Utah’s Watershed Restoration Initiative Responds to SUWA Commercial

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The proposed vegetation management projects (apparently) targeted in the SUWA commercial we discussed here are part of the Utah Watershed Restoration Initiative, a partnership effort with the State, BLM and private groups linked here.

Why is the State responding to an ad that attacks the BLM?
-The project depicted in the SUWA ad was funded and completed through the State of Utah’s Watershed Restoration Initiative (WRI).
-Funding for this project came from several different sources including: Bureau of Land Management (sage-grouse funds), State of Utah general fund (tax dollars), —
– State of Utah fuels reduction fund, Foundation for North American Sheep, The Mule Deer Foundation and Sportsman for Fish and Wildlife.
-The State of Utah issued contracts for the chaining operation, the aerial seeding, the seed purchase, the cultural resource surveys and many other parts of the project.
-State of Utah employees were involved in the planning and implementation of the project. Click this link for more information on the project shown in the SUWA ad.

What is Chaining?
-Chaining is a management tool used by WRI and the BLM to reduce pinyon and juniper trees to make way for more usable forage for wildlife and livestock.
-It involves the dragging of a large anchor chain between two crawler tractors.
-The chain rolls across the ground removing trees while simultaneously tilling the soil to prepare the seed bed for seeding.
-Chaining operations always involve an aerial application of seed to help the area recover and thrive following treatment.
-Chaining has been used by state and federal agencies since the 1950s.

Why do the BLM and WRI use this technique?
-One of the major threats to both Sage Grouse and Mule Deer is the ongoing increase of pinyon and juniper trees in Utah.
-Pinyon and juniper stands, like our higher elevation timber stands, need to be managed. Chaining and the seeding that follows helps to diversify these even-aged stands of trees and create areas that provide better habitat and forage for wildlife and livestock.
-Chaining breaks up the often continuous and dangerous fuels, this reduces the size and intensity of fires, saving millions of dollars in fire suppression costs.
-Chaining is not the only, or the most common, treatment technique we use to diversify these over-mature stands of pinyon and juniper trees but it is the least expensive and most useful for large project areas.
-Chaining is used in older stands of pinyon and juniper where the trees have almost completely driven out grasses, flowering plants and shrubs. We call these late succession or phase III stands.
-These older stands of pinyon and juniper provide very little usable habitat for wildlife or forage for livestock.
-Chaining reduces competition for water and nutrients to help seeded plants to better establish and grow. Similar to how we weed our gardens and till the soil before we plant each spring.
-Research and monitoring from across the west has shown the long term success of this treatment technique. Studies have shown significant increases in grasses, flowering plants and shrubs following chaining as well as increases in available soil moisture.
-Some anecdotal evidence exists showing an increase in stream and spring flows as well as ground water levels following pinyon and juniper removal projects. WRI is currently funding long term study with the Utah Geological Survey to confirm this.

Are Chaining projects currently being planned or implemented within the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument (GSENM)?
-No green tree chaining projects are currently under consideration for FY2019 funding through DNR or Utah’s Watershed Restoration Initiative.
-The use of chaining as a treatment technique depicted in the SUWA commercial was specifically forbidden by the old GSENM management plan. The new management plan has yet to be written.
-The treatment polygons highlighted by SUWA depicts areas currently under consideration for future restoration treatments within the old and new GSENM boundaries.
It is our understanding that these highlighted future project areas represent pre-monument chaining treatments that are being considered for maintenance projects to remove any remaining and invading pinyon and juniper trees.
-The treatment techniques being considered in these areas include hand removal, mulching, chaining, etc.
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And I will add: The monument management plan, which is the guiding document for land management for the lands both inside and excluded from GSENM, indicates that chaining is limited to areas that contain late seral stage sagebrush stands, and is restricted from being used on live pinyon and juniper trees. Also note that these projects are designed, in part, to improve habitat for sage grouse.

Western Governors on Prescribed Burning and Air Quality

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One of the things I’m interested in is looking at forest policy and public lands issues in a way that de-emphasizes partisan politics. In my view, partisanizing issues leads to more heat than light, and also divides people, intentionally. I support people who work across the aisle, listening to each other and working towards agreement. Hyperbole is said to be the language of politics, and sometimes it is difficult or impossible to find facts through the jungles of hyperbole, truth-shadings, and “false facts” put out by the different factions and their media allies.

If we look at some western governors and how they approach issues, perhaps we can see how they are influenced by the ideology of their political party compared to the pragmatic need to solve problems and support the people in their state.

One way to do that, is to look broadly at what Western Governors agree to about the West, our problems and potential solutions.

Here’s a recent letter they wrote to the EPA:

Wildfire and Prescribed Fire
• More frequent and intense wildfires are steadily reducing the West’s gains in air quality improvement. Smoke from wildfires can cause air quality to exceed the NAAQS for particulate matter and ozone, impacting public health, safety and transportation. Prescribed fire, which is managed according to state SIPs and smoke management programs, can reduce these impacts, but is currently underutilized.

• Western Governors support the use of prescribed fire to reduce the air quality impacts from uncharacteristic wildfire in the West. Federal and state land managers should have the ability to use prescribed fires when weather and site conditions are appropriate and air quality impacts are minimized.

• Prescribed fire practices should include smoke management planning coordinated among state land managers, state air agencies, state health departments, EPA, other federal agencies, federal land managers. State or regional prescribed fire councils can help facilitate this coordination.

• Western Governors call on EPA and federal land managers to improve existing tools and create additional tools for states to encourage prescribed fire. These should include an exceptional events guidance for prescribed fire, and tools to address the air quality impacts from wildfire in the West.”

Here’s also a link to two webinars on prescribed fire, smoke management and regulatory challenges.

Litigation Weekly – February 16, 2018

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(The header links to the Forest Service summary, and each bullet links to an associated legal document.)

Litigation Weekly Feb 16

The court denied a Forest Service motion to dismiss claims that the Stanislaus N. F. violated the Clean Water Act and the forest plan in relation to its management of three grazing allotments.  (E.D. Cal.)

The court denied a motion for a preliminary injunction by the current concessionnaire to stop the bidding process for a 5-year permit to run the shuttle service for the Sabino Canyon Recreation Area on the Coronado N. F. (D. D.C.)

(update)  The Ouachita N. F.’s denial of a permit to construct a road in the Upper Kiamichi Wilderness has been appealed to the 10th Circuit.  (E.D. Okla.)

(update)  Plaintiffs have voluntarily dismissed their challenge to the Westside Fire Recovery Project on the Klamath N. F.  (N.D. Cal.)

(update)  The district court agreed to stay pending appeal its order to destroy wolf data illegally obtained by the State of Idaho using helicopters from the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness on the Salmon-Challis N. F.  (D. Idaho)

(new case)  The Forest Service is a signatory to the 2000 Interagency Bison Management Plan, and the plaintiff alleges that a tribal notice of intent to hunt bison is significant new information requiring supplemental NEPA analysis for the plan because more bison hunters in the concentrated area established by the plan would create a safety risk to recreationists.  They seek to enjoin the activities that keep bison within the concentrated area.  (D. Mont.)

Market solution to the WUI fire problem may be coming

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It seems obvious to me that home insurance companies should be basing their rates on differences in risk of fire, and I’ve wondered why that hasn’t been happening more.  California seems to be the first place, but why should it stop there?

California’s insurance commissioner has warned that more and more insurers operating in the state are refusing to issue homeowners’ policies in areas most prone to wildfires.

Although many of the affected customers can still get coverage from other insurers, Jones noted that there has also been an increase in homeowners signing up for California’s insurer of last resort of fire; the FAIR Plan.

Jones said that the problem will only get worse as insurers label more homes as wildfire risks following the most recent series of wildfires that hit the state.

Others still disagree.  Something that doesn’t make obvious sense to me is that they seem to be looking at past fires more than the potential for future ones.

Navigating Social Forestry

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Interesting open-access paper in the journal Land Use Policy: “Navigating social forestry – A street-level perspective on National Forest management in the US Pacific Northwest.”

Highlights:

• US National Forest management takes place within a vetocratic institutional setting.
• Non-agency actors both constrain and enable forest management.
• A mismatch exists between official policy objectives and institutional regime.
• Resulting decisions are sub-optimal for reaching management objectives.

Getting rid of the lynx problem

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In case you missed this news a month ago, the Fish and Wildlife Service has decided to propose delisting Canada lynx.

The Canada lynx was listed as threatened in 2000 largely due to a lack of regulatory mechanisms on federal public lands, which is where a majority of the habitat for Canada lynx was believed to be located in the lower 48 states. Since receiving ESA protection, federal land managers throughout the lynx’s range have formally amended their management plans and implemented conservation measures to conserve the species. For example, all U.S. Forest Service land management plans in the Rocky Mountain region have been amended to include conservation measures for the Canada lynx.

The recommendation was informed by a recently completed, peer-reviewed Species Status Assessment for the lynx, which compiled and evaluated the best available scientific information on the historical, current and possible future conditions for the Canada lynx. Over a two-year process, the Service worked closely with federal, state and academic subject matter experts to evaluate relevant scientific information on snowshoe hare population dynamics, climate change, forest ecology and other issues. Although climate change remains an important factor for the conservation of the Canada lynx, neither the Service nor the experts we consulted conclude that the lynx is at risk of extinction from climate change within the foreseeable future.

That last sentence may be the most important.  The Trump Administration has been revisiting and redefining what “foreseeable future” means.  They basically seem to be saying that the main thing that has changed is that they no longer think extinction is predictable enough to worry about yet.  There is also this motivation:

Given the outcome of this analysis, the Service will not at this time be completing a recovery plan for the Canada lynx.

Which was due in January.  Here and here are some other concerns.  I wouldn’t be surprised if it took another 18 years to get this through court, but by then extinction may be close enough to count.  And much as the Forest Service would like it to, delisting doesn’t mean they could remove the regulatory mechanisms that contributed to delisting.  If delisting happens, it would be worth recognizing this as a payoff for good forest planning, and as a model for future plans involving listed or potentially listed species.

How the Outdoor Industry Could Really Help the Forest Service and BLM- Disruptive Innovation

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I had an op-ed published in my local paper, the Colorado Springs Gazette, Saturday. My point is that we’ve been fighting about fees for recreation and federal budgets for (at least?) 30 years.. maybe it’s time to try something different? Below is an excerpt. Check out the whole thing here.

As veteran of federal public lands policy and politics over the last 40 years, I can tell you that the greatest threat to our federal public lands is not the Republicans or the Democrats. The “enemy” is us – the millions of people who hike, bike, ride, drive, hunt, fish, climb, camp, and everything else in the National Forests and BLM. The greatest problems have resisted solution by R administrations and D administration, R Congresses and D Congresses and all combinations thereof. Maybe it’s time to try something different.

The outdoor industry instead could choose, as Amazon, Buffett and JP Morgan are doing with health care, to just “do it,” as the shoe people say, instead.

What would disruptive innovation look like? Here in Colorado Springs, we can talk to a few people, and walk a few trails, and get a sense of the problem.

We all like to recreate on the Pike Forest. Some of us feel, like one colleague, “I don’t think it’s right for some taxpayer in New Jersey to pay to maintain trails where I walk my dog every day.” Others feel “Congress needs to provide what is needed, we shouldn’t have to pay to use our federal lands (except for National Parks).”

For decades there have been skirmishes between these different views, and the division is not at all along partisan lines. For decades, conditions have only become worse as more people flood the forests and the funding has not kept up. Agency employees do the best they can, but they are not getting the help they need. It seems to me that we the people need to step up and help them, and the outdoor industry could and should take a leading role. They have incredible assets and are in the right place at the right time. They have a network of local businesses, technological know-how, marketing and media skills, and unfettered creativity compared to agency employees (that’s in terms of fetters, not creativity).

So what if the outdoor industry put its financial, human and technical resources behind building nonprofit capacity to support Forest Service and BLM programs? They would be choosing a leadership role of uniting, not dividing, something our country greatly needs. What would this look like? Here’s one possibility. The outdoor industry could set aside some percentage of their profits to give back to public lands. The first step would be to support the development of nonprofit, nonpolitical (how countercultural is that?) Friends groups for each forest or unit of the BLM.

Comments?

Whassup with That SUWA Commercial? Chaining, Planning and Trumpfoolery

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I guess I have to say I was a little suspicious that the SUWA ad brought up the Trump Administration. As many of you know, the wheels of Federal project planning move very.. very… slowly. So, for there to be a difference between Trump and Obama administration policies, the rules in the Plan about where and what you can do would have had to have been changed. And you don’t have to follow this stuff very closely to know that that takes a while (writing one, public comment periods, litigation and so on). Well, as it turns out, this kind of project was OK under the Monument management plan (approved 2000). You can look it up yourself here.

RM-2 The use of machinery (e.g., roller chopping, chaining, plowing, discing) may be allowed in all zones except the Primitive Zone. Chaining has been used in the past to remove pinyon and juniper prior to reseeding with perennial grasses. Due to the potential for irreversible impacts to other Monument resources, such as archaeological sites and artifacts, and paleontological resources, this treatment method will not be used to remove pinyon and juniper. It may be allowed to cover rehabilitation seed mixes with soil after wildfires only where:
• noxious weeds and invasive non-native species are presenting a significant threat to Monument resources or watershed damage could occur if the burned area is
not reseeded,
• it can be demonstrated that Monument resources will not be detrimentally affected (i.e., completion of full archaeological, paleontological, threatened and
endangered species and other resource clearance and consultation),
• it is determined that seed cover is necessary for the growth of the native species proposed for seeding, and • other less surface disturbing measures of covering seed are not available or cannot be applied in a timely manner.
Visual impacts of chaining will also be minimized near routes and other points of concern by covering the native seed mix with harrows or light chains. The GSENM
Advisory Committee will be consulted before the use of machinery for treatments is permitted.

I used the bold about the pinyon and juniper because that’s what it showed in the SUWA commercial. So SUWA says the Trump Administration is doing a bad thing that is different from what used to happen, but it’s really not. Now I don’t know if that is a “lie,” or an “inaccuracy” or a “shading of the truth.” The point seems to be to get people worked up about something that’s been going on for a long time, but was presumably OK under the previous administration. I’m going to call this Trumpfoolery. It’s worth asking, what’s in for SUWA to do this? Don’t they lose more in credibility than they gain in…whatever?

The people of Utah were using these vegetation practices long before President Trump entered politics, and they are incorporated into a Clinton Administration Monument plan. More on the practices in the next post.

Has “energy dominance” lost a battle?

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Opponents of fracking on the Wayne National Forest filed a lawsuit last spring alleging the failure of the BLM and Forest Service to comply with NEPA and the Endangered Species Act in authorizing oil and gas leasing.  They argued that when the forest plan was revised in 2006 it didn’t address the effects of fracking.  Plaintiffs suggest that is the reason why the Forest has now decided to again revise it forest plan.   (Which would make it one of a very few forests to re-revise, so it is noteworthy that the Wayne was put in the queue ahead of many forests that have not been revised at all.)

The Forest says this:

For years, the USDA Forest Service, Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR), and USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) have been innovating ways to collaborate in the restoration of southeast Ohio’s oak and hickory forest ecosystems. The next step to realizing that objective is having compatible long-term management plans that allow the organizations to work together more efficiently. With ODNR’s intention of revising their State Action Plan by 2020, the Wayne National Forest decided the time is right to revise its Land Management Plan, to facilitate collaborative work efforts with the State.

That’s a worthy goal, but not one I would have expected to get it to the top of the Forest Service’s priority list for plan revisions.  Let’s see if they argue in court that starting revision would moot the lawsuit.  Regardless, “The public can now demand a plan that bans fracking in the Wayne.”

CFRP Technical Advisory Panel will meet April 30 – May 4 in Albuquerque

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Anyone on this blog going? Note that “The meeting is open to the public and grant applicants are encouraged to attend.” Press release:

The 2018 Collaborative Forest Restoration Program (CFRP) Technical Advisory Panel will meet April 30 – May 4 at the Hyatt Place Albuquerque Uptown, 6901 Arvada Ave., NE. The final number of days the meeting will last will depend on the number of grant applications we received by February 27. An agenda for the meeting will be posted on the CFRP Website the first week of March. The purpose of the meeting will be to review the 2018 CFRP grant applications and make recommendations to the Secretary of Agriculture on which ones best meet the program objectives. The meeting is open to the public and grant applicants are encouraged to attend.

For more information on the Collaborative Forest Restoration Program Technical Advisory Panel, please contact myself or Walter Dunn at [email protected] 505-842-3425.

Amanda Montoya
Program Specialist
Forest Service
Southwestern Region
p: 505-842-3176
[email protected]
333 Broadway SE
Albuquerque, NM 87102
www.fs.fed.us