Media Campaigns and Their Sources: Dave Skinner on the Western Values Project

by
From Western Values Project website.

While looking at the Western Values Project following up on the E&E News story Steve Wilent mentioned here, I found this op-ed in the Sacramento Bee about the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

This campaign against reform of the conservation fund is cleverly disguised. The group behind the ads is called the Western Values Project, but it is a front group backed by the D.C.-based New Venture Fund, an organization that runs more than 100 similar projects and has received tens of millions of dollars from environmentalist interests.

And then I found this piece, from Dave Skinner of Montana, who has posted on this blog before.. an op-ed in the Flathead Beacon here.

“Do you think either of these experienced progressive public-relations workers would generate all those press releases and produce those ads for free?

Nope — so who really foots the bill and whose “Western majority” values are being voiced?

Well, we have to go back to 2013 when WVP issued its first press release, which reads (way at the bottom) that WVP “receives financial support from New Venture Fund.”

Again, readers, but not reporters, are forgiven if they’ve never heard of the Washington, DC-based New Venture, a “501(c)3 public charity [which] supports innovative public interest projects […]” NVF began in 2006 as the Arabella Legacy Fund, taking about $725,000 from Swiss eco-billionaire Hans Wyss for an “innovative” project called Responsible Trails America (RTA). RTA hired Greens to pose as off-road users on state trail funding committees, working to divert gas-tax money from motorized to non-motorized trails. That’s innovation!

From that small start, Arabella-nee-NVF has become massive. NVF’s 2015 funding, as shown on the most recent IRS “charity” tax return available, was $315.7 million bucks! From whom? Forget it, that’s not open to public inspection. To whom? Oh, the anti-gun Americans for Responsible Solutions ($1.013 million); Sierra Club Foundation ($515,000), hundreds of grants totaling $87 million, and not a dime of it political in any way. Majority western values, my eye!

There is nothing to be found about WVP, its budget, its purpose, anywhere in NVF’s records, nor on its web site, nor in any news stories.

Worse, while there’s a smallish number of “news” stories highlighting multiple “six-figure” advertising buys by WVP in multiple states the past few years — not one single “credentialed” journalist, left, right, or straight, from Montana or elsewhere, has ever caught on to WVP’s true nature.

Western Values Project is a dark-money front, buried deep inside the Russian-doll corporate structure of an unknown, yet multi-mega-dollar “charity” called the New Venture Fund. Probably, but instead, Montana’s TV media ran these ads during news prime time — grabbing big bucks while failing to spend a penny of their windfall on, yep, actual investigative news.”

If folks say “the Koch brothers do it too” that doesn’t really help IMHO. The problem to me is that you can’t interpolate the truth from two groups that are prone to using sophisticated media campaigns to make their case. They twist the facts and intentionally talk past each other. Or as Dave Skinner said in the comments to the Flathead op-ed “The real trouble is, both sides have gotten sophisticated enough at the funding kabuki that average Americans are people are getting the full mushroom treatment.”

Southern Utah- Home of Presidents’ Last Minute Public Lands Gifts

by

Another piece worth reading by Jim Stiles of the Canyon Country Zephyr. Here’s the link.

Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell came to Utah to hear both sides of the issue. But PLEASE…let’s be honest. No one thought Jewell would come down on the side of monument opponents. And as the presidential election approached and almost all the pundits were predicting a Hillary landslide of “historic proportions,” Bears Ears National Monument felt like a foregone conclusion. President Obama would make the proclamation, President Clinton would implement it.

Then November 8 happened.

Knowing that a Trump administration would be taking office in January and had already expressed its specific opposition to the monument, would Obama create the monument anyway?

He did. On December 28, the proclamation decreed a 1.35 million acre Bears Ears National Monument.

Stiles then goes back and talks about a Bush administration last-minute group of lease sales in 2008.

“The Salt Lake Tribune noted that: ” DeChristopher won bids on 22,000 acres in Utah’s red rock country, near Arches and Canyonlands national parks.” Environmentalists had accused the Bush administration of trying to ram through the sale of the environmentally sensitive land before President Obama was sworn in.”

Later, in January 2009, as Obama took the oath, environmentalists without exception believed that the new administration should not be bound or conflicted by the “last minute” efforts of the previous administration to impose its will on the next and contrary to the stated environmental objectives of the new Interior Department.

And months later, as expected by everyone, the Salt Lake Tribune reported that, “Obama’s Interior Department eventually ruled that its predecessor had incorrectly administered the lease sale and yanked the parcels off the auction block.”

In 2008, Republicans were doing what they’re philosophically bound to do. In 2016. It was the Democrats playing the exact same strategy, with the shoe on the other foot.

The idea that there is a fundamental difference of opinion as to how public lands should be utilized is no secret. The fact that so many environmentalists are acting shocked and outraged is a tad silly.

Of course they aren’t really shocked- they are telling that story to make political points and attract donations.. to feed political campaigns to elect more friends to get more of what they want next time. I don’t blame them. In fact, I don’t really blame anyone, because the way the world has gone it’s very hard to find both sides of any given story when you are not an expert (except in the areas we cover in this blog). This environment is a petri dish into which partisanites (or partinsanities as I call them) are uniquely adapted to flourish. The secret that partinsanities won’t tell you in their media (and almost all non-local media is theirs nowadays, whether they admit it or not) is that there are many things about public lands that people agree on, and not every idea of the “other” party is bad.

Anyway, Stiles has an interesting take, and what I didn’t understand until now was that both of these last minute deals were in the same area..maybe it’s some kind of revenge scenario for the lease sales of 2009? How did the area become “winner takes all until next election” instead of “let’s work it out?”. I wonder how that dynamic gets started and how it can be turned around.

Colville NF poised to set records as timber harvest, restoration increase

by

This article from the Spokane Spokesman-Review, “Colville National Forest poised to set records as both timber harvest, restoration increase,” notes that “The forest is expected to yield 120 million board feet of forest products in 2018, compared to 70 million board feet in 2017, said Colville forest supervisor Rodney Smoldon.”

“Compare that to the two years before 2017, when the forest’s output didn’t reach 50 million board feet; or since the late 1990’s, when it struggled to offer 40 million board feet per year.

“Those advances haven’t come overnight, and have spanned several White House administrations and leadership changes in Congress.

“Smoldon said he credits the advances to a mixture of local collaboration and use of innovative management tools Congress has provided, including those in the 2014 Farm Bill. Those resources were motivated, in part, by hopes of expanding forest restoration work necessary to reduce the risk of wildfire in northeast Washington.”

Lots to discuss in the article, including the words of Mike Garrity, executive director of the Wild Rockies Alliance: “corporate welfare.” His group lost in court, so far, on a challenge of the project.

Jeff Juehl, national forest chair of Upper Columbia River group of the Sierra Club, raises a good point: that the Forest Service doesn’t have the budget to monitor the contractors doing the work (Vaagen Bros.). Does the Northeast Washington Forestry Coalition do some monitoring?

FYI, I picked a year at random to check past volumes — 1988, when the Colville cut 127 million BF.

The Unsolved Mystery of the Marbled Murrelet

by

“The Unsolved Mystery of the Marbled Murrelet,” is from Hakai Magazine, which “explores science, society, and the environment from a coastal perspective.” It also recently was republished in High Country News.

“It was partially with the murrelets’ dire straits in mind that broad restrictions were placed on old-growth logging across 9.7 million hectares of federal land in the United States under the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan; individual states also curtailed the harvest on their lands to a lesser extent. In British Columbia, more than a quarter of nearly two million remaining hectares of suitable murrelet nesting habitat is on protected land.

“But the murrelets’ numbers haven’t climbed in response. The combined California, Oregon, and Washington population, with fewer than 20,000 individuals, continues to decline by as much as four percent per year. In British Columbia, where there may be closer to 100,000 murrelets, the population is declining by 1.6 percent per year. Even in Alaska, home to the greatest number of murrelets, scientists believe the population has declined by 71 percent since the 1990s, from around one million birds down to 270,000.”

Interesting points: “The terrestrial threats are as well understood as any, but marine threats are a complete mystery.”

And: “We strongly suspect that jays and crows can have a significant impact on murrelet eggs and chicks,” Rivers says. But why are jays and crows able to find the nests? It could be because the big trees murrelets use are too close to a forest’s edge, where jays and crows are more numerous. 

 

Litigation Weekly – February 2, 2018

by

Litigation Weekly Feb 2

(New case.)  Plaintiffs claim 23 surface water diversions on the Sawtooth National Forest adversely affect listed fish species, and that the Forest Service failed to consult on them with the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service as required by the Endangered Species Act.  (D. Idaho)  (Also discussed here.)

This Supreme Court decision favored industry plaintiffs objecting to the Obama Administration’s 2015 regulation defining the “waters of the United States” (WOTUS) subject to the Clean Water Act by holding that the case must be heard initially in a district court rather than an appeals court.  This maneuvering is likely related to the fact that the Trump Administration is in the process of changing the 2015 regulation. (U.S.) (More information may be found here.)

(New case.)  The Tribe’s claim is that federal agencies have a mandatory duty to exercise jurisdiction over permit applications for discharge from a mine into the Menominee River and adjacent wetlands, and cannot delegate that responsibility to the State of Michigan.  (E.D. Wis.)

The Fish and Wildlife Service improperly denied petitions to list bison under the Endangered Species Act in its initial (90-day) finding because competing scientific theories indicated that the species “may” be warranted for listing.  (D. D.C.)

Blogger’s note:

The Forest Service summary doesn’t really explain the importance of the disagreement about genetics.  One of the claims in the petitions is that while the existing plan to maintain the population at 3000 individuals could be an adequate regulatory mechanism to protect one genetic population (inadequate regulatory mechanisms being one of the factors for listing species), it would not be adequate to maintain two genetically distinct herds (arguably requiring 3000 in each herd, and I think one of the studies must be suggesting that the loss of one genetic population would threaten the species as a whole).

Also, it is important to recognize that the “may” be warranted standard prevents the agency from making its own determination of the best science at the 90-day stage.  That is what federal agencies normally get to do.  The second stage of the ESA listing process is the 12-month finding, and that is where the FWS must decide if listing is actually warranted, based on its weighing of the science.

These bison are also an issue in the Custer-Gallatin forest plan revision process (noted here).

 

Discussing the Undiscussables: Gender, Harassment, Discrimination, Favoritism and All That

by

Back when I worked for pay in Region 2, our Regional Leadership Team had a couple of discussions around “undiscussables”. One I remember was about the Regional Forester overruling a Forest Supervisor on a resource decision. In my experience, just talking about it openly took out some of the underlying tension. But don’t believe me! You can read this from Leadership and Change, in an article from 2015:

Last year, the New York Times revealed that not everything has been golden at Harvard Business School. And surprisingly or not, the crack in the ivy-covered veneer at Harvard Business School is the challenge of gender equity. Revealed was that females got lower grades than man even though the sexes enter the school with similar test scores. Female students and younger female faculty in the classroom were hazed, and female students felt pressure to dress well, ‘look hot’ and not be ‘too assertive’.

Yikes, nothing really new here – but what is most surprising is how long these behaviors appear to have been tolerated at the Business School to the point that Harvard staff describe them as their “dirty little secrets.” As at Harvard, asking people to name their own workplace undiscussable, or a difficult to talk about topic, is a great way to open the door to ‘honest culture conversations’ in most organizations.
…..
As you can see, just naming the undiscussable can lead to ‘honest culture conversations’ that are the basis for sustainable change. At Harvard Business School, Dean Nitin Nohria named this approach: “Sunshine as the best disinfectant.” “

I don’t think it’s remarkable that the undiscussables in this article were about gender and favoritism. Forester 353 raised these same questions in a comment here.

How will the numerous – possibly hundreds of accusations over the past several years with increasing intensity, both true and especially those proven false, effect the future work place? I can tell you from personal experience that it won’t be positive one, even though it should be. Attractive women will be shied away from by self conscious male superiors because the risk of some accusation isn’t worth it. I’ve already seen people walking on egg shells in meetings and in the field when in mixed company because of the fear of something being mischaracterized.

Less than qualified people of both sexes have already be being promoted because of “equality” issues, often creating an elephant in the room. Now will we see more women promoted regardless of qualifications or being the best person for the job? Long term if this happens, it is not beneficial to an agency, company or the person being promoted.

At first I thought “this is a society wide problem, someone smarter and more experienced than we are can figure it out.” But it affects our lives and undiscussables are not good for the Forest Service. Plus we have a place here where people freely disagree all the time, mostly civilly. So if people are interested, this seems like a good place to host this conversation. We can start a new thread for other FS undiscussables people might want to bring up. While this is generally about the Forest Service, others are welcome to share their own experiences and thoughts.

What if forest plans were a blank check?

by

There’s an interesting observation in this opinion piece about the process for amending the Allegheny forest plan to allow construction of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. It required replacing standards in the forest plan for this “project” – here’s one of them:

“Standard SW06: Severe rutting resulting from management activities shall be confined to less than 5 percent of an activity area with the exception of the construction of Atlantic Coast Pipeline, where the applicable mitigation measures identified in the COM (Construction Operations & Maintenance) Plan and SUP (Special Use Permit) must be implemented.”

The problem this author points out is that the COM was written by the permittee and it wasn’t written when the public NEPA process was going on. The result was the Forest essentially writing a blank check for plan components that the Forest did not evaluate the effects of and the public did not get a chance to comment on. I think there’s some (legal) problems here.

This story got my attention because I’ve been looking at a lot of plan components being proposed for forest plans being revised under the 2012 Planning Rule.  One common theme is to not make any commitments in a forest plan, often using language that says essentially, “we’ll figure it out later,” often project-by-project.  It’s kind of hard to evaluate the effects of that forest plan decision. Sometimes it’s kind of like this example – where the forest plan defers to someone else, for example the states to tell them how to manage for wildlife. But there’s an even bigger problem when there are legal requirements that a forest plan must meet, particularly those related to plant and animal diversity.  A plan component that writes a blank check for a future decision does not demonstrate legal compliance.

Light and Heat and and Paychecks and Taxes: Contributions of Federal Minerals

by
Coal train rolls through Denver from Wyoming.

Pileated Woodpecker made this comment here on this post about the Outdoor Industry and Bears Ears.

There is, I think, a very critical reason why the issue now is not the same, or at least is not perceived that way: the water produced by damming Hetch Hetchy benefited a great many people. The profits produced by uranium, coal and other public lands resource extraction do *not* benefit a great many people. (Or so the perception goes; I’m not going to try and adjudicate those claims in this space.)

A few working-class people and locals get the crumbs that fall off the table, so to speak, but most of the money is going to upper management and capital holders. Meanwhile the environmental and opportunity costs get sloughed onto the public.

If public lands are being used to support prosperous, fair, resilient rural economies, most people — including most environmentalists — have no problem whatsoever with that. If they’re used to support the economics of the Zinke class, it’s a different story.

Well, maybe we should discuss those claims..

Woodpecker’s point was that reservoirs benefit many people, and compares that to profits produced by resource production/extraction. But public benefits and profits are two different things. Maybe I’ve reviewed too many coal and oil and gas EISs and lawsuits, but I would argue that providing heat and electricity is indeed a public value. Producing energy domestically has security and resilience advantages. This report quotes:

“Oil and gas production from federal lands accounted for $1.6 billion in total state revenue last year — a whopping 26 percent of New Mexico’s total budget.”
You can look up your own state’s and national contributions here’s from this 2016 DOI report.

Everyone can also look up the source of their state’s energy in this very nice EIA website. Here’s a link to Colorado’s and you can change to your own state. If you are in Denver, for say, a trade association meeting, you are fueled by coal, much of which comes from the feds in Wyoming (the surface is some federal, some state, some private, but all the minerals are federal). You can watch the coal trains come through Denver, seems like almost continuously, on their way to power plants.. So it wouldn’t be too much to say that today, coal and oil and gas keep the lights on in Colorado. You might think “well they should produce oil and gas and coal on private land, not public surface.” But if you were in Colorado, you would see that some of that oil and gas development is close to town, which causes its own issues. And minerals tend to be where they are.. you either get them or you don’t, you can’t move them to where it’s convenient. If you live around here, your neighbors may work in the energy and supporting businesses, office jobs, field jobs, driving trucks, geologists or executives and they are generally paid better than other industries. That’s why people work there despite the boom and bust nature of the business. Certainly all of that is not from federal land in a given state, but you can check this BLM report to see how much the federal portion contributes.

You can rate also industries by 1) the intrinsic goodness and necessity of the product 2) How many jobs do they provide and how much do those jobs pay? 3) How much of the profits do the shareholders keep for themselves? How much are their execs paid? 4) Are they environmentally and socially responsible? But you would have to find the data and compare them, and I suspect that there is a great variation within an industry as well as between industries.

Update on BLM Reorganization

by

Greenwire: “New Interior Department regional boundaries will be in place this year, and the agency’s massive reorganization will begin in Alaska, according to a document obtained by E&E News.”

The article cites a BLM FAQ. — “We expect the boundaries for the thirteen new common regions will take effect in the second half of FY 2018.”