In his email Wednesday, Tooke wrote: “I have been forthright during the review, but I cannot combat every inaccuracy that is reported in the news media. What I can control, however, are decisions I make today and the choice of a path for the future that is best for our employees, the Forest Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. I must also think about what is best for my family. Therefore, I have decided that what is needed right now is for me to step down as Forest Service Chief and make way for a new leader that can ensure future success for all employees and the agency.”

“We are in a moment at the Forest Service when we have a tremendous opportunity to mold a bright and successful future in delivering our mission. To seize this moment, however, the right leadership must be in place to create an atmosphere in which employees can perform their very best work. Each employee deserves a leader who can maintain the proper moral authority to steer the Forest Service along this important and challenging course,” he also wrote.

PBS Newshour had a bunch of the background:

U.S. Forest Service chief under investigation after complaints of sexual misconduct (here)

They reported sexual harassment. Then the U.S. Forest Service retaliation began (here)

Diversity in the Sierra Club

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Interesting Greenwire article: “The green movement lacks diversity. She’s here to help.”

At the Sierra Club, the nation’s oldest environmental organization, the senior staff is around 92 percent white.

Nellis Kennedy-Howard is on a mission to improve diversity at the Sierra Club and across the mainstream environmental movement.

The 36-year-old is the organization’s first-ever director of equity, inclusion and justice. When she took the job in fall 2016, she was counting on the Sierra Club to take those issues seriously.

….

EADM- Process Predicament Redux?

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Andy Stahl reminded me of the Forest Service’s previous work on Process Predicament. It’s a 40 page paper, and it is interesting to reflect on what has changed and what hasn’t in the last 16 years. Here’s what they said in 2002:

Unfortunately, the Forest Service operates within a statutory, regulatory, and administrative framework that has kept the agency from effectively addressing rapid declines in forest health. This same framework impedes nearly every other aspect of multiple-use management as well.
Three problem areas stand out:

1. Excessive analysis—confusion, delays, costs, and risk management associated with the required consultations and studies;

2. Ineffective public involvement—procedural requirements that create disincentives to collaboration in national forest management; and

3. Management inefficiencies—poor planning and decision-making, a deteriorating skills base, and inflexible funding rules, problems that are compounded by the sheer volume of the required paperwork and the associated proliferation of opportunities to misinterpret or misapply required procedures.

These factors frequently place line officers in a costly procedural quagmire, where a single project can take years to move forward and where planning costs alone can exceed $1 million. Even noncontroversial projects often proceed at a snail’s pace.

Forest Service officials have estimated that planning and assessment consume 40 percent of total direct work at the national forest level. That would represent an expenditure of more than $250 million per year. Although some planning is obviously necessary, Forest Service officials have estimated that improving administrative procedures could shift up to $100 million a year from unnecessary planning to actual project work to restore ecosystems and deliver services on the ground.

…..

It is time to tailor the Forest Service’s statutory, regulatory, and administrative framework to the new era of public land management. Part of the solution will be internal. However, the problem goes far beyond the range of control of any single agency, or a single branch of the government.
The Forest Service will need to work with partners, both in and out of government, to establish a modern management framework. By working together with partners to create and operate within such a framework, the Forest Service can focus more of its resources on responsible stewardship and thereby improve public trust and confidence in the agency’s ability to care for the land and serve people.

Some of the efforts to improve NEPA included more contracting, better IT support for applications and a variety of other things (many of which our blog regulars were involved with). It sounds like EADM is covering some of the same territory. I’d be interested in the views of others on 1) what has been improved in this time period, and 2) what challenges remain.

Sue and settle … for a study

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This lawsuit involves two predator-killing poisons.  It doesn’t directly involve the Forest Service, although the chemicals are used on national forests.  But it is a recent example of what a lot of settlements look like – more analysis.

The 10-page agreement filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Montana requires the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to complete consultations with the Environmental Protection Agency by the end of 2021 on the two poisons used by federal workers on rural Western lands to protect livestock.

The Center for Biological Diversity and the other groups in the lawsuit filed last year in Montana say Fish and Wildlife is violating the Endangered Species Act by not analyzing with the EPA how sodium cyanide and Compound 1080 could harm federally protected species including grizzly bears and Canada lynx.

“The federal government needs to ban these deadly pesticides, but until then we’re hopeful the analysis spurred by our lawsuit will lead to common-sense measures to prevent unintended deaths,” Collette Adkins with the Center for Biological Diversity said in a statement.

Evidently, in this case, the agencies can continue to use the chemicals while the study proceeds.

 

Environmental Analysis and Decision Making (EADM) – Regional Partner Roundtables This Month- Be There or ???

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Jasper Mountain Case Study

People on this blog tend to have more interest than the average (Smokey?) bear in NEPA and NEPA improvements and challenges. This seems to be an opportunities for “partners” to participate in Regional (and there are also Forest roundtables). In case you have not been invited, I think you can call and invite yourself. It would be interesting to hear back from attendees and your impressions.

Here’s a handy description, thanks to the National Forest Foundation (page here):

The Forest Service is undertaking an Agency-wide effort to improve processes related to environmental analysis and decision making (EADM). The agency’s intent is to gain efficiencies and effectiveness in these processes while continuing to value diverse stakeholder perspectives.

Join us as we explore challenges and opportunities for improvement and innovation. We invite partners to identify issues and concerns they experience and share their creative ideas and concerns they have about this effort.

The Forest Service will host Regional Partner Roundtables in every region and the Washington Office by March 31, 2018. For more information on your Region’s specific roundtable, click the respective link to the right.

Roundtables Objective:

Collect diverse partner feedback to inform EADM processes on local, regional and national scales.

Purposes of EADM Partner Roundtables:

Share why changes are important for achieving the USDA Forest Service mission
Identify, discuss, and capture partner perceptions on barriers and solutions
Explore what roles partners can play moving forward
Support dialogue to strengthen relationships between partners and the USDA Forest Service
Explain how partner inputs will be incorporated from the Roundtable and from participation in the formal rulemaking process

Support Materials
The Why, What and How of the Regional Partner Roundtables

Forest Service EADM Website

As far as I can tell, there is a Sharepoint site to share information and case studies (like the Jasper Mountain case in the photo above), but that is only open to employees?

Is the Science Biz Letting Women Down? I. Harassment- How Can We Still Not Know This?

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So here we are in 2018, and sexual harassment is still a thing. I agree with Dr. Judith Curry, the atmospheric scientist, that part of the problem might be that different actions are lumped together under “sexual harassment” and that makes it more difficult to address. As she says here..

In the 1990’s there was growing awareness of sexual harassment in the universities. In the early 1990’s, I was on a university committee to evaluate new training materials on sexual harassment. I was astonished when I saw that ‘winking’ and ‘elevator eyes’ were on the same list as rape and quid pro quo behavior. There was simply no hierarchy of sexual harassment sins — a problem that continues to concern me as we hear the latest litany of accusations.

The most vexing issue was ‘hostile environment’ and the subsequent ‘backlash’ if you reported anything. This issue became very real to me when a female faculty member in my department complained about lewd and crude cartoons being posted on the walls of the Center administrative offices. She complained to the Center Director – he wouldn’t take them down. She complained the the Department Chair, essentially no response. But then the backlash began, with attempts to harm her career. She lawyered up based on the backlash, and after several agonizing years she apparently won her case (details were never made public) and managed to salvage her career at the same university and go on to have a very successful career. What was exceptional about this case is that her job and career were salvaged in the outcome — other successful litigants in such cases usually ended up leaving their university because the situation was too hostile and unsalvageable. I suspect that having a female Associate Dean helped this to happen.

The failure to discriminate among the hierarchy of sexual harassment behaviors is evident in the current round of accusations. Behaviors in the ‘hostile environment’ category are particularly vexing, as individual women have very different sensitivities and desires in context of their casual social interactions with men. However, assault, quid pro quo and backlash situations are very unambiguous, and we need to make sure that ambiguous hostile environment issues don’t detract from the most serious transgressions.

My question is that we have excellent thinkers and scientists of all persuasions, from social to physical. Here’s a simple question: are sexual harassment efforts more successful if they break down the different categories of harassment and address them separately?

We spend oceans of research money on all kinds of future problems (like climate change). How can we know so little about this problem and how to fix it? Are some institutions (universities and fire research funders) so run by men that this doesn’t seem worthy of attention? Do the answers to these problems involve the relatively uncool social sciences instead of the always cool physical sciences? Who determines that figuring out fixes of current real world problems is less important than running models to attempt to predict things in 2100?

What would a random mix of women scientists come up with as key areas of research if their own research was not included in the possibilities (to avoid conflict of interest).. what if they could think outside the box, not what can I get funded, but what does the world most need getting done?

Wildfire Today on Sexual Harassment

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Bill Gabbert, of Wildfire Today, has a nice round-up of all the stories and news around this in this post.

He concludes:

Chief Tooke is, of course, innocent until proven guilty of the sexual misconduct allegations.

Our opinion:
This is a disgusting, demoralizing, distasteful, detestable scandal facing the agency where I spent 20 years. Looking at the sheer numbers, and knowing that allegations of sexual misconduct go all the way to the top, it is hard to fathom how anyone who has been mistreated can be optimistic that the harassment will stop, or that the perpetrators will be brought to justice.

This HAS to be the Forest Service’s number one priority — clean up this wreckage that is festering within their workforce.

Would you recommend that your daughter, girlfriend, or spouse apply for a job with the U.S. Forest Service?

Of course, I would say absolutely apply for a job with the Forest Service! If you are in, say coop forestry, or research, or a NEPA or silviculture person, you can go for 30 years or more without sexual harassment. If you are a woman and you want to go into fire, well then I would look at the statistics comparing women in fire in the Park Service, BLM, BIA, FWS and so on… even state agencies. I wonder whether they are available? Any folks know of these? Based on what I know now, I would say “stay out of Fire” not “stay out of the FS.”

Fire is part of the FS, but it is not the FS.